I was glad to have received some knitting gifts for my birthday.  I received three books.  Heirloom Knitting by Sharon Miller.  I also received two of the Barbara Walker Treasury books, numbers two and three.

Now that I have these treasury books, I have an urge to participate in the Walker Treasury Project.  If you haven’t heard of it, it is an effort to knit swatches of all the patterns in the Walker Treasury books.  All of the swatches in the project are posted to a blog and categorized by book, stitch type, etc.  It’s a really interesting effort.

In addition to books, I was also the lucky recipient of yarn.  Pictured below is Knit Picks Risata in Cocoa and Memories in Redwood Forest.

Finally, there are two skeins of the Knit Picks Memories in Rocky Mountain Dusk.  Notice the amount of blue in the photo below.  If you check out the color selection on the Knit Picks site, the blue is barely noticeable.  Both the gifter and I were surprised by the color of this yarn.

I also got a new size 0 needle.  My Addi is taking a beating while knitting Bayerische.  It is in a weird arc/bent shape.  Speaking of Bayerische, I’m in the second repeat of chart D on sock number two.  I forgot how long each round of this sock takes.  I hope to finish the second repeat of chart D by the end of the weekend.

Thanks to a commenter, it has come to my attention that one of my online creations was featured in the New York Times yesterday.

A link to my Illinois Yarn Stores Google Map was featured in a New York Times article on online map making.  There is no mention of the creators of the maps, but I’m super excited anyway.

Blame my lack of blogging lately on Ravelry.  I got my invitation on Monday, and have feverishly adding my stash and projects.  My username there is TwistedLoops, stop by and say hi.

Today is my birthday, so I decided to hop on the wikipedia birthday meme

Events

1. 1692 – Salem Witch Trials: Five women are hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts 
2. 1848 – Women’s rights: The two day Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York
3. 1996 – Opening Ceremonies of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia

I picked the Atlanta olympics because I attended. However, I had the unfortunate timing of arriving in Atlanta about 4-5 hours after the bomb went off. A friend and I planned a roadtrip at about 4pm on a Friday.  We sat down at work and decided to head to Atlanta and the Olympics for a “once in a lifetime” experience. We drove through the night and crossed the border into Georgia around 4 or 5 am. My radio wasn’t working, so we listened to CDs the entire drive. We picked up the early edition of the Atlanta paper, and headed into the nearest Waffle House for breakfast and to plan our day – there was nothing in the early edition newspaper about the bombing.  We put together the plan and headed down to the heart of the Olympic event area.

We were near the bombing site, and saw a lot of national guard troops, but still had no idea what had happened.  I’d thought security was kind of heavy, but didn’t really think much about it.  I was still just a naive college kid.  It wasn’t until I approached a bank of phone booths to call my mom and let her know I was in Atlanta that I noticed the corner newsbox headline. 

We still managed to have a good time in Atlanta, and even managed to get tickets to an event.  It’s definitely a trip I’ll always remember.

Births

1. Edgar Degas 1917
2. Lizzie Borden 1927

I’ve always found it amusing that I share a birthday with Lizzie Borden. I’m not sure what this says about me.

Holiday

1. Lucaria

No idea what this is.  Wikipedia listed it as a roman feast.  There weren’t many holidays to choose from.

Want to play along?  The rules:

1. Go to Wikipedia
2. Search for your birthday Month and Day
3. Pick 3 events, 2 births and 1 holiday

I finally finished reknitting the Bayerische sock tonight.  I decided to add an additional 8 rows of the texture pattern, and then knit the toe.  I did some informal measuring, and decided that there would be enough yarn for this.  I knit, and knit, and knit.  Each row became more and more troubling.  Would I run out of yarn?  Finally, I decreased down to the 8 stitches on each needle called for by the pattern before grafting.  How much yarn was left?  You can see it there in the picture, all 29 inches of it.  That’s right, less than one yard of yarn remains.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m worried about the second sock.  If my gauge is off just a tiny bit, it could spell disaster for sock two.  But, I went ahead and wove in the ends on the first sock.  It’s interesting, my sock is actually a bit big on me.  As I knit with the others from KTog on this project, I kept noticing that mine was a bit wider than the other socks being knit.  But, as I stated in a previous post, I refuse to knit socks on anything smaller than my US0s.

As for the next steps, I’m not sure if I’ll cast on for the next sock right away, or continue with my other current knitting obsession, dishcloths.  I’ve finally knit some ballband dishcloths.  The pattern is easy to memorize, and makes for good movie knitting.  I’ve still got a ton of cotton to go, so I image there will continue to be more of this pattern. 

So, Ravelry posted a way to check your place on the waiting list.  I’ve got less than 1,000 people in front of me.  Based upon the Ravelry blog’s previously stated statisitics about the number of invites they are sending per week, I’m thinking that I should get in this week.  While I heard about the site early on, I wasn’t really interested in joining.  It wasn’t until Ravelry posted screenshots of the features that I really became interested.  I have the advantage that I already keep a fairly extensive spreadsheet of my yarn inventory and some projects I want to make. 

As I was surfing around the net today, I stumbled upon a site of knitting and felted bag patterns that I’d never been to before, Noni Designs.  I’ve never seen their patterns, but I love this bag, the Large Patterned Prism Bag.  I even love it in the chocolate and aqua colors shown.  I haven’t done any felting in more than a year, but this bag might just be a reason to jump in.  The site also has a nice tutorial on how to line square bags and triangle shaped bags.

There has been no knitting progress on Bayerische.  I did manage to rip the toe back to the last patterned row, but I did nothing from there.  The knitting time I had this weekend was spent making some Ballband Dishcloths in the cotton that I have.