Summer Updates

Hello all!

Basically, I haven't been posting a lot because...I just have nothing to say. Sad, but true. Believe me, I've sat down a couple of times trying to write an entry......but nothing comes. An uneventful life + mediocre writing skills = an exceedingly boring blog. I apologize.

I guess I can at least make a few updates about knitting progress.

I've made good progress on the February Lady Sweater considering that I'm up to over 300 stitches per row. I'm on the first row of the lace pattern and am separating the sleeve stitches from the body stitches.

I've got another sweater in the queue: Cherie Amour from Knitty. I've already bought the yarn for it, too, Loops and Threads Impeccable in a gorgeous chocolate brown color. It's acrylic, but really soft. I haven't cast on yet, and I wish that I could claim that it's because of sheer will and my iron resolve to finish projects before starting new ones. But really, it's because I don't have size 13 circular needles.

Other projects include gifts, but on the off chance that the recipients read this, I won't elaborate until those birthdays pass.

All right, that's all for now...mainly because I'm procrastinating on some summer homework that I should be doing right now...

You know you're obsessed with knitting when...

....the junk in your pockets consists of spare stitch markers, safety pins, a yarn needle, and some scrap yarn from when you trimmed the ends of your last project and didn't have a trash can nearby.

Admittedly, I did have my license and a credit card in there, too.

Wow, a whole year!

It turns out that I completely missed my first "blogoversary"! I started this blog last year on May 4th, so I'm late by almost 3 weeks. I totally forgot!

Can you believe it's been a year? I honestly thought I would have given it up within a few weeks, so this is pretty cool. Especially since it was started on a random whim and I don't ever really have anything to say. Admittedly, I don't blog as often as I should, but things should pick up over the summer as I have both more time to blog and more time to get some knitting done.

Speaking of knitting, I've got a few updates on that front. No pictures, though, because I don't feel like getting the camera out, finding good light, actually getting a good picture, trying to upload the pictures, then struggling with blogger's stupid formatting of pictures for like an hour. (Yeah, i'm a bad knitting blogger, deal with it)

The most drastic update is that I'm frogging that blue cabled hoodie that I was working on. I finished the back of it, but the shaping wasn't right, and I ended up with the wrong number of stitches at the end, and it was too long. Plus, I realized that that sweater really wouldn't look good on me anyway, because it's basically a shapeless hoodie, but knitted. Basically, the whole project was a disaster. So, it really wasn't worth finishing it. It's been sitting untouched for about a month in my "unfinished projects" box. (That pink suede box you got me, Staci).

So, I looked for a more flattering sweater to knit with that same yarn and settled on the February Lady Sweater, which is really cute! I am going to modify it, however, so that it's fastened more in the middle, with either a single button or a shawl pin. The yarn is Caron Simply Soft in a greyish denim blue color.

I cast on today, and have about an inch and a half done so far. Another plus for this pattern: It's seamless! It's knit from the top down in all one piece! I'm pretty excited about it, and we'll see if I can actually finish a project for once, despite my long history of suckage.

'kay, that's about all I have time to type right now. I'm trying to post more regularly now, so hopefully it won't be too long until next time.

Hello again!

Goodness, it has been a while. I have a whole list of excuses, but you'd just be bored. So basically, AP exams are eating my life, but now, the hard ones are finally over! So I have a bit of free time!

There's actually a lot of news to report this time. First of all, I'd like to introduce you all to the newest members of my family, Hera and Artemis:

(sorry for the bad pictures, the mice move so fast, it's impossible to get a good one!)

Aren't they adorable? Hera is the dark brown one and Artemis is the white. Don't you think it's ironic to name mice after the queen of the gods and the goddess of the hunt? Me, too. That's why I like it. I got them from my AP Environmental Science teacher. She also teaches an animal behavior class that did some sort of project with mice. Well, their original mice started having babies by the dozen, so she needed to get rid of them. So, I volunteered to take one home.

I did some research, found out all about how to take care of mice, bought a big aquarium, set up an elaborate cardboard jungle gym in it, and bought food and litter and stuff for them. Artemis was the first one I brought home, on monday (April 6th). I wasn't really sure whether she was a male or a female, so I looked it up on the internet. My original plan was to have one male mouse, because 2 male mice together will fight like crazy (they're really territorial) and a male and a female will breed at an alarming rate. But, it turned out that she was a female, so her name changed from Bartimaeus to Artemis and I decided to get another female mouse. See, mice are really very social creatures, and a female all alone will get depressed and sleep all the time.

So the next day, Tuesday the 7th, I took my little hermit crab cage to school again to pick out another mouse. But when I went to the teacher's classroom after school, the mouse cage was completely gone! It turns out, another student had volunteered to take them home over spring break and had taken them out of the classroom early. So I had to run to the bus loop to find her and pick out a mouse in a hurry. It is extremely hard to determine a mouse's gender, especially on the fly, so I took my chances and just grabbed the prettiest dark brown one. Luckily, she is a female, so her name's Hera. They are so cute!!

In knitting news, here are a few updates on my various projects on the needles (no pictures, though, because I don't feel like it):

1) Seascape Shawl

I need to come up with a new name for this project, because it's lime green and not ocean-y. Like, Winding Vines or something. Well anyway, I've got quite a bit done, at least, I've exceeded my own expectations for my progress. I finished the border section and now I'm a little over halfway through the first chart. This is going to be awesome when I'm done!

2) Garter stitch cowl

This is a new one! I went on vacation recently to the beach, and we went through this tiny, tiny town called Plymouth, NC. We were going through the pitiful little downtown Plymouth when we passed a store called Yearning for Yarn. So of course I was like MUST STOP. So went in, and was greeted by the store owner, a sweet little old lady named Catherine. She immediately introduced herself and the other woman in the store and took us on a tour of all the yarns she had. It was a little bitty store, and really long and thin, but it had a good selection! Catherine was SOOOO nice and sooo sweet that I HAD to buy something, so I bought a bag of used needles in various sizes (for 3 dollars, what a deal!!!) and a skein of Plymouth Yarn Co. Baby Alpaca Grande. This yarn is so soft I want to roll in it, or knit bedsheets out of it, it's incredible! I could only really afford one skein because it was 14 dollars, but I had to have it. And I didn't feel bad about paying that much, because I wanted to support such a fantastic store!

So anyway, one skein isn't enough for a whole scarf, unless it were really skinny. So instead I'm making a cowl. It's completely garter stitch, with 21 stitches per row on size US 13 needles.

The only sad thing is that it's getting warmer every day here, so I've got to wait until NEXT winter to wear it!

3) 3-2-1 Scarf

I just finished this one today! It's based on the pattern here: http://laughingpurplegoldfish.blogspot.com/2008/10/3-2-1-and-youre-done-its-curlicue-scarf.html
Mine is made with purple Caron Simply Soft, with a border of some teal Knitpicks Suri Dream. It's gorgeous! But again, i have to wait until next winter to wear it. :(

4) Crochet Earrings

I made the first pair of these for my mom for mother's day. They're basically tiny crocheted flowers made from embroidery floss and put on earring wires. I've done the first flower of the second pair now.

So, that's about all for now. I'll try to post again in a reasonable amount of time....

Life, etc.

Hello all!

I don't have a lot of time to write blog posts, what with all of the homework and stuff I've had lately, so this won't really be a full post. Just thought I'd update a bit in the meantime.

For the kool-aid dyed yarn, I've decided not to do any of the possible ideas I had last post. You know, just to shake things up. No, really it's just because I tried a few of them out and didn't really like any of them. For a first lace project, the branching leaves pattern was just too difficult, at least for me (don't laugh, lace knitters) and I got frustrated VERY quickly. The very first row had types of decreases that I'd never heard of before. And after working a swatch of about 1/2 of a repeat, I had already had to rip back so many times that I had to restrain myself from flinging the whole thing across the room. If I can't handle 1/2 a repeat of the lace pattern, I sure as HELL wasn't going to attempt a whole shawl. I still think it's a very pretty scarf, but I'll probably come back to it much later, after I'm more experienced with knitting lace.

So, it was basically back to the drawing board. Or in this case, back to Ravelry pattern search.

In the end, I decided on the Seascape wrap from Knitty. It looked fairly straightforward, I could understand all of the charts without having too look anything up, and there are good sized patches of stockinette that make the lace pattern look a whole lot less daunting. Not to mention the fact that it is GORGEOUS. I'd admired the pattern when it first came out (Summer '08 issue of Knitty), but just in a wow-that's-awesome-but-i'd-never-knit-that kind of way.

So anyway, I started the pattern, and I'd like to say that this is probably a perfect first lace project. The first thing that you knit is a simple border with basically just knit stitches and YOs in a repetitive sequence. It's a great introduction to reading a chart and dealing with laceweight yarn because it's easy, and every row is the same. Fantastic! Then, once you get past the border section, the wavy pattern is pretty much just the same sequence of stitches, but with more space in between and an extra increase or decrease here and there. It's easy to understand why the lace pattern works the way it does. I mean, it's not just blindly following a chart, the mechanics of it actually make a lot of sense.

I've knitted about six inches, impressive progress for about three days of work, if I do say so myself! (it's actually been about 2 weeks, but I only have time to work on it on weekends). I'll put up a progress picture when the lace pattern takes shape a little more. Right now, you can't quite see the swirls yet.

Would you look at that, this turned into a pretty decent-sized post. Huh.

Frustration

I wrote in my last post about trying to knit/crochet a shawl for prom. I even picked out a sort of fishnet lace crochet stitch pattern for it. I crocheted a couple of inches in this stitch pattern when I realized...I really don't like it. It looks too....cheap. I don't know, just somehow it reminds me of a string bag or something. Not glamorous and elegant and prom-like.


So, I've been looking for other lacey shawl patterns on Ravelry. I'm thinking of making this pattern from Knitty, just making it wider and longer. That's really a last resort pattern, because I think the yarn I'm using would do better in a more classical lace pattern. I'm also thinking about one of those dragon scale-looking lace stitch patterns. I like those, and I think I have an afghan pattern around here somewhere that I can adapt. There's also a leafy lace pattern called branching out that I think would look gorgeous if I knit about 2 or 3 side by side. Especially since the yarn is green and would look terriffic as leaves.


Two problems, though.


1) It needs to be relatively fast to knit/crochet. I've only got until April 25th to have this DONE. And this is working around the intense workload I've got at school right now.
2) I've never knitted lace before. I have never even worked with yarn this thin before. The pattern needs to be simple enough that even a beginner like me can do it with no problem.


Not to mention the fact that I have to actually LIKE it...


Ideas? Suggestions? All are welcome!

New Knitty Issue!

I've always been a huge fan of Knitty, an online knitting magazine with tons of free patterns, but the most recent issue (Winter '08), they have really outdone themselves!

I realized earlier this afternoon that I hadn't checked to see if the new issue was out yet. When I went to the website, I was immediately blown away by some of the patterns! Never before have I seen so many in an issue that I MUST KNIT right away!

My favorites of the issue (there are a lot of them!):

Amused, a raglan sweater with a huge cabled collar, 3/4 sleeves, and ribbed bottom and cuffs (This one is definitely my favorite of the issue. It's gorgeous!)

A little bird told me, a felted purse with an adorable embroidered bird

Fish hat, a hat shaped like a fish. Because who doesn't want a hat that's eating your head? Adorable!

Miitens, mitts for babies shaped like Mii hands (you know, the little people on the Nintendo Wii)

Oomingmacks, slippers shaped like musk oxen. I never realized until today how much I need slippers shaped like musk oxen. (Is that the plural of 'ox'? I wasn't sure.)

Socktopus, a toy octopus wearing 8 different socks

Amelia, an incredibly cute cardigan

and finally Maja, a shawl using a fascinating crossed stitch pattern

I really need to finish up all of my current UFOs (in non-knitter lingo, un-finished objects) so that I can start on that Amused sweater. Because I MUST HAVE THAT SWEATER! It's so pretty!!! I also really want to make a fish hat for myself and for my brother, and my mom would really love that shawl!

I've got to go get knitting!

Santa Claus is coming to town!

Holidays are right around the corner!


And if you're a knitter, you know what that means... Time to knit presents!

This year, I wanted to make something easy and quick enough to make several in time for Christmas. What I came up with is this:

An awesome Santa Hat!!!

And my Christmas present to all of you in cyberspace is this free Santa Hat pattern! Yay!

Materials:
-Yarn
A: 1 ball of white eyelash yarn (I used Paton's Cha Cha in color White)
B: 1 skein of white worsted weight yarn (I used Red Heart Super Saver in color White)
C: 1 skein of red worsted weight yarn (I used Caron Simply Soft in color Autumn Red)
- US 11 straight knitting needles, or size needed to obtain gauge
- Yarn needle
- Scissors
- Pom-pom maker (store-bought or home-made, doesn't matter. See this website for instructions, if you need them)

Gauge: in st st with two strands of C held together - 11 st and 14 rows = 4"

Hat:
With two strands of A and one strand of B held together, CO 48 st

Rows 1-7: work in garter st (k all rows)

Rows 8: With two strands of C held together, k across

Rows 9-23 , work in st st. You should end with a purl row.

Row 24: k1, k2tog, *k 6, k2tog, repeat from * 4 more times, k5 (42 st)

Row 25: purl

Row 26: knit

Row 27: purl

Row 28: k1, k2tog, *k5, k2tog, repeat from * 4 more times, k4 (36 st)

Rows 29-31: Repeat rows 25-27

Row 32: k1, k2tog, *k4, k2tog, repeat from * 4 more times, k3 (30 st)

Rows 33-35: Repeat rows 25-27

Row 36: k1, k2tog, *k3, k2tog, repeat from * 4 more times, k2 (24 st)

Rows 37-39: Repeat rows 25-27

Row 40: k1, k2tog, *k2, k2tog, repeat from * 4 more times, k1 (18 st)

Rows 41-43: Repeat rows 25-27

Row 44: *k1, k2tog, repeat from * 5 more times (12 st)

Rows 45-47: Repeat rows 25-27

Row 48: k2tog across (6 st)

Row 49: purl

Row 50: knit

Cut yarn, leaving a really long tail. Thread yarn through all remaining stitches and pull closed.

Finishing:

Use tail of yarn to sew up the back of the hat. Make a pom-pom about 2" in diameter, and attach to the point of the hat. Weave in all ends. Wear and enjoy, or give as a gift!

See? I Told You So!

Having decided to stop wrestling with that god-awful yarn, I feel so much freer! I don't even feel bad, really, for stopping because I got three projects completed in the rest of November. That's right, THREE WHOLE PROJECTS, start to finish!



And guess what!!! I even wrote a pattern to share with everyone! What do I have a pattern of? It's a surprise!! Yay! But it's awesome!



Ah December. I'm so excited! We set up our Christmas tree two days ago! Well, it's not really a Christmas tree. We made it out of bamboo poles set up in a sort of a teepee shape. My mom's an artist, so we usually have unique trees like that. It actually is really cool, though, it looks like something from Dr Seuss books, so we call it our Who-ville tree. I'll put up a picture later!

That's all for now! Adios!

Thanksgiving!

Much news to catch up on!!

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to all you Americans out there! To the rest of the world, happy Thursday!

Next: NaKniSweMo.

Since I last post, I have given in to all the guilty voices in my head that are saying "It's almost Christmas, and you're spending a whole month on a project for yourself???" I don't want to think of it as "giving up".....I mean I could possibly finish the sweater by the end of the month if I set my mind to it. But then I start thinking, "Yeah, but if I put that much effort into other projects, then I could get multiple gifts done in the same time." So I start getting into this weird guilt thing.

Yeah.....basically, I suck.

Not that it was particularly hard to tear myself away from this project. I mean, the project is fast and all with the size 13 needles, but I am getting really sick of the yarn. I have never before seen yarn that caused more dropped stitches. The furry alpaca sometimes glues two stitches together so that only one of the stitches gets knitted. So then I get several rows down, and I notice the dropped one. And don't even think about just ripping back to the mistake, oh no. Once a stitch has been....stitched, the fuzz pretty much glues it in place. So you CAN'T rip back to mistakes. Basically, the yarn is a pain in the butt.

I have good news, too, however. Yesterday, I finished an entire Jayne hat in one day. Shiny! (By the way, Jayne is a character in the TV show Firefly. In the episode called "The Message" he receives in the mail a hat his mom knitted for him. So he's this big, tough mercenary guy wearing this cute little hat with earflaps. And thus, a nerdy joke is born.) Here's the TV version of the Jayne hat, modeled by Adam Baldwin (the man who played Jayne):

And here is my version of the Jayne hat, modeled by my brother (for whom the hat was knitted. Though I'll probably steal it from him like every day.)

Pretty cunning, don't you think?

It's a little (okay kind of a lot) bigger than the original pattern intended because 1) it's supposed to look dorky, and 2) I'm sorry Owen, but you have a giant head. Plus, I think I have a disease where I can't just follow a pattern to the letter. I just have to go make some modification. I mean, look at the sleeves I'm doing for the NaKniSweMo sweater. I just HAD to go knit them in the round, didn't I?? *grumbles incoherently about the stupid yarn*

I fully intended to follow the pattern this time, but the urge to modify is apparently too strong. For the hat, I extended the orange section by one row, shortened the yellow section by one row, worked the decreases at the top of the head differently, and increased the width of the earflaps by two stitches. It turned out great in the end, so I'm not complaining.

I've also started another pair of fingerless mitts for my mom's friend Tammy. I'll upload pics of them when they have a little more shape. Right now, they're just garter stitch rectangles with thumb holes.

All right, I think that's all for now. Don't eat too much turkey, everyone!

Nearly there!

I have now completed the front and back parts of my NaKniSweMo sweater!

This is such an effortless project. I haven't rushed myself at all, just picked up the knitting whenever I was watching TV or something. I have started on one of the sleeves, and I decided to knit it in the round on DPNs to avoid the huge seam up the arm, but I fear that I may be making things to complicated for myself. Skinny yarn does NOT want to be knitted on huge DPNs. I only have about two inches done, so I'm going to wait until it's a bit longer to decide whether I should just frog it and restart the sleeve on straight needles.

I will have pictures later!

Yay, pictures!

Since it is so hard to format text and pictures, I'm just going to type all the text up here, and leave the pics in a group at the end. Sorry, my camera is so blurry. Using the flash is the only way to get clear pictures. However, if I use the flash, the color gets all washed out. So, I'm going with the lesser of two evils here and just taking the darn picture with no flash. These pictures are just of what I got done on the first day because I haven't taken any pictures since then. The last picture here is just a view showing how open the stitches are. Seriously, this sweater weighs nothing at all.

A Whole Day of Excitement!

Well, have I got a lot to tell you guys!

First of all, two days ago was the first day of NaKniSweMo! I stayed up until midnight the night before, and cast on just as the clock struck 12. On Saturday I managed to knit almost 15 inches of the back of my sweater!! I have some pictures, but I'm on a different computer today (my brother commandeered the good one for NaNoWriMo) so I can't upload them. But I will.....eventually. So, anyway, this is probably the fastest sweater to knit, ever. I finished the entire back of the sweater yesterday, and started the front. So I'm predicting I'll be done in maybe a week. This feels like cheating! I'm also going to have a bunch of yarn left over, because I'm still on my first ball. I'm taking a bit of a break today because I have to get Death of a Salesman read and annotated by Wednesday...


So anyway, on to the excitement of Saturday!


I had originally decided not to discuss politics on this blog, because I didn't want to offend any of the people who read it. However, I'm such an opinionated person that I should have known that I would be forced to bring up the subject sooner or later.


So, just to start, I'm very liberal, and proud of it! I support Obama for president whole-heartedly. I'm the vice president of my school's Teen Democrats club. So, yeah, I'm pretty passionate about politics.


So, Saturday: There was an Obama rally at Shaw University, which is not far at all from where I live, where Chris Rock was scheduled to speak!!! I went with my parents and my brother to the rally. When we got there, there weren't too many people, and we got a pretty good place to stand where we could see the stage. But then, some guy with an Australian accent (He was a volunteer helping organize the event) comes up to Owen (my brother) and asks him "Do you want some VIP tickets so that you can stand by the stage and meet Chris Rock?" He just randomly chose us to get backstage passes! So of course we accepted, and we went inside this little fenced-in area right next to the stage.


But that's not all! You know how in videos on the news and stuff of people giving speeches how there's always a crowd of people behind the speaker? Well, some other volunteer came up to us and asked if we wanted to sit behind Chris Rock while he was talking! Which means that we'd be in practically all of the pictures and videos of the speech!!! And we'd be like 5 feet away from Chris Rock!!


So Owen and I went up onto these bleachers that were set up behind the stage. The only spots left were on the back row to the far right. Which means that we had to sit, with no back to our seats, with a 15 foot drop right behind us. If you didn't know this already, I'm TERRIFIED of heights. Like, it's the only thing that I'm really horribly afraid of. I don't mind snakes or spiders or bugs, and I actually really like frogs and thunderstorms, but I HATE heights. So here I am, sitting in front of a bunch of television cameras scared to death of toppling backwards off the bleachers. I just knew I was going to make a fool of myself.


We had to sit there for a really long time. Chris Rock was scheduled to speak at about 3:45, but I don't think he even came onstage until almost 4:15. And then, he only spoke for eleven minutes! Seriously. I felt almost ripped off; the whole rally was so anticlimactic. Plus, afterward when Chris was supposed to meet us and give autographs and such, he gave maybe two atugraphs and posed for two pictures, then he left! All the time with this really forced "I really don't want to be here" smile. But, it was still cool to see him speak.

Check out this link to see a few pictures of the event. I'm the person in the top left of most of them.

Alright, that's about all, I think. If you're old enough, GET OUT AND VOTE TOMORROW!! If you're not, TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO GET OUT AND VOTE TOMORROW!! My philosophy is, if you didn't vote, you have no right to complain about the government. So, go exercise your rights!

Boo!

Happy Halloween everyone!!!

This is just a great day overall, not just because it's Halloween. It's also the day before NaNoWriMo and NaKniSweMo (!!!), and the day before a FOUR DAY WEEKEND!! Yay! And I don't have loads of homework! Double yay!

I am sooooo excited about casting on for my NaKniSweMo sweater!! I have the pattern practically memorized because I've looked at it so much, and I have all the supplies I'll need (yarn and needles) all set out and ready. If I stay up late enough tonight, which is likely, I can start it at midnight! Hooray!!

Another exciting thing: I've started regularly updating my Ravelry account! Look for me (and friend me!) there as browncoat50.

Happy trick-or-treating everyone! Be safe!

November is coming up fast!

Yay! Masochism month!

This year I'm doing NaKniSweMo (National Knit a Sweater Month), the knitter's version of NaNoWriMo, and I am so psyched! (side note: I think that is officially the first time I've ever used the word "psyched"...)

This is technically going to be my first sweater (the pink bamboo top doesn't count), so I kinda wanted something easy. Plus, I needed something I could do while still keeping up with my insane workload from school. So, I've decided to knit this sweater:

(It's the To Dye For sweater from the book Stitch & Bitch)

With this yarn:

Knitpicks Suri Dream in Lilac Heather (it's the very middle skein, the darker purple. Yeah, this isn't my picture, but my camera is a butt that can't take any pictures that are worth a darn. Whoa, did you just see me not swear in that sentence? Go me!)

I'm soooo excited to start the sweater! The yarn is incredibly soft and fluffy and cuddle-able, and I am head over heels in love with the pattern! My favorite part is the bell sleeves! Yay! I can't wait!

That's all for now, Adios amigos!

Om nom nom

Yay I'm actually posting again!

And I actually have PICTURES!! Go me!

Pictures of what, you may ask?


Gratuitous yarn porn!!! (um, before you start looking at me funny, that's just a knitting blog/forum term for unnecessary pictures of yarn). And, sorry for the awful picture quality, my camera sucks booty (to borrow a term from my favorite 6' 5" musical star).

These are all pictures of some yarn given to me by my mom's friend. She wants me to knit some stuff for her. The green fuzzy yarn and the red and green are for scarves for her.

These purple/blue-ish and the burgundy are for a felted messenger bag for her daughter Livian.

The rest are undecided, except for this blue and green fuzzy yarn that's ALL MINE! MUAHAHAHA!

Ahem. But it's so beeeyooootiful! And lovely and soft and it will make a purdy scarf!

And this is my latest project:

It just looks like a rectangle now, but it's actually the back to a cabled hoodie I'm making. It's pretty sweet!

Alright, that's it for now. Adios amigos!

Knitting = Crack.

I have come to the conclusion that knitting is completely addictive.

I don't mean like, "hmm this is fun, i'll make something else now!" casual kind of addiction. I mean like shaky hands "I NEED TO KNIT!!!" desperation kind of addiction.

Not only that, but I have to take on more drastic projects to get my knitting fix now. Those quick size 35 needle scarves are just not doing it for me anymore. No, I have to be knitting sweaters and blankets and hard stuff! Not to mention the fact that yarn itself is ridiculously addictive because its so soft and pretty (and expensive...) and has so much potential!

Since school began, I've had hardly any free time at all, let alone time to knit (or blog...sorry about that). So I'd gone several days without picking up the needles at all. I came really close multiple times to just abandoning homework to go knit. But thankfully, that little inner voice that is constantly telling me "you must get good grades so you can go to college and go to grad school so you can get a good job and do a lot of research so you can cure cancer!" won out over the knitting jones. Not that that was an easy choice, mind you.

So, I've been finding sneaky ways to get a few minutes of knitting in. I even took my latest project to school so I could knit on the bus ....and during class....:)

Speaking of my latest project, I am currently knitting a cabled hoodie made from Caron Simply Soft (doncha love the cheap stuff?). The pattern is from one of those leaflets you get in Michaels next to the yarn. I picked one up and just HAD to have the sweater (addictive, I'm telling you!!!).

Alright, that's all for now. Hasta luego!

Yeah...it's been a while since I blogged last...Sorry about that.

Anyway, I think I'll take an idea from Deborah at Toss the Apple and give little blurbs of info about a wide range of subjects instead of trying to write about just one.

First of all: Honk! The play went well! We had nearly full audiences for every performance, and no major screw-ups. Success! I think last year's play (Godspell) was better, though. Thanks to Deborah and Sarita for coming!

Next: Vacation. I got back last night a little after nine from a vacation to Marion, VA to visit my dad's family. His mother (my grandmother) has a little cabin next to Hungry Mother State Park in Marion that we stayed at. We brought the bicycles with us, so we stopped at Foster Falls (a park where you can rent kayaks and inner tubes to go down the New River) and biked the New River trail. The trail was great. It's used to be a railroad, so the path is wide and flat and goes on forever. The only problem is, once you bike so far one way, you have to turn around and come back. So you have to try to decide when you are halfway to too tired to keep biking, and turn around then. We biked about 11 to 12 miles there, then went and relaxed by the river for a long time, because the weather was so beautiful.

The next day we borrowed a canoe from my Aunt Melanie and Uncle Doug and took it out onto the lake at Hungry Mother State park. We also rented the "Paddle Boat from HELL!!", as named by my brother and me (or is it "me and my brother"...or "my brother and I"...oh, who cares!!). This was a seriously defective paddle boat. The rudder was practically out of the water, so you had to hold the little lever towards a direction for like 10 minutes before you'd even start turning in that direction. Ugh.

Anyway, the last day of vacation, we went to another bike trail called the Virginia Creeper Trail. It's another trail that used to be a railroad, and it's named after the nickname for the train that ran on it. Anyway, in Damascus, VA there are a bunch of bike places that charge about $11 to shuttle you up White Top Mountain to the beginning of the trail. Then you ride down the mountain back to Damascus. It's a pretty incredible ride. It's slightly downhill the whole way down, so it doesn't take much effort, but we saw people riding up the trail. That's pretty hard core. The view from the trail was beautiful, lots of creeks and valleys and rock formations. There were also a bunch of old trestle bridges left over from the railroad. The trail is 35 miles long, total, but we only went on 17 miles of it (just back to Damascus). There was a cute little restaurant about halfway down that we stopped and ate lunch at. All in all, it was a great ride, and highly recommended if you like biking. Even if you're not a serious biker, it's not a hard trail so anyone can do it.

Okay, next topic: knitting. You remember that bamboo shirt that has been languishing incomplete for ages and ages? Well, I got it back out as something kinda mindless to knit backstage during Honk!, and it is now completed!!! I had to do some serious modifications though, because the people who wrote the pattern are apparently mentally disabled. The pattern clearly says "knit 11 inches" before making the V-neck. So I knit 11 inches and thought "Hmm, this seems a little short, I'll knit 2 more inches!" So I did. So it was now 13 inches before the V-neck. So I finished the V-neck shaping, exactly the way it told me to and checked the size by holding it up to myself in the mirror. The V-neck exposed waaaay more of my chest than is decent, and the rest of it barely went past my belly button. WTF??? That is not what it looked like in the picture!!! And it was 2 inches longer than it was supposed to be!! So i went back and added an almost 2-inch seed stitch border to the hem and a 1-inch seed stich border to the V-neck. So I finished all that, sewed it all up, wove in all those loose ends (ugh), and I'm done! yay! I'll have a FO post for it later. (For those of you who do not regularly peruse knitting blogs/forums, FO=Finished Object).

All right, If I think of anything else to say, I'll be back later, but that's all for now!

New Podcast!!

Hello all!

My friends and I have successfully released the first two episodes of our podcast!! It's called the M.A.D. Podcast, (it stands for Media Analysis and Discussion) and on it we discuss music, movies, books, other podcasts, and more; anything that can be classified as "media" is a viable topic. So, check it out at http://themadpodcast.libsyn.com/, and in a few days, you'll be able to search for it on iTunes. Our first two episodes are about Prince Caspian and the Twilight series, respectively.

I went to Joann's (a craft store) the other day, and this time I was unable to withstand the temptation. I bought 2 skeins of some gorgeous, unbelievably soft yarn called Angel Hair, and 3 skeins of cotton Sugar and Cream yarn. The Sugar and Cream is going to become reusable shopping bags eventually, but I just couldn't keep my hands off the Angel Hair. Even though I have way too many projects going right now, I put them all aside to work on the Wavy Gravy scarf from the book Stitch and Bitch Nation. The yarn's so amazing to work with, but I wouldn't suggest using aluminum needles with the yarn. It's so soft, it's slippery and would just slide off aluminum needles. I used my favorite bamboo needles, and even then the yarn is super slippery. But oh so soft!!! The Wavy Gravy pattern is awesome, too. It's simple enough to work on at Honk rehearsal while waiting for my cues, but interesting enough that I don't get bored. I love it!

I'd also like to thank Knitting Pattern Central for posting my fingerless gloves pattern on the site!! I'm so excited, I feel like a published knitting designer now! Okay, it's just a link to a blog post, but still! Yay! At the Knitting Pattern Directory, look under Mittens and Gloves. My pattern is there under Super Funky Fingerless Gloves! Awesome.

So, yeah. That's it. Bye for now!

I don't feel like thinking of a creative title...

Yeah, I haven't posted in while, sorry.

Things have been happening, though, and I shall fill you in now.

Honk Jr. rehearsals with the Garner Towne Players have been going well. The show's going to be great! It's such a fun show to do, and I'm loving working with my old friend Patrick again. The show is basically a musical story of the ugly duckling. Patrick plays the main character, and he's pretty amazing. But, then again, he's always been amazing. I'm so jealous. :)

We almost got a new pet yesterday! A baby possum got stuck in a bucket in our garage! (Okay, we were never actually intending to keep it as a pet, but we joked about the idea.) We had no idea where its mother was, and it was just a little guy, so we took in out of the bucket and put it in a dog kennel with some cat food and a bowl of water. It loved the water; it eventually started just sitting in it. It was hilarious! Possums are so ugly and scary looking, but he was so tiny he was almost cute! Except for when he was trying to bite us...
But anyway, we let him go last night, and hopefully he found his mother. We weren't real sure what else we could do for it, but we did the best we could.

We got a new dishwasher! Our old one broke about a week ago. But this story isn't very interesting, so I'll just move on.

Owen, my younger brother, is going to be a freshman next year, so he's taking a class over the summer called Freshman Seminar. Basically, it's a bulls**t class where they're supposed to teach you how to do the "graduation project" that we all have to do before senior year ends. Anyway, he has to do a "mini" grad project, and for some reason he chose knitting as a topic (don't ask me, I can't explain why he chose it, either). So I've taught him how to knit, and for his "product" thing he's knitting some squares to donate to the "Warm up America" foundation. It's pretty cool, because I've been trying to convince him to learn how to knit for years.

So yeah, I think that's about all I've got to say. It's funny, I expected this to be a really short "I haven't left, I promise!" post. but it ended up pretty long. Not bad!