Summer at last

Finally, after a couple weeks of late night paper writing, I am free. The semester is over and I don't go back for four months and when I do I will be spending it in London. Yay.

I have begun regular knitting again. I am so tempted to start new projects, but so far I have been sticking with the Shifting Sands scarf from last post. Knit some of it today while watching my brother march in my town's Loyalty Day Parade. However, I'm afraid that the loud horns and candy throwing children distracted me, as I seem to have ended up with a few extra stitches. Oh well, I'll figure it out.

One of the nice things about being home is being able to cook my own food. It's very satisfying, in more ways than one. Today for lunch I made couscous off the recipe on the back of the box.

It was roasted pine nut couscous and the recipe had me add some olive oil, garlic, chicken broth, and asparagus (substituted with spinach). I added a piece of that microwavable chicken which is quite good despite its frozen nature.

My cat, Winnie, joined me as well. I think she missed me because she's been hanging around a lot more than usual. That, or she just likes to stare out the window at the fish that reside in our backyard pond.

Tonight I plan on swatching for the Dollar and a Half Cardigan. I have heard good things and bad things so we will see how it all goes.

Bonus cat photos:

Some scarf action

Isn't this a nice yellow yarn? All snuggled up against my books for my research paper on Anne Bradstreet?


Well it's becoming this:



Well it's becoming Grumperina's Shifting Sands. Definitely inspired by Brooklyn Tweed's version. So pretty. But is it just me or does mine look completely different than everyone else's? I can't figure out why. I am pretty sure that I'm cabling correctly but I don't know. Maybe blocking will help? However considering that I knit most of this scarf last JUNE while on vacation in Alaska, who knows when I will get around to that. Lame. Semi-regularly scheduled programming will return in about a week or so after all my crazy finals are over. Just you know, five papers to write in the next five days ranging from 4-12 pages. Should be nooo problem. I can't to get back home to my stash and my lovely room and all my crafty things. Oh and I'll actually have the time do knit or embroider or sew or read instead of writing papers 24/7 like I do now. I hope everyone is enjoying spring!

Summer plans

So over winter break, Wool and Company had their magnificent sale, and I woke up early enough to get 40% off. I bought a sweater's worth of each of these two yarns:

Cascade 200 Heathers - Christmas Green
Note: It is a very green green that would not photograph properly despite the abundance of natural light. I had to tweak this color with Picasa so it is closer now, but really it is about the same as the text on the label.




I also was able to get about 9 skeins worth of Skye Tweed in Scottish Mist. Pretty!


So what should I knit? I am thinking about a cardigan with the Skye Tweed and a sweater with the Cascade. I have a few things in my Ravelry queue/favorites like the Dollar and a Half Cardigan, Mrs. Darcy, or Maude Louise. Opinions? Recommendations?

Spring

It's spring in Washington, D.C. But I do not live there, I live in Chicago, where it is cold and rainy and the grass is only hinting at being green. But I spent a weekend in D.C. being teased by nice weather and blooming flowers and this is what I have to show for it.

See the rest at my Flickr.

Remember this?

I started this Pomatomus sock way in February 2007. I had bought the yarn at Wool and Company's amazing sale after Christmas, and started the sock after I finished Lady Eleanor. Well now, that sock looks like this:
That's right. I've finished one sock. In an entire year. Isn't that terrible? I am sure that I will get second sock syndrome as well. I finished the first one a few weeks ago and I haven't even cast on for the second. And I don't know why! I mean I am busy but I've been able to finish other projects. Also, the needles are so small. They are US2 or US1 (I cannot remember) and that is the smallest I've ever used. I really like the pattern though. They will be great socks for my boots as well. Maybe someday, I'll actually have two. Until that day...

Raise your hopeful voice

I have been expanding my crafting skills, to embroidery this time. I have always been interested in some kind of needlework. When I was younger, my grandma taught me how to cross stitch with plastic canvas, like the kind you'd see on tacky tissue box holders or coasters. I still have a half-finished project in my sewing box. I also remember cross stitching my initials onto a handkerchief during a day camp at Mahaffie Farmstead, a living history museum in my town. There is something so historical about cross stitch, I think that is part of its appeal for me. Not that knitting isn't historical, but I love looking at historic samplers. They are so intricate and I can just imagine some young girl sitting in her parlor, slaving away over her sampler. For Christmas, my sister received a sampler kit from Colonial Williamsburg which I promptly stole for my own. Add that to the list of summer projects.

But anyway, last summer, in a fit of inspiration, my sister and I rushed to Hobby Lobby and Michaels to procure some embroidery floss and tshirts. I think she wanted to make an "Omaha is for lovers I don't have to love" tshirt (a la Craftster and Conor Oberst) but our plans took off from there. She embroidered her shirt with little help from me and started on her second design, a cherry tree with little penguins nestled in its branches. She has not completed it as far as I know.

Inspired by this Joanna Newsom album cover, I decided to use the ship design and make a Joanna Newsom shirt. Joanna Newsom being a great harpist, although some may consider her voice to be an acquired taste.


I am pleased with it for the most part. The ship came out nicely, but the text is a little too small for the tshirt. Additionally, the tshirt itself does not fit me very well. It is too short and the sleeves are unflattering. But it gets the occasional wear and the even more occasional compliment.

Delving back into cross stitch, I decided to make a small present for my friend Ashley's birthday. She is a big fan of, well, her vagina. So inspired by Subversive Cross Stitch, I designed this:

It was quite a fun project. It is gratifying to see something you designed yourself become an actual object. I made good use of the color function on Excel to create a pattern. I mostly just estimated for the sizing, which you can tell if you look at the bottom right corner. But Ashley was quite happy with it, which was nice. The really cool, and I guess obvious, thing about Subversive Cross Stitch is that it seems like an oxymoron. No one expects cross stitch to say something inappropriate. It really helps break the classic stereotype that crafters are old women and that is awesome. And did you see the limited edition Natalie Dee valentines? So cool!

Over spring break I was able to break out the embroidery floss yet again. I saw a drawing by my boyfriend's sister's friend of a whale with flowers growing out of its mouth and that put me in a whale mood. I sketched out this drawing one night while watching Lars and the Real Girl and decided to embroider it onto a plain tshirt I had laying around, waiting for a moment like this.


It is simple, but I liked its box shape and its knowing smile. I have such a hard time trying to make things that are "cute." Although I think of myself as crafty, I am not artistic. Creating original things does not come easily to me as it does to others. This whale was firstly inspired by someone else's drawing, but I also remembered this shirt that my sister and I made a few years ago.
Where does your creativity come from? Is it possible to be completely original? To create in a vacuum without other influences? Does it take practice or is it one of those things you either have or you don't? I don't know myself.

Oh goodness.

Oh it has been so long. I am the worst blogger. I have such high hopes and aspirations and I admire so many other bloggers, but I just can't keep it up myself. Usually I have no problem with people making excuses, but there is no point for me to do that here. I will just keep reading other awesome bloggers and hope that they inspire me to keep going.

Just because I have not been blogging does not mean that I have not been knitting and crafting over these last 11 months! I will try to give an overview of the highlights.

First, in reference to my last post, a mere 11 months ago, I bring you my new bedroom:













The walls are a lovely blue and the contrasting yellow chair fits right in. My stash is neatly organized, as is my personal library. These pictures show my nonfiction collection on the built-in/makeshift shelves on the left. On the right is the young adult section. I have plans to paint those bookshelves, but that did not happen last summer. The piece of art on the floor is a Monet print, which will be hung eventually I am sure.

I strayed from my original color scheme because I could not find the right comforter. Trust me, I looked everywhere. However, I eventually found this lovely comforter set on sale at Kohls. There is a small bit of yellow which ties in the chair perfectly. I now have matching green curtains and a "Shabby Chic" curtain rod from Target. I also have plans to knit some covers for throw pillows. Another ones of those ideas that never quite became reality.

But despite the unrealized plans, I am quite happy with it. I hate my room at school now because it just does not compare to this. I love coming home from a stressful week at school to this soothing blue, comfy bed, and my hundreds of books. The literary critic Wayne Booth thinks that readers should be in relationships with books and friends with their authors. It's true! I really do love my books, both their physical form and the ideas contained within. /English major and Librarian love fest

Last summer I also had a lovely lunch with my friend Hannah. We are pretty much soul sisters. Every time I see her I am reminded of how much we have in common. She came over one afternoon for an outdoor meal of french bread, chilled berry soup, and chicken and tortellini salad with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.


And Hannah made this delicious blueberry cheesecake. And lucky for me she left it at my house so I got to devour the leftovers.

After lunch, we sat in the shade in our new patio furniture and talked about The Feminine Mystique, while knitting. It was quite a delightful afternoon, hopefully to be repeated this summer.




My final treat is this felted bowl. I made two for my grandma for her birthday. The other one was in a nice burgundy but was smaller and shallower. I used Lamb's Pride Worsted for both. They were quite fun actually. Nothing in the round stockinette. I had never felted before either, so that was an interesting experience. They did not shrink as much as I had hoped, but they were still enough when they dried. I pulled this one over plastic bowl while it dried to keep some shape. The ridge at the top came from the bowl as well. I think it is a nice touch.

I hope my grandma liked them, as I was not there when they were given to her. She has enough good things to say about my cousin's pottery bowls that she made in middle school so I am assuming she liked these as well.

That was my summer. I suppose the embroidery will have to be another post, this one has gone on quite long enough.

Sigh.

I have not been knitting. It's finals week. Instead of knitting, I am trying to memorize 13 verb tenses and over 400 vocabulary words for my French final. I am finishing up an eight page paper on the use of reform and migration in the American novel. I need to write a paragraph about Machiavelli and also study for my anthropology final. NO TIMEEEEEE.

But soon it will be summer and I will be knitting like crazy (I hope).

Also I am going to be redoing my room this summer. So look for updates on that in the near future. It is going to be teal. And like an anthropologie catalog. These kind of colors. I'm going to bring up the yellow chair from my grandmother's house. And it will be ten thousand kinds of awesome.

I have forsaken knitting

No that is not true. Let us just say that I have begun using one stick instead of two. Get it now? Crochet! And it's a hook not a needle, I keep saying that. It's just that I have begun to notice these wonderful granny square afghans. Especially Alicia's. I just think that they are delightfully tacky. I wanted one.

Okay so I must admit that I have always thought of crocheting as being below knitting. I know that is terrible of me, but it is true. I think that I am just a snob, in music, books, in everything. Maybe not yarn though, at least yet, because I am also very frugal. I think that this snobbishness is also why I thoroughly enjoyed Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, which was the most recent book that I had to read for lit class. Carol comes into this small town with all these ideas about reform and changing and improving all these small town people. Most people hate her as a character because she is pushy, but from the beginning I loved her because she went to library school in Chicago and worked at a library and saw all these people come in, not for literature, but for tractor magazines. And I can totally relate because today, everyone comes in the library for the dvds and John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks, not for anything decent. And it's frustrating because there is a lot of good literature out there, but people just don't have the time or so they say. Or they want something light and uplifting, because God forbid that they actually do any thinking.

See this is why the new title of my blog is "Knitting in College", because the two things interact.

Anyway, I still think knitting produces more aesthetically pleasing things, but crocheting isn't all bad. So don't be offended. And so I've started making some granny squares. These are my first two:

The one on the left is my first one, done in the traditional granny square pattern. The one on the right is my second one, and it's being blocked. On the floor. In the semi-middle of my dorm room. I am pretty sure my roommate thinks that I am crazy.



I think part of the reason I looked down on crocheting is that I could never get it right. Knitting came much easier. But crocheting is not easy! Or perhaps I am just not familiar with terms and what things look like. But it took me a while to get the hang of it. I didn't realize that "into the ring" actually meant into the ring.

So project specs. I am planning to crochet my granny square afghan in Caron Simply Soft, because it is cheap and I already have a lot of it. I am going to use the blue you see above and a darker navy that I also have. These colors (and hopefully another shade of blue) all match my comforter that I use at school. It is a china plate type design, blue floral on white, and I completely adore it because it is very colonial. I will have to crochet 56 8-in squares to get my desired squares. I am not going to do multi-colored squares, at least so far. I checked 200 Crochet Blocks from the library and I'm crocheting patterns out of that.

So far it is all going well. I like it. Although my hand is not used to crocheting and it definitely cramps up a lot sooner than it would with knitting. But I am excited.

LADY E

Thanks to spring break, I have finished my Lady Eleanor! Pictures!
The middle picture is the best example of its true colors.











Pattern: Lady Eleanor from Scarf Style
Time: About two months.
Yarn: Noro Kureyon, 6 skeins.
Mods: I cast on four base triangles instead of seven so it is less wide, which was necessary because of my lack of yarn. My lys only had six skeins in that particular dye lot and it was a sale, etc... I am just glad that the length turned out okay.

This is honestly my favorite project ever. I absolutely love it. The pattern was the perfect blend of mindless and not mindless, at least for me. I was almost sorry to finish it. With every new color that would come up, I would just be like, "Wow what a great color". Though it's true what they say about Noro, there's bits and pieces of grass or sticks or whatever. I think it just added to the charm. So yay for amazing FO's.

Next up: Pomatomus Socks from Knitty. I'm about an inch and a half into my first one. I like socks, and these are the first ones I've ever made for myself.

In which we see the return of the blog

Yes so it has been a dreadfully long time. I am not quite sure what made me completely abandon my knitting blog, but it could most likely be summed up in one word: college. I am not going to lie and say that college is amazing, because honestly, it is downright mediocre. Most of the time bordering on no fun at all. Knitting is far too scarce. However, the projects that do get worked on are of much higher quality than last year. If you shall indulge me, we shall now take a little trip to recap what has happened since my last post, nine months ago.


This is a mess. Most of it is what I "inherited" from my grandmother. The word inherited here means "taken from her house after she died". This is not even all of it because later the rest came in the POD thing. There were some half-finished afghans and the back of a vest and basically a lot. Also a lot of needles which was nice, but still. I have not used really any of it, except right now. I am knitting the "anthropologie-inspired capelet" from craftster. (I think part of my problem with blogging is that I hate encoding it and adding links and formatting. I mean I like it, it's just too time-consuming.) I am knitting it in a nice cream to go with, coincidentally, my anthropologie dress. I am attended a ROTC Dining Out.. thing.. with my boyfriend and I muss look nice and so I figured the capelet would be quick and easy and it was. I am almost done. I think it will be very nice. Pictures later.



During August I knit Katie's razor cami in Carron Simply Soft navy. It came out okay. It could've had a better drape. It's real tight and hard to get on and off. Also the top there curls dreadfully. But it looks good with that orange-ish skirt that I had nothing to wear with.

Below is a picture of two complete projects and also me looking like a hobo. The first is the Elizabethtown hat. The pattern is easily found and it was my first hat! And my first cables! They turned out quite well I do say. Only problem is that my sister has kind of taken the hat so it is hers now.

The second project is my attempt at screenprinting the cheap way. This shirt is also my sister's. Those are lyrics from some song that I don't even remember anymore. And I think we got them wrong. It's not the best; text is hard. But from far away it looks fine.And then school started. I started many a projects, but only finished a few.



From top to bottom: Short Row Rib Scarf; still looks that way today. Mittens; I did finish those! Purl Scarf; from Last Minute Knitted Gifts, finished! Ubernatural; I have a sleeve and a fourth to go. Also I need buttons.

Okay now onto to second semester. My boy's mother generously gave me a gift certificate to my lys and after Christmas they had a huge sale. 40% off before 8 am. And, shockingly, I woke myself up and went. I bought six skeins of Noro Kureyon for a mini Lady Eleanor. Presently, I'm on my fourth skein and a couple feet in. This is possibly my favorite project ever ever ever. Je l'adore.


I also knit socks for my boy for Christmas. I finished them mid-January. No pictures.

I visited a Forest Park yarn store that was tres petite and jolie et j'ai achete some real mohair lace for version 2.0 of Branching Out. Currently I am one pattern repeat in. Eh heh.

With the rest of the money to Wool and Company, I bought 2 skeins of yellow something or other for Shifting Sands. And two beautiful teal skeins of sock yarn for Pomatamus. Both are a long way off.

I think that is all. This was a ridiculously long update. I hope I will be more diligent in the future, but you never know. Happy knitting!