Make My Day

The lovely ladies at Team Knit have graciously appointed me a "You make my day award".



It makes my "two sizes too small" heart flutter to receive such a wonder. It's now my turn to share the love, and I'm feeling generous.

All of these lovely people really make my day. I check your blogs at least twice a day and you always make me smile:

Heather at The ADD Knitter
Kim at Yarn Abuse
Robbie at Knitxcore
Roger at Over Abundance
Franklin at The Panopticon
Stephen at Watch Stephen Knit

Thank you guys for making my day!

Boys in Love

Check it out! I knit a hat. I hear your gasps of surprise. "Another hat? No he couldn't. He wouldn't." Oh, but I did.



I knit this for Andrew. Look, its even got little norwegian boys wearing some sort of breeches and holding hands.

I know this is going to sound pretentious, but I really didn't expect the Wool of the Andes to be so soft and nice. I think I might use it for all of my general wool needs in the future.

So this hat finished, all of my christmas knitting 2007 is complete. Now I can get back to knitting for me. I may even get to adjust something over on my progress bars. Bet.

Vegan Knitting

I have a very good friend named Jack who is also a very angry vegan. In my efforts to cover all of my loved ones in hand knits, I decided to knit him a hat. Well, actually I decided that Andrew would knit him a hat. We went to the yarn store and Andrew picked out the yarn and began knitting. The yarn is Classic Elite Premiere, which is a 60/40 cotton/tencel blend. After about 10 hours of knitting, He had about 1 1/2". With only the mildest patronizing tone in my voice, I offered to finish it for him.

Let me just say that I hate knitting with cotton. I know all of the properties that make cotton the wonderful fiber that it is, such as it's ability to keep one cool and supa crisp stitch definition, but these very qualities make it an incredibly bad choice for a hat.

The first problem I came across is the blown out ribbing. The more I attempted to maintain even tension, the more it prolapsed into some unmentionable blob of stringy entrails. Whatever. I figured that once I got to the stockinette, all would be gravy. Like any good knitter, I used a jogless join for the stripes. With wool, this would result in beautifully even stitches. On cotton, it makes a really gross ladder of gaping stitches 100x more fugly than a little jog in the stripes.

In the end it came out okay. A hat was made using no animal products and therefore another vegan is kept warm.



Note: Next year he gets a juicer.

Happy New Year!

It's been a pretty big year for me. I moved cross country, started school, and subsequently lost any glimmer of my former care-free nature. All in all, it's been a good year. Our power went out last night so we spent the night huddled under seven blankets, praying that we would have all of our toes in the morning. Thankfully our heat came back on about 20 minutes ago and we can take our parkas off.
I was going through my yearly New Year's knitting roll call of FOs and realized that the list is pretty short. I've been knitting constantly, and yet my stack of woolen goods is light. I planned on knitting four sweaters this year. How many sweaters did I start? Three. How many finished sweaters do I have? Zero. Not a damn one. Eek. That's okay. I managed to finish some other stuff.

This is what my mom's cowl ended up looking like:



She really liked it, so I guess that's a success. Oh and by the way, LMKG times this one at 6-8 hours. It took me about twelve. Go fig.

Andrew had the flu on Christmas eve so I stayed home with him while my family was busy merry-making. I used the extra hour or so to finish my dad's scarf. Here's my dad. He likes it.



I spent Suday night knitting the Army Earflap cap for my friend Atom:



Due to the lack of heat and the densly knit bulky wool, this fucker has had a hell of a time drying. I don't have to give it to Atom until Saturday, so hopefully it will dry by then.

One last thing I knitted way back in February for our first trip to Chicago:



Blurry mittens! Actually, these are about 30% less blurry in person. They're knit out of Plymouth Galway with D.B. Cashmerino stripes. The left mitten is about 1/2 an inch longer than the right. Would you believe that I have a grotesquely misproportate left flipper? I don't, but it's awful to admit that I can't hold an unfinished mitten to it's partner and think "Hey, one of these is not like the other!" Alas.

I started something for Andrew last night before the power went out. Let me preface this by saying he picked out the colors.



Andrew has a unique sense of color that clicks about 70% of the time. I have knit him some truely horrendous creations over the years from yarn he picked out. I'm trying to both forget everything I know about color theory as well as save this hat from being able to be used as a method of torture akin to water boarding. Wish me luck.

Have a fantastic 2008, my friends.