Category — Bloggy Blather

Who can keep track when in the grip of illnesses like these?

Handspun Nereid mitts were begun.

Then I made of the mistake of going to the local-to-my-office yarn shop, Stitch D.C., to pick up some lace Addi needles. (A need sparked, as I said in the last post, because the other US 3 and 4 needles I have are currently lost in the abyss of my disorganization at home. Also I think they’re too short anyway. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself.) While there, after discovering they did not have the needles I needed, I had a wee accident with the card and ended up with some amazingly soft yarn:

Lacey Lamb 100% lambswool yarn. Rub-against-the-cheeks soft.

Then I ended up in a bookstore — never good for the wallet but nearly always a necessity for my sometimes-fragile ability to cope with the world — and came home with A Gathering of Lace and Lace Style books. I’d been seeking a project to knit for my best friend’s impending Samhain wedding. She’s a very tall, willowy, utterly gorgeous red head. (A pause, so you can all hate her guts with me…okay, moving on.) Anyway, I figured, she’s getting married on Halloween, and the bridesmaid’s dresses are all burgundy. Sorry — Cabernet. Therefore, despite having purchased the above burg — I mean, Cabernet-colored yarn, I went stash diving for some lace yarn I got from eBay waaaaaay back when I first started knitting again in earnest.

Found it!

This is how much knitting happens from cast on to present when one spends all weekend doing very little other than knitting whilst being immersed in Blue Planet DVDs:

Okay, so that doesn’t show you the whole thing, because the whole thing? Is just a variegated red blob. But that is a circular shawl, knitted from the center out, through the Shetland Fern chart, and one repeat of the Horseshoe lace chart. For me? This is lightning fast knitting. This is the Shetland Tea Shawl from the book A Gathering of Lace, and I am L O V I N G the knitting of it. (Dear Jared, sorry for stealing your letter-spacing thing, but I love how it looks! Also you are intensely cool and I am a fangirl. Forgive me? Love, Liz)

A couple of shaky pics of the lace repeats are over on Flickr — they were slightly blurry because holding the lace out so you can see it with one hand and taking photos with the other hand is not so very conducive to sharp photography.

And then, (NOANDTHEN! Name that movie reference…) The Sainted Husband required wee circle thingies from Michael’s for his gaming group, whereas Youngest Rat required a new job, and Michael’s is hiring. So Youngest Rat, my daughter, and I all piled into my car and trundled ourselves to Michael’s to obtain wee circle thingies and a job application for Youngest Rat. (My two teenaged stepsons are collectively “The Ratz” — Youngest and Eldest. I can’t remember if I have explained this before. No, I do not trundle large rodents to and fro during my errands. :)) (Also? Oxford comma, baybee. Stoopid AP Stylebook. Hate.)

Upon walking into Michael’s, I beheld there upon the shelves Something I Had To Have.

And yea, the fluorescent lights shone down in benediction upon the Wee Skully Lunchbox of Awesome, and verily didst The Knitter squee unashamed before all and sundry; and spaketh She to those gathered therein, “This. Is. AWESOME. And I must have it.” Thus did The Box Of Awesome appear in the Holy Shopping Cart of Antioch, and lo, The Knitter Was Pleased, and It Was Good. Here endeth the tale.

And finally, because I don’t have ENOUGH going on the needles, I got the perfect honey-colored lace for a gorgeous honeybee-themed stole from KnitSpot.

Now I want to get some lovely beads to knit into this, and maybe some honeybee beads. I’m thinking I want lampworked glass bees to dangle somewhere from the stole, but I haven’t solidified that idea in my head yet. (Which is just as well, given that I have so many things in progress floating around that the likelihood of my getting to this anytime soon is slim.)

Did I chase everybody away with my inconsistencies? My stats page says there are people reading, but still all my comments read ~NIL~. Therefore, if you’ve a moment, tell me — is there anything you’d like to see here that you’re not seeing? It looks as though most folks read on the weekends, so is it better for you if there’s a regular schedule of Friday posts? I seem to have finally regained my Mojo (Interestingly corresponding with losing a fair percentage of my bank account), so I’d really like to know your thoughts. (Also? Me = Comment Ho. NICE.)

Not ONLY do I have a work in progress to show you, but I can try the picture thing in the process.

Forgive me for the camera phone images, friends — it was this or nothing, and since I’ve done the nothing thing for months now and it doesn’t work, I thought maybe something was better than.

Noro stripe scarf, anyone?

My favorite part of this scarf thus far — and it’s halfway done — is the citrusy color bands near the middle.

This is a project a co-worker requested; I can’t remember what he saw me knitting, but he asked did I take commissions, and I said that depended on several things. One — What he wanted me to knit for him (a scarf, he said, definitely, and possibly at some point a beanie hat), what flavor of such items he might want in terms of complexity (he saw the Noro striped scarf on Jared’s blog and said, THAT, please), and that he would have to buy the yarn I wanted him to buy for said item. He agreed on all counts, and as a result I get to play with gorgeous Silk Garden on somebody else’s dime, in a project that is beautifully, satisfyingly brainless.

Bliss.

~dugga dun, dugga dun~ Footloose and fancy free!

All I need now is Fozzie and a Studebaker.

I managed to get the rotating header images up to 14 for now; every one of the header bars include photos (or in most cases, mega-crops of photos) that I’ve taken myself, of places I’ve been, projects I’ve done, etcetera. I hope as time goes on that I can keep adding to the inventory up there. I am inordinately pleased with the sit-and-click satisfaction, seeing the banner changing all the time. I like this much better than one static header.

Holiday preparations continue apace here at GeekCentral. The upcoming weekend is Shopping Weekend, but it’s also the weekend my dad, newly retired to North Carolina, will be here visiting a sick friend and filling in to play the organ at said friend’s church. He’s staying at our house for the first time, and I am in full-on panic-cleaning mode — or rather I would be, I guess, if I hadn’t become utterly obsessed with the WordPress blog upgrade I’m busily using as Procrastination Tool Numero Uno.

Once the kinks start really getting worked out around here and I can post images without breaking the fragile new threads of this here blog, I hope to show you the tragedy of last week, when my beloved Clotho (that’s my Kromski Minstrel spinning wheel, for anybody who didn’t know) took damage in the form of a chip out of the wheel rim. She seems to be okay, if a bit cosmetically lowered, but I’m hoping maybe I can find a way to fix it.

What are you folks up to, in terms of holiday prep? (if any?) I continue to read with awe, admiration, and not a little envy as Amanda Soule talks about their family’s winter preparations. I’m also spending a fair portion of time surfing over at Etsy, and the other item of considerable research and discussion for me right now is Steampunk, specifically as it relates to costuming. (I won’t be offended if you have to go look it up — I’d never heard of it until a few weeks ago, and Googling the term is what sparked the costuming style obsession.)