I don’t remember what triggered it, but someone on Ravelry mentioned backing up their patterns.  I’ve come across several discussions regarding paper vs. electronic patterns.  There’s one online store that only sells paper patterns, which have turned off a number of knitters who are unwilling to pay the high shipping costs, wait for a pattern to come through the mail, and/or have a paper copy that could be lost.  And one of my sock clubs did a survey on whether the members would prefer PDFs or paper (PDFs won 4-to-1).

Personally, I prefer PDFs.  Some patterns I can knit straight from my computer, so I don’t have to print anything out.  Or I can print out multiple copies if I’m making the same pattern in multiple sizes.  PDFs are also a lot more secure for me, because I’m a packrat with a bad memory…and some of you might remember this incident.

But it occurred to me that storing my patterns on a computer without backing them up isn’t all that secure.  And I should know better–I’m typing this on a computer purchased after my previous laptop died without warning and the wanna-be computer experts at a not-to-be-named electronics store screwed up the data recovery attempt.  Fortunately, I’d been backing up my files, so I lost almost nothing.  This computer, however, I had not yet backed up.  So I purchased a couple thumb drives and backed up the two most important categories of items on my computer:  my photos and my patterns.

As for my knitting, I was done backing up and ready to move forward.  I found knitting with the Luminesse to be both a delight and a pain. The pain part was literal–the ribbon is stiff and scratchy (no surprise, based on the composition) and it was uncomfortable to knit with.  But the look…that was a definite compensation.  I loved how the Luminesse knit up and how it looked next to the Doodle yarn:

The colors are not identical, as I mentioned in the last post, and you can see the differences here.  The Luminesse doesn’t have any of the green, the blue-purple is a little bluer, and the purple isn’t as red.  But they still look good together.

Once again, I had less yarn than I hoped for, but this time it wasn’t as much of an issue. I just knit most of it up (I had plans for the scraps) and that will simply be the center back portion, whatever width it turned out to be. Now I’ll be finishing off the shrug with what’s left of the Doodle yarn.

As for the scraps of the Luminesse, they went to a good cause:

Lexie seems to appreciate it!

Yesterday I discovered I didn’t have enough yarn to finish the matching shrugs for Lexie and me.  So I came up with Plans A - D to solve the dilemma:

A. Buy more Judi & Co. Doodle yarn from Knotty Girl.
B. If there was no more yarn, see if Ann could order more.
C. If Ann couldn’t order more, try to find more online.
D. If there was no way to get any more, tink 6 rows on my shrug and 4 on Lexie’s, then reknit those rows in K2P2 ribbing and bind off.

By the time I went in to Knotty Girls today, I knew options B and C were highly unlikely.  I couldn’t find the yarn on Judi & Co.’s own website, or on any online store, even ones that sold other Judi & Co. yarns.  So if Ann didn’t have any more in that colorway, I was going to have two shorter shrugs.  Ann wasn’t in today, but Gloria quickly broke the bad news to me–there was no more, and she was pretty sure the yarn had been purchased soon after the store opened two years ago.  So…Plan D, right?

Nope!  Plan E!

As I was checking out the shelf where the Doodle yarns were located, I came across another Judi & Co. yarn: Luminesse ribbon yarn.  It’s not the same colorway–the Doodle yarn is Wisteria, with some greens; the Luminesse yarn is Delphinium, with no green but much more white–but it coordinates beautifully.  I couldn’t just add it to the end of the shrugs, because that would look funny and the ribbon yarn is a little scratchy to be the part snug on my arm.  But if I use the Doodle yarn on just the arms and the Luminesse on the back…now that would be cool.

One problem–I’d already knit well past the shoulder on my shrug, which meant a lot of frogging in my future.  But I didn’t want to rip the whole thing…

First things first–I had to wind my new yarn.  I wasn’t sure how well my makeshift nostepinne would work with ribbon yarn, but it wound up smoothly.  Jeffrey came up to watch, and after a few minutes said, “I want to do it!”  I explained that this was something that was a little difficult to do, and Mommy would do it.  He accepted my explanation…for a minute or two.  “Pleeeeease?” he asked.

I looked over at his bright, pleading face and quickly balanced the worst-case scenario (a knotted nightmare of a yarn pile) against the delight that helping would bring my son, and scooted back so he could stand in front of me and help me wind.  He was delighted.  The yarn was unknotted.  Soon, I had a yarn cake that wasn’t pretty but was perfectly serviceable.

Well, I’d dallied long enough–it was time to see if I could rip back to just a foot of knitting without completely ruining what I had done.  First, I did some research into lifelines. Most of what I read and saw involved inserting a lifeline while knitting, and I needed to put one in after the fact.  I understood the principle behind lifelines–my problem was figuring out where to put the waste yarn to lock in the stitches.

Once I’d measured the 12″ I needed to keep…

…I picked the row to put the waste yarn through. I’m knitting the shrug in a simple garter stitch, since the yarn is so textured anything more intricate would be lost. Unfortunately, that same texture made figuring out where the stitches were a little more difficult for someone doing this for the first time. Eventually, I decided to use the purl bump row, and it looked like it would be easier to run the tapestry needle through the lower bumps. So that’s where I started:

It took a bit of pulling and tugging to see all of the stitches, but eventually I had the waste yarn through the entire width of the shrug. I made sure to count that I had picked up all of the stitches, and I did have 44.

I took a deep breath, slid the stitches off of the circular needle, and…

…I was at the point of no return.

It didn’t take long until I neared the lifeline. The stitches were coming out a lot easier than I was afraid they would, and the stitches were standing up pretty well instead of running like with a smoother yarn. But there were times the boucle yarn was catching on the loops and I had to give it a good tug…and every time I did, a nearby stitch would drop back several rows. It was clear that the lifeline was going to be vital.

Another deep breath, another pull, and…

…Houston…we have a problem.

Obviously, I’d picked the wrong purl bump to run the needle through, and instead of locking the stitches, the would-be lifeline was pulling away with unraveled yarn.  Fortunately, this wasn’t a serious problem.  For one, it had occurred to me that when I’d measured initially, I hadn’t given the knit fabric that bit of a tug it needed, and I actually had more than 12″.  So I remeasured and picked a new row for my lifeline.  This time, I ran the yarn through the top purl bumps, since they were obviously the stitches, and started ripping again.

Now that is much better. The extraneous straight needle you see in there I needed to pick up 2 stitches that I’d missed with the lifeline–although I’d been counting to make sure I had all 44 stitches, I forgot that I’d actually cast on 46 stitches. And actually, I ended up with 45 stitches–I’d also forgotten that at some point I’d realized I’d lost a stitch (probably through knitting 2 together inadvertantly; the stitches tend to stick together) and need to add it back at some point. That was all minor, because at the end:

Success!

It was a very simple matter after that to slip the stitches back on to the size US15 circular needles–a pleasant surprise, since I thought the stitches might have tightened up enough to make sliding on to that thick needle a struggle.

Then it was just a matter of rewinding the frogged yarn with my DPN, and voila!

Let’s see what we can do now…

My Doodle Shrug and Lexie’s Mini Doodle Shrug are on hold.  It’s not that they’re not looking good, because I think they are:

When I first bought this yarn, I intended to use it to make something for Lexie.  But my first thought, which was to make a summer shirt or dress, I tossed.  The yarn felt like it would knit up a little too warm for a south Texas summer, even with stitches as loose as I was planning.  I don’t know where the sudden urge to knit myself a shrug with this yarn came from, but I decided to just go with it.  I had two skeins of the yarn, and looking at it, I felt I had plenty to knit a shrug that went from elbow to elbow for myself, as well as one for Lexie.

That’ll teach me to guestimate yarns by looking at them, with a pattern I’m winging, when I have no idea what the gauge of the yarn I’m knitting up will be.

I could tell I was running out of yarn about a foot short of the length I wanted for my shrug, so I decided to go ahead and cast on from the other end of the second ball for Lexie’s shrug.  My thought was I’d knit hers, and then just use whatever yarn was left to finish my mine.  Unfortunately, that plan required yarn to be left over after I finished Lexie’s shrug…and I never finished Lexie’s shrug.

I’m left with four options.  My preferred solution is buy more of this yarn at Knotty Girl…but I don’t think there is any more of this colorway.  Second choice is to see if Ann can special order any more.  The good news is that it’s hand-dyed yarn, so there isn’t a lot number to match…and with hand-dyed yarn I’m not terribly concerned about a perfect color match.  I’m not sure if she’ll be able to order such a small amount of yarn–I only need one skein–so third choice is to try to find yarn somewhere else.  I’m even less sanguine about this option than the others because a cursory search earlier today came up empty.

So that leaves me with my last option…which, while it’s not my first choice, is not a disaster by any stretch:  ripping back each shrug the number of rows needed for the ribbing (6 for my shrug, 4 for Lexie’s), knit the K2P2 ribbing on each, and then bind off.  They’ll be shorter than I wanted, but I love what these are looking like so much that I can deal with it.  And if (ok, when) I buy more of this yarn in other colorways, I’ll know in the future to get three skeins.

Of course, I think part of the reason I’m able to be so relaxed about this problem is that I notched a recent fiber art victory.  Two days ago I started work on Steve’s first Hawaiian shirt (the neon flamingos).  My only thought was that I’d like to get all three of the outfits in that fabric (Steve shirt, Jeffrey’s shirt, and Lexie’s jumper) completed before our upcoming trip to visit with Steve’s family.  Steve came home from the ship, looked at the work I’d done, and asked, “Will that be ready for the picnic tomorrow?”  Steve’s crew was having a Fourth of July picnic on Thursday, and he was quite excited about the idea of showing off a new shirt to his Sailors.  I told him I’d try, but no promises.

Well, it took staying up until 2 a.m. yesterday morning, and then finishing off the buttons and buttonholes after I woke up, but Steve got home to gather us all up for the picnic to find this:

It’s the fastest I’ve ever knit sewn* up one of these shirts, so I was quite pleased with myself. Steve was just plain pleased.

(My apologizes for the fuzziness of this picture.  Once the shirt has been washed we’re going to try again…but my theory is that the fabric is so eye-bleedingly neon that it’s screwing with the camera focus.  So we’ll see…)

*Apparently, I have knitting on the brain!

I heard that phrase quite a lot during my Navy career.  We used it most often during my first tour, on USS NASSAU (LHA 4).  NASSAU is an amphibious assault ship, specially designed to transport large numbers of Marines and support them during an assault.  It looks sort of like an aircraft carrier, with the large flight deck, but it has a special ability aircraft carriers don’t–it can be partially sunk in order to flood a well deck inside the ship to launch small boats.  It’s also one of the few conventional steam ships left in the US Navy.

I loved my entire tour on NASSAU–my job in engineering, all three of my commanding officers, and the ship’s mission (including the evacuation of non-combatants from Albania in 1997).  The only thing I didn’t love was that amphibious warfare tended to be pretty near the bottom of the Navy’s priorities.  Aircraft carriers and the flashy cruisers and destroyers–they got all the support and money they needed.  Amphibs (also known as ‘gators) weren’t cool and didn’t have all the wonderful new technology that made them popular to support, so Gator Sailors learned to make do.  In training, in maintenance, and even during missions, we prided ourselves in improvising, adapting, and overcoming.

These days, my ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome isn’t quite so life-or-death critical, of course…especially when it comes to knitting.  But I still like flexing my imagination and ingenuity at times, if only for the satisfaction of doing it.  So when I realized I was about to reach the end of the ball of yarn I was using to knit my Doodle Shrug, and I hadn’t yet balled the second skein, I knew improvising, adapting, and overcoming was called for.

I’d meant to have this balled the last time I was at Knotty Girl, once Gloria balled up the first yarn I handed her.  Unfortunately, that skein was so badly tangled that we had to untangle the entire thing by hand, with each of us working from one end, before we could finally use the ball winder.  Remembering back to when I’d balled the first skein of the above yarn, it had been a nightmare that had taken me a couple hours.  So I wasn’t willing to inflict that on poor Gloria.  And now there I was, an unwound skein in one hand, a WIP in the other, and a strong desire to keep knitting.

At least this time I had an actual swift–handmade with all of the focus on function and none on form–but perfectly serviceable.  I realized that there was one other tool that could make my winding experience much better:  a nostepinne.

I’d never heard of a nostepinne until Ravelry, when someone asked about it.  One of the many helpful souls posted a link to her blog where she not only described the use of a nostepinne with step-by-step pictures, she even had a video of herself using one.  Quite simply, a nostepinne is a cylindrical tool used to turn a skein into a yarn cake, by wrapping the yarn around it.  There are some gorgeous and intricate nostepinnes out there, and someday–someday–I’d like to own one.  But right now I don’t…and I needed one quick.  As the website mentions, however, there’s no need for a fancy nostepinne, since something as simple as an empty paper towel roll will do.

I knew I wanted something smaller, especially since the skein I was winding wasn’t that big.  And I just liked the idea of the feel of wood.  So I dug through my collection of bamboo DPNs and pulled out the thickest one I could find–a 7″ size US15.  I’d hoped for something bigger, but that was the largest I had so I figured I’d give it a shot.

So I got the skein set up on the swift and started wrapping the yarn around the DPN-nostepinne.  The advantage over my previous method–wrapping around my fingers several times and then using that as the basis for a center-pull ball–was immediately obvious.  Doing it the old way, I dropped that tiny starter ball more times than I could count.  It also tended to tangle, so I pulled out a lot of knots at first when knitting from the new ball, but I wasn’t going to know until I was done whether the nostepinne solved that problem.  Still, once I fixed the twist I had in the skein on the swift, the ball spun up in a matter of minutes.  Even though I was trying a completely new technique after watching a video twice, I had my first yarn cake in about ten minutes.

Isn’t it pretty?  It’s not quite as a neat a cake as my LYS can whip up on the ball winder, but that’ll come with practice.  Still, it’s much neater than any ball I’ve hand-wound before, and it does have a nice flat bottom (the top’s a little more domed, but since that’s where I pull the yarn out of it doesn’t matter) to set the cake down on.  And I have determined that the yarn pulls out of the center of a cake like a knife slides through butter.  I am definitely a believer in the power of the nostepinne…even if I have to improvise with a DPN.

I didn’t need a reminder today in order to get to Knotty Girl to meet with my fellow knitters.  I did need some organization to my Ravelry tote.  My zombie socks weren’t the only ones getting out of hand, so the inside of my tote looked like a VDOT (Virginia Department of Transportation) project:  completely disorganized, decades from completion, prohibitively expensive, and a safety hazard.

So I whipped out my super special WIP organizing tool:  the little plastic bags with hangers that baby onsies come in.  Baby girl has outgrown her 3-6 month onsies, so I had to buy her a few new sets.  And I’d held on to several from previous purchases with the vague idea that they might come in handy someday.  Oh, yes:

Now that I had everything organized, I needed to choose my project for today.  You’d think, with all the projects I have on the needles, that this would be an easy choice.

You’d be wrong…at least when you’re talking about me.

First, there’s my Zombielle Socks. After all, I worked on them at Sit ‘n Knit on Thursday–why not keep working on them?  Well, I can answer that in one word:  ribbit!

Unfortunately, the sock was knitting up too small for my calf.  I haven’t decided yet if I want to try to add pattern repeats (which means redoing some math later) or try going up a couple needle sizes.  I think I want to go up to size 3 needles (I’m currently using the larger size 1, 2.5mm), but I only have one Harmony size 3 circ, so I need another one before I can continue.

Ok, what about my Branching Out into Lace scarf?  I’m still loving both yarn and pattern, and I’m excited to see how it looks when it’s all done.

The problem is that, unlike the Zombielle Socks, I can’t knit this with only a fraction of my attention.  If all I wanted to do was concentrate on my knitting, I’d knit at home, but I go to the LYS for the socialization.  I’ve already got one noticeable mistake on this scarf–knitting through tears of laughter (as I did Thursday night) would be a disaster.

There’s my other KAL project, my Sunny Summer Sky t-shirt for the Nothing But a T-Shirt KAL. I’m plenty far behind, since Genuine is nearly done with the front (and by now might be completely done) and Michelle has both sleeves completed…and I haven’t yet finished an entire back.

As casual as we get at the LYS, I’m still not ready to throw one of my t-shirts down on the floor to check my progress on the knitted shirt–and I need that visual check as I finish up the neck shaping and shoulders.  So that’s an at-home project until I have the back finished.

So what about my secret project?

I can’t tell you that–it’s a secret!

All right…what else do I have on the needles right now…?  Hey, how about Lexie’s curtains? They haven’t seen a stitch in awhile…

…because I keep forgetting about them, hanging on the peg board.  Like I forgot today.  Still no stitches.

Well, that left me with only one choice.

Start a new project!

Introducing my Doodle Shrug!

I’ve been wanting a shrug for awhile now, especially since one of my fellow Knotty Girls knit herself a really cute one.  I’d originally bought this yarn to make something for Lexie, but the idea of a funky shrug with funky yarn was irresistible.  And since I’m not making one with long sleeves, I should have enough to make Lexie a matching shrug, which will be fun.  So I got this newest WIP underway this afternoon…once poor Gloria and I balled another skein of yarn I’d brought with the intention of making this yarn into my first shrug.  But that skein turned out to be one of the most knotted messes I’ve ever seen, and it took the two of us 30 minutes just to get the two ends untangled and in temporary balls so Gloria could use the ball winder.  After that, I figured it was time to try another yarn for a bit.

Of course, I realized I hadn’t brought needles nearly big enough for what I wanted the knit fabric to look like, so I had to try a couple larger sizes.  Then I had to test swatch a couple times.  Then I was able to figure out how many stitches I needed and cast on…and then several rows in I realized I forgot the ribbing I wanted at the ends.  So I frogged and started again, which is why there are only six rows completed for an entire afternoon devoted to knitting.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

*With apologies to Elizabeth Barret Browning.

I love baseball.

One of my (many) fond memories from my childhood is going to the ball game with my dad.  Dad would make it a special day with each of us, and I still recall the excitement I felt as I sat next to him in the car driving down to Baltimore to watch my favorite Orioles play.  There wasn’t much money for luxuries in our family, although my parents willingly went without in order to provide us with as much as they could.  So we really needed those binoculars Dad would bring to see the field from our nosebleed seats, and the glove I clutched in both hands was more wishful thinking than potential.  I didn’t care.  I still got excited every time a ball came our way, and in the meantime Dad taught me to keep score in the program he always bought as we demolished a bag of salted in the shell peanuts.

The last Baltimore Orioles game I attended was in 1992, during my Plebe Summer at the U.S. Naval Academy.  Thanks to the accumulated fatigue of that summer, I don’t remember much of the game…which is a little sad since that will be the last visit I make to beautiful Camden Yards.  I love baseball, but I despise Major League Baseball.  They lost me as a fan during the last strike while greedy owners argued with greedy players; ensured I’d never come back when the owners jacked up ticket prices so high the average dad can’t take his daughter (or son) to a game without taking out a second mortgage; and confirmed my decision when Barry’s head exploded, Sammy and Mark bulked up for a season-long homerun derby at just the right time for MLB’s ratings, and Rafael chastised Congress for even thinking he’d take steroids…right before his violation of MLB’s atrociously lax drug policy was announced.

Fortunately, there’s still a place where parents can take their kids for some quality family time, at reasonable prices, to enjoy America’s sport:  minor league ballparks.

Whenever we went to a ballgame as a family, it almost always meant heading north to Harrisburg to cheer for the Senators.  We loved cheering from the rickety wooden stands, but a minor league game is about so much more than baseball.  There was something going on at almost every inning break, not to mention various other diversions for the kids.  I am more grateful than I can express that I have the opportunity to share with my son the same experience Dad shared with his daughter, thanks to minor league baseball.

Our team is the Corpus Christi Hooks. We missed their inaugural season, since we arrived here just after it ended, but Jeffrey and I were frequent flyers at the field for the 2006 season.  Steve was deployed that summer, so it was just my little guy and I for six months.  We went to games with two other families from Steve’s ship; we had children of similar ages so they enjoyed the games and each other.

Steve’s ship returned from deployment just before the end of the season and was able to attend a few games as well–including the final games for the Texas League Championship, won by our Hooks in their sophomore season.

Jeffrey loved going to the games.  He learned to walk at the games…and once he got steady enough on his feet, he learned to dance (much to the amusement of our fellow fans) and wave his rally towel.

So both Steve and I were quite excited to finally be taking Jeffrey to his first game this season, and Lexie to her very first game ever.  We started with a quick dinner of sausage and soft pretzels (the soft pretzel was for me, but I shared with Jeffrey).

I bought the tickets just last week, and the Hooks are extremely popular down here.  Don’t try to get a reserved seat on game night–the only thing that will be available is general admission, which is open seating on the grass berms beyond left and center field.  But those tickets are a great thing for families, because they’re only $4 apiece.  Still, reserved seats are only $10 apiece, and that what we got.  We were all the way down the 3rd base line, but we still had a great view.

Jeffrey got right back into the swing of things, cheering for the Hooks as they were introduced before the game.  We had to remind him a few times who he was cheering for (his initial answer to “Who are we cheering for?” was “Junior!”, a hold over from watching NASCAR; then he started confusing Hooks with ‘Hawks–his dad’s Seattle Seahawks), but no matter who he was cheering for, he was enthusiastic about it!  He also enjoyed dancing to all of the music, much to the amusement of the young ladies sitting behind us.

The night was perfect.  Our seats were out of the sun by game time, and there was a continuous breeze blowing from home plate.  It felt so hot and heavy out when we left the house to drive over that we were stunned at how great we felt at the game.  And the wind couldn’t have been better for our Hooks–they rewarded our cheering with a 5-0 thrashing of the Tulsa Drillers.  All of the runs were scored via homeruns (a 3-run homer in the 3rd and a 2-run homer in the 7th), which made for the only two rough patches of an otherwise perfect night:  the loud cheers frightened Lexie, and then the home run fog horn scared both kids, so we both ended up holding weeping children until we could calm them down.  We’d forgotten the horn, but being prepared didn’t help us the second time around!

But other than that, the game couldn’t have been better.  We did leave a little early–after the second homerun we decided to leave at the end of the 7th inning, especially since we wanted to stop by the Hooks store.  Poor Lexie was the only one not decked out in Hooks gear, so we had to fix that.  Both kids were clearly tired but not exhausted (we couldn’t believe they lasted so long), and we were in the car and heading home as the 9th inning started.  We tuned to the local Hooks radio station and were able to hear the end of the game before we got home, so we did a little cheer for the Hooks just in the family (Jeffrey added a few for Lexie).

Someday, I hope Jeffrey and Lexie look back on these days the same way I look back on the games with Dad.

I recently read the first four books in Maggie Sefton’s Knitting Mysteries Series.  The books came to my attention when someone in the MCY group on Ravelry pointed out the newest book in the series, Dyer Consequences.  Considering the reason for our group’s existence, we found the idea of someone drowning in a dye pot to be inappropriately hysterical.  I enjoy reading mysteries, so I decided to give Sefton’s books a try.  They’re a good light read, once you’ve managed the suspension of disbelief required for any book in this genre (you know, that a CPA with no criminal investigative training can poke around official police investigations without being arrested for interfering with said investigations, with the help of a retired police officer who’s willing to divulge inside information, and solve said investigations where the police are clueless).  Of course, if I wanted to read Agatha Christie, I’ve got some of those books on the shelves too.  I didn’t–I wanted a fun, enjoyable read, and that’s what I got.

And for some reason, I felt a definite affinity for main character Kelly Flynn, the mystery solving CPA, which went beyond our shared appreciation for men named Steve.  I wasn’t quite sure at first why that was–she was a reluctant knitting student with trust issues who actually enjoys running.  Then I learned why:  I had sensed the incipent “fiber floozy” (the term Kelly and her friends use) in Kelly Flynn, and like called to like.  Kelly agrees to learn to knit because she really wants a sweater she’d seen a sample of in the shop, but the sample had already been sold.  Knitting it herself was the only way to get it, so with her friends’ help she works her way up to knitting a sweater in the round.

She starts the sweater in the second book and is still working on it in the third…or rather, still being seduced away from it in the third.  Every time she walks through the door of her favorite yarn shop, it seems, the owner has brought in a completely new selection of yarn (and since Kelly lives right across the parking lot from the store and stops in daily, that’s a lot of yarn changes).  And every time there’s new yarn, or she sees a friend working on a new project, Kelly can’t resist.  Then one day, she sits down at the table in the yarn store to work on her newest affair…and she can’t find the yarn.  It takes a concerted search through her knitting bag before she finds the new yarn, buried in a bottom corner.  She has no idea how it could have gotten there…unless…

Unless the neglected sweater-in-the-round attacked and beat the new yarn down.  Kelly decides she really doesn’t want to think any more about the possibility of yarn coming to life.

I realized it was a timely warning I had to take to heart.

I knew my Zombielle Socks had gone unattended for much too long.  And one of my fellow Zombie Sock KALers had already warned us of the danger of unattended Zombie Socks.  She’d let hers go for awhile and one of them disappeared.  She eventually found and subdued it behind the couch.

So, when I went to the Thursday night Sit ‘n Knit at Knotty Girl Yarns, I decided to pull out my sock and get back to work on it.  That turned out to be easier said than done.  Somehow, a ball of yarn and project I’d placed in the very bottom of the bag had managed to migrate throughout and wrap itself around every other WIP in the bag, slowly throttling all the other skeins.  It took the help of fellow knitter Suzanne to finish the detangling.

After that, things went quite smoothly, once I found the paper that told me where I was in the pattern.  I quickly got right back into the rhythm of the drop stitch pattern–it’s really a very easy one to do…which is good because there were a number of times during the night that I was trying to knit through tears of laughter.  I even felt comfortable enough to leave off halfway through a round (easier to do when knitting on two circular needles than DPNs) where I was dropping the stitch.  Little did I know that Zombielle had struck again…

On my drive home I stopped at a local ice cream drive thru to get my husband his favorite, at his request–he takes the kids every Thursday night so I can get out of the house, and this night he’d even reminded me about Sit ‘n Knit when I forgot, so he more than earned this treat.  As I was sitting in the usual lengthy and slow line, I decided I had enough time to get those dropped stitches laddered down (the wool yarn is a bit sticky, which is nice when I accidentally drop a stitch, but it needs a little help when I drop intentionally).  So pulled the sock out, looked at it, glanced at the pattern…and froze.

I forgot the yarn overs.

On the same row where I drop the stitches, I need to add yarn overs in another location to set up the next set of dropped stitches.  I tried to figure out a way around it that didn’t involve tinking almost half a round…but I couldn’t come up with one I was happy with.  At least the ice cream drive thru was so slow that I almost got all the tinking done before my order was up.

Once home I finished the tinking and reknit the half-round, adding the yarn overs.  Then I finished the other half round (properly) and by the time I went to bed last night, I had an entire second pattern repeat done.  Just one more before I start the heel flap fun:

Oooh…spooky…

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…

…I promised an update on my Nothing But a T-shirt KAL entry.

There.  I hope you’re happy.

Ok, seriously…I did let my NBaT slip.  Show me pretty yarn and I have the attention span of a fruit fly…or my 3-year-old playing outside (in the course of 10 minutes, we “played baseball,” kicked the soccer ball around, played in the playhouse, played baseball again, slid on the slide, played baseball some more, tossed the football, and then got back on the slide).  But c’mon–hand-painted silk yarn?  How am I supposed to resist that?  And the burpcloths/dishcloths were actually functional knitting.  And don’t forget the Hawaiian shirts.  Plus, there are two other WIPs I’ve got going that I can’t talk much about right now.  One is a block swap I’m doing with the Quilters Knitting group on Ravelry–we’re keeping our blocks under wraps until they’re swapped out, and the unexpected surgery of one swapper has delayed that slightly.  The other is a total secret, so I’m not even going to give a hint.  Not even which fiber art it is.

Anyways, back to my NBaT.  I knew I’d been away too long when I picked it up and realized I had no idea where in the pattern I was.  A fellow knitter at Knotty Girls noticed my blank stare.  “Forgot where you were?” she asked.  Yep.  Fortunately, checking the edge verified my guess that I was 10 rows into the armhole shaping.  I finished the shaping just as I finished off the current ball of yarn, held it up to take a look, and…

…oops.

It was long.  Really long.  And yet I had another 5 inches to go before I even started the neckline shaping, which was going to take another 2 inches.  There was no way I needed to knit another 7 inches to get the length I was looking for.  Granted, I wanted this to be longer than most t-shirts, which are too short for me, but this was beginning to look like a mini-dress in the making…and that is so not my look.  I tried holding it up against my front, but I just couldn’t get a good idea of how it was measuring.  So I tucked it back into my bag until I could get home to my assistant (aka Steve) and my tape measure.

I was pretty sure I knew what had happened:  I hadn’t weighted my gauge square before I measured, and so my row gauge was off.  The yarn was heavier than I expected, and over this much length it was just stretching more than I anticipated.  In some knits, not a big deal because I could just knit a little shorter.  But with something so fitted, there were a lot of things that had to be in just the right spot.

I didn’t get a chance to pull the NBaT out of my tote until after we got both kids to bed.  Then Steve and I headed to the bathroom so I could watch what he was doing in the mirror.  He held the shirt up so that the hem hung to just the point that I wanted, and then I checked the armholes…and found the shaping started just under my armpits, like it was supposed to.

Huh.

Still, I had trouble believing it.  So, as you can see in the picture above, I laid my WIP over one of my t-shirts.  This time I lined up the armholes, and durned if the hem of my NBaT wasn’t about 2 1/2 inches longer than the t-shirt.  Obviously, I don’t eyeball sizes well.  Still, it’s clear that I won’t need to knit quite as many more rows as my revised pattern is calling for.  So, I’m pretty close to calling the back done, and then it’s time to tackle the front with all the fun I’m adding there.

It was my fault.

I got complacent.  Jeffrey’s really good at not opening drawers he knows he’s not supposed to be in.  But I left this drawer open because I was in a hurry.  And then, I left the door to the office–which has a childproof doorknob protector he hasn’t yet learned to defeat–wide open.  As soon as you walk out the door of his bedroom, you’re looking straight into the office and at that drawer hanging wide open.

And I knew he didn’t usually nap during “nap time.”  Or stay in his room like he’s supposed to for quiet time.  So I have no one to blame but myself.

Amazingly, no actual destruction was done.  Despite the fact that the pattern pieces are tissue thin, none of them were torn.  I haven’t yet been able to motivate myself to get everything back in the right envelopes yet, though.

In fact, I’ve had my fill of sewing pattern pieces for a while.

Just pinning all of the pieces for the first family Hawaiian shirt set took all of Sunday (it didn’t help that I was trying to do all of the Sunday chores to give Steve a break for Father’s Day…it did help that he wouldn’t play along and insisted on working too).  It’s not that any of the outfits have that many pieces (Steve’s shirt has the most–five, compared to four each for Jeffrey’s shirt and Lexie’s jumper–but I haven’t cut out the pocket yet because I pattern match the pocket), but that I was pinning up three outfits at the same time.  Oh, and cutting out the pattern pieces for Jeffrey’s and Lexie’s outfits was incredibly tedious, because each pattern booklet is for several different clothing articles (dresses, pants, bloomers, a shrug, etc.) so I had to find the right pieces in the right size…all the while trying not to shred the delicate tissue paper.

Pulling out a pair of scissors was actually cathartic.

Twelve pattern pieces for three outfits, all ready for some sewing fun!  I still need to cut out the necessary interfacing pieces–I realized it would be a big mistake to unpin anything until I’m ready to start sewing, else I’ll never remember what goes where, so I haven’t been able to free up the pattern pieces for the interfacing–and Steve’s pocket, but that’s definite progress.  Steve is quite excited.

Now for a knitting break…

Today was World Wide Knit in Public (WWKIP) day today–so did you KIP? I did!

I planned my knitting assault on the public carefully. For the morning, I was staking out the local Starbucks; the afternoon was reserved for our usual unofficial meet up at Knotty Girls, and once the LYS closed, three of us put in an hour at Barnes & Noble. I arrived fully stocked: long and short pairs of bamboo knitting needles in sizes 6-10 and several balls of inexpensive yarn.

Our layout at Barnes & Noble

But I knew the key to a successful WWKIP day was an irresistible hook. I had to be seen knitting something that made people overcome the natural disinclination to approach a stranger out of the blue and potentially disturb her…something so beautiful they just had to ask about it.

Think this will work?

It did.

Despite stocking up on teaching supplies, I honestly had no real expectation that I would end up showing anyone how to knit. However, while I enjoyed my pumpkin bread and fruit juice at Starbucks (I don’t drink coffee), a woman approached me, complimenting me on the scarf. She also added that she’d always wanted to learn how to knit. I think I stunned her when I immediately offered to teach her.

Turns out she was actually the manager, and we only ended up with a quick 15 minutes snatched from her lunch break. She picked a purple, pink, and white variegated ball of Peaches and Cream to knit up a quick spa cloth. The long tail cast on turned out to be a bit too complicated for so quick a lesson, so we switched to the single cast on instead. Then we shifted to the knit stitch and threw in a yarn over. By the end of the lesson, we only had two rows (a total of 9 stitches) completed, and one of the rows had a twisted stitch. But that was so insignificant next to the delight on the face of my “student.” As she went back to work with her new needles and yarn, she proudly waved those stitches and announced to her coworkers, “I did this!”

After lunch, I joined the usual crowd at Knotty Girl for our usual stitchin’ and gabbin’. Our conversation, as always, was completely stream of consciousness–if it came to mind, someone said it. Knotty Girls’ Gloria was back from her trip from Hawaii, so she stopped by briefly, full of stories about her trip (I’m looking forward to seeing what Ann got out of Knitters’ Connection this weekend, especially the Ravelry presentation by Jess and Casey). And as always, we admired and complimented each other’s projects. One of my favorite parts of our get togethers is seeing what everyone else has been inspired by.

With Ann out of town and Gloria still recovering from jet lag, Suzanne was holding down the fort at Knotty Girls. When she closed up, she, Gavi and I headed to the nearby Barnes & Noble to close out our WWKIP day. We scored the comfy seats by the cafe–few men can resist the smile of a pretty expectant mom like Gavi–and set up with our projects and teaching supplies.

Gavi (left) knits while Suzanne looks for a lace stitch pattern

No lessons were taught during this stop–we mostly got curious glances and smiles. One woman did stop to talk, but she already knew how to knit; when her children were young, she shared, she’d knit for them all the time. She was quite intrigued when Suzanne explained about WWKIP, which got us thinking because it looked like she might have been a manager at Barnes & Noble. Next year, we agreed, we’d contact them in advance to see if we could set up something a little more formal. I’d already been thinking about doing the same at Starbucks. In fact, the manager I’d given the lesson to mussed that maybe we could set up a knitting group there; she’s new and is looking for a way to try to draw in more people. I’ve already told her I’ll come in during the day this coming week to continue our lessons–just because it’s no longer officially World Wide Knit in Public day doesn’t mean we can’t keep spreading the knitting love.