Trucking and Flying

This week has been a rocky one. We all have them. The week where you can hear the sound of deadlines whooshing by.

I started the evenstar swatch at the engineering grad student knit night. First I did 4's, and that was huge, so switched to 2's which was the same size as the first swatch. Then I realized the FUBAR'ed the pattern, so I concluded wine and evenstars are incompatible. Then I cast on again for some reason (wine might be to blame) and I am was satisfied with the result. Yes, it is small, but I am ok with it not being ginormous. I don't own size 3 circulars.

I might need to break out the highlighter tape, because I feel like I am losing my place in the chart. Normally I am pretty good about reading my knitting, and then there are some days where I just want to buy a row counter and be done with it.

The sweater body continues. I've done 7 1/2 inches since the armpits. I tried it on, and I think I guessed right on adding waist shaping. I am not sure if I want to take up some of the fabric in the back. It is looser there.

Maybe looking up a pattern to verify that the shaping I am planning on doing would be a good idea. The sweater is so freaking cute from the front. I don't own a sweater book, so I am flying fairly blind. My book  has no shaping whatsoever.

This is the trucking part of the post. Now that I have accepted that the body is boring knitting, I can find ways to make knitting the body less boring. Like flying to Indianapolis in a 4 seat prop plane.

Did you know the Indy Regional Airport gives free coffee! Well, that wasn't the best part actually.

There were no pictures of lunch. And since I didn't ask, there were no pictures of me knitting on the plane. I did, since I am trucking on the sweater.

No clue if I will need to break into the 3rd skein. It seems like I have a decent amount of the 2nd. Likely it means I will not need to implement the emergency backup plans.

The apo challenge was loose change this week. So I made a pile of coins.

  I made a whole series of these grand julians. I fudged some things with this one in photoshop. Mostly to soften things up and give it some extra shine.

That's all for now, take care guys

Molly : )

WIP Wednesday: Escape from Sleeve Island

The only way to escape from sleeve island, is to knit both sleeves. Luckily for this sweater, that was very early on in the process. Jump from yoke to sleeves, while the happy memories of colorwork still linger.

I went on a rock climbing trip last weekend, this opened up quite a bit of sleeve knitting time. Since I was not interested in leading this trip, whenever we arrived at the crag I would need to wait for the other people to put ropes up. This meant I had at least 20-40 minutes of down time before I even got to climb.

 Since I have been climbing stronger this summer I was able to try some things that would have been out of the question the last time I went down. Which, I can honestly not remember when the last trip was. Maybe spring/summer of 2011? I tried a couple of things outside my grade, tried a few easy things that I did not feel like leading, and I got to introduce a new climber to the outdoors.

I am in the red belaying him, and he is struggling up the wall. It is a slab route, so it is a completely different style of climb than what you normally see in a climbing gym. He did not like it so much : ) Sorry, but no pictures of me actually climbing, these were taken by another guy on the trip, who was quite smitten with his new iPhone5.

Unfortunately there is absolutely nothing exciting knitting wise to report until I get to waist shaping. Stockinette in fingering weight yarn, is quite boring.

I am nearly a part of the underboob fan club. Or the sweater fits like her shirt does.

This is my bathroom. I am standing in the tub. It is so freaking hard to take good photos here. The more this sweater grows, the more impossible these photos will be to take. Damn you winter!

I need the DSLO to take photos, but he isn't around often enough where there is adequate light.

The mirror is strangely high, and small, so while this is fine for grooming, it is dreadful for full body shots of knitting. I have been having better luck aligning the camera by looking at the view finder in the mirror, and taking a photo with the camera facing me, than the point and click into the mirror.

I have a full body mirror in the bedroom, however the lighting is so dreadful in there that I can't get a good shot there either. Le sigh.

Not that I am much of a seasonal knitter (alpaca sweater in July, hello?), but I modded a image I found on the internet. While I have seen Game of Thrones on HBO, or the first 8 episodes, actually, I read all of the Song of Ice and Fire (that are written). I guess the author is infamous for the sound of deadlines whooshing by.

Who can deny the Stark Direwolf wearing a scarf? I made it my ravelry avatar, because I can poke a little fun at the super stressed gift knitters. I have enough stress in my life, without the added stress of knitting obligations with a hard deadline. I love to make things for people who ask, but not as a Christmas gift.


While I was winding the yarn for the Evenstar, I was staring at my stash and I pondered about my knitting goals for the year. Some of them are probably just not happening, like teaching a planned pooling class. I need to set aside time if I am ever going to design and knit the sock pattern in my head. Obviously this didn't stop me from starting a monster project anyways. I might have planned on casting it on Monday. It looks like today or tomorrow is more likely.

On the fractal front, this one was an unexpected surprise. I never get a non-grainy blur like this.

Bubble + Linear was the apo challenge, or Hyperbolic + Linear, or Eyefish + Linear. I took the easy path. Bubble is so versatile.

I ran into an apo glitch again. The round thing in the corner isn't supposed to be visible. Hopefully I can work with the developer to get rid of this problem. It is only on the 64 bit version.

Please go check out the other participants for Work in Progress Wednesdays!

That's all for now, take care guys

Molly : )