Babylope!

Never turn your back on a jackalope. Next thing you know, they multiply!

Since it’s been cold and rainy around here lately, the baby jackalope has been catching whatever sun he can.

He took a little longer than his mommy, as I got wrapped up in other projects and then lost one of my circs for a while. But he turned out rather sweet. And Little Miss loves him.  I wish I’d put his ears more toward the center of his head, but she doesn’t seem to mind at all.

Specs:
Pattern: Jackalope, by Hansi Singh, from Amigurumi Knits, but she’s also had the pattern out separately in her Etsy shop.
Yarn: Patons Kroy 4-ply, one skein dyed brown with tea, part of a second skein dyed red with strawberry Kool-Aid, plus a bit left white for the antlers. Face details are brown NatureSpun Sport.
Needles: Addi Turbos, size US1 (2.25mm), 2 sets
Started: December 20, 2009
Finished: January 30, 2010

Not Another Hobby

Last night, while watching Night at the Museum II, I put the final touches on the not-a-surprise jackalope for K.

Isn’t he cute? He’s so cute, in fact, that Little Miss keeps grabbing him and telling me that “the rabbit” is her “favorite animal”.  It’s a good thing I was already planning on making a second one.

I love Hansi Singh’s wacky patterns from this book. They’re just so much fun! I think I found one tiny error – a line that reads “K1, K23″ (actually, it’s not 23, but I don’t remember the number) instead of “Sl1, K23″, which would make a lot more sense.  There are a few fiddly bits in the pattern, but it’s so worth it. And, wow, these amigurumi knits really are a good way to practice things like various increases, picking up stitches, and kitchener.

The Details:

Pattern: Jackalope, by Hansi Singh, from Amigurumi Knits, but she’s also had the pattern out separately in her Etsy shop.
Yarn: Cascade 220, something less than 2 skeins, plus scraps of NatureSpun Sport for the face embroidery. I dyed one skein of white Cascade 220 brown with tea, and a small amount red with strawberry Kool-Aid.
Needles: Crystal Palace bamboo DPNs, size 4, two sets.
Started: November 11, 2009
Finished: December 19, 2009

I’ve already started on a second one, actually, in thinner yarn and on smaller needles. A baby jackalope.

After doing the jackalope’s photo shoot in the back yard, I started tidying my desk. I decided to put some Disney pins that were hiding in my drawer out to be seen.

That’s a shot glass display case there, mostly housing my Tacky Shotglasses of the World collection, a collection I discontinued a few months after Little Miss was born. The Half Marathon pin is from when I ran the race in 2007. The other three pins belonged to my grandmother and came to me after she passed away. After I put them out, I started poking around eBay for other pins. I really don’t need to start collecting Disney pins, right? Right?

Maybe I should go knit another toy.

What’s Cooking

K came into the kitchen early this morning to find me with a couple of pots heating up on the stove.

“What are you cooking?” she asked.

“Yarn,” I said.

I think she was a little disappointed. Especially after discovering that I managed to avoid boiling the pot over again, so I was unlikely to scrub the stove again.

I decided that I didn’t like the colors of Cascade 220 I had on hand for the jackalope’s ears and paw pads. Also, I really wanted to try some Kool-Aid dyeing. And, I’ve decided that I want to knit up a baby jackalope, too, and I needed more brown yarn.

I’m fascinated by the way the water turns clear as the yarn soaks up the dye in the Kool-Aid pot. Tea dyeing leaves you a (big, strong, yarny) pot of tea after removing the yarn.

My yarn hanks are drying in the yard at the moment. I’ve finished the body and legs of the jackalope, so I need to get going on those paw pads.  This batch of tea dyeing gave me a much darker yarn, which is kind of neat. The red yarn is the result of 4 packages of strawberry Kool-Aid mix. I would have liked it lighter – I probably should have tried to get some of the Pink Lemonade flavor. Maybe next time.

A Hat Would Be Good Right Now

For the last several years, I’ve been a big proponent of sock knitting. They’re small! They’re quick! They’re portable! They’re way more practical than the big bulky sweaters I’d love to knit, since I live in sunny Southern California!

Yeah, it’s that “sunny” part that is mocking me at the moment.  The rains have come. And so has the cold. On Monday, I went running in a drizzling rain. On Wednesday, I went running on a clear early morning that happened to be 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Wednesday night, I bought running pants to wear instead of my running shorts, but this is not a running blog.

Yesterday, it rained on us as we picked out our Christmas tree.  It stopped, of course, while we were at dinner afterwards, but this morning, it was bucketing down. Cold, wet, fat drops of rain pelting our garden window, streaming off the eaves, and turning the dirt in our side yard to mud.

To be fair, it has warmed up. Yesterday’s high was 55.  This is good, because we have no heat at our house.

Early in the week, the heater abruptly started blowing cold air out of the vents. This was disconcerting, to say the least. No matter what we did to the thermostat, including turning it off, adjusting various switches, and hitting the reset button, had any effect. K called the HVAC company that the home warranty people had sent out for a previous repair. When the HVAC guy came, he informed us that the “computer board” needed to be replaced.  He turned off the system (yay – no more cold air!) and left, waiting to hear on whether we wanted to pay for the repair ourselves or go through the home warranty company, which he assured us would take at least a week.

Meanwhile, the HVAC company that the home warranty people actually called had not even called us to make an appointment to look at the problem.  They finally made an appointment with us… for today.

And then, yesterday, HVAC guy #1 returned with a computer board. Unfortunately, it was the wrong computer board, and the shop was about to close for the weekend and unwilling to either stay open to give the board to the guy or to leave the board where he could retrieve it. 

All of this leaves us with no heat.  Still.  We are dressing in layers. My Bastille Cables sweater has gotten more wear this week than any time since I knit it, several years back.

Which brings me back to the socks. While I have been loving my handknit socks this week, I’m rather wishing I had knit more sweaters. Or maybe some hats. Hey, Laurie, could I have Dmitry #5’s number?

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Victory is Mine!

I finished the Zig Zag Diamonds Socks while watching the Illini lose to Northwestern on Saturday. Well, at least one of us was successful.

Details:
Pattern: Zig Zag Diamonds, by Jeannie Cartmel
Yarn: Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100% Superwash, in “Guide to Galaxy”
Needles: Addi Turbos, size US 1, 2 circs
Started: October 15, 2009
Completed: November 14, 2009
Comments: This would have been a quicker knit if I hadn’t messed up the pattern on the second sock. It was nice to have plenty of yarn for that 3rd sock, though. I’m not loving the way the pattern starts straightaway after the cast-on, even though it’s a 1×1 ribbed stitch pattern. The pattern and yarn were the September shipment for the Loopy Ewe sock club. It also happened to fit the theme for the Sock Knitters Anonymous Sockdown! for October, which is the main reason they got cast on and done so soon.

They are cozy socks. Now, what to do with that extra one?

Experimentation

For the last couple of months, I’ve been engaging in a little experiment. At the end of August, I challenged myself to avoid purchasing any yarn until my birthday (at the end of January). When I decided to go to Stitches West, I moved the goal posts to the first day of Stitches.

And then Jenny of Stash and Burn talked about Cold Sheeping, a great term for Not Buying Yarn. This was prompted by a Cold Sheep thread on the Ravelry group, which I finally got around to reading right after buying a sock kit at a farm in October. Technically, K bought it for me, and I wasn’t even trying to weasel out of my own challenge! (Also, I’m knitting the socks for K’s classroom, anyway.)

I made two exceptions to the No Buying Yarn rule: (1) the Loopy Ewe Sock Club packages, which bill for each shipment rather than up front, and which I committed to back in the Spring, and (2) a possible extension of the Tempted @ 3AM club, which did take an upfront payment, and I can’t tell you how nifty it is to get yarn in the mail that you paid for so long ago it’s like the yarn is coming for free.

Other than that, I’ve been knitting out of my stash. Meanwhile, people have been confessing their falls off the Cold Sheep Wagon. So, I wanted to share a Cold Sheep Success Story.

It started out with me wanting to knit up a Jackalope for K. It was supposed to be a surprise, but that’s another tale. The stumbling block was a lack of rabbit-colored yarn. I have several single skeins of Cascade 220 in red, orange, green, and blue, but no brown or gray. But I do have something: several skeins of white (which I didn’t want to use for the body, because I want to use white for the horns; also, a jackalope is a desert animal, not a snow animal!) and a whole lot of tea.

I brewed a really big pot of tea:

That’s an 8-quart pot (not quite full) and 12 bags of Tetley’s British Blend.

Meanwhile, I soaked a hank of white Cascade 220 in my favorite pasta pot:

Once the tea boiled (over, in fact, which is why I ended up scrubbing the stovetop, which might have made K happier than the finished jackalope will), I pulled out the teabags and very gently added the wet yarn:

And then I waited. I waited about half an hour, but it was still steaming, so I left it until steam stopped coming off of it, then very carefully poured off some of the tea into the sink until I could even more carefully take out the yarn and rinse it under the faucet. I rinsed with warm water until it ran clear, gently squeezed out some of the water, wrapped it in my old Swim Team towel (it’s old, and also dark blue, effectively hiding any tea stains), and finally hung it up to dry in my backyard:

I left it there all day, then brought the nearly dry yarn inside to hang over a chair back overnight. The next morning, I took a comparison photo with some white yarn exactly like the original:

It came out a very nice desert rabbit brown, I think. And I didn’t even need a separate set of pots. 

I’ve been alternating working on the jackalope with working on my third second Zig-Zag Diamonds sock. Progress on the sock is slow, but I’ve turned the heel and picked up the pattern for the foot in the right place this time. At this point, I really just want to be done with it.

Just Stitchin’

I still haven’t cast on for the third Zig Zag Diamonds sock. I have been knitting, but it’s one of the Sooper Seekrit projects that I can’t share yet.

I’ve also been reading my knitterly mailing list email, where I found out about the Stitch n Beach knitting cruise. It sounds fantastic, except for the fact that it departs from the east coast on Friday, February 26 – the same weekend as Stitches West. Think there’ll be one departing from Long Beach the same weekend as Stitches East?

In any case, I’ll be in Santa Clara that weekend, at my second-ever Stitches. (The first one was five years ago!) I signed up for four classes:

• Tradition! with Candace Eisner-Strick
• Beyond the Rectangle: Fun Shapes for Shawls and Wraps with Sandi Rosner
• Spinning for Knitting with Merike Saarniit
• Suitable Seams with Judy Pascale

I was heavily tempted by the Swedish North Halland Pullover class with Beth Brown-Reinsel, but I’m not staying through Sunday afternoon. I’m planning to drive up on Friday morning, and then back down on Sunday afternoon. The last time I went to Stitches, I did something similar, driving up early Thursday morning to make it to the Opening Day events. While I’m sad to miss the Market Preview on Thursday evening, it’s a fair trade-off for not paying for a third night in the hotel.

I am ridiculously excited about the whole thing. I’ve been catching up on back episodes of Cogknitive, and I just listened to her 4-part outtakes on her trip to last year’s event. I was still such a brand-new knitter the last time I went, and I didn’t have any knitting friends yet. Now, I’m looking forward to meeting people from Ravelry and podcasts and blogs. I can hardly wait.

Sad Sock

One day, I will learn to look carefully at a sock before weaving in the ends. Yesterday, it seems, was not that day.

I had just finished watching Glee while doing the toe decreases and grafting the final seam. I neatly wove in the ends, turned the sock right side out, and put on my snazzy pair of socks.

Something didn’t look right. It took a minute to figure out what it was (and move past the Denial stage). The patterning didn’t match.

Somehow, on the second sock, I zigged when I should have zagged after the heel turn.

Wollmeise comes in a extra-large skein: 150g instead of the usual 100. My finished sock weighs 42g, and I have over 70g left. I would rather knit a whole third sock than rip out that woven in end, frog, and reknit the entire foot with the kinked-up yarn. I’m just not quite ready to cast on yet.

Fair Day

The County Fair opened this weekend, and I made a trip over there this morning. Since I was by myself, I could spend lots of time poking around the Tapestry displays. I thought it would take some time to find my entry, but it was pinned up in a case right near the door.

Looks like I got a Second Place ribbon, but I’m a little puzzled about the ribbons.  I hunted down the other entries in the Infant Handknit Sweater category.

All red ribbons, except one.

As always, I’m mystified by the entire arrangement of the Tapestry entries, but they seem to have had a display designer this year who was particularly unclear on the concept.  The knitted and crocheted afghans were almost all displayed folded up.

This looks like a lovely sampler afghan, but we get no idea what it looks like.

The tag on this one says something about a boat.

This is Eeyore.  I know this because it says so on the tag.

Mystery character!

Total mystery pattern.

Most of the afghans were on the floor of displays, under beautiful hanging quilts.

Next year, I’d like to enter some socks.  I knit socks more often than anything, but I always want to wear them right away! There were quite a few socks entered, and I’m not sure how many subcategories there were.

I don’t know how they decided it would be a good idea to cover up the color on the cuffs and display the stockinette feet.

This looks like Embossed Leaves with some added embellishment on the cuffs.

Entrelac socks, I think.  I don’t know if that was a separate category or not.  I didn’t see any other entrelac socks, although there was a Lady Eleanor stole on display.

I think these are really neat.  And there has got to be a story behind these socks:

There were also lots of adult and child sweaters on display, and some lovely shawls.  After much searching, I located the Best in Show for Hand Knit Clothing.  According to the tag, it was entered in the Shawls/Wraps category.

I’m sure it’s fantastic.  It would have been nice to be able to see it.