Wednesday, May 24, 2006

No bowling for you!

Sadly, time out did not help the bowling bag purse.

DH put it best when he said, while I was cursing the project yet again, "Honey, I thought you took up knitting because it was relaxing..."

Yeah.

That and I left it up to the yarn doGs to determine the fate of the bag: I managed to miss the part of the pattern at the very beginning that called for TWO pair of 10.5 circs, so I got to the part after the hellacious picking up & increases on the sides & bottom and knitting 15 rows and THEN figured out I NEEDED ANOTHER PAIR OF CIRCS. Wugh. I tried putting it on DPNs but after dropping innumerable stitches (and the above helpful comment from the man...), I decided that my meager budget could afford a trip to Hell Mart - if they had 10.5 circs, I would bull my way through. If not, well, that was that.

End result? Yarn doGs were quite cruel that day: no circs AND there was a ton of novelty yarn on sale for $1, $2 & $4 per ball BUT there was so much other yarn in the bins, you couldn't tell which was what and naturally, no one in sight to answer questions.

Sigh.

So I booga'd a bag. Yay me.

I managed to leave it in washer a titch too long, so it's a bit shorter than I had hoped, but it's OK. Blocking nicely, using the last two volumes of Harry Potter....

Oh, and did I mention 6' of I-cord is a huge PITA?

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Um, yeah. I can't think of a catchy title for this post

Because I am suffering more newbie knitter trauma.

Sigh.

Went to big yarn yard sale, got lots of stuff. You'd think that there would have been enough of something to MAKE something. You'd think so, but you know you would be wrong....

So, with the beautiful 4 balls of soft purple bulky yarn, I decided to make the bulky baby asymmetrical cardigan (scroll down for pattern). BUT, of course, just plain purple in garter stitch wasn't good enough for me. Nonono. SO I decided to edge it with nice soft fuzzy $2 a ball on clearance from Michael's yarn. Which resulted in a beautiful edge and what felt like I was knitting an octopus, I had so many live threads going....

And then, we came to the "Cast on 5 sts on right edge." Whoopsie. No can do, what with that purdy fuzzy edge. So I tried my hand at increases. Not so nice. But wtf - I"m not frogging all of this.

Now the thing is in time out, because on the opposite side, I have to CO like 15 sts and I haven't figure out how to do that without it being fugly.

In the mean time....

This was more of the $1/ball sale at Michael's. Knit up quick in garter on 17's while watching Law & Order. It will be someone's Xmas present....

And this little almost-FO...
Moda Dea Tutu is evile - even if it was in the same $1/ball sale....And I have some sea green too. I don't want to make another little envelope purse that I have to line and make a handle for and find a button for that will probably just never get finished because...what a PITA. I actually looked for buttons the last trip to Michael's & JoAnn's. Totally spaced actually BUYING some, because I was so fixated on yarn...

Which brings me to my current dilemma. The
Felted Bowling Purse. I love this purse. Except that I have frogged the 3rd triangle 3 times and I am about to frog the 2nd triangle. Because for some freaking reason, I can't get the 3rd triangle to begin with the color change showing up on the WS. The only way to do it is to purl the 1st 3 sts or....to tear my hair out. Aptually, it appears that I screwed up somewhere in the 2nd triangle. Ithink. At some point, for some reason, I hd to frog some rows & they may have gone back on the needle wrong. Or something. I have no fucking idea.

The really sad part is that I inexplicably woke at 3:30 this morning, and that damn triangle was haunting me & I couldn't go back to sleep.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

My First Hat

Awwwwwwwwwwww.......

I absolutely fucking HATED purling on dpns.

And I HATED purling on circs to get the garter stitch.

AND...maybe I read the PATTERN wrong, but the PICTURE looks like it's all in garter stitch and the PATTERN says, in the decrease rows to fooking KNIT all even rows. So, I'm either blind or stupid (quite possibly both - doG knows I'm crazy as a loon.....) or the PATTERN LIED TO ME.

Surprisingly enough to me, (after the battle of the DPNs) the finishing of the hat by pulling the tail thru the last 6 stitches was so easy, I figure I must have done something wrong LOL.

Here is my favorite model with the hat.

What you can not see/hear is my thinks-he's-so-funny husband singing the Mary Tyler Moore theme song. Sigh.

The Miracle of the Pink Yarn



Yup. That's all that's left of the miraculous Pink Cascade. Bless its heart. It lasted as long as it needed to.

Along about row 50, I was starting to get worried. I continued to berate myself for not striping the bottom or something. I was worried I would run out of pink and have to do the handles all in yellow and I knew that grubby hands on yellow would be, well, grubby looking.

Speaking of handles...I'm kicking myself for second guessing myself on how many to bind off for the tote handles. I had planned on 20 and I should have stuck with my plan, because, well, the handles turned out too big. And, just in case you were wondering: NO, you can NEVER have to many markers.



Oh, and now would be a good time to thank all the Yarn Hores at Syberemoms for talking me down from my OMFD! HOW THE HELL DO YOU PICK UP STITCHES ON THESE EVILE CIRCS?!?!?!? little freak out. They didn't even really laugh at me. Much.

So, here it is before felting - I really, really, really like the way the stripes worked out.



And finished:



A qualified success. As in "I had no fucking clue what I was doing when I started and I pretty much winged it the whole way and look! I have a relatively useable (as in, you can put shit it in. mostly.), not-actually-fugly finished item!"

I don't like how wide it wound up and we've already talked about the not so great Handle Decision. But I think the stripes totally rock and I want to use that pattern again.