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I'll blog more on the rest of the crafty Christmas presents later.
My very first sweater-type garment is finished! I wore it to work yesterday, and it was so warm and soft (I used Garnstudio Drops alpaca). Even though it's knitted to gauge and blocked to measurements, it's still a little "gapey" at the top, but I guess that just allows for bulkier undergarments.
I used my favorite cable stitch of all time (Hollow Oak from "Vogue Knitting") and some stash Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran in a dark blue for the first one:
I'll keep the remaining ones a mystery for now—at least until Christmas.
The sewing machine has been lugged downstairs and is hard at work again on several new projects. The only one that's finished so far is a modified version of the clutch from the cover of Amy Karol's book. I stumbled on some great Free Spirit gnome fabric while online shopping at Purl and knowing that I was soon to be the houseguest of a gnome-loving friend, I decided to put it to good use. As for the modifications, it's reversible. I added a ribbon along the edge of the solid side for a little more pizazz and voila! I think it was a hit!
Woolgathering was yesterday's word of the day on dictionary.com, and though I didn't have time to write yesterday, I thought it was an appropriate title for a knitblog post. And to use that word of the day in a sentence — it means "indulgence in idle fancies or daydreaming" — I am currently woolgathering about all the free time I'll soon have for knitting. But until that glorious time (about two days from now), here's an update of the super-secret gift I made last month for my sister. Her birthday was last week, and I think the starry-eyed surprise was a big hit! I slightly modified Amy Gaines' "Woodland Animals" owl pattern and added a few personal touches. Stuffed animal toys are fun for all ages — especially if there's sisterly significance!
It's rainy, gross, flooding, and tornadoey in Nola today. And Ravelry is teasing me with this little piece of information:
I am pretty amazing if I may say so myself. Despite the fact that the vast majority of all non-day-job-working and non-sleeping hours last week were spent slaving over a big freelance project with a rapidly approaching deadline, I still managed to find time over the weekend to crank out the super secret gift I alluded to last post. I can't show the whole finished project yet as the super secret occasion has not yet arrived—and I wouldn't want the super secret recipient to catch digital wind of the surprise—but here's a little taste to tide you over. The finished object is literally a starry-eyed surprise!
Many apologies for the time lapse between posts. It has been a whirlwind three weeks of frantically seaming the lacy dress, entertaining travelers to this Subtropical ‘Paradise’ I call home, traveling to exotic temperate climes (right), and celebrating my golden birthday! The lacy dress is still not finished. It’s about halfway seamed, and the rest is held together by safety pins. But my visiting friend saw it and loved it. She saw it without the seams attached and liked it better sleeveless than with the pattern’s bell sleeves. I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing, but I have decided to put this project on hold for now. There’s no chance I’ll wear it before next May, and I have dozens of cooler-weather projects I’m itching to start.First up is a super secret gift project that can’t be discussed on here for fear that the recipient will catch wind. But also on the books is the Tilted Duster from the Fall 2007 Interweave Knits. I ordered my Berocco Peruvia in Tabaco (brown), and it arrived last week. I can’t wait to start! And I’m also planning to make a few more of Cheryl Niamath’s Fetching fingerless gloves. (Aside: this was the first pattern I tackled after knitting many long rectangles, which I taught myself to do while living in A Very Cold Place back in 2004. I took a break from knitting while I went to grad school in the Cusp of Subtropical Paradise and picked it back up about this time last year when I lived in Glorious Seasonal Bliss. The pattern makes for great public transportation knitting, so I made four pair last fall. The pair I kept for myself are beginning to look a little ratty, thus the need for some new ones. Not that I’ll really need them here in ‘Paradise’—maybe my office will get cold or something.) But really, the renewed Fetching interest is due to my discovery of a SubPar LYS that sells Debbie Bliss!
So that is what’s on slate for the next month or so. In other exciting knitting news, I met the Yarn Harlot a couple weeks ago! She was amazing—just as funny and entertaining in real life as in her blog and books. Check out her post on New Orleans. She gets it.
And let's not forget my glorious knitting-filled birthday. OK, I didn't actually have any time on my birthday to knit, but I got lots of knitting-related presents, including Vogue Knitting, Maryjane's Stitching Room, and some great DVDs for watching while knitting: Planet Earth and Breakfast at Tiffany's!
Pride and perfection aside, my Amish flaw is a fairly large and noticeable one, which was not put there on purpose. The dress pattern calls for alternating sections of the lacy knots pattern and the lace acorn insert. Having never made lace — or anything of the apparel category — before, it didn't dawn on me that the instruction "(k1, p1, k1, p1, k1) in the next st" meant to do all of that in one stitch (despite the very obvious "in the next st" directions). So my acorn inserts for the main body of the dress are a big jumbled mess (the piece on the left in the picture) compared with my correctly knitted inserts in the sleeves (bottom section of the piece on the right in the picture). I guess Weird Al would say this qualifies as an "Amish Paradise" (sorry, I couldn't resist). Urgh. What to do? I don't particularly want to redo 76 inches of acorn insert, but I also want the dress to look nice. I guess it's time to start frogging. Thank goodness Netflix just delivered a new disc of "24." And don't worry, I have a few other less noticeable Amish flaws worked into the dress. I'm not going to be turned into a spider anytime soon.
My first real post will not be about knitting as promised. I know all you faithful readers—all two of you—are severely disappointed. I may throw in a little knitting shop talk at the end just to spice things up. But for now, I present my beautiful, "new" parquet coffee table. Many of you already knew and loved this table in its youth. What a fun-loving and jovial kid it was. With a flair for obnoxiously bright colors and the uncanny ability to keep sticking around, this table has gone through several reincarnations since it first came into my life six years—almost to the day—ago. Here's a brief history of the table for those of you who don't know or have forgotten. I bought this table used for $5 at a sketchy back-of-a-warehouse second-hand store in Buena Vista, Virginia, when I was in college. (Oh sketchy trips to BV...but that's another story). My roommate and I decided to paint the table hot pink to match our living room decor and proceeded to slather on apparently hundreds of coats of shiny, sticky hot pink paint. I assume the table had the lovely parquet design and some sort of decent finish when we bought it, but that was sophomore year. A lot of it is kind of hazy now. We gave the table a loving and happy home for nine months with only the occasional college party—ahem—"get-together" abuse. The table stayed with me through college, moving into the sorority house and later the slightly more whimsical house I lived in senior year.
When I started graduate school the following fall, I decided hot pink was a bit too juvenile for my geriatric tastes, so I repainted it lime green, a so much more sophisticated choice. Obviously, I didn't first strip the pink paint, I just added on another couple hundred layers of ridiculously colored paint on top. Lime green table survived through graduate school and moved into storage during my first year in the "real world." Which brings us to May of this year, when it moved out of storage and into my brand new, beautiful, grown-up, working-girl apartment. I had new furniture and new decor and it was obviously time for the green to go. So I decided to refinish it. I read up about wood refinishing online and headed to my friendly, neighborhood Lowe's for supplies. I naively thought this project would take me a weekend. I bought only one jar of paint stripper and just a few sheets of sand paper. Now, numerous weekends and about $100 worth of paint stripper, sand paper, chemical-resistant gloves, stain, and finish later, I have a beautiful new table to show for it. I have to say, all the hard work was well worth the effort because my "new" table adds the finishing touch to my lovely grown-up living room.
