Knit One, Purr Too

I had some great ideas for the Knitting Olympics this year. Instead of starting a new project, I was going to drag out one of those big projects that have been marinating in the back of the yarn closet for (sadly) years and make it a goal to get at least one, or more of them finished.

But then Stitches West showed up on the calendar and a friend who was volunteering to help with Buffalo Gold yarn asked if I was interested in doing a lace sample piece for them (because she knows I like knitting lace). Naturally I said yes. There was never really any deadline discussed, but we both agreed I’d try to get it done in time for Stitches…except that they didn’t get the yarn to me until last Thursday, which meant I’d have just over a week to finish it up.

No problem, I said. I am a fast knitter, I said. Stitches weekend is at the tail end of the Olympics, so I’d just change things around and make this my Olympics project. A week is lots of time!

Ha ha ha.

A week is a lot of time, yes, but when you discover on Wednesday, five days before the self-imposed deadline, that your gauge unblocked is what it should be *blocked* (I usually don’t worry so much about gauge for sample pieces since they’re not being fitted to a particular body), and you might run out of yarn, panic starts to set in.

I did the only thing I could do. Thursday night after I got home from work, I ripped the entire thing out and cast on from scratch. Since it’s still All Furlough Fridays All The Time at work for me, I knit furiously on it pretty much the entire day on Friday. I took it with me to Stitches on Saturday and spent a very long time weaving in a gazillion ends (I really hate weaving in ends). And then Sunday, with the Closing Ceremonies looming ever nearer, I sat down at the dining room table with the directions and the yarn and worked and worked and worked.

The buttons bands are crocheted. I am a very, very slow crocheter. For one of the colors I literally had to weave in all the ends where I’d used it before, and then tie all the little pieces together so that I would have just enough yarn to finish the very last color repeat. They didn’t send me buttons so I had to do a lot of guesstimating to work out where the best place would be to set the buttonholes. Rupert did his best to try to steal my yarn, over and over, until during the last few hours, Richard very kindly camped out behind me and did nothing but distract curious kittens so that I could finish in peace.

We didn’t have the TV on (too distracting) so it’s possible they’d already doused the flame, but considering that I did not get the yarn until a week into the Olympics, and that I had to rip it all out and start over FOUR DAYS before the end, the fact that I finished at just about the time the TV schedule said the ceremony was to end means, to me, that I made it.

These aren’t the best pictures, because I took them this morning and I was tired and in a hurry and not in the mood to try to stage some kind of lace photo shoot, but here you go. Lake and Forest Vest, made with six different colors of Buffalo Gold Lux.

Four days. Phew. I earned this, baby. Oh yes indeed I did.

The knitting group I’m part of in Sacramento has a tradition of making baby blankets every time someone gets pregnant. Since we’ve got a lot of young women in the group, lately we’ve been making a lot of baby blankets. And since we were all getting tired of the usual ‘everyone make a square and someone try to seam them all together’ variety, when one of the women announced her pregnancy, I decided to try something a little different. I came up with a cute blanket, perfect for a group of knitters with varying levels of skill, designed so that a little mismatch in gauge won’t drive the person seaming the pieces together batty.

As is usual for my patterns, I sat on this one for a while, working on it here and there, but not with any sense of urgency. And then Knitpicks announced their Independent Designers Program, and on a whim I sent them the pictures of the blanket, and they sent me some yarn to make a new one, and I did a little more tinkering with the pattern, and…voila.

Pickets Baby Blanket, now available for download from KnitPicks.com. The original was knit in 11 different colors of Swish DK in the Heathers, but you could mix and match and come up with any color combination you’d like.

(The baby modeling the blanket is not the baby for whom we made it – this one belongs to another friend. Luckily I have lots of friends with cute babies to call on for impromptu modeling photo shoots).

What do you do when someone has absolutely nothing on their wishlist, and when every single family member you ask for ideas cannot come up with a single thing (assuming, of course, that they respond to your messages in the first place)?

You knit them an afghan for Christmas.

Got the yarn and cast on December 4th; finished the last loop last night (the 22nd). The pattern is the Celtic Knot Afghan. I used just under 9 skeins of Red Heart Soft, so this sucker is a bit on the heavy side. The recipient will need something extremely durable, that can be tossed in the washing machine and in the dryer, so I decided acrylic was the best option, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

I did three panels, with 7 repeats of the 40-row cable pattern per panel, and by the time I was starting the second panel, I had that thing memorized, and may likely continue to knit the dang cable in my sleep for a few weeks longer. I admit I was really hesitant about the edging, but once I started, it looked far better than I expected, so I kept on going. Attaching the edging was a royal pain, plus the pattern gives you absolutely no info on how to *end* it (although it wasn’t all that hard to figure out once I realized what was missing), and for both ends I pretty much did about 20 loops worth and then crocheted it to the afghan and then kept on knitting the edging until it looked like I had enough. This is how I ended up with three more loops on one end than on the other but I suspect no one but me will ever bother counting them, so I’m not going to worry about it.

Still here. Still knitting. Just been busy elsewhere (Nanowrimo, Nablopomo, Vox Musica. You know, the usual.

Hello to anyone who’s coming over from the 2009 Blogger Christmahanukwanzaakah concert. I’d recommend you mosey on over to my regular blog if you’re looking for actual content, since that one gets updated a WHOLE lot more than this one.

It’s been kind of a roller coaster sort of summer. The up parts included placing at the State Fair, rediscovering my love of making socks, finally learning how to do ssk correctly (after four years of knitting, because it’s magic what happens when you actually *read the directions* – sigh). The down parts included having to have two of our beloved cats put to sleep. Sebastian was diagnosed with kidney failure and left us just shy of his 19th birthday, and then three weeks later, Tangerine developed endocarditis (infection of the heart valve) and no matter what the doctors tried we couldn’t save her.

Getting a pair of adorable little kittens has helped fill the void just a bit (but admittedly it does tend to put a damper on knitting), but old friends can never truly be replaced, so we’re slowly getting used to the new ‘normal’ around here. And in the meantime, I have a new purse, large enough to tote around a sock-in-progress, and I’ve got another lace piece slowly progressing on my needles, and life, as always goes on.