New Week, With Red Shoes

Of late, there has been something about Mondays that necessitates wearing red shoes.

Yes, with a green purse. Criticize not: it's a Namaste bag.

These are not red shoes worn in a desperate attempt to make the week survivable, but red shoes worn in triumph, for I have conquered the festering mess that was my corner of the universe.

Behold:



Clean dog on clean rug next to comforter waiting to be put atop clean sheets.

I will not subject anyone to a blow-by-blow account of my day spent cleaning, but suffice to say that not only can you see the surface of my desk, you can walk up to it without tripping over anything and put things in the drawers without having to ram them shut afterwards.

The bliss!

My knitting got a good ordering, too. Among the items cleared out of the desk drawer was a size 5 circular. When was the last time I used a size 5 circular? January. Some odds of skeins joined the circular in their proper home, and, better still, I finished off my latest never-ending project:




Yes, my latest never-ending project was a potholder. What should have taken 2 days, max, took me 2 1/2 weeks. The pattern, Modern Vintage Potholder by Maryse Roudier, was the essence of simplicity: 9 rounds, 2 sides, smack them together and voila you have a elegant little household accessory.

That's how it might work for you. I, on the other hand, have a wonky little household accessory: On one side, the sections fan out in tidy little pie-shaped sections, on the other, they pinwheel. The rumpling, which no amount of blocking will flatten out, is the result of the two sides being different sizes (different mistake than caused the pinwheeling).

It was agonizing. It would not allow itself to be finished. And yet, I really want to make another.

That's my Picture!

Happy Things:

1. This photo of my skein of Twisted Sisters yarn bought on absolute sale and modeled in my lucky tooth mug (won at a guess-how-many-teeth-on-the-table contest in my Dental Anthropology course) was chosen as one of the Ravelry images for the Avarice. As an amateur photographer who has a hit to miss ratio of about 1:24, getting Ravelry's seal of approval is pretty fabulous.

2. The weather has gone from bearable to nippy. Sweater season!!!



3. I am knitting Stella a Jaunty Sweater. This has been on my to-do list since last winter, and so far so good. I don't have a pattern, so I just started at the neck and am making it up as I go along. Stella has been very good about fittings, with one exception: when I go to take the sweater off, she tries to nibble on the needles.

Less Happy Things:

I have thirteen days to finish two rawther involved projects and miscellaneous busywork. Time to get Panic Switch cranking.

Update

1. No pictures (mis apologias). I don't want to attempt rigging a 2nd camera to this computer, esp. just for another few days. And the iSight camera captures a most unappealing panorama of the most cluttered part of my room.

2. According to the Fed Ex oder tracker, my new computer is on the delivery truck. Ohhh.... the guilt.

3. I hope it comes after las hermanitas get back. Stella is absolutely incensed by package delivery trucks and their drivers. It's bad enough when they drive down the street, but the scene she causes when they come to the door is pretty mortifying. Peeling a 16-pound mutt that thinks she's Pinkerton away from the front window and retrieving the package being delivered can be achieved by one person, but it's easier (and less mortifying) with two.

4. Thank goodness for Daytrotter. While having my little world of school files, organized perfectly by my own admittedly scatty organization schema, jettisoned into the ether hasn't sent me over the edge, it's still a bit unsettling. Layering that with Pandora's similarly unsettling tendency to throw things like Incubus on my Death Cab station (Incubus--I ask you!) is not always a good thing. On Daytrotter, you get to pick what you hear. And a little Port O'Brien will start anyone's day right.

5. I am making record time on my Flower Basket Shawl.

Week 10: Do Not Tell Me It's Week 10

...Because if this is week 10, that means I need to start working on some class projects.

Moving on to happy thoughts: Sunday was Stella's Adoption Day!



The day was nothing out of the ordinary--she threw up on my carpet at 5 in the morning, sat and watched Sunday Morning with us, the usual Sunday things--but it's so strange to think we've had her for a year. In that time, she has developed a ridiculously large vocabulary (eat, sit, and walk, but also bed, dressed, cheese, shoes, and kiss, to name just a few) and an affinity for nesting, as pictured above. I was changing the sheets on my bed, and she came over and plunked right down in them, nevermind that they were right in the entrance to my room.



I love having a dog, for all the barfing in beds and on carpets, and will say it loud and clear: if you want a dog, rescue dogs are the best! Mutts have excellent personalities, and there are too many dogs out there without good homes and loving, responsible owners. We were lucky enough to find Stella by chance (literally, the first dog we saw when we went to the pound), but Petfinder is another great resource that will show you how many dogs (and cats) are out there in need of homes.

In knitty news, I am taking a day to do some stash-diving (and me knitting) while waiting for the back of Mum's Thundercloud cardigan to dry. If it shrinks to the right gauge, I'm done with that piece, if not, I have to rip out the last dozen rows and bind off from there. For all I think this is a brilliant pattern, I'm really hoping it dries to the right size, because I'm kind of getting tired of obsessively measuring my knitting.

What the Dickens!

(I'm not sure why, but Stella finds this a comfortable style of repose)

The new season of Masterpiece Theatre is in full swing, and it's the perfect opportunity to get working on my Top-Down Shoulder Warmer. The "Classic" portion of the season--Tales of Charles Dickens--has just ended, and although I knit my way through both the end of Little Dorrit and The Old Curiosity Shop, frankly, I'm looking forward to a good, wholesome murder or two on the "Mystery" leg. It's not that I don't love Dickens--David Copperfield is one of my favorite books and has an awesome Masterpiece adaptation--but these two did not end on the note I was expecting.

I saw the way The Old Curiosity Shop was going when I realized they were cramming the whole thing into one and a half hours. A Christmas Carol fits into one and a half hours. Anything else, forget it.

But Little Dorrit... We pretty much sat there staring at the screen after that one ended, all thinking, did that really just happen? I will not go into detail, for those who have not yet been floored by this one in print or picture form. Suffice to say I didn't know that sort of thing flew in Victorian England.

In the same vein, I am a little puzzled with my Shoulder Warmer. The first thing I realized when I was trying to figure out which size to knit was that my back size (16" or L) had no correspondence to my bust size (34, between S & M). A review of the pattern and a modicum of common sense told me that in a sweater without a front, the back size is probably the way to go. So I went that way.

I think part of my dissatisfaction at the end of The Old Curiosity Shop was that at that point, I discovered that my trim, snug little shoulder-warmer-in-progress was neither trim nor snug about the shoulders. The sleeves, and the shoulder region they grew out of, were too big. Apparently my back size has no correspondence to my arm size, either. I tried the nascent shoulder warmer on three times, deliberated, went through the notes on all the Top Down Shoulder Warmers on Ravelry, deliberated some more, and decided there was nothing to be done but rip the whole thing back to the beginning and fudge it.

The back size had to stay, but none of the sizes written give a a sleeve with a 10-11" circumference, which is what I wanted. Careful perusal of the pattern revealed that the different sizes were achieved in part by working more or less increase rows. Another trying on of my sweater revealed that the armholes were a little deep, so I decided to attempt a custom fit by combining strategies.

First, I cast on more back stitches and fewer sleeve stitches, and now, I will work fewer increase rows. This will produce the right stitch counts and hopefully will *not* throw the design out of whack. I was quite pleased to have figured something out for this conundrum, but all the same it makes me wonder if I'm shaped like an effigy jar.

*Sigh* Nothing to do but continue knitting and keep our fingers crossed for a nice murder this Sunday night.

Week 14: Alpaca Fumes

As an avid reader of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, I am well versed in the hazards wool fumes pose to knitters (heaven knows I've even gone a little crazy in a yarn shop myself once or twice)

I was unprepared, however, to learn that alpaca can have the same effect on dogs.

When I washed my alpaca skirt, Stella was obsessed. She couldn't stop smelling it when it was outside, and when it came in, she even hopped up on my bed to get a whiff.

Mum was not pleased, particularly not when Stella wanted to inspect the next load of (non-wool) laundry in hopes of finding the skirt.

When I had made the skirt, I lengthened the waistband to help it stay up, only to discover that a strand of beading elastic did a better job. This was finally my impetus to snip the extra piece off (no worries, it was knitted separately) and unravel it.


I was intrigued by the sproingyness of unraveled alpaca.


Stella was (and is) intrigued by the finished product.


Specs--
Ollie the Octopus catnip toy (Ridiculous name; Stella's is called Hubert) from The Knitter's Book of Yarn
Less than 1/2 skein Blue Sky Alpaca Sportweight (color unknown), held double
Size 6 dpns
An excellent pattern--my only modification was to make the legs shorter than called for, so there was no danger of Stella choking if she attempted to eat one.

Week 12: Happiness is a Warm Puppy

Sin dudo.

This is Stella, and although happiness is undoubtedly a warm puppy, the little angel has caused a minor derailment of basically everything.

Case in point: those Christmas socks? On hold for an entire weekend because the poor baby needed something to keep her warm outside.



Warm Puppy (or dog) Cape:
Just over 1 skein Lamb's Pride Bulky in Onyx (out of stash--woohoo!)
Size 10 1/2 needles
No pattern
Two vintage buttons out of button tin

I started with a cape because I couldn't imagine getting a dog into a turtleneck, but Stella's such a good girl she'll let us slip the cape over her head with the front tab buttoned. I see a world of knitty possibilities opening up--I just need to resist temptation long enough to finish my classes. And those socks.