Yarn store fun

Paulette and I hit the local yarn stores yesterday.

In a fit of aqua goodness, I bought this at Yarns by Design in Neenah:

I went there to find aqua fingering weight yarn to make lace gloves from the book, A Gathering of Lace. As you can see, I was successful. I bought the Lorna's Laces Angel (the teeny skein on the left) because I love it and have been looking at it for a while now and also I thought maybe it would be good to trim gloves or mittens. The Smooshy just came home with me.

We also went to Iris Fine Yarns (we actually went here first). I started looking there for the Gathering of Lace book and yarn to make gloves with. Here's what came home with me:

I bought the cream Trekking Pro Natura sock yarn to make lace gloves with. I bought the pale pink Misti Alpaca to make a lace shawl with.

I also bought some 5" size 0s to knit glove fingers with.

The Gathering of Lace book is just GORGEOUS!! I want to make a lot of the projects in there. Paulette and I went halfsies on it, so we each only paid $15 for it at Iris. There is one lace shawl in there that is just plain nuts. The skill level on it is marked as "adventurous". Not for me! The charts for it are very teeny.

Paulette bought some lovely 9" rosewood size 8s there. We can't remember what brand they are because Paulette is waiting for them to order the case for them that they were supposed to be in. These are the silkiest needles to knit with. Some of them come with sterling silver accents.

My Sea Silk lace scarf is just humming along. I should have it almost halfway done by the time I go to bed tonight.

Scarf progress

Here's the progress on my lace scarf:




It's slow going, but it's worth it.

I think I will look at Iris tomorrow to see if they have the book, "A gathering of lace". I looked at it the last time I was there looking for glove patterns and drooled over the patterns in the book--all of them.

I have about 200 yards of Alpaca Sox yarn left from my gloves (I weighed it on my kitchen scale). I think I would like to make a scarf to go with them. I hope I have enough yarn. It doesn't have to be a long scarf, since I am just going to wear it with my leather jacket. I am thinking of this pattern perhaps:

http://gonnapurl.blogspot.com/2006/01/scarf-patterns.html

We'll see what happens.

I think I would actually like to finish the quilt I am hand quilting (for 5 years now!) for my bed. I drew the quilting pattern myself because I couldn't find one I liked. It's vined morning glories. I hope that when my quilting guidelines are washed away that you can tell what the design is.

Here's an example of the piecing pattern:

Mine is all in soft pastels--really pretty.

I want to paint my bedroom this coming month in a soft aqua and this quilt has a beautiful aqua in it. When that one's all done, I have a wall quilt I want to make to hang over my bed that's all striped material, something I've been wanting to do for like, forever. I have all the materials for the wall quilt--all I have to do is cut it out and sew it. I am thinking of machine quilting that (which I have never done before) to speed things up. We'll see what happens with that in the end. I'm all about the hand quilting.

Wow, it's Wednesday!

I can't believe it's Wednesday already. That means it's Knit Night again. Lots to do before then though.

I got my gloves all finished:

It sure helps even the stitches out when you wash and block them.

My new project is a lace scarf. I am using Brooke's Column of Leaves scarf pattern that can be found here:

http://brookenelson.com/leafscarfpattern.html

Here's the start of it:

The Handmaiden Sea Silk yarn I am using for this (color: Rose Garden) is very soft and lightweight. I can't wait to wear this!

Easter intervenes

Oh my, I'm so tired. I have been running with one Easter thing or another since last week Monday. This morning (the day after) when I woke up my body said, "You're not really expecting me to get out of bed this early and go to work, are you?". I really didn't feel all that well, probably from all the unfamiliar food, so I stayed home and slept until 10:30AM. Yikes, that's almost 12 hours of sleep! I do feel much better now. Hey, it's spring break anyhow.

My gloves are coming along. I almost have the index finger done on the second glove.

My next project is Brooke Nelson's column of leaves scarf, made out of the Handmaiden Sea Silk in the Rose Garden colorway (peachy-pink and sage green) I bought a few weeks ago:

http://brookenelson.com/leafscarfpattern.html

I can't wait!

Noooooooooooooo

I just read the weather on the Green Bay NWS site. Ugh. We are under a snow advisory tomorrow for 3-5 inches. Noooooooo.

Hey, I only work one more day this week!

I am taking off on Friday, so I guess tomorrow will be my Friday. Unfortunately, I hear we are supposed to get snow on Friday-yuck! I mean, I like it and everything, but it's March now. And what's worse is I read on the Green Bay National Weather Service website that we may possibly get snow on Easter. Not that's it has never happened before, but could it stop now--please?

Got some Easter shopping done last night in Appleton and also found a new pair of jeans on sale at the Gap (instead of $59.50, I got them for $21.97).

Therefore, I didn't get much knitting done last night on my second glove. I have a good start on the lace edging, which is 2 or 3 rows from being done.

Maybe today will be a good day because it's Knit Night tonight. At least I know the evening will be good. And why not? The combo of mocha and knitting--well, who can beat that?

Love the gloves!

I finished my first glove last night!



I'm hooked!! The most fun part was knitting the fingers.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Jeffy and Churchill are participating in the wearing o' the green today:

I finished my fingerless gloves on Friday, AKA Lit mitts:

Then, I started these gloves:

They're made out of Classic Elite Alpaca Sox yarn, with 1.5 US DPN needles. The pattern is Golden Bracelets in the book, Knitting new mittens and gloves, by Robin Melanson. I heavily edited the pattern for me. I left out the Fair Isle band and added a lace edging (from the Waving Lace socks in Interweave Press' book 25 Favorite Socks). I wanted them plain both because it's my first pair of gloves and because of the patterning in the yarn. Gloves are really fun to knit!!

Update on the land o' potholes--this morning when I was getting ready for work, city workers were filling in the great swath of sinkholes in front of our house. They ran out of patch mix and had to go for more. I told you they were really big.

We had a busy day on Saturday. First we went to a meeting in the morning in Fond du Lac. Then we went up to Appleton because Iris was having a sale, where I bought this yarn:

I don't know what I'm going to use the RYC Soft Lux in pink metallic for. I just liked it. I think I may make some more gloves with the Jaeger Roma in light blue. We'll see what happens.

Back to Saturday... after we were done at Iris, we stopped at home to feed the cats and get the bags of candy for the St. Patrick's Day parade in Fond du Lac that we were marching in with our friend Jessica King, who's running for state senator in the 18th Wisconsin State Senate district. Then we went to Peg Lautenschlager's house (our former AG) for dinner with everyone from the parade and then we went to Jef Hall's (Jef is our county Democratic party chair) house in Oshkosh for a St. Pat's party. I was pretty tired at the end of the day. Yesterday I went to church and Starbucks. I spent the rest of the day knitting.

Tonight is slated for putting up the Easter stuff. I was going to do it yesterday, but the gloves I was knitting wouldn't let me.

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!

It's getting deep

I want to thank my friends Jennifer and John in Colorado for the lovely sympathy card they sent us to comfort us in our mourning for Brett Favre's retirement. It was most appreciated. I laughed for at least 5 minutes after opening it. Thanks, I needed that!

The potholes in front of our house have been revealed in the melting:



They're not so much potholes as they are sinkholes right now. Maybe they should leave them there as they are really slowing the speeders down on our street. At lunch I saw a city street division truck checking them out.

I only have the thumb left to do on my fingerless mitts and they are done! Then, on to regular gloves.

I'm still a factory!

Here are the Railroad Rib worsted weight socks all done:




It's creative picture taking run amok. I made these with size 5 DPNs. They turned out a little big, but that's okay since I'm just wearing them in boots. Next time (if there is one) I would use 4s. This pattern was really easy, but I was getting bored towards the end. My feet are warm.

Now I started knitting these "Lit mitts".



What are lit mitts, you say? Oh, my little readerlets, they are actually fingerless mitts. I named them lit mitts because I do a lot of literature drops for political candidates and it's hard to manipulate the literature to leave it at someone's door with gloves or regular mittens on your hands. These will be really good! I borrowed some of Paulette's a couple of weeks ago when we were putting lit out and they were wonderful.

On the Jeffy front, he is all happy that I took him outside for 10 minutes yesterday. He sat on the front steps and purred and purred. He has spring fever in a major way. Don't we all. I wish the ugly snowpiles would go away now.

Knit Knot and stuff

Here's a picture of public knitting art in Ohio:




A link to the article on the tree:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/ODD_KNITKNOT_TREE?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Not that I'm saying I'll be knitting tree sweaters anytime soon. I have enough with the stuff I am knitting.

Got a lot done on my socks this weekend. I am looking forward to knitting gloves with the Alpaca Sox yarn I bought a few weeks ago. Phyllis at Iris thinks I'm nuts. She has never personally knit gloves. I love Phyllis--I got a glove and mitten knitting book up there for $3.00 with an Iris card that was $5 from being full. Lots of good patterns in there.

You know, why is it that in order for something to be considered art it sometimes has to look weird. Like the above picture. I consider everyone's needlework a work of art. When did such lovely stuff as knitting become downgraded to just a craft? There are some things I have seen knitted out there that should be framed and hung on a wall they are so lovely. But yet, our stuff is ignored unless we do something weird with it. Knitters, unite!! Our stuff is a work of art and we're not going to take it any more!

What a difference a day makes

This morning when I was working in the Slide Library I started thinking that you can't argue with hard numbers. Sooooo, I started doing a survey of the entire slide collection (all 195 drawers of them!) to see where we got all those slides from. Well, I got through the first 4 drawers ( I would have gotten through more, but I needed to go on break to knit. I have my priorities!) and found that out of the roughly 1000 slides I looked through that more than half of them are copied from books or magazines, therefore they would be unusable for this project. It's actually worse than I thought! Okay, I'm saying it--I told you so, Art department faculty!!

Enough of work stuff now. My sock is going along slowly. If I didn't have to keep going away to meetings or whatever in the evenings after work it would help. Tomorrow I want to go to Iris Fine Yarns to look for a glove pattern to make gloves with the Alpaca Sox yarn I bought for spring. Maybe if I make gloves for the spring season, it get here faster.

Some day the icebergs outside will melt. It's been slow going on the melting front. It's supposed to be -5 outside tonight. Not much melting is going to happen that way. We have a ton of potholes on the pavement that is uncovered. I don't remember any recent years when they have been quite this bad.

For your personal entertainment...

Last night at our knitting group, Margaret was complaining that folks aren't keeping up with their blogs for her personal entertainment. So, here's one for you, Margaret. Even though at the moment I don't feel real entertain-y.

Why the mood, you ask? Well, lemme tell ya..... got a few minutes? One of my bosses is trying to pressure me into potential copyright violations concerning digitizing the contents of the Slide Library. He is offering a typical Big Brother answer to try and pacify me that the "Executive Committee" knows all about the copyright issues (do not!) and that I shouldn't be concerned about them--at all. Yeah, whose ass is it who'll get fined for willfull copyright infringment (to the tune of $750,000 per infraction) if we get caught? Being the only person who is in the Slide Library, I have quickly realized I need backup to fight against the faculty dummies who want me to do this. What do art department faculty know about copyright....geez! If it was their work, they'd be all over that. But if it's someone else's, nah, that's no big deal!

I'm sure this saga will continue indefinately, since the whole scheme was sprung upon me 1 1/2 weeks ago by surprise that I am to immediately do this after I've been asking for 5 years if we could explore our options in this regard. But now I'm supposed to accomplish it without any planning. Just because you can buy a new computer and scanner is no reason to just scan away with no thought of the consequences. I was painfully reminded of this sort of thing on Tuesday when I was driving to Madison. Just because your car can go faster than the speed limit, if you get caught, it's going to cost you money. $236 of money. I've had a bad two weeks. Sorry for the rambling.

Look at the pretty yarn and make it all go away:

Peace Fleece pretty. Peace Fleece peaceful. Want to crawl into the skein of Peace Fleece and hide for a week. With my knitting, of course.

Wednesday was a much better day--the bus driver could take his chances with the weather and State Patrol. Got bus knitting done:

Jeffy, can I snuggle up with you the rest of the week? I'm tired (but apparently, not as tired as Brett Favre!).

Smokin' fingers!

Geez, my fingers are smokin'. I finished one whole mitten yesterday. The pair is done.



Now I have moved on to the boot socks I wanted to make. The pattern is Railroad Rib socks by Evelyn Clark. I believe it's a Fiber Trends pattern. I'm using Lorna's Laces superwash worsted in the Tuscany colorway on size 5 needles (DPNs, of course!).



This is what I got done on my break and on my lunch. These should go fast!

Not much else exciting today. There are students in the Music Library listening to music for a class. At least, for the moment, they are not listening to it so loud it's like sensoround and rattles my office window. I think they're listening to their IPods way too loud and losing their hearing sometimes.

Tomorrow I am off work to go to a political action committee meeting for our union in Madison and on Wednesday I am going to ride on a bus with my union brothers and sisters to our annual Lobby Day at the state capital, again in Madison. Lots of knitting time on the bus and as an added bonus, it's also Knit Night that evening! Tomorrow after my meeting I want to go to the Sow's Ear in Verona to get some more Noro to make fingerless mitts. They'll be great for those lit drops on chilly days.

A fun Saturday!

Well, we didn't get to yarn stores, but we had plenty of fun snowshoeing:

What a beautiful day for snowshoeing!

We went to The Cookery in Fish Creek to eat when we were done.

We saw this turkey near the Nature Center in Peninsula State Park at the beginning of the trail:

Mr. Turkey was with a group of two other turkeys. This guy was pretty aggressive. I think that other people must have fed him. He got within 5 feet of me a couple of times and I think he would have gotten closer if I hadn't run away from him. Gobble gobble.

I got one of my mittens almost done in the car ride.

Tomorrow we are staying home, except to go to church and of course, Starbucks. Maybe I'll get the mittens done!