from the sublime to the ridiculous

you decide which is witch!!  i'm so glad halloween is over.  it's terrible to hate a holiday that the kids enjoy so much, but i do. 

i survived!  and even wore my ancient troll earrings.  everything old is new again.

♬ sewing the seams of love ♡ ♬

yes, i think i'm hilariousツ

thing one will be a witch for halloween this year, and needs a cool, middle-school cool, glittery, tulle-y cape.  so i'm sewing.  the seams.  of ♡.  ♬

    
if you're too young to get it (or if i'm not as funny as i believe i am), check here.  for heaven's sake don't watch the whole thing -- it's really long, and i never really liked the song.  (no offense to the tff fans out there ツ)

my new toy...

you know how amazon.com gives you free shipping on books if you go over a certain amount? i was ordering some books for my daughter and came up just short. so naturally i needed to buy the barbara walker treasury, seen above. i pored through it, and after my recent experience with päivi's  22 leaves KAL, i wanted to just experiment a little. i found a little lace design, printed out some graph paper and got to work! well, hardly work. but some fun thinking and calculating and figuring.

i thought i'd try a square and just repeat a simple pattern out to make a lace kerchief, in effect. it's really fun, and i can't wait to finish this one so i can start another! i'm using some autumn colorway sock yarn from joann's called sensations bamboo & ewe pattern, a wool/bamboo/nylon blend. the colorway does not allow for much view of the lace, but it's inexpensive and easy to work with. i think i might use a plainer yarn for my next experiment, but it looks very fall-like, and i like it.  if i figure out how to write an elegant chart that someone besides me, myself, and i can understand, i'll write up the pattern and post it on ravelry.  it's just the repeats and exceptions that i don't know how to express on a chart.  but that will be fun to figure out, too!

finally, i have one last picture of my official french market bag in use -- it's so pretty, so handy, and i can't wait to do another. it's one of my favorite patterns ever.

as always, if you click on a picture, it will pop up much bigger.

i love it!

here is my gaia trapezoid with the bead attached.

this is how i have been wearing it.

here it is spread out a bit, showing off the gaia detail and the lovely noro colors.

i'm sorry about the lousy pictures -- i have 20 minutes to do this so only time for snapshots, not photographs.ッ

a trapezoid

my gaia shawl turned trapezoidal scarf is done. knitting complete, 2 ends to weave in. the only thing left is to determine how to treat the one hanging stitch there at the top. i think i will put a bead on there to finish it off.

look how pretty! i'll take a picture once it's dry and the bead has been placed, but i'm thrilled right now to have another incomplete knit off my hands.

if you're interested in the knitting details, you can look at my ravelry page even if you're not a member.  

i'm felting, i'm felting...

what a world, what a world!
my crazy enormous hat felted down, as you can see, to a reasonable size.

it's still really large, but quite comfortable.  it's not supposed to have that brim, but i like it!  the colors are better than illustrated here -- they're actually quite restrained in an autumnally lovely sort of way.   bad hair days, i presently defy thee!

my official french market bag, in these dark days of me not being in the mood for knitting, benefited by getting its embroidery on.  instead of my customary daisy chain, i back-stitched my decor in order to get a finer level of detail.
here it is pre-felting:

and then post-felting, sitting upside down on the coffee maker with one of those square tupperware containers doing the blocking.  it fits perfectly.

you can still see a great deal of stitch definition.  why did i not felt it more?

1. i did not want it to get smaller, as the handles are pretty short when knit per the pattern
2. size 7 needles are really pretty small, i believe, for felting the lamb's pride.  i think i'd go up to 8's if i were to do it again.  this would help the stitches rub against one another and cancel one another out.  ッ  as it were.
3. the flash makes it look more stitch-defined than it really is. 
4. this one is a reminder for me for the future:  the bind-off sections could easily have a penultimate row of garter, to prevent so much curling.
5. well, i think that's it.

i'll take another picture when the bag is dry and ready for its close-up.  but this wicked witch loves her some paisleys, can you tell?  in my former days of gainful employment, the paisley was my favorite doodle.  before i was able to play solitaire on the computer while listening to a customer complain interminably, multi-colored paisley doodles on a desk pad soothed my bored and anxious brain.  i replicated that notion in yarn here. ッ

somehow i never figured out that all i had to do was click my heels three times...

crocheting in lilliput

it looks like a short, odd crochet hook, doesn't it?

(sorry it's blurry) here is that crochet hook next to a skein of bulky yarn.  i popped by a stitch in time yesterday to grab a size Q hook -- i really did not know they came that big -- in order to crochet up this cute hat from the purl bee.  the prefelted hat is ginormous!

it seemed like an excellent use of this yarn i received as payment in kind for a sample i knit up for a local yarn store.  sadly, i did not like the feel of the yarn or the fabric it knit into, so i've wondered what i would do with it.  it has almost identical properties to the yarn recommended in the bucket hat pattern, so i thought i'd give it a go.  i cannot imagine that this thing will felt down to a wearable size -- it's 48" in circumference along the bottom -- but it will be great-looking if it does.  i've never felted a crocheted item before, so that's an adventure as well.

a FO is in my future, i can smell it!   or is that just the wet lambswool...

now, reporting from los angeles:

a flu update for you.

hmmmmm.  low to minimal activity for the united states.  let's zoom in, shall we?

california is not looking too affected by the flu.  let's check into this a little more closely.

los angeles -- low flu trend.  but wait, what's that smudge on the map in the l.a. area?  zoom in once more, please.

ahhh.

CHOOO!

you have to be pretty sick not to feel like knitting!  but i'm not too sick to be inspired...

look at this wonderful graphic, figure 887 from the amazing Encyclopedia of Needlework, by Thérèse de Dillmont, free on the kindle.  it's an embroidery pattern, but how great would it look knit up?  especially in one of those incredible kauni fair isle colorway combinations? 

i cannot believe...

... i knit something this beautiful.  thank you so much, päivi, for the wonderful opportunity and for sharing your talent and your lovely pattern with us.

it's obviously a quick blocking job,  ;-) but i had to squeeze in the blocking between school obligations, errands, etc.

click on the picture to make it much bigger, as usual.

i pause to admire...

... oh yeah --  the last row of the 22 leaves shawlette!

we now return you to our regularly scheduled knitting.  i can't WAIT to block this and see how it looks!

well, cr&p.

so much for "Miss High-and-mighty, I'm using lifelines, nyah-nyah"!  i meant to put one in after clue 3.  the road to hell and all...

i mean really, it's like saving or backing up on the computer, isn't it?  you should save/back up when you don't want to recreate what you've done.  since i did NOT follow my own "sage" advice often enough, i have much time invested now in the deep annoyance of:

1. realizing that something does not look right, 
2. trying to fix something 3 rows ago, 
3. realizing that looks WORSE and tinking back, 
4. and the most aggravating thing of all -- knowing that i know better and could have prevented all this by just (say it with me) using a lifeline!

i did figure out this morning that i will NOT have to frog to my lifeline on row 32.  in fact, i this morning i found that i had knit 14 stitches instead of 13 on one section on row 67, setting up my "wait a second, this doesn't look right" moment 2-1/2 rows later.

bbl -- gotta go put in a lifeline. knitting will ensue.  and some ryder cup golf watching.  and some college football watching.  oh, yes, i am QUITE busy.  haha!

ps -- i wish i had taken a picture of the weird stitch arrangement that clued me into my error last week, but i panicked ツ