Ravellenics Days 1-4

I got off to a great start on my projects. Honestly I ended up much farther than I expected, which is probably a good thing.

I sat down and did the math estimating how much time I knit this weekend, and it was pretty ridiculous!

8 hours Friday, 12-16 hours Saturday, and about 8 hours on Sunday. Monday on the other hand, not nearly as much. The day job gets in the way. I doubt I will get 26 hours in next weekend.

I had to make a few tweaks to get everything right.

The DSLO has skinny ankles, and duck feet. So I have to make women's size in the legs, and it is a toss up if the foot needs to be a man's size or a woman's.

On my sock, the 64 stitches with 8.5 SPI was a little too small, so the leg is 64, and I did less gusset decreases for the foot to make it 68 stitches. All in all the sock isn't half bad.

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

 

Day 4:

 One done, 1/3 of another left to go.

On the fractal front, I've made a couple of grand julians.

The first one is the for the apo challenge. The last 2 were re-renders of last week's challenge, with a few tweaks. The centers might be a little too busy. No worries I still have stars on the brain.

That's all for now, take care guys

Molly : )

Oh my goodness!

I am a pretty happy camper.

My knitting group threw a party in honor of my marriage, and they gave DSLO and me an afghan they knit together. It was so sweet and kind. I was totally surprised! They pushed back the party a week so they would have enough time to finish.

Did I ever mention that blue is my favorite color? The great size is so that the DSLO one can fit under, because let's face it, that boy is always cold. The best part about it is that if there is any knitting project I would like, but don't have the willpower to do, it is an afghan. It is too long of a haul for me. Give me socks any day of the week.

They also gave a sweet card, and a gift certificate to the LYS. I might be picking up some size 0 circs today.

I am also excited because I am helping host a colorwork KAL in Sock Knitters, and I have got some fantastic prizes lined up for some lucky, adventurous sock knitters! Oh my goodness!

I was so worried that no one would want to donate prizes, but I had a wonderful response. Thank goodness! Desert Vista Dyeworks, Spin Monkeys, and Tangerine Designs are all donating. From the mod camp, I am giving away a skein of Wollmeise from my stash, and Ruatha is giving the Fellowship of the Socks E-Book. I was vibrating with excitement all day yesterday.

I do not need another project. . . but I think the project I am planning on will be a good fit.

Spur of the moment, I decided to combine my oldest skein of sock yarn, with the pattern Butterflies are Free. Hey, who can complain when the oldest is getting used?

I present the majesty of the stash room My stash was relegated to 2 shelves at the apartment, but here there is enough room to have it all out.

The top shelf is stuff, the one underneath is lace, the middle is sock yarn, the one under it is worsted and the bottom shelf has all of my notions, and random knitting stuff.

I got a foam puzzle floor from overstock.com which had 48 square feet of squares. Since the house is almost entirely wood floors, they will be great blocking mats. And, since that is the only use of the room, they don't need to be put away.

There are a couple of things I would like for the room. A comfy chair, and light, a frame for the bed, and a folder to store all of the patterns I have printed out. I organized them according to type of project. But they really need a permanent home.

On the knitting front, my laptop cozy continues.

I love the little flowers.

I did the first row of the first edging chart before casting on my socks for ravellenics in the car.

I'll talk about the socks later, since I failed to post this Friday.

Yes I bought the needles, no I did not like them. I am returning them Tuesday because the joins blow, and they weren't even really size 0, they just said they were. I will replace them with 2mm Hiya-Hiya's because I love mine in 1's and DPN's in 0's and they are cheaper to boot!

On the blog advancement front, I added the 'related post' widget, and please complain if you find the moving fractal obnoxious. And I figured out how to do some cool things to the progress bars, like make them blue :D

That's all for now, take care guys!

Molly : )

So This Day Last Month Was a Big Deal

I got married :D

I figure the 1 month anniversary is a decent time to talk about it.

All of the pictures are in now, so yesterday I was going through them and remembering what happened.

The day was a complete happiness explosion. I do not know if it is physically possible to be that happy, for that long.

The kisses were sweeter, the hugs were tighter, the drama so distant it was insignificant, and honestly there was a happiness feedback loop between the DSLO and I, that just built continuously upon itself. As soon as I saw him that day, everything was wonderful. He was my favorite part.

The day started with breakfast at a diner in GH. It is my new favorite thing, because it is a New Mexico themed restaurant. You can get things smothered in green chiles! And they had cherry flavored coffee. Basically, I decided that everyone was going to have a stress free day. My sister's wedding had been fairly stressful getting everywhere and doing everything, so we started early, and we had a ton of time between things, and it worked.

From breakfast we went and had hair and makeup done. My hairstylist and I shared a few mutual friends from high school, so it was a little funny being able to swap stories. We had a vague idea about what the hair should be like, and a few do-dads to stick in my hair. It turned out very different than the trial run, but it turned out great.

From there, we walked though the art fair going on in downtown GH, with a lot of crazy looks. and then we drove to GR. We had lunch at noodles and co. I had the truffle mac and cheese. It was delicious, but I couldn't finish it because I was caught somewhere between full from breakfast, nervous, and excited. From there we went to the venue, suited up, and started the photo taking process.

From there, the full wedding album tells the story.

Looks like that completely set off the happiness positive feedback loop.

Hell, the rest of what happened isn't important. Only that look is.

That's all for now, take care guys

Molly : )

Upping my Game

I am going to Vogue Knitting Live, as I explained it to the lab manager, basically it is a knitting conference.

However, there are a few details I need to iron out first.

I have been trying to find someone local who wants to drive up with me, and share a hotel room. Le sigh Normally the big knitting event is Stitches Midwest in August, so those who go to big knitting events are going to that, since it happens every year. The fact that it is in Chicago is special, since it moves around every year.

I still need to ask my Chicago friends, but it will be lame to drive up, crash, and then spend most of my time knitting. The DSLO was totally cool with it, as long as I didn't spend a small fortune on a hotel room.

I wanted to take a class with the Yarn Harlot, but the one I was interested in was full, the moment I clicked on the button, so the plan is to go to a lecture from her. I am taking a class from Cookie A, and 2 other classes. One about finishing, and the other about making sweaters that look good on you, and avoiding patterns that will look bad on you.

This will be the first time I have ever taken a knitting class. Much less from celebrities in the knitting community. I am not expecting Earth shattering revelations in three hour blocks, but I am super duper excited.

On the current knitting front, I have a fingering weight sweater, and a lace shawl. The next FO will be a long time coming. On the future knitting front, there is a lot coming. 3 pairs of socks anyone?

I even remembered to take photos of my WIPs this morning.

Everything is coming together, slowly. I am actually stalled on the Bohus, because I am waiting for the other yarn to come in.

Crap! I forgot to show the yarn that has already come in for that.

The Stash Elephant is still in an undisclosed box, but stashquitions continue unabated by the missing guardian.

I don't have anything in there for scale. They are 12, 30g balls, of many colors. A few will be going into my bohus.

The colorways are not all certain.
My guesses are:
12:00 Strohblume/Aurora?
1:00 Olio vergine
2:00 Farn
3:00 Pesto
4:00 Fritzi Frizzante/Neptune?
5:00 Vergissmeinnicht
6:00 MOBJ/Dora?
7:00 Grand Mere
8:00 Skandal um Rosi
9:00 Magnolie
10:00 Digitessa/Merlot?
11:00 Herzblut

Eh, it is confusing, and I don't have enough wollmeise to compare colors.

On the future knitting front, I am casting on two pairs of socks Friday for the ravellenic games.

I wound my balls, I still need to print the patterns. I should cast on the silver yarn for a pair of socks. It is the commission pair.

This picture is just silliness. when I did the provisional cast on, I made the pull here chain, and then secured the ball of waste yarn. I must have screwed up the provisional cast on, every stitch seemed to have an extra twist in it, which meant I had to pull the yarn out as I went.

The fractal as my desktop background  is this one.

It is a long time favorite. It has been living on the desktop for quite some time.

On the new fractal front:

This guy is for the apophysis challenge. The goal was to make a fractal that was ectopic ie displaced. So I turned a round one into a spiral. With a star in the center.

This fractal was just for fun. I hadn't made a rotational in awhile, and they can be fun to do. They have great movement.

I also met my nemesis again, but won. Russian Black Bread and I have been fighting a battle. My problem was that I was adding the butter/chocolate/molasses mixture when it was too hot. So I killed my yeast, it never rose, and there was great sadness in the land. Today however, I figured it out. I put the hot liquid in the freezer until it was below 115 F.

 It rose! Yea!

And I made bread that turned out like bread. This is very satisfying. It may result in more bread baking.

Prepare to be Hypnotized!

It took over an hour to weave in all of the ends, which mostly involved tying knots and trimming, but at last, the hypnotic hexagon socks are done. They are flashing, pooling and spiraling like mad.

Since my camera was out of commission during most of this project, there are not a lot of photos. Such is life, you can't capture it all.

As far as socks go, they looked pretty strange on the needles. The hexagon heel fits great, but off the foot it looks pretty strange. I will be making another pair of these, and I will probably weave as I go, since there are just so many ends to work at the end. It was a modular project, so there is no avoiding that. The original reason why I made these was because the DSLO did not want to be experimented on. Oddly, he can put on my pair. He would prefer slightly larger socks.

Probably the neatest feature of the socks was actually a feature of the yarn. When I went to make the cuff and toe, I had a fantastic stack pool. My planned pooling project was pre-blog, so I haven't had a chance to talk at length about it. The short answer is that any variegated yarn (like wollmeise), at a given gauge has a magic number of stitches, where the color repeats on top of itself. With a little finesse you can control the pooling.

What have I learned on this pair. . .

I got pretty good at estimating how much tail I need for a long tail cast on.

Modular knitting, honestly it gives me pause to try to make mitered square, or entralac socks. Sure they are cool patterns, but I am not so OCD that a little mad pooling puts me off a project.

In blog related news, I have my first follower! Go check out Susie's blog.

That is all for now, take care guys,

Molly : )

Thank You Joni!

Now is as good a time as any to be thankful. As I mentioned in my last post, Joni, my mother in law, is responsible for a sizable portion of my stash.

Before Ravelry there were the first several pairs of socks.

The Suri-Merino became many different things, like the fluffy headband, a calorimetry, the 2-D rib cowl

The Inca Alpaca became the First Sweater, Regina, the Drew Hat and the Vijay Hat.

There is the zitron trekking, which became part of the sunset socks and the drew hat.

 The Gründl Hot Socks became the April meets October socks 

The Argosy Luxury Yarns Five Oaks Ranch: Solace became the Eleanor Cowl

The Vesper became the Magic Socks.

The Lorna's Laces in circus became my first Skew Socks.

The Lorna's Laces in Rainbow became the Rainbow Fingerless Gloves.

 

The Black Trillium Fibre Studio BFL Sock became Holden.

There is the Black Trillium BFL that became loud fingerless mittens

The Cherry Tree Hill in Iris became the Loud Man Socks.

This one is funny, I was commissioned to knit the DSLO socks, because Joni figured I could finish them way before her. Haha. I ran out of yarn right at the toe!


The knit picks Imagination became the slipped stitch hat.

The socks that rock became the fire on the mountain socks

The Regia became Jaywalkers.



The Wollmeise 100% in Am Kalten Polar became a pooling stole, and Regina.

The Wollmeise Twin in Granatapfel became the flaming cardigan and the devon fingerless gloves.

The Wollmesie Lace in O-rH Negativ became the Briar Rose Shawl.

The String Theory Colorworks became the Rose-Hulman Skew.

The dye for yarn tussah silk is becoming the blood queen as we speak.

 And there are a couple of skeins I haven't gotten to yet. Two skeins of Mountain Colors Crazyfoot, 2 skeins of Panda Silk, a skein of String Theory Colorworks, a skein of Casbah Sock, and a skein of MadTosh Vintage.

 No worries it is wonderful stuff. The Wollmeise bender of 2011-2012 has gotten in the way. Joni was the one who introduced me to it, and it is wonderful stuff.

So in conclusion, thank you Joni! You're an awesome enabler.

Molly : )