Knittin' Mittens

I'm about 75% finished with this pair for the Spring Afghans for Afghans campaign. I should really be working on other things. . .like my St. Patrick's Day project, or those Christmas presents. But they NEED the mittens, and mittens are EASY and make for excellent "chill-axing" knitting at night. (Cabling still requires too much of my brain to be good end-of-the-day tv-watching knitting.) This is Elizabeth Durand's "Basic Pattern for Children's Mittens" from the A4A website, in the 8-10 year old size.

This pair is knit with an unknown orchid and carnation pink wool from that $1/skein yard sale I hit last summer. To make the hand warmer and fuzzier (and prettier) I added a strand of laceweight mohair to the hand ("Mohair Royal" from Lana Gatto, also from the yard sale, also $1, despite the original $11 price tag.) I have two big "cakes" of the wool, about Cascade 220 size--so probably about 220 yds each (oh my, I'm having an epiphany---could the 220 in Cascade 220 be the YARDAGE??) I also have several more skeins of the mohair (which I am loving) in the baby pink, a dark chocolate brown, and a screaming red. Held double with the wool, the mohair makes these WARM.



In the background you will see SNOW. It SNOWED last night. Not fun snow. Not snow that closed schools. Just really wet, slushy snow that froze overnight, making an obnoxious crust on the windshield and roads this morning. I'm tired of scraping. I'm tired of sliding. Winter can be OVER now. Seriously.

When I woke Audrey up this morning I told her it had snowed overnight "so dress accordingly." "Dress accordingly" apparently meant "go ahead and wear the mini dress and short sleeved sweater you laid out last night." She's ready for winter to be over, too.

In Praise of Smaller SD Cards

I know the trend is toward larger and larger SD cards. I think the last one that came into our house was a whopping 4GB, but I miss the old ones. I miss the ones that ran out of memory before the camera was old technology and ready to be replaced. When I plug the card into the computer to download the pictures, it takes 3 years for the images to load. I have pictures on my SD card from when the dogs were puppies, from three Christmases ago, from summer vacations two different years. It takes a l-o-n-g time for these to all show up on screen so I can tell the computer I want to save the last 4 to Flickr so I can blog. I'm a 256MB kind of girl, or maybe I just really need a new computer.

Audrey was out of school all last week. James hasn't missed school, but he's not 100%. I've been trying to motor through with a sore throat and intermittent fever and chills, and I think John has had the sore throat on and off. Knock-on-wood we at least didn't get the flu-like virus that is going around.

Over the weekend Audrey and I got out some of the beads. Audrey wanted a couple of new necklaces, and I wanted to make a few things to put in with my St. Patrick's Day swap package.

Here is one of Audrey's necklaces:


(She's wearing the other one to school today, so it wasn't available for photographing.)

Here's some stitch markers and a charm for scissors:



And a bracelet that I'm really rather pleased with:



I'm half-way through the green cabled mitts:




I'm also trying to make the house hospitable for John's Dad's visit, which starts next week. Audrey's friend "Latonka" told me I was Super Mom, and housework was my Kryptonite. I don't know about being Super Mom (this may be sheer flattery because she was in the middle of a homemade cup cake,) but housework is definitely my Kryptonite.

John has been working on the remodeling of the hall bathroom. I really should take a picture of his beautiful job with the copper tubing for the shower before he puts the concrete wall board over it. I'm seriously glad plumbing is man-work. Seriously.

James had the regional Knowledge Bowl tournament yesterday. They came in 4th place, and I'm thinking this means they won't be progressing to state. He definitely had a good time with it, and is going to miss having practice twice a week. His band is supposed to start practicing at our house next month. Scary.

Audrey has decided she's through with middle school romance. She's in the process of letting the last boy know she's not interested, and I'm feeling very sorry for him, because he waited for her answer over a week while she was out sick, and he seemed nice. She's also doing all that make-up work for the week of school she missed, which is less than fun.

Socks!!!

I made my first socks!!



The pattern is Amber Wards' "Ribbed Far-Away Baby Socks," and I made them for the Afghans for Afghans spring campaign. The yarn is a wool/bamboo blend

I tried a couple of other patterns, but this one looked more satisfactorily sock-y to me. I've read that turning your first heel is a magic moment. I don't know that I felt the magic--but there's been a lot of first sock dancing going on.

Audrey has been in bed since President's Day with a very bad cold. At least 3 of her friends have been out of school, too.

Val-Grams

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Today (Friday) was my very last stint of selling candy-grams at the middle school. Words cannot express what a big "YAY!!!" this is for me.

I didn't take a picture of this year's edition (Necco conversation hearts, a Hershey Kiss, a Dum-Dum, a heart sticker, and a fancy Valentine pencil all wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbons,) so I'm recycling last year's picture, but I brightened it up with Picnic (the photo editing software at Flickr, which I think I love.)



We made over 600 and sold every one.

The parts of Audrey's hair that were green are now pink for Valentine's Day. I will have to get a picture of her. After a couple of hours bleaching the tips and applying the color, I tried to talk her into a pink T-shirt to match, and she said "no thank-you, I don't like pink." (?????) "But you just dyed your hair pink!" says I. "That's different," says Audrey, "hair is temporary, but a T-shirt lasts forever." (??????)

Audrey is at the Valentine's dance until four o'clock this afternoon. Then I am supposed to take all her and all her "single" friends (those who did not go to the dance with a boy) to El Charito's for drinks. Virgin pina coladas and strawberry margaritas. I may even have one myself. After all, I'm celebrating. ("I don't have to do Val-grams, I don't have to do Boo-grams, I don't have to be PTO president next year, Tra la la la la la" sung roughly to the tune of "We are looking for Blue's Clues.")

And as an aside to those of you who know Audrey. . . she found out there's a boy at school who has liked her for a couple of months (a big deal in middle-school-time,) and his last name is Drake, and his friends call him "Ducky" (For those of you who don't know Audrey, this is funny, because Audrey has amassed a huge rubber duck collection over the last 6 years.)

Matter of Perspective.

My feet are cold. My bed is warm, and if I didn't have things to do and a feeling of guilt, I might huddle under the covers for the next six weeks like this:


more animals
(Only UNDER the covers, and probably with both dogs and a cat or two.)

Winter is a limited time-engagement.
We've missed the flooding that happened in our area.
We aren't on fire in Australia.
I've got stuff to do, but I can throw some cupcakes in the oven and put on some coffee first.
And there's new TV tonight for me to knit during.

Fetching

Okay, for the Muggles:

Knitty.com is a wildly popular quarterly knitting webzine with loads of great free patterns.
Ravelry.com is a social networking site for knitters and crocheters.

Every once in a while a pattern comes along that takes the fancy of the knitting community and people go nuts about it. Cheryl Niamath's fingerless glove pattern "Fetching" published on Knitty is one of these. As of this morning there are 10,308 projects for "Fetching" listed on Ravelry. When you consider that not everyone who reads Knitty is on Ravelry, and a lot of Ravelers (me included) don't get all their projects listed on Ravelry, well, that's an awful lot of "Fetching" fingerless gloves.

I started my Fetchings as a Christmas gift for one of my favorite people. Her favorite color is red. I used yarn from the LYS that promised fabulousness, a super-soft superwash wool from Italy (the tag is lost and oblivion is deserved.) I had to learn how to do a cabled cast-on. I didn't resent it at the time. I made three repeats of beautiful little cables. Then I hit the thumb and it all went to hell.



"Fetching" doesn't have a thumb gusset. You make sort of a button-hole by knitting with a piece of scrap yarn instead of your main yarn and then you come back and rip out the scrap yarn and pick up the live stitches and use them to make the thumb. Huh. I like the thumb gusset better.



And the knuckles. Sigh. The knuckles. Only one row of cables, and a funky picot cast off that flares away from the knuckles. I suppose if one had a fabulous manicure this might be a flattering and really cool feature. To me it's just kind of. . .well, cool. It lets a bit of a breeze in. And I just have a suspicion that if you stick your hands in your coat pocket, that they will want to roll back.

I finished the first glove in good time (despite the fact that the yarn is splitty, yuck,)I dragged my feet starting the second glove ("Oh man, you mean I have to do a cabled cast-on again?") got up to where the thumb is supposed to go and stopped.

I might have known anything named "Fetching" was going to give me trouble. I've been trying for over two years to get the dogs to fetch.

Oh well, the yarn is a pretty color, and it is soft, and I'm getting heartily sick of plugging away on my baby blanket. Maybe it's time to wrap them up and reclaim that set of DPN's.