Fridays, Fridays

I wrote out a few depressing paragraphs, and then Jiji walked all over my keyboard and managed to erase it.  I'll take that as a sign.

  
She's a cunning kitty.

My swap package has been sent, and according to the tracking info, received, but I've gotten no confirmation from Ravelry.  Is she staring at the contents in disbelief, and too disgusted with my inept handling of the assignment to say anything?  Is everything sea green?  Is her internet out?  Does she have a life outside of Ravelry that is keeping her away?  No one told me swaps were so aggravating, argh . . .

Today was the deadline for sending things out, so I should be receiving a package sometime in the next week.  I'm so excited and curious to see what my partner picked out for me.  I hope it's purple, but I love all kinds of colors, so if it isn't purple I won't be at all disappointed.  I almost wish I'd said 'orange' and left it at that, just to open a box and see nothing but orange.  Orange is an unexpected color.  I love color.

I finally finished this darn bookmark.

Who knew second sock syndrome could be caught by such a small target?  My tension and row counts were inconsistent, so they don't quite match, but I'm just so happy to have another UFO off the board that I don't care.  It's a bookmark.  I'm happy.

Since that didn't take up all of my Wednesday, I also wove all the ends in on Jenn's finished mitten, and worked a couple more rows on the thumb of the unfinished one.  Have I mentioned that I hate those mittens?  I'm so glad I don't have to work on them again until next Thursday.  On the bright side, it's been so crisp and cool in the mornings that working on mittens is sounding charming again.  I can't wait to get back to work on my Hermione mittens.  I wish I had taken better notes (or any notes at all . . . ) on the first one.  I'm more or less starting from scratch with the second, except for the knowledge that I added eight stitches to begin with, and I can read cables pretty competently.  There's going to be some guesswork, though, and that makes me antsy.

Silas is rolling over these days.

He doesn't really look where he's going yet.

Unfinished Thursdays

I've cheated today and continued working on my swap package instead of anything outstanding from my UFO list, but here at least is a thing I finished on a past Thursday.  It was a SquiPod iPod cozy for my Zen mp3 player, but I got bored of making i-cord tentacles not long after I started it, and then I retired the Zen, and it got tossed around the house a lot, but I finally finished all the legs, embroidered on some eyes, stuffed it with a nice crinkly bag, and a wee bit of catnip, and voila - new favorite cat toy.

No Better than Usual

Still trying to get to a place in my life where I can blog regularly.

The baby, he is growing.

So, I made him another hat.  Same pattern, with an extra increase round, an extra body round, and a slight mod to the brim so it wouldn't be super-ruffly.  Ryan was disappointed that I didn't leave it as a beanie, but I'm trying to keep the sun off my son, not make him look stylish.  That just happens naturally.

The cats still don't know what to make of him.  Theo is convinced that Silas is stealing the best seat in the house.

Everyone loves the swing.

In other knitting news, I joined a swap on Ravelry, right before I discovered that babies break the bank.  However, I've pressed on, and managed to avoid overspending.  As it turns out I have lots of things around the house that suit the theme.  The theme is Rainbow, which boils down to picking a color that your partner likes and filling a package with things that are all that color.  Pictures will have to wait, to keep things secret, but I had a lot of fun picking them out/making them.

Some other things I'm working on, since it's work in progress Wednesday:

A 'whimsical' shawl, as my husband described it, made up of various sizes of crocheted stars, from Austentatious Crochet by Melissa Horozewski.

Pictured before I finished all the stars.  Now they're all made, and about 1/3 assembled, and it's a daunting thought that I'll ever have all the ends woven in someday.  I hate it with great intensity, but hopefully I'll mellow out once it's finished and actually wear it.

I'm also making myself a purse out of granny squares.

Speaking of weaving in ends....

Friday at last!

 I accomplished things today.  I went grocery shopping, paid my insurance, set up an installment plan for those pesky hospital bills, fixed an issue on Silas's coverage, and set up an appointment to meet with a possible daycare provider.

As for finished objects for the week, you've seen the bag:

And the bookmark:

Both of which leave me giddy with feelings of fulfillment.  I need to put my beloved kindle aside for a while and read a real book so that I can put the bookmark to use.

Other than that, I have only finished these:

I'm torn between naming her Wilhelmina and calling her Billie for Billie Piper, or naming her Elizabeth and calling her one of the 30 odd nicknames that would provide.  Anyway, real quick dress and shrug pattern so that she's no longer running around naked, made from more leftovers of the Great Knitted Thing of 2006.  The shrug came out a little odd and doesn't fit her at all well, but shrugs are like that anyway, in my opinion.  While crocheting it I watched the first few episodes of the second season of Dark Shadows.  Soap operas were different in the 60's, weren't they?

Wrapping up

This edition of WIP Wednesday is brought to you on Thursday courtesy of fussy babies everywhere.

I restarted the Belle Ruffle gloves in blue and white, since I have lots and lots of Caron Simply Soft leftover from when I cosplayed as Rinoa way back in 2006, a time when I believed I could knit anything, no matter how big and crazy.

Also when my hair was long.  I miss my long hair.  Right up until I remember having to wash it.

I cast on enough stitches to make one more ruffle, which gives me a little more wiggle room for my giant hands.  Once I'd finished the ruffly portion, I showed it to my husband, who said he didn't like it.

He said it had been better in the pink and gray, more feminine.  I agreed that I wasn't in love with the new colors, but decided to ask Ravelry just to be sure.  Ravelry said my husband is crazy, so trusting the goodwill of random internet strangers, and the fact that we were on the golf course and I don't golf, I plowed ahead.

It is pretty darn cute, I think.  Reminds me of Disney's Alice in Wonderland.  Blue dress, white pinafore, all that.  Back then, blue was the color for girls, while manly red-shades like pink were for boys.

I also started another dishcloth (crazy, I know) for the sake of Ravelry.  It's a nice balance of mindless and complex.

Now, back to your regularly scheduled UFO Thursday.

I finally finished the Everlasting Bagstopper.  The handle is nice, sturdy single crochet, the ends are woven in, the cats approves.

If you look closely you can even see the second cat in those shots.  Camera-friendly Jiji is not.

Finally, all in one day I managed to finish the crocheted bookmark.

 Thread crochet is a bit tedious when it isn't lacy; it takes forever to see any length appear.  The end result is very nice, however - imagine squashing a worsted-weight bookmark in between the pages.  Yick.

 On the non-crafty side of life, Ryan and I celebrated our 2-year anniversary.  He bought me flowers.

Then we opened our hospital bills, agreed never to buy flowers again, and told Silas he was going to have to get a job.

Anyone know of any openings for a professional milk-taster?

UFO Thursdays

Thursdays are for flying saucers.

Or so it would seem.  Any knitter will tell you that a UFO tends to lurk in project bags and closets rather than the depths of space.  I have a terrifying collection of UnFinished Objects cluttering up various corners of the house, and my resolution to finish them this year has been off to a rocky start.

Enter Ravelry again, and the group One Day a Week for UFOs.  From now on Thursdays are dedicated to those looming half-finished projects that I steadfastly ignore the rest of the time.

Today I finally ironed and trimmed off the ends of a dishcloth that I actually started back in March.

It's a knitting pattern off of a Sugar and Cream label.  It packs a nice punch for a really simple pattern, though it was agonizing on my hands to knit so tightly with unforgiving cotton yarn.  I'm experimenting with taking better pictures, or at least finding more interesting backgrounds.  I've asked Ryan a couple times for advice, but despite almost having a degree in commercial photography he doesn't seem interesting in photographing knitwear for his wife.

I also pulled down the Everlasting Bagstopper that's been hanging in my kitchen collecting bags of chips for the past two years and finally wove in its ends and started crocheting a handle onto it so that it can finally fulfill its destiny as a reusable shopping bag, assuming I ever remember to bring my reusable shopping bags with me when I go to the store.  Heaven knows I'd miss all the plastic bags, though, since they line the various garbage cans upstairs and also come in handy for cleaning the cat boxes.

Ryan is contemplating giving the cats away as a money-saving measure.  I can see the logic, but I can't bear the thought of their ending up put to sleep in a shelter or mistreated somewhere.  I couldn't let them go unless I knew they were going to a good home.  Fingers crossed that it doesn't come to a head for a while yet.

How can I possibly let these poor dears go?  

Wiling away my time

Interwebs!  Long time no see!  No surprise, I haven't been knitting much either.  Jenn's mittens lay forgotten in a bag on the passenger seat of my car, occasionally I pick away at another row on the second Hermione mitten's cuff, and I've finished the knitting on a Steve Zissou-inspired hat for my husband, but that is all.  No pictures yet.

On the crocheting front, I visited my parents a couple weekends ago and sewed up my second Christmas angel, here modelled by my willing victim brother Nathan:

Careful examination will reveal subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) differences between it and the original, which had the kinds of mistakes you get crocheting at three in the morning on half-remembered directions.  I used perhaps a little too much glue stiffening it, but otherwise I'm satisfied with the results.

I've been working away at the stamped cross-stitch pattern kit I bought two Decembers ago for the nursery.  It was a great source of comfort and distraction while I was in the hospital, and now I find it again to be wonderfully engrossing at a time when I'm prone to worry too much about this pregnancy, my dad's cerebellar ataxia, and how to balance my mother between the two.

Jiji, on the other hand, thinks I'm spending too much time not petting her.

Theo shares the opinion, but he's too big now to fit his whole body all at once on to this particular embroidery hoop.  He still squeezes himself into odd little spots, though.





I picked up a copy of "Our Mutual Friend" by Charles Dickens at Half-Price Books.  I've seen the BBC movie/miniseries, so the end is already spoiled for me, but I am nonetheless adoring the book.  For some reason I've had a hard time getting into some of Dickens' other work (A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol), but this one has me hooked.  The characters are delightful and a bit absurd, and the language is mellifluous and a welcome change from the clunky and insipid prose that so much modern writing is plagued with.

She said, ending her sentence with a preposition.

2012!

Yes, I know it's been forever since I posted anything - why, it's been since LAST YEAR.  I'm terrible.  Here are some pictures of my cats to make us all feel better.

Can you tell we've been cleaning?  All the stuff piled on the desk used to be on the floor.

It was a mostly successful Christmas as far as gifts went.  I still haven't finished Laura's hat or Jeremy's blanket, but there's no rush there.  They haven't found a permanent place to stay yet, so I'd rather wait and know that they will receive any package I send them.

Mom, after some convincing, loved her fingerless gloves.

She doesn't really "get" fingerless gloves, but she has poor circulation and I thought they'd be nice for around the house, especially when she's typing.  She's always saying how her hands get so cold.  Of all people Phillip came to my aid to explain how they keep the fingers warm by warming the blood at the pulse points.  My brother has hidden depths in his general awesome.

He got a gun cleaning kit for Christmas.  I thought about making him some potholders for his new house, but then it occurred to me that Mom might want to do that, since potholders are her specialty.  I passed the idea along and she was thrilled.  She's on a potholder/coaster making kick now - you can never have too many.  As for her granny square slippers, I frogged them, decided to put any other knitting for her on hold until Mother's Day, and bought her yarn and knitting looms instead.  No time left.

Jenn's mittens, alas, were not finished in time for Christmas.  I gave it  the old college try, as my husband would say, but it was not to be.  However, one was worked up enough for her to see, try on, and approve of the pattern, and assuming I don't give up in a hissing rage on trying to weave in the ends, she should have a complete pair by Valentine's Day.  As the pattern is called "Valentine's Mittens," that seems appropriate enough.  The original, from "Stitch and Bitch: Nation," is red and pink with duplicate-stitched hearts, but Jenn does not like pink hearts. She likes stripes.  And bunny hats.

Another pattern from the same book (which she gave me for Christmas several years ago, the enabler :P).  The original hat, naturally, was pink and infant-sized, but it turned out that by using two strands of white Caron Simply Soft held together and size10 or so needles, I didn't have to change the pattern directions at all to end up with Jenn-sized super-adorable hat for marching band practice.



On the mitten front, Ryan finally got his two-years-in-the-making argyle flip-top mittens.

 

I even blocked them, since I had to wash one anyway.  While the second was still in production he used the first while trying to fix his car.  Fortunately gentle hand-washing with mild dish detergent saved the day, and also allowed me discover that blocking is a beautiful process that turns lumpy mittens into handsome, soft, awe-inspiring functional pieces of art.  They even got a stamp of approval from my sister-in-law's fiance, a mechanic, who says that flip-top mittens are the best thing ever.

Not flip-top is my newly resized Hermione mitten-in-progress, which has not seen any progress since I started my Christmas knitting, and won't see any more until after Jenn's mittens are done.

I made a New Year's resolution that I would only work on two projects at a time this year, and at least one of them has to be from my enormous and looming pile of unfinished work from previous years until it is all gone.  Finish or Frog! is my battle-cry this year.  Once Jenn's mittens are done, I can go back to these mittens, which probably won't see any service until next winter, at this rate.

I did make an exception for two little projects.

The last couple months I've been searching for some kind of first Christmas memorial ornament for Gabriel.  I wanted something angel-themed, maybe with his birthstone, but nothing struck the right chord until I read on Ravelry that a woman crocheted angel ornaments for her miscarried babies.  "I can do that," I thought, and at 1am Christmas Eve morning I started with size 20 crochet cotton and a size 10 hook.  Angel number one was finished just in time to hang it on my in-law's tree before we left for church.  I wasn't able to finish the second one before the end of Christmas at my parents, but they didn't put their tree up this year, so it was alright.  It just needs to be sewn together and it will be ready for next year.  The one pictured, the first one, has two fairly major mistakes, in the wings and in the halo, but she turned out alright, and I'm sure Gabriel doesn't mind.  I was able to catch them in the second angel, so that one should be picture-perfect once it's done.

One last picture, then, of my angel.

We will always love you.  Merry Christmas, little one.

An update or two

I lost my nerve with the French Press Slippers when I discovered that my row gauge was way, way off.  Maybe I'll endeavor to finish them, but they most likely will not be a Christmas gift this year.  Instead I'm going to make Mom a pair of ChezPlum's Babouches, to commemorate our granny square evening and also because I think they're adorable.  I have a pair started for myself, but I ran out of yarn after finishing the first half of the first slipper.  This is actually exactly where I am on Mom's pair now, so here is a picture of what hers look like, if they were teal and lime green instead of plum and blue.

Her fingerless gloves are finished, ends woven in and all.  They are sweet and dainty, and hopefully not too super-snug.

Jenn's mittens hit a snag (called gauge, surprise surprise), but before I realized that, I let Theo pose with the WIP.

In other news, I think my husband may be reading my journal.  That doesn't bother me; it's mostly musings about Gabriel and loneliness, and other than perhaps the real depth of my feeling of isolation, it's nothing he doesn't know about already.  I wrote last night about missing Gabriel, about my slow loss of sensitivity to not being around him (Ryan), missing being around Phillip, and my terror and sorrow about my Dad's declining health.  I didn't mention it to him or my diary, but writing about it sent me into an intense sobbing fit that scared the cats out of the room.  Perhaps it was childish of me, but why beat myself up about crying when there are so many other things to worry about?

At any rate, Ryan sent me a text today to tell me he misses me.  That may carry me through the night.