Too much work and no knitting leads to a very boring blog.  Hopefully there won’t be another work week like this for quite some time. 

Before life went insane two weeks ago, I teased a large shipment coming to my house.  Yes, I did receive two very large boxes of yarn. 

It wasn’t quite 38 pounds, but it was about 31.5.  You see, I’d organized a KTog group order of yarn from Elmore Pisgah’s online store.  I have to say that I was very please with the ordering process.  I placed my order on June 10th, and the order arrived at my house on June 14th.  There’s not much else to say, so I’ll leave you with photos of the yarn.

Colors below are Teal Blue, Yellow, Daisy Ombre, White, Delft Blue, Cream, Tea Rose, Sea Breeze, and chocolate.

Colors below are Shocking Pink, Yellow, Black, and Pink Lemonade

Colors below are Camel, Burgandy, Raspberry Swirl, Light Grape, Shades of Green, Sour Green Apple, Apple Green, and Bubblegum.

Colors below are Sunburst, Mar-Di-Gras, Fiesta Ombre, Black, White, and Dalmation.

About a week ago Kelly had an interest in knitting the Bayerische sock from Eunny Jang.  She thought it would be fun it other members of KTog would join her in a knitalong.  Since I was looking for a new sock project, and had some plain colored sock yarn, I decided to jump right in.  Michelle, Melissa, and Kim decided to come along on this adventure too.

As of Sunday evening, I’ve made some decent progress on the sock.  I’m beginning to worry about how much yarn I have.  I was concerned about this from the beginning, so I only knit half the number of rows of twisted rib.  Now, I may only knit three repeats of chart D on the leg and then begin the heel.  I’ll weight the yarn and the sock as I get to the end of the third repeat and make that decision.

The other concerning fact about my yarn usage is the width of my sock.  When we were at our knitting meetup the other night, my sock was significantly wider than the other socks.  While I didn’t do a gauge swatch, I’m knitting with my Addi Turbo size 0s.  I refuse to knit socks on a smaller needle.  A size US00?  I don’t even own needles that small.  Even if I did, I might refuse on principle.  No garment other than lace should be knit on sizes that small.

Overall, it is surprising to me.  I used to be a very tight knitter.  In most patterns I had to upsize the recommended needle by 2 sizes to get the correct gauge.  I made an effort once to loosen up my knitting, but now it seems I’ve gone overboard.  I’m now going down needle sizes to make gauge.  Am I the only one with this problem?

Today, I finally got around to blocking the Handsome Triangle Shawl from Victorian Lace Today. Once it dries, I’ll find a way to take some nicer photos of it.  In a previous post, I’d hoped to have this shawl blocked more than a week ago, but life threw me for a loop that I wasn’t prepared for.   

When I started the blog, I swore that I’d keep it to mostly knitting content, that the world didn’t need commentary on my daily life.  But, the last ten days have been tough, and I think it would be helpful to get it out. So…

Warning – no knitting content follows.

(more…)

I’ve never really been one of those knitters with eight million projects going at the same time.  I tend to be faithful to one “big” project and maybe a pair of socks.  Items in my works in process pile usually get finished before I begin a new project.  Usually.

Back in early January, I cast on for the Handsome Triangle shawl from Victorian Lace Today.  I raced through the shawl.  The pattern was easy to memorize, the yarn wonderfully soft.  It was such enjoyable knitting.  The yarn was handling the texture of the lace nicely.

Within a few weeks of knitting, I made it to the last pattern row.  I consulted the book to see how the bind off should be handled and there it was…*ch8, sc into next shawl stitch, ch4, sc into next shawl stitch*.  How had I missed this?  The shawl called for a looped crochet bind off.  Now, I have some basic crochet skills, but my crochet is not as even as my knitting.  I did not want to ruin all of my hard work with a wonky edging that wasn’t to the same quality as the rest of the work.  The best thing to do, I thought, was to set it aside for a few days while I decided what to do about the edging.  That was back in January.  Tuesday night I dug through my knitting area trying to find my chibi to graft the toe ends of my Monkey socks.  While looking, I found the shawl hiding in a box.  It looked like this.

There it sat, still at the last pattern row, on live needles, waiting for the bind off.  Five months of sitting in a box, not being worked on.  I decided to do something about it.  Last night I started weaving in all of the ends.  Sure, it’s a bit more procrastination before working on the bind off for the shawl.  But, see all of the messy ends in the corner of the photo?  There’s quite a bit of work to be done on this thing.  My goal is to finish the bind off for this shawl and get it blocked this weekend or early next week.  Making my goal public makes it more likely to be finished.

In the spirit of confession, I’ll also confess to the following.  What could it be?  It’s tracking information from UPS.  I’m receiving two boxes today, 19 pounds each.  What on earth could this have to do with the knitting blog?  It couldn’t possibly be yarn…could it?

I love simple things.  I love to knit, and I love trivia/puzzles/games.  I’ve discussed this in previous Web Wednesdays.  This category will often revolve around these two subjects.

Today’s Web Wednesday is another trivia podcast, Music I-Quiz.

Anna does a really fun, 20-question music podcast.  Each podcast has a theme, and the songs and answers are all focused on the theme.  The current episode is her second “Little Miss I-Quiz” theme, where you can send in your answers to try and win a prize, and the title of Little Miss I-Quiz.  Be sure and check out previous episodes so you can hear the usual format, where you get the answers in the podcast.