Camera Fail
Once upon a time, at a sheep festival far, far away, I broke my camera. Specifically I broke the screen, so I could still take pictures with it, I just couldn’t see what I was photographing. This led to a lot of kinnearing and a lot of funny looking shots, until yesterday. Yesterday, when I attempted to replace the screen myself, and now… well, now I can’t do anything with my camera.
Apparently when they say “don’t try this at home” they really mean it.
So tomorrow I get to take the thing over to the local camera shop and beg for their mercy; in the meantime the only thing I can possibly show you is a picture of the sample knit I’m working on, the gorgeous Ivy Wrap in some ultra tasty Buffalo Gold Lux.
Imagine it at twice the length, now—the combination of pattern and yarn is so lovely that I’m just whipping through this. I should have it done before the middle of the week.
I was hoping to have Caturday for you, especially since we have three new teeny tiny foster cats, but see above re: camera, so you’ll just have to trust me that they look like this:
Still Sick
Sorry guys. In addition to the actual bug I picked up, an infection has settled into my lungs, so I’m sleeping more often than not, and I’m hardly coherent enough to sit up when I’m awake. Hopefully next week I’ll be back and in better condition. In the meantime, email me if it’s urgent and I’ll try to respond within 24 hours (but no promises).
21
It’s my birthday and I don’t even have any pictures to show for it. Have a sheep instead.
Aaaaah, baaaaah.
This Just In!
No, not the yarn for the elephant. But fortunately the baby decided not to wait for his toys to be finished…
Kyan Andrew was born yesterday at 5:35am, ten fingers, ten toes, all cute. Good job, kid. Keep it up and you may just earn yourself an elephant.
In non-baby news! You all have seen this before but now you get to see it with my face—Yarn Forward, Issue 14, page 32 (also on page 13 with a teenier picture and a blurb):
In honor of both of these events, there is free shipping in the shop from now until Thursday! Anywhere in the world. I’ll even ship to the moon, although I bet it’s hard to spin with low gravity. Go shop!
Startitis: 1, Jesh: 0.
Went out to knit night last night and could not resist the call of the wild new project, even though my spring socks aren’t finished and I have a million other things to get to.
But come on, handspun + Cookie A socks? Who could restrain themselves?
A word of warning if you have a copy of Sock Innovation—the row numbers do not quite line up on some (not all!) of the charts.
I emailed Cookie about it (and she Interweave), and while she was helpful, they were not. Essentially they said, it’s just the font, it works if you hold a ruler up to it, we ain’t fixin’ it. Which is a disappointing answer, to say the least—but I’ve penciled in the numbers at the correct positions so I won’t have to worry about it from here on in.
And on a happier note, the wonderfully shiny thing that my sock in progress is sitting on is my new/old macbook pro. New to me but I bought it used from a dear friend, who saved my butt by offering to sell it to me when my previous laptop kicked it. It’s got it’s quirks, but I do too, and so far we get along just fine. Hopefully we’ll have many happy years together!
Seder
Please admire my handiwork before it gets cut into tasty, tasty pieces:
Chag Sameach!
New Year
I’m not really big on new year celebrations; unlike, say, solstice or Christmas, new year’s seems to be a pretty arbitrary assignment of time to flip the calendar and begin anew. The ritual of resolutions and casting off of the old year also seem pretty strange to me; if I didn’t have the resolve to do something before the new year, the change of the year isn’t going to suddenly give me that power.
Still, a lot of people place a lot of importance on these things, and what with my loss of knitting mojo, I thought I might try it. Someone on knittyboard suggested that we should frog any languishing projects that we know we won’t get back to; done. (I’m not going to tell you how many things I frogged, but the number is high, and most of them were never ever documented anywhere, so I’m trying not to feel too guilty.) Someone else suggested casting on something new; done.
Exactly at midnight, I pulled out my needles and started some stockinette socks. Nothing fancy, or challenging, or stressful, just some simple socks in the hopes that my upcoming year will also be simple and low-stress. (It won’t be, but this is part of the ritual, right?)
The next phase of the rituals that I’m going along with but not quite believing in is actually one that makes a bit more sense to me—I’m going to be clearing out some (a lot) of my things in anticipation of a move. More details to come as they are available but let’s just say… there will be much destashing before I go.
Ennui
Do you ever get that feeling like none of your knitting is working out, and you have so much of it to do, and it’s all on a deadline, and you just want to work on something fun but you can’t because you’ve got all these other projects going, and maybe this whole thing isn’t worth it and I just ought to sell my entire stash and give up this knitting thing because obviously I’m no good at it?
I think I need to cast on for something quick and fun.
Life With Cats
Things I can no longer do in my room:
1. Knit.
Despite Oolong’s attempts to chew on my yarn and needles at every opportunity, I’ve gotten a few more tiers done on the neverending entrelac scarf. I’ve got to speed up a bit though, since there are other things I need to get to that I can’t start ’til this is done.
2. Sleep. Because nothing is more fun than a cat pouncing on your feet at midnight. And 3am. And 6am. And 9am. And any time that you may be trying to get some rest.
3. Spin.
Since Oolong has taken an extreme liking to all things a) moving and b) fibery, I’ve had to take my spinning upstairs to the wheel, where I’ve been working on some qiviut. I only have an ounce of this stuff so I’m trying to really get as much out of it as possible—spinning long draw into superfine singles, which I’ll turn into 2-ply once I’m done.
4. Eat. If I have to defend one more sandwich, bowl of soup, or plate of pasta from this crazy cat I may just go crazy myself.
5. Get any work done. Oolong, with her aforementioned fondness of spinny things, also likes to chew on spindle components whenever I sit down to work. So, not as many spindles built this week as I would like. Still, I got a few done, and they’ve just gone up in the shop, including a couple with some shorter, smooth tapered shafts that I’m trying out. I’m loving the look and feel on them, and they spin quite well.
6. Blog, apparently. Although this one is probably my own fault; in trying to avoid boring cat talk I’ve ended up posting nothing instead. I promise we will return to regularly scheduled updating shortly.
Really, she’s lucky she’s so cute.
Things I bought
Purchasing was light this year, due to both money restraints and time restraints—every time I would turn around someone else wanted to say hello or chat or show me this or go to this gathering and it wasn’t until I woke up on Sunday morning that I realised I’d only bought two things on Saturday. Of course, the two that I bought were particularly fantastic things: A Kitri kit and a Vintage leaf kit! I’m too lazy to get pictures—imagine your normal every day average sock and leaf kits but ten times more amazingly awesome. Then you have these.
Funny story about the procuring of both these kits, though. I knew going in that I wanted me some leaves, and found out when I got there that the colours inside each kit were random—two green, two brown/orange/yellow. So I went rummaging through the kits trying to find one with the perfect four colours for me, and finally I gave up and said to Tsocky, I’m breaking open these kits to pick my own damn colours. To which she responded, yeah sure whatever.
Then, as I was just deciding that I wanted a Kitri kit as well, I heard Jen say that they were gone. Sold out. What!? But they can’t be gone, because I wanted one and didn’t get one and I really really wanted one… sob! But then, lo and behold, hidden behind some something or other, someone found four more kits. Jen was nice enough to set one aside for me. So it is mine! All mine! *cackle*
Ahem. Moving on.
So Sunday was comparatively my big purchasing day, although I still picked a few quality things rather than going overboard with quantity. First I scored some signed books and pretended I was cool by chattering with famous people.
Then, the dear and darling Dan basically said “Hey! Look at this pretty stuff I just bought! Don’t you want some?” to which I replied “Hell yes,” and we journeyed to the Sheep Shed/Mountain View Farm booth, where I snagged a large amount of kickass and inexpensive roving. We’ve got merino/tussah…
Some straight up solid coloured merino…
And some gorgeous heathered corriedale
which I already sampled as a 3-ply sportweight
(The colour is much closer in the other picture. I don’t know why my camera sucks so much at capturing greens.)
There was also a small gift from my dear Pixisis of some alpaca/silk…
in what is definitely not a usual colour for me, but I’ve managed to fall in love with it anyway. Pink? Really? Really.
And that’s all I got! It was a fantastic time and I don’t think my vocal cords will ever be the same, after talking and laughing and generally enjoying myself so much. Counting down the days ’til we can do it again next year!
