Yarn Thoughts

New Doings!

All sorts of new things are happing over here at the McG house of fun.

My older son, Ben is starting kindergarten Wednesday AND he's about to lose his first tooth.  The husband is ALSO starting school this week and we have been jamming in fun about every weekend since we left our North Carolina vacation in July.  This past weekend was camping.  What a great trip!  Until my niece threw up 3 hotdogs all over the tent, herself, her clothes and her bedding on Saturday night but without these kinds of stories life gets boring.

And boring is something I won't be having for a while yet.

New things are on the horizon.  For all my ravelry fans I have started a new raverly group - Whip Up Wishers.  It's a fan group for the website of Whip Up, a great crafty site that kind of gathers all sorts of greats tutorials and crafty projects from around the internty and posts them all in one place.

And cooler than cool is that after I made the group I contacted the site owner, Kathreen Ricketson, who is super-duper nice and allowed me to interview her for the group so that fans could get a little more background into the site.  Pretty awesome stuff.

I hear the husband walking in the door and I need to pop out and get lunch supplies as me and my little man are brown bagging it together from now on.  I see lots of goldfish crackers and tuna sandwiches in my future.

Up next, how to fail at designing a lace thing!

Rooty Tooty

Look! It's an FO! Does it matter that I finished it over a month ago? Maybe two? I only added the embellishments last night. Thanks for not being judgmental. The pattern is from http://www.purlbee.com and it's the Fruity Potholder pattern, crocheted. I used KnitPicks Shine Worsted and Cotton Ease by Lion Brand for the white parts. I added a row of cream backstitches by the rind to break up the colors and to represent the pith. This type of project is right up my alley. I love small, quick, colorful projects that incorporate some kind natural theme. I'm actually a little more excited by this than I should be! Hopefully mom likes it too as I'm sending it to her!

Oh my gosh, I'm already slacking!
I have been knitting. And buying yarn like a horde of moths is on its way to chomp my stash.
But blogging? Somehow August always ends up as busy as December for me. I take vacation every year in July and as soon as I return I pack in activities into every weekend from then until fall. Go go go.

A Little Somethin' Somethin'

My monkey socks are way too loose. As soon as I vented about the pattern it clicked. Go figure!

My next pattern sat in the back of my brain all day yesterday as I read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Totally worth it. This is a gripping book and I can't wait to start the next one tonight.

On Friday I left my new project at work over the weekend so I had nothing on the needles. I hate that! Luckily for me I went through a little fit last winter when I was stressed out and had absolutely zero, zilch, nada patience for anyone or any thing. I was walking around MAD and pissed off at the world and I could only bring myself to crochet granny squares and flowers. These had no purpose whatsoever which was great! I made about two dozen squares before joining the gym and taking my stress out on my muscles instead. There are tons of Attic24 flowers all over my house too. These little things take less than an hour (or 20 minutes for a flower). I love having this kind of project on standby.

I am perfectly ok not having a purpose for making granny squares. Of course I know they COULD be a blanket, but I'm not even in that mindset. The squares will probably be a blanket someday but right now I'm content to let them just be what they are. How very zen, no?

Now whenever I'm in between projects (like today when my pattern and project are split up) I just grab a few balls of cotton classic and crank away. Methodical, mindless but oh soft soft, pretty and colorful! Kind of like my mental state...or where I need my mind to go so I can regroup and sally forth!

The next pattern

I have a pattern I'm going to be taking pictures of and writing up today.  I like this one a lot and am very excited to get going on it.  Today being Sunday it's one of the few times I have unscheduled hours in the afternoon. 

I haven't abandoned the Monkey socks but my gauge is wicked loose on 2.75 needles and I may restart them on on a 2.25 to make them more sock like as opposed to slouchy-leg-warmer like.  Though now I'm thinking that monkey leg warmers or even arm warmers would be a good idea.  This is how my ideas happen.  I just let my mind wander from place to place to place and I end up somewhere different from where I started.

Off to get started!

We live, we learn

In February of 2006 I learned how to knit. My son wasn’t
yet a year old. My previous life of staying up late playing videogames,
hanging with friends and ordering food in was starting to diminish. Oh we
held on far, far, longer to that life than we should have - only now in 2010
have we stopped having friends over on a twice a week basis. Getting old
sucks.

ANYWAY.

It was 2006 and Valentine’s Day was coming. I
mentioned to the hub that I wanted knitting lessons so he paid for me to take a
class through our local adult education program. My teacher Lorraine was
a feisty woman. On my third class she came to me and my sad, pathetic
strip of yellow acrylic knitting. She took my work out of my hands and
without blinking just started to frog it right there in front of me. She
said something along the lines that when she was learning to knit someone
had done the same to her and that was the action that finally got her to learn
it. Well it worked for me too. I actually started “getting”
it after that. Another thing she taught me was to read a whole pattern
through at first, but when knitting a pattern to only read to the comma. 
This meant that in a line of instructions, say “purl 3, k2tog, knit 5,
yo, …” just do the purl three. Then do the k2tog. Then
knit 5. She said not to get ahead of ourselves and get distracted. 
This has always been very good advice for me and has served me well.

But it doesn’t work for charts.

Which is the whole point of this post.

I love charts for colorwork but I LOATHE them for lace. I am what one may call a total flaming idiot when it
comes to yarn overs and decreases in the same row. Totally freaking slays
my intellectual capabilities and I have the paperwork (and the student loans)
to prove I am an intelligent woman. Now this may accent or contradict my
intelligence, but I am also pretty determined to challenge myself and take on obstacles
for the simple fact that they’re in my way. To that end I have
started knitting my first pair of patterned socks. What? What I
have done before now? Ribbing. Good old functional ribbing. 
But I am better than that! I have paid my dues and am ready to get off
the bench and onto the field with the big girls and knit some fancy socks for
Pete’s sake. I have this very pretty ball of sockotta and a copy of
the Monkey Socks pattern and I hit the road running yesterday.

This has not been going well for me.

Kind of like the way throwing water on an electrical fire
would not go well. Or forgetting to check my pockets before I throw them
in the laundry and trash my birthday check from my grandpa. Or taking my
kids to the library at the time at which the little guy always poops (he’s
very regular) and not bringing a diaper. 

I’ve finally gotten past the 1 inch of twisted ribbing
that was just slightly annoying for the fact that I had a knot in my yarn after
knitting like 8 rows. I thought that might be a sign to start over but I don’t
believe in signs and plugged on. Even though I screwed up and had to tink
past the yarn join three separate times. I don’t believe in fate
dammit! I don’t!

I’m on row 6 of the first repeat of the first sock and
I have basically knit the damn thing twice already for how often I have had to
tink back and re-do. Tinking yarn overs ALWAYS screws me up. Maybe it was
because I started the pattern on the train before I had any coffee. At least that's what I told myself. I was
reading the chart very carefully yet whenever I came to the next row there were a
whole mess of purl stitches that weren’t purls at all but knits! 
What the hell! It wasn’t even all of them or even sections, it’s like I
read the symbol and my mind started blinking in and out of consciousness at
random intervals so I would stop purling and knit a few.

Thinking I might just need coffee before I challenge myself I
took it out again on my break. I can’t even complete one row
correctly! It’s me. I’m disabled by lace and charts and
yarn over and decreases.  

Should I accept this and move on? Should I frog it and
get on with my life? Should I just shove these aside as my pick-up
project and just do a row or two in between projects? Or suck it up and
make myself get over this stupid obstacle? Telling me that I can’t
do something makes me crazy and really fires me up to prove I can, but I don’t
think telling myself I can’t works the same way. If it did I’d
be super fit and rich at this point in my life and right now…well, let’s
just say I’m not ;)

Oy.

If I never mention these socks again you’ll know what
happened.

 

How Does My Garden Grow

My wonderful, beautiful, special, intelligent and all around amazing niece Tori inspired this hat design.

 

Isn't she a beaut?  Those eye and freckles just kill me. 

ANYWAYS.

Tori is always appreciative of hand made gifts.  She's been wearing this hat since I gave it to her a week ago and it's been in the 90's.  That's love right there.

This is my first knitted pattern of me own design that I'm sharing.  I hope things go well and I become a ridiculously famous pattern writer, so if you like it let me know!  If you hate it, let me know too and while my heart is crushed I will vow to do better next time.

I actually have way more confidence in the awesomeness and simplicity of the hat.  Seriously if you hate it, don't make it.  No big whoop.  Actually to take a tangent here my husband and I have a thing called the whoop scale.  Forgetting to defrost chicken and there's no dinner - that's a moderate whoop.  Breaking a leg is a major whoop.  Letting my 5 year old wear his underoos shirt to his cousin's house for the day is pretty low on the whoop scale (though I don't believe in wearing underwear as clothes.  Sometimes the whoop scale reads a little differently between him and I). Tangent is now over.

Ok, so here's the pattern.  The hat is wicked cute, the yarn is stupidly soft (and cheap) and it's really a fast knit.  It's not going to be hot forever people, get your hat knitting going now and heads will be warm on that first frosty morning!

Download Howdoesmygardengrow

Chumwin Coconut Donut

On March 4th of this year my older sister gave birth for the 4th time to my niece Tamlyn.  Her cousins/siblings came up with many nicknames for the little bean and I cobbled a few together and call her Chumwin Coconut Donut :) Ta Dah!

(what a cutie.  Yes, I made the hat, that's not this story.  Picture is dark cause I didn't use the flash.  You get the gist.  She's little, precious and adorable!)

I had a long time to wait for Tamlyn as my sister and I seem to know instantaneously when we're pregnant.  Plenty of time to make her an adorable little sweater.  I wanted something girly and pretty but not too taxing.  I looked and looked and looked and finally decided on this cute cardigan.  I picked out some great cuddly yarn, Sirdar Snuggly Kisses before I had the pattern and had done a gauge swatch and I was right on target and hopped to it.

Merrily along I knit up the back no problem  Zim zam zoom I was done in no time and absolutely in love with soft blending stripes of this yarn.  I checked my pattern, went to knit the fronts and came to a screeching halt.

The fronts would not match the back if I knit a cardigan.  Thy would be totally different and I could not abide it at all.

Here's my best efforts to illustrate my problem:

 

Now I'm not fussy but this would have bothered me.  So I went in search of another pattern.  HA HA HA!  Way easier said than done once the back has been done.  I looked, got discouraged and just kind of let the back of this sweater stare at me sullenly as my  niece grew and grew.  My Stitch N Bitch knitters started to give me a hard time.  So I began knitting a front, not sure what to do about the neckline. One night, while knitting at my friend Cynthia's house she pulled out a Debbie Bliss book, Simply Baby and there was the perfect pattern!  The Striped Sweater Pattern 

Obviously I wasn't using two yarns but the mechanics were great though my sizing was off a bit.  I ripped out two inches of the previously completed back and added in the garter border and button holes and finished the front.  Then I started to lag a bit come summer. It was getting warm, I was no longer in love with the project but my psyche kept nagging. I carried around this thing in bits and pieces for weeks.  Months.

It's now August.  She's 5 months old.  I just couldn't have this on my mind any longer and finally finished it by sewing the buttons on! (a month after I seamed it. Seriously, I suck hardcore).

Not only did I finish the sweater BUT I TOOK A FREAKING PICTURE!  Saints alive something must have bitten me.  In all it's stupendous glory, may I present Tamlyn in her new sweater:

 

Who doesn't need an acrylic pullover in August?!  It's actually roomy enough that she might squeak out a wearing or two if it gets chilly in September.  The neck band is great on this sweater, the shoulder seams are buttoned and the neck is wide and loose for her noggin.  Coming from a mother whose son had to have an ultrasound on her 3 month olds head cause it was at the 175th percentile, I understand the need for roomy necklines.  Why aren't all toddler shirts V necks?  I also knit her big sister a hat of my own design that I plan to chart up but that's just fodder for later.

The kids are in bed, the dishes need to be done and True Blood starts in 33 minutes!  Lates!