good-natured ribbing

This past weekend I went to Virginia for my nephew’s 4th birthday party. We had a great time practicing our “swording,” watching Superman cartoons, and testing everything in the Ikea kids area. He received an estimated 2.4 tons of toys.

I also received some gifts:

These were both handcrafted by Kira. She made me the fantastic needle case for my birthday, and gave me the cap she made for fun! She doesn’t really live in Occoquan (the title just has a nice ring to it), but she is a craft queen.

See, Beth, I love my mac so much I let it wear my pirate hat.

…but not me. It looks more like a tea cozy, without a spout hole. This crazy thing was knitted up with the first yarn I spun and dyed so I shouldn’t be too hard on it. Regardless, I’ll probably pull it out and find something better to do with such unique yarn. Either that or it will go into the Beth Museum of Firsts.

But my sweater looks great!

Yeah, so I started the sweater like a month before everyone else…what can I say, the yarn was too beautiful to just sit in that bag waiting. Here is the body so far:

And I don’t care what the rest of you say-I like the intarsia rectangle :)

The sweater (last mentioned in the Christmas round-up post) is all sewn, and the only step remaining is to attach three buttons. I went to http://ascuteasabutton.com/ and found 2 different styles that I liked:

While I was there, though, I decided to splurge and order a grab bag of buttons, since I don’t have a button reserve. As a result I spent a ridiculous amount of time yesterday morning sorting buttons by shapes, colors, material, etc. I couldn’t believe it was so much fun.

As it turns out, my family helped me decide on entirely different buttons for the sweater:

We all agreed definitely not these:

If I ever get them attached, I may wear this sweater someday.

And, I finished a hat this weekend, which is in reality much more attractive than this photo would have you believe. In real life it’s a rich brown, made with Rowan’s Kid Classic, but I have given up (for now) trying to take a better picture of it.

On December 8, 2005, I wrote about a sweater I started for Ava. Well, I did eventually finish it and was quite disappointed with it. The seams were bulky and the sleeves were too long and just weird, somehow. When I realized that it was everything sleeve-related that caused the sweater to be weird, it was clear that the sleeves had to go. I didn’t even put a cuff around the arm holes. I think it turned out great. Ava loves it, too. Here she is:

(Yes, she is trying to eat a dried up leaf in the second picture. That is why she wouldn’t turn around for the camera!)

End of story, right? Well, not quite. What ever became of those poor abandoned sleeves? Here is the reluctant recipient.

As if there wasn’t enough excitement on this blog, I decided (after Kristen led me to it) to sign up for Sockapalooza 2006! Participants are matched up anonymously with someone for whom they’ll be knitting a pair of socks, while someone else knits a pair for them. You also are assigned a “sock sister” to update with your progress. We have from Feb. 1 to May 1, which seems like plenty o’ time. This will only heighten our level of frenetic knitting excitement!

In the meantime, I’m knitting furiously to finish “Christmas” socks for my sister and brother-in-law. I’m using Jawoll Cotton for their California climate. (You may recall I had some prototypes in my earlier postings, but I decided to go with the lighter-weight fiber.)

Oh, and today’s coffee is Trader Joe’s Double Dark. Yum.

This blog is turning into all Beth all the time! Where is everyone… don’t make me come over there!

Anyway, I’ve made it through one full ball and am just past the elbow. My arms are long so it might take me close to two whole balls for each sleeve. My lovely assistant is modeling the sleeve for me here:

I finished the teal and other color v-neck earlier this week. I purchased the yarn for it in December with my birthday money. I started working on it on New Year’s Eve and finished on January 25 – super-quick for me!

The pattern came from the book 1000 Sweaters. This book lets you mix and match the various parts of the sweater – body, sleeves, and neck. The possibilities are endless! Well, at least 1000 anyway ;)

Here are a couple of (not-so-great) pictures:

I am going to block it again to make it a bit longer – I kept feeling the need to pull it down at the waist.

Ok, ok, I just have one more thing to share before going to bed – the first few rows of my rosedale cuff:

It will look a little neater after I do a few more rows. The corrugated ribbing isn’t bad – very similar to fair isle.

After seeing Kristen’s post about dying yarn with Kool-Aid, I was inspired to try it myself. I used my first two skeins of yarn that I spun – very thick/thin – and gave them the Kool Aid in the microwave treatment (following the instructions on Knitty). I did one in Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade and the other in Lemon-Lime. I did the blue first, slowly pushing the yarn into the mixture, making sure that is was fully saturated. When I finally took my hands out and looked at my fingers, I thought to myself, “Wow, that really does dye stuff.”

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of cooking and resting time for each skein and a few more minutes at the spinning wheel (to ply the two together), this is what I ended up with:

Days later, I learned that you are supposed to spin the wheel the opposite way when plying. Oh well, it wasn’t going to be a wonderful specimen anyway. I think I’ll try knitting it up as a hat (it is a little to stiff for a scarf).

I thought I’d hurry up and get pictures of my yarn posted before Sherry got hers up :) I am almost ready to start my Rosedale sweater – I can’t wait. I just have one last seam to sew on my v-neck and I hope to do that and block it tonight! (After two days with minimal naps and staying up all last night, Ava has gone to bed early, allowing me to concentrate on the sweater. Look for some pictures of that in the next day or so.)

Here is my Noro Kureyon #090, 12 skeins:

I really love it and can’t wait to start knitting!!

Hi Knitters,

Christina and I decided to knit a sweater together (i.e. each of us knitting our own sweater at the same time, using the same pattern – not working on a single sweater!) and thought it would be fun to invite others to join us.

Here is the cardigan pattern we picked:
http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEfall03/PATTrosedale.html
There is also a pullover version:
http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEfall03/PATTrosedaleunited.html

The cardigan has a few advanced techniques like intarsia and the fancy corrugated ribbing) but we are going to work through the pattern to simplify it a bit for beginners. This will make the pattern suitable for both beginners and more advanced knitters. You could even pick a different sweater if you want.

We haven’t decided when to start yet (I really want to finish my current sweater before I start another) but it should be within the next couple of weeks. You’ll need that time to pick out the perfect yarn, anyway.

Let me know if you want to play. The only requirement is that you post photos of your progress on “Good Natured Ribbing,” our knitting blog.

Please notify anyone else who might be interested.

I bought a pattern for Convertibles, gloves and nordic mitts and made them for the boyfriend of my middle daughter:

I like them very much, but haven’t yet acquired the velcro it calls for to make the flaps attach when they’re pulled back. However, someone else has made these gloves and had the clever idea of using a button/loop method instead, which I like and think I’ll copy. I also agreed with this blogger that by following the pattern the tips of the mittens would be too pointy, so I used the method I use to make sock toes rounder: decrease every other row until you’re down to half the number of stitches you started with, then decrease every row until you get to 16 stitches.

Today’s coffee is Trader Joe’s Organic Bolivian Blend.

A purply-green sock had been started a few weeks ago, but was abandoned in favor of the Hermione Hat (pattern from atypically.knit) and a blue scarf (pattern from the naive knitting blog). Fortunately for the sock, I needed something I could work on while watching Revenge of Sith this morning.

I had to pause the slaughter of the jedi in order to graft the toe.

      
Thuja socks, Artyarns Supermerino, Color 114