tired me

i would like to be knitting but i'm tired. i drove from la to richfield ut with thing 1 and thing 2 today. 8 1/2 hours. they are finally asleep. they're excellent travellers, fun to travel with, enjoy the sights as well as can be entertained by dvd's.

free wifi! so fun to sort of catch up on the normal things (knitting blogs and facebook!) when you're on the road by yourself.

playing with the camera

look at my yummy noro seed stitch multidirectional scarf! i am trying to learn how to use all the snappy features on my new camera to make my snapshots worthy of the camera taking them ;-).

i think this scarf may look better in the picture than in person!

for your shower...

this is the soap sweater that joined the wine bag that interrupted the clapotis that interrupted the yellow sweater that interrupted the bags that interrupted the february lady sweater that lived in the house that jack built. ;-)

here's how i did it:
i think i used a 7 or 8 long circular for this (magic loop). i looked at several soap sweater patterns on blogs, then kind of made one up to use up some noro.

c/o 6 st, then kfb in each one. split the stitches to create a round, then just increased by kfb twice on each end every other round until the little sack was big enough. i think i got up to about 30 stitches.

tuck the soap into the sack, then start doing k2tog twice on each end every other row until you are down to 12 stitches. then i just did a 3 needle bind-off.

i striped the noro for the fun of it.

the stripes are wavy because the soap has already been in use and the little sweater has started felting.

this is easily done in an hour or two -- it is a bit fiddly maneuvering the soap there at the end, but i'm thinking xmas gifts with leftover yarn!

it's like the knitting that jack built

this is the house that jack built.
this is the malt that lay in the house that jack built.

i can still recite that entire nursery rhyme/poem/tale by heart -- i loved it so well.

my knitting lately reminds of the layer upon layer that that poem builds, except that each project represents an unfinished interruption of the project before. so, here we go.

this is the project i finished over the weekend:

it's a wine bag i knit with some leftover worsted -- so quick, very easy, very fun. i did not use the colors paton suggested, but assigned my own colors to their scheme of color widths. the pattern can be found in this paton yarn book.
here it is prefelting:
i want this as a sweater!
i started this project because:

a) i needed a wine bag for a party and

b) i was bored with this:

oh, yes, clap me a river, i have begun the clapotis. in knitting as in life, way behind the fashion curve, but the noro sock yarn inspired me, i had queued it a long time ago, so i started it. the yarn colorway reminds me of van gogh's starry night.
look at those gorgeous runners -- so fun to knit the 12 rows and then rip those babies down! can you tell i'm just past the center? look on the right hand side and you can see that i am mirroring the color flow using the second skein. i center-pulled the first ball, and am pulling the yarn from the outside for the second half.

why did i start the clapotis? i was bored with this (you may remember it from a previous post):

don't you love it? it's based on this short sleeved summer cardi, using rowan's all-season cotton.
as you can see, my impulse to knit this included the urge to replace all that boring stockinette with the leaf lace pattern from nancy bush's knitted lace of estonia. here's a picture of that lace pattern in lacier yarn (the third picture on the page).


i've finished the sleeves, and just need to keep knitting down, down, down until it's long enough, then i may block it to see if i need to put button bands down the front. i don't want to button it, i like it open, but the fit is close enough that blocking it may let me know if i need that step.

i started that fun sweater because i was bored with these:

the evolution of a bag!


so i thought i might be teaching this bag, so started a fourth one as a sample, to illustrate in case i needed help teaching it. here's part of that one:

i'll probably be ripping that one out to make something else out of that yummy monochromatic noro.

i think that's enough for now. i started those bags because i was bored with other bags i was making, and i started those bags because it was too hot to knit my february lady sweater. i'll pick it up again next month -- i just have ONE SLEEVE to finish and i'll be done.