Happy Little Hats

Here are the happy little hats I finished last weekend. This weekend I have another finished hat and have started a fifth one. I've got plenty of yarn left, we'll see how long the happy little hats keep coming.

If you are interested in making happy little hats for Dulaan, (or anyone else) here is what I am doing.

Using US 8 needles and LB Homespun yarn, cast on 80 stitches. Join without twisting, knit and knit and knit until you have about 7 inches. For me that's about from wrist to fingertips, so it's an easy measurement. Decrease 8 stitches per round - K8 K2tog around, then K7 K2tog... you know how that goes. Thread the tail through those last 8 stitches, pull it tight and weave in the ends. Badaboom, happy little hat.

With 80 stitches on size 8 and my knitting, these hats fit me. I, however, have kind of a pin head for a grown up, so I'm hoping that they'll work for a variety of noggin sizes. The roll of the brim also allows for some variability in the size. I'm completely content to knit these for a while, though I hear the call of socks and lace in the distance, so we'll see how long this lasts, eh? At least I will have my 5 for sure.

I am a Dorkfish.

I think that I'll blame it all on pms. It was a weird weekend for me. Friday before I left work my boss and I were having a conversation in which I cried. Not that he's a bad guy, he's not. In fact I like him quite a bit. But we were talking about the state of the office and what we'd both like to see happen in the upcoming months and I brought up some stuff that had been frustrating for me... tears. Saturday the Hubby and I ran some errands because he couldn't sit in the house all day. I totally could have, but I went with him anyway. My contact lens was funky and hurt my eye all day. Sunday I did not leave the house, nor did I leave my jammies. Sunday evening I cried again. Actually, while sitting on the couch knitting and watching episode after episode of Clean Sweep and What Not to Wear, I had several tearful moments. At that point I decided I must be hormonal. Today, as if all that weren't clue enough, I have the dropsies. Does anyone else get this? I spilled my lunch on my sweater and my pants. Classy! Then I knocked a full cup of tea off my desk onto the floor. Sweet! I didn't really want that tea anyway... I took pictures of the 3 hats for Dulaan I made over the weekend, but I can't get my camera to talk to the computer and be able to use the mouse or the keyboard work at the same time. I was planning to work on our taxes tonight, but perhaps it's better I don't touch anything.

Sock Randomness for Wednesday

Two posts in the same week? Weird. I turned in the store model socks without pics. Perhaps I'll stalk them with the camera once they are on dispay.

The "Hubby socks that would not end" have met an unfortunate fate. I did not have enough yarn to get all the way to the toe, and toe-less socks are right out. So last night with a heavy sigh they got frogged. Back to square one. A do-over with bigger needles is coming, but I just couldn't get them started last night.


Another pair may be destined for the frog pond. Here are my Rockin' Sock Club socks so far. As lovely as they look, they are a bit on the roomy size for my feet. I did the toes on US 1 and the foot on US 0 needles, I may have to go smaller. I'm going to continue for another inch or two so I can get a better feel for the fit over the ball of my foot.

Monday night I went to the Eastside Knitter's Guild meeting. I enjoyed it, I joined. Ryan was there talking about Dulaan. It gave me ideas about what to do with some yarn I recently cleaned out of the garage and was planning to donate somewhere. I'll be perusing the suggested patterns section to find some inspiration. Maybe since I'm having sock trauma, some quick and easy charity hat knitting is just the thing.

Monday Monday!

I finished something! Ok, it's the model socks for the store and they seem to have gone MIA before I could get a picture. I thought I put them in my bag so I could drop them off on my way home from work, but clearly they escaped. Perhaps tomorrow I'll capture them and get a mug shot for you.

Spring cleaning mode has hit me hard. My house of chaos is probably the biggest reason. This experience has really brought home the fact that we have entirely too much crap. Trying to get things organized and back to a working order is exhausting. There has been a lot of sorting and culling and parting with things. Not just of things that were damaged, but of all the rest of the stuff too. It feels good to let go of stuff that hasn't seen the light of day in years and has just been getting in the way. The major accomplishments of the weekend were moving my knitting stuff up to the dresser in the spare room so I can get to my dresser, and hubby parked his car in the garage for the first time ever! I have a big basket of clothes I'll never wear again to take to the donation station, the garbage and recycling cans are ready for pick up day!

Happy spring!

Eureka!

Yes, I finally found the USB cable for my camera! And we have a bathroom upstairs again! I am loving the new tile... ain't it pretty? At this point I think the contractor is all done with our house. Tomorrow the people come to run a gas line into the laundry area for the new dryer, and the new washer and dryer will be delivered on the 10th. I'm not sure we have enough clean clothes to get us all the way to the 10th, so I may have to do one more laundry run to my friend's house this weekend. Normalcy is returning at long last.

This is for Carole. This is what the cherry tree in my front yard looked like this morning. It really illustrates what March is to me. The last gasp of winter doing battle with the first blush of spring. I apologize for the quality, I don't have a steady hand when trying to take a picture over my head. :-)

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue...

It was going to be so clever with pictures and everything. But even though I have my camera and took pictures, I have no idea where the cable is to connect camera to computer and upload said pics. Crap. So allow me to try the thousand word version since the picture deal isn't going to happen...

Something old:

I finished the Austerman Step socks for my sister-in-law. The were pair 5 of 6 (for those of you keeping score at home) of the holiday sock-o-rama. This weekend I had an overwhelming urge to finish some stuff. The socks were top of the list. I'm sure that this need to finish was really inspired by my house which is still in a state of total chaos, but whatever, I finished the socks!

Something new:

I started new socks. These are for me and are in Trekking XXL color #131. Very bright and springy, don't you wish I had a picture? Me too! So far I've got a little over an inch of 2x2 ribbing, but it's the beginning of happy socks all for me! Also in the new category we have a spinning wheel! I am now the proud owner of a Lendrum folding wheel and I love it. I have signed up for a spinning class starting the 27th, but have already made yarn. I have also knit said yarn into little wrist cuff things. They aren't much since I only had a little over 50 yards of yarn, but they are all mine!

Something borrowed:

I went to the library and checked out Wendy Knits and EZ'a Knitter's Almanac. So far I've mostly flipped through to look at pictures, but I'm sure I'll enjoy reading them as well.

Something blue:

I am really enjoying working on my Trekking sweater. I'd love to show you the pictures, but alas, I'm lame. Take 8 balls of trekking sock yarn in shades of blue, pair them up and switch color pairs every 10 rows. I'm loving the look and can't wait to have more than 6 inches to look at.

As for the inspiration for the title, we will be celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary this weekend and I'm totally looking forward to a couple days away with the hubby. I'll even bring his socks (6 of 6) to work on while we're gone. :-)

The comforts of home

I have had cause to think quite a bit about house and home and comfort. I recently went on a bit of a binge with the online shopping. I couldn't figure out why I suddenly felt compelled to buy all that stuff. When I really thought about it, it was a comfort thing. My house is still all topsy-turvy trying to recover from "the incident". Not a single room in the house was really usable for a couple of weeks. In short, my home was not providing me with the comfort I needed. Naturally I turned to my knitting for the comfort I was lacking. No such luck. I was sick of socks. I didn't have the concentration required to knit lace. I had swatched for the sweater I was really excited about, but until I washed the swatch to make sure the gauge was in fact good, I couldn't work the sweater. Unfortunately we don't have working laundry at the house right now and I kept forgetting to take the stupid swatch to the laundromat. Without home and knitting comfort, I turned to shopping. I finally ordered some Rockin' sock yarn. I ordered three books from Knit Picks. And I subscribed to IK at long last. Several times I was able to back down from the ledge and finally asked myself, "what are you doing?" The answer was looking for comfort. Once I realized what the issue was I was able to take other steps to make things better. I moved a bunch of stuff that had been stacked up in our bedroom up to the spare bedroom that won't require any construction. My personal sanctuary was restored to some semblance of order and the compulsion to comfort shop has relaxed. Whew!

Last Saturday I ventured down to Tacoma to check out the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival. It was lovely and next year I may actually attend classes. I got my book signed by Stephanie! Then I went to the market. It was lovely wandering around the booths looking at all the wonderful fibery goodness and being wrapped in the loving comfort and wool fumes. Several things happened at the market. I was fondling some fiber when a woman behind me started explaining the properties of some yarn. I knew that voice, I just couldn't remember from where. I moved around so I could see her face and she was really familiar, but I still couldn't put my finger on it. She looked at me and said, "welcome back!" That startled me because I hadn't been there before. Eventually the epiphany hit. This was the woman who taught my mom and me to spin! What a wonderful small world. Next I met Teyani, and had a nice conversation about spinning.

It was a really great day that ended up like this... I joined Knitters Anonymous. I bought a new spindle and some fiber. I have been spinning a little bit each evening when I get home, and I am in love! Hopefully this dose of comfort shopping will hold me over until my house is back in order. If not I have set my sights on a spinning wheel asap, so perhaps that motivation will keep me from getting out of control in the internet...

We'll see!

Let's recap...

So 2007 hasn't started out the way I had envisioned. Our year end trip to California was great. We spent 5 action packed days at Disneyland and California Adventure. Then a couple days in the Pasadena area including the Rose Parade. The down side is that with the long hours and lack of sleep, the dry climate and the air quality, we all came home with a cough and sniffle. We got home late Monday night to find one of the trees in our yard laying over into our neighbor's driveway. Luckily nothing was damaged when it fell. We had 2 evenings to do our laundry and clean up the disaster we left when we rushed out of town before my parents arrived to stay for a week. It was great to see them and my mom very generously shared her cold with me. So back in bed I went over the weekend feeling like total snot-headed crap. I even missed the rescheduled Christmas gathering with the in-laws due to my yuckiness.

Monday things got really interesting. A load of laundry was started before everyone left the house for the day (not an unusual occurance). Upon arriving home we discovered that the washer had malfunctioned and pumped large quantities of water into my entire house. The laundry room is upstairs in our house and directly over the garage. The hallway was soaked and the water was making it's way into the other three rooms up there. It was practically raining in the garage and the furnace was completely filled with water. Water made it's way down the stairs to the hardwood in the diningroom and through the walls/floor/ceiling to the family room below and rained onto the leather sofa below (missing a large stash of sock yarn by inches!) What a mess!

We have spent the last week in a hotel while our house was full of drying equipment. I just got word that the new furnace is in and the blowers and dehumidifiers have been removed. The carpets are getting cleaned tomorrow and the insurance adjuster is coming Thurday. I'm sure it will be a long process of putting everything back together, but I'm so excited to sleep in my own bed tonight!

What about the knitting, you ask? I worked on hubby's socks on the plane to and from California, but since I've not felt well and the light in the hotel room sucked, I've done very little. I did buy a sweater kit and did a little swatching for that, but I'm not jumping in on that quite yet. In my cold medicated state while my mom was here I managed to somehow end up with the wrong number of heel stitches on the other pair of gift socks I was madly trying to finish, so that didn't happen. I will finish them and they will get to the intended recipient, but I just didn't have it in me last week. I am very ready to get back to the normal routines of our life. We haven't really had that since before Thanksgiving.

Think happy thoughts for us, and I hope 2007 gets better very soon!

Down to the wire

At 5:00 last night I finished grafting the toes on a pair of socks that were to be delivered at dinner at 6:30. Both pairs were very well received last night and I have it on good authority that one pair at least was worn to work today. That right there is the joy of giving hand made gifts.

So now I have one more pair that needs finishing (I'm working on the heel flap) before Monday and I'm home free. The hubby already knows he's getting socks in January and I'll work in them on the plane to California.

Since I'm not entirely sure where my camera is at this moment, I have no pictures today. I'm madly trying to get everything done at work so I can leave for a week and not have a disaster when I return.

Wish me luck, I'll let you know in January how things turned out...

18 days until vacation!

That's right in 18 days, we leave for Disneyland! That also means in 18 days I will have not only finished but washed, blocked, wrapped and delivered all the socks. I tried to take a bunch of pictures yesterday so I could show you all the progress, but alas the afternoon light was fading and they are pretty much crap. Today I spent the few moments I had between phone calls and assorted whatnot knitting on said socks instead of photographing them.

I've decided to wait until they are all done to graft the toes so I don't have to relearn how to do that 6 times. I'm sure by the time I'm done I'll have it down, but it's not something I've used often enough to just do it. I now have 2 pair waiting for closure, and I'm doing the toe decreases on another. I have started the heel flap on the next pair, am about an inch shy of the heel flap starting on one more. That's five for those of you keeping score at home. The sixth pair is for my hubby, and I've already told him that he may not get his socks until we get back from vacation. That will give me something to take on the plane, now that I think about it...