Yesterday, The Sainted Husband (TM) and I put in an offer to purchase our first home together. (We’ve rented for the 9 years we’ve been together)

Today, the sellers accepted our offer.

Holy CRAP, we’re buying a house!!!!

Our House!

Und now iz ze time on schprockets ven ve FREAK OUT! But in a good way.

Or, a story to tide you over until I’m past the craziness of trying to buy a house.

So Maryland Sheep and Wool festival dawned this year and I attended with a dear friend, husband, and daughter in tow. Although I adore all the people with whom I attended, it reminded me that when I go to festivals, I really ought to attend alone, with a game plan, and if I happen to meet cool people there, so be it.

At any rate, the major lack of attention span that resulted from having my husband and daughter along left me with the single most tragic case of camnesia I’ve yet to experience: I met Amy Singer and I have absolutely no proof of the encounter.

Dear Amy Singer:
I’m the one who accosted you across from the Cormo people to introduce myself, and gave you vague directions to Tess’ booth, including the brilliant phrase “Just look for the mob!” as if that actually delineated anything from anything else.
Dorkitudinally Yours,
Liz

My husband and I have neither of us ever had especially fabulous credit. Back at the beginning of our relationship we were fleetingly pre-approved for a mortgage, but ultimately everything fell through and we ended up not being able to purchase a home of our own, after all. Given the state of the market at the time, it’s likely best that we didn’t, although naturally it didn’t feel like much of a good thing at the time. At any rate, we’ve been renting for as long as we’ve been living together.

NOT a house we're buying; just an image of one I loved

Through a series of circumstances, some of them happy and some of them not, we were finally able to go through our credit reports this year and make everything good that needed goodness. And after a very long haul, some seriously unhappy times, and all that jazz — Today, we’ve finally received an honest-to-goodness pre-approval letter for a mortgage.

Another house I'm not buying; it's just COOL. Also, image from Flickr, not mine. If anyone objects I'll gladly remove it.

This is a dream come true for us — to be in a position where we can purchase a home that is really, truly ours instead of paying somebody else’s equity, etc. I don’t know how many folks reading this may be able to relate to this, but the credit rating system in this country can make one feel like a second, third, and tenth-class citizen for mistakes made more than a decade ago, so to have managed to claw our way to a Magic Number that would get us the equally magic pre-approval letter feels like the Biggest Deal Since Having A Baby.

The Owens House from the movie Practical Magic

I have no idea where we’ll ultimately end up; we’re hoping to stay here in Alexandria, VA, but we’ve looked as far as Fredericksburg, VA and Baltimore, MD, so the options are many and varied. But it’s a gigantic relief to have gotten such great news after such a long, difficult slog!

1) That I will always have something to say,
1a) but seldom have photographs attached to the words actually available.

2) That I will have daily ideas for Things I Should Blog, but do nothing because of items 1 and 1a.

3) That my blog shall always lay dormant should I keep preventing myself from just getting online and typing, already.

4) That incorrect usage (or lack of usage) of punctuation will always make me crazy. (You’re/your, there/their, apostrophes connected to esses where they don’t go, or NOT connected to esses where they OUGHT to go, etc.)

Hence, I hereby make myself the following manifesto:

1) If you have something to say, say it, already, nevermind the pictures.

B) Do try and TAKE more photos, though, okay? (See what I did there? Oxford comma! I don’t care WHAT style book says not to use it, I refuse to give it up.)

III) Have some FUN with your blog again, won’t you? It’s gotten dead around these parts!

So. I may be a YarnGeek, but I am likewise a geek of many other things and topics, so expect to see a little of everything in this space.

Things I need to remember to talk to you about:

• Kombucha
• On Being a “Starter”
• maybe touch on Bodily Sovereignty as it relates to recent news, mabe not; haven’t decided if that’s going to be far too volatile a topic for this space
• Teen in the Army Infantry
• Home buying process
• My soon-to-be-a-Kindergartner
• Whatever else comes up!

I know, cheap excuse.

Here’s what’s been going on: My eldest stepson moved out about a month? two months? ago. My youngest stepson joined the Army (!!) infantry (!!!!), graduated from basic training two weeks ago, spent a week with us during which he got his first tattoo (see below), and then flew to Kentucky to report to his unit for the beginning of what he hopes will be his career in the U.S. Army.

Meanwhile, my husband and I are dealing with the mortgage pre-qualification and approval process (We’re pre-qualified but won’t know about pre-approval until Monday at the earliest), the conundrum of where to live when we do purchase a home of our own, and the assorted fun times ensuing when digging out paperwork of various sorts.

Then this weekend is Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which I’ll be attending ala famiglia on Saturday, and Monday is my seventh wedding anniversary, for which we’ve planned absolutely no celebration whatsoever.

If anybody needs me, I’ll be over in the corner trembling and nursing a bottle of scotch. See you on the flip side!

It’s another of those times where my inability to be faithful to a single project at a time bites my blog in the ass. (Sorry, blog! Neosporin should clear that right up, though. Wanna bandaid? We’ve got Dora and Hello Kitty, but we’re out of Transformers…)

I worked on several different projects this week, none of which had anything particularly earth-shattering to impart in terms of photographic evidence. I’m designing a pair of kilt hose for The Sainted Husband (TSH), but those came to a screeching halt when despite having knitted a swatch and theoretically having twiddled with maths, the swatch didst lie and the maths were either wrong or likewise untruthful, the cuff turning out a good 2 inches too big around. And so here we are again…back to the drawing board.

(ETA: even as I typed that, I couldn’t handle the guilt and took a couple of photos with the Ott lite. It’s nearly 11 pm so forgive me, but it was these or just my blathering on, so I thought maybe you’d let it slide, yes?)

But it’s Sunday, a week since my last post, and I didn’t want to let another week go without at least popping in to wave at you. Happy Easter, to those who celebrate; happy belated Passover; and happy belated Ostara, as well. I know I must be missing several other religious observations in there someplace, so please forgive me if I’ve missed something dear to you.

So while I’m back at the drawing board for the kilt hose — I knitted that cuff on US 3 Addi lace needles, so I’m going to try the same cable as the focus and add in some smaller ones to add width to the cuff, on US 1 Addi lace needles, to see if that gives me the row gauge I THOUGHT I had with the 3’s — I’ll leave you with a serene image of the Potomac river here in Alexandria, taken while I was on a bike ride this past week with the iPhone camera:

This is another of those posts that my friend SSB should skip, presuming she doesn’t want to see what parts of her wedding shawl will look like. Continue reading Progress!

This is what happens when the twain shall meet:

I took far too long knitting this sweater for a wee dude born a couple months ago — so long that I was beginning to be afraid it would be too small for him by the time I cast off, if I didn’t get a flippin’ move-on, already. And thus, when I suffered a bout of insomnia night before last, I finished the knitting, sleeve-seaming, and button choosing:

So. Everything but the blocking, but there was A Thing for the recipient at my office the next day, so I let it go out wonky…and without taking any reasonable photos of it. (LAME!)

Enter Calliope, my iPhone. And thus you have photos, albiet not pretty Pentax ones. Still — an F.O. is an F.O., yes?

Project: February Baby Sweater, Elizabeth Zimmerman (rav link)
Yarn: Alpaca blend purchased at MDSW last year. I have a LOT left, so expect to see this again. It’s rediculously, wonderfully soft. Has major halo.
Needles: Addi Turbo US 6 (it doesn’t look NEARLY that gauge, does it? so weird.)
Mods/Notes: I skipped the gull patterned lace as this was to be a macho wee sweater, and went stockinette, instead. The rest I knit as written, or at least in so far as I could understand it — there’s wonkiness under the arms there because I didn’t get the “pick up 4 x 7 stitches” part at ALL. Will be hitting Ravelry E.Zim. forums with that question before I knit another one of these, which will likely get cast on…oh, NOW.

Also, with the buttons — there were only four of the blue buttons that had two holes, and one button that was exactly the same as the other four in all ways except that it had four holes in it. Weird! But typical button-box/jar fare, yes? So I put that one in the middle, and it totally worked. ~fin~

Well, here’s a first try at using a cut tag/jump-link to prevent spoilering folks for stuff. I’ve joined a few fiber and sock club things that ask that you don’t spoiler folks who haven’t received their kits yet, and I’m also working on a wedding shawl for SSB, who reads this blog, and who maybe doesn’t want to see her wedding shawl until…you know, her wedding.

So this is where we give that a shot, mmkay? Ready? GO! (ATTN: SPOILER for Rockin’ Sock Club January yarn after the jump. Be thou forewarned.)

Continue reading New Tricks

I have started and stopped projects from my own handspun maybe a handful of times, and I have one really massive project that’s been floating around in my head ever since I got my first spindle and fiber in hand, but I had never actually completed anything from my own handspun until now.

This is yarn I spun from fiber purchased from Flawful Fibers; she called the colorway Valkyrie, which was at least half the reason I purchased it. In the braid, it looked very starkly red and black, but I LOVE how it mellowed with the drafting and spinning and plying. I originally spun the yarn vascillating between wanting sock yarn and laceweight, and it shows my inconsistent thinking, but it turned out really beautiful on its own and I ultimately decided I wanted to knit something very simple from it to show it off.

There are somewhat random, beautiful grey stripes that run throughout the yarn that took me by pleasant surprise.

So these are just simple 40-stitch stockinette tubes, with an 8-stitch afterthought thumb opening knit into the tube with a scrap yarn (resulting in an 18 stitch thumb, ultimately, when I picked up one stitch on each corner to try and avoid holes); knit in marginally fingering-weight yarn on size 6 US Addi Turbo needles. (I think. Must try and confirm needle size. That’s the ballpark, anyway. Since the Blog has stood in for my memory more than once, I really ought to confirm that for myself.)

I have plenty of yarn leftover, so I may either knit another pair of these mitts with some kind of patterning in them, just for fun, or I may pick up and knit from the wrist down on these to extend the length; right now they’re very sort of Regency hobo looking, very Oliver-Twist-looking (hence the title of this post), but the wind still creeps up my coat sleeves and makes my forearms cold. Also contemplating adding on mitten flip-tops. Time will tell.

Anyway, I leave you with two more shots of the colors this roving produced in a simple two-ply spin, and a gentle nudge in the direction of Flawful Fiber’s shop. Only because I love you, you understand.