And lo, there was much finishing, and it was good

Who, me? Absent?

Okay, you win. I've been quiet here for a while, but look! I've been doing things, and I have photographic proof!

I finished that gigantic pink scarf:


And I finished knitting my TwitKAL/Wanderheart shawl, which looked like this before blocking:


...and is currently stretched out on the rack floor, drying into its newer prettier shape:


And I finally Navajo-plied the second bobbin of Rubies and Sapphires Merino that I spun during last year's Tour de Fleece:


Hmm. That doesn't seem like much, does it?

I've also been baking and going to the beach, though not at the same time (yet — someday I'll have a solar oven, mark my words!).


Random baking pic


Random beach picture. Tiny crab waves hi!
And I've been working on my Big Black Socks and on a secret knitting project for my Santosha Swap partner (which I could probably actually post about, since only the organizer knows which partner is assigned to who ;)), but those aren't ready for photography yet. ;D

So ... see. I've been doing stuff. And there is more stuff yet to come. Think productive thoughts at me, 'cause I'm still going strong now ... but I can use all the encouragement I can get!

In favor of hugemongous yarn, and Epic Socks pics

I hardly ever knit with chunky weight yarn — it's not generally useful in Florida weather, and I tend to prefer a slim look to a "fluffy" look, if I can help it, and the patterns that are awesome enough to make me want to use the chunky yarn anyway tend to require massive amounts of it, which is, y'know, usually more expensive than things requiring nonmassive quantities of yarn. ;)

The pound of pink yarn in the last post, though, is for a custom scarf, and chunky weight was an absolute must. (There's no way I'm knitting a scarf of these epic proportions in a lighter weight of yarn — I'd be middle-aged before it was done.)

And this scarf? If anyone needs convincing that knitting with chunky weight yarn has merit — well, lights, please! I present to you my evidence:

This is the scarf partway through day one of knitting it.


And this is the scarf on day two.


That's 26 inches, people. 26 inches of 12-inch-wide scarf in two days. I've never knit that amount of fabric in such a short amount of time in my life, methinks. ;) Well, at least not before this week.

So there it is: The perfect argument in favor of gigantic yarn.

And on the far-from-gigantic yarn front, here are some of those photos of the Epic Socks, my first beaded lace socks, that I mentioned I'd take:




Lace close-up! ;D
Giant yarn, nongiant yarn ... We gots it all around here.

(We've even got yarn that isn't yarn yet, she said as she glared at the four ounces of freshly-dyed turquoise-ish alpaca fiber that needs to finish drying RIGHT NOW DANGIT. Pics of that coming once it looks less like pieces of a wet rat with a strange fashion sense.)

Socks on the beach & crochet of various frilliness

Oh, the puns. But here they are: the aforementioned socks on the beach, because yes, I have made it to the beach twice this spring already. TAKE THAT, evil procrastination monster!


Sadly, one of these socks (the one in the background) will be ripped out and reknit. Right now it's still attached to the same ball as the current, larger sock because, well, it amuses me to have two socks coming off one ball of yarn, and because you never know — I might suddenly be seized by the need to compare the old, too-small sock with the new sock, which I won't be able to do if I rip out the old one. Besides, I don't need the yarn from it until I finish the first sock. ;D

By the way: Socks apparently go faster if you knit at a larger gauge. And I don't mean they go faster because the knitting is looser and each row covers more area than it does at a tighter gauge — I mean that the same number of beaded lace chart repeats goes faster at a larger gauge. Or maybe that's just me...?

My crocheted Tulip Doily is now finished, too, except for the weaving in of tails and the blocking, which leaves me in need of another crochet project. (I've discovered that crochet is waaaaay easier than knitting when it comes to putting it down in the middle of a row and coming back to it in bits and pieces as I have time. So having a crochet project sitting out all the time is a nice way of feeling like I'm always making progress on something ... and also, if I keep crocheting, then I can't forget how to do it again. ;))


Oooooh, doily-y. I've never really thought of myself as a doily person, but this one reminded me of a mandala, and it may have given me doily fever. The first mate says I should make a bunch of these and join them together to make a privacy curtain for the front porch, and if he can find something in the homeowner's association agreement that says we're allowed to have curtains on the porch (or at least, that curtains aren't disallowed), I just might. ;D

But while I'm waiting for him to produce convincing paperwork, I need another crochet project. Suggestions, anyone? Something springy and not too frumpy (says the chick who just made a doily)? Maybe I could crochet a bikini to wear while I knit on the beach. But I fear I may have to create my own super-awesome bikini pattern if I do that, and I'm not sure I'm that confident in my crocheting skills yet...

Oh, well. Gotta go put a toe on that sock now, and finish dyeing some fiber. I need to do some finishing of various projects this month or there will be Grumping in my future.

...and yeah, I know I didn't do a Craft or Bust check-in last week. Crossing my fingers for tomorrow. ;)

Crocheted flower, Blings, and a pair of mystery scissors

Still scratching the crochet bug's bite here. I made a double-layer crocheted flower the other day — my first ever! ;D (Instructions from The Ultimate Sourcebook of Knitting and Crochet Stitches.)


And I've started a Lily Go Tulip Doily that should be done fairly soon. The crochet hooks and yarn are getting rapidly smaller and smaller around here. Guess I just had to take years off crocheting and work on knitting to be able to understand crochet — ha. ;)

Also still working verrrrry slowwwwwly on the Bling socks.


And while organizing sewing supplies the other day, I came across this pair of scissors, inherited along with a bunch of other sewing supplies from the first mate's grandmother:


Anyone know what they're for? They look awfully familiar, but I don't seem to remember ever owning a pair of scissors like this before now, so I'm not precisely sure what to do with them. They do look like they were designed for something pretty specific. ;)

A fancy shawl, a simple headband, a wee heart and some epic socks

Time for another crafty photo update, me hearties. ;D

Finished: Hairpin Lace Shawl
Pattern: Woman's Hairpin Lace Shawl from Coats & Clark

So I finally! Finished! My first hairpin lace shawl! As UFOs go, this one wasn't too bad — less than a year old when I finished it off. Ha. ;D And it also conveniently illustrates the fact that with a camera that I can actually change stuff on (you know, like the aperture! And the shutter speed!), I can finally take photos of my projects draped on random other stuff. (I can also fail to remember to take the cluttery porch crap out of the first few photos I take, and then end up liking one of the early photos.)


Finishing this shawl made me want to go crochet other stuff — but most of the hairpin lace projects out there that I want to make involve paying for patterns, and right now I don't have any spare pattern money ... sniffle. I may be forced to design my own hairpin lace something-or-other just to get a fix.


Finished: Three-String Headband
Pattern: Simple Crochet Headband from Creativeyarn

If I want to design my own hairpin lace, though, it'd probably be useful to actually kind of know how to crochet. (Since hairpin lace is a kind of crochet and all. Yeah, yeah. You know it already, right? ;)) So I'm sloooooowly re-teaching myself to crochet by doing easy things, instead of jumping straight to hard things I don't understand that will confuse me and turn into UFOs sitting on the mountainous pile of temporarily abandoned projects. Here's one of the easy things in question (and look! I can take pictures of my own head with the new camera! ::hugs camera::).


Finished: Heart Coaster
Pattern: Heart Sachet from Lily/Sugar'n Cream

One of the things I loved about crochet when I first started doing it is that it's fast. And it's pretty easy to make cute shapes if you actually understand what you're doing (which I didn't then and kinda-sorta do now — a few years of knitting seems to have helped out with my understanding of things like increases and decreases ;)). So having no money + needing a Valentine's Day gift for B = crochet to the rescue! Voila, crocheted heart coaster!



In Progress: Epic Socks
Pattern: "Bling (Arkansas)" by Adrienne Fong, originally published in 50 Socks (50 States & More)

And I finally cast on the second pair of socks I'm knitting as a trade for yarn — officially the pattern is called "Bling," but I'm calling them the Epic Socks because of a comment someone made about how they sound. ;) They're lace and beaded, and can I tell you a secret? Shh — I've never beaded lace before. In fact, I can't remember beading my knitting before ... at least not successfully. Unsuccessfully, sure; I have a bunch of yarn and beads sitting in a basket in the craft room that were meant to turn into a beaded shawl. But both the lace and the beading on these socks are turning out to be way easier than I expected. Is my knitting mojo high this month, or was that just a contrast to the fact that it took me almost three hours to knit the hemmed beaded cuff? Yeah, that's the thing in the photo right here. Three hours, 'cause it's folded in half and knitted to itself with multiple sets of double-pointy objects that had to interact with each other in friendly ways.


So there it is. That's what I've been doing lately. Let's pretend this is a Craft or Bust update and you guys can tell me what you've been making now, too — right? Right??? Talk to me already! ;)

Pics: Crafty Projects I Have (Very Recently) Known

Because I keep sitting down to write blog posts and they keep turning into massively epic expositions on human nature and my experiences as a human being, and then I keep going back to edit them and turning them into almost completely different expository epics, and it has thus far been an endless cycle that's kept me from posting anything here, today I am Buckling Down and just posting some photos of crafts I've been doing. HA! You now have proof that I exist! Feel free to report the discovery to the local newspapers. ;)

So, ahem, to get to that crafty stuff...

Finished: ChiChi Tea Towel
Pattern from Yarnplay at Home by Lisa Shobhana Mason

I finally found the crochet hook that I needed to finish the edging on the ChiChi tea towel, so I went ahead and finished it. Yay!


And here's another photo of the full towel. Please excuse the fact that I kinda sorta made the photo obscenely bright when I was tinkering around with it in Photoshop, and also the fact that I am Too Lazy (or maybe Too Impatient) to go back and fix it right now. Or maybe ever. (I got a new camera for my birthday, and this was taken with the new camera in iffy lighting on a not-quite-white background. Too many variables = wonky photo adjustment. I'll get better, I promise. On future photos. ;))


Finished: Crocheted Organizer Basket
Pattern: Stash Baskets from Bernat (You need to have a free account to see the pattern, by the way.)

Apparently finishing the tea towel put me in a crocheting mood — and why not? I went through a crocheting period right before I started knitting regularly, even if I gave up crocheting for the most part because I couldn't figure out how it Really Worked. ;) I am also in dire need of storage solutions uniformly across the house. So I crocheted an easy little basket to help me organize the bathroom, and — wonder of wonders — to match the tea towel. (Matching bathroom decor may not be miraculous to you, but I don't think I've ever owned two towels that matched each other, much less owned bathroom accessories that match. It's, er, my eclectic style, right?)


One ball of the cream-colored yarn didn't manage to be enough to finish the sides of the basket, so my basket has a racing stripe. (The bottom is also blue.)


In Progress: Brigit Socks
Pattern: Brigit from Monkey Toes (Link leads to a Ravelry page where you can download the pattern.)

I've also made some amount of progress on the first Brigit sock, which happens to be the first full-fledged sock I've ever knit for myself. The other socks I've knit for me have been missing bits: One pair has no toes and the other pair has no toes and no heels (because they're yoga socks).


That's a good way to psych yourself into doing socks, by the way ... Or at least, knitting socks with the scary bits missing made me ridiculously aware that a sock is basically two tubes joined by a fiddly bit, with some decreases at the end of one tube. As the decreases aren't any scarier than the ones in a hat, the only scary bit remaining is the fiddly heel bit, and if you slavishly follow the heel directions in a good sock pattern, even the heel isn't very scary.


See, look! I knit this heel differently from the way the pattern said to and I wasn't scared at all! ;)

In Progress: Hairpin Lace Shawl
Pattern: Woman's Hairpin Lace Shawl from Coats & Clark

Finally, I've picked up this poor old abandoned hairpin lace shawl that I started with some recycled yarn last year for the first HPL-Along on my Ravelry hairpin lace group.


The crochet hook for the tea towel was hiding in the hairpin lace project bag (because hairpin lace is actually a form of crochet, even though I forgot that while I was puzzling over where the Size G hook had gone), and after I borrowed the hook to use for the tea towel, I couldn't just leave the poor shawl alone again. Only one more strip to go ... or maybe two. And then more joining. Uh ... I should stop thinking about that or the shawl might end up in the UFO mountain again. ;)

And ta-da! That's it for the stuff I've been doing that has to do with yarn. I do have about 4,000 photos of food I've made and/or consumed in the past couple of months, though. To post another photo-riffic post, or not ... That is the question. ;)

Semi-wordless Wednesday: two loaves and three knits

A pictorial tour of what I've been up to lately:


Swatched for a new knitting pattern. Can you guess what it'll be when it's done?


Almost finished this Lighthouse Gansey sock. Must ... keep ... knitting...


Finally wove in the tails on this long-unfinished vest. Yayyy for finishing five-year-old projects!


Baked a super-flat but tasty loaf of bread. Note to self: Use fresh yeast.


And then baked a less-flat but also slightly less tasty (though still good) loaf of bread. Fresh yeast = taller bread. Who'd've thought?


Here's the inside. Nom nom nom.
I also read a book and went to a birthday party (thing), but those aren't crafty ... they're just things crafters do sometimes to be able to say they don't always have their heads in a pile of yarn or a box of beads. ;)

The UFOs are coming alive!

No, I'm not talking about the latest UFO scare in New York. I'm talking about all the unfinished objects in my knitting queue that have suddenly reared their heads and demanded to be worked on.

Just today, while I was rebelling against the idea of starting a large project I'll need to finish before the Daytona Hallogreen this weekend, I pulled an old knitted, felted pumpkin project out of the UFO pile, thinking I could motivate myself into a larger project if I finished something small — like one or two of the little wedge-type sections that are going to be the pumpkin's body.

(The pattern, by the way, is Jordana Paige's pumpkin pattern from Knitty.)


This color of orange is not the orange you're looking for. Move along.
But then I realized the pumpkin sections were all done. All that was left to knit were the stem and the vine. Well, sheesh. I knocked those out in well under an hour. Ta-da!


Trust this orange more than the other. I remembered to switch the camera settings for this photo. Good orange. Good.
Now I just need to weave in the tails, sew the thing together, felt it, and stuff it. Maybe it'll even show up at the Hallogreen this weekend, so that I can justify having worked on it this week instead of making product. ;)

I also recently excavated an old knitted vest I tore through when I was originally knitting it, except that I got stuck on picking up and knitting the ribbing. See, I started knitting it back when I was first learning, and I had virtually no experience with pick-up-and-knit, and I'd decided I was going to do the main body of the vest in a completely different weight of yarn than the pattern called for. We did all the math so I could knit the body, and that came out fine, but then when I got to the ribbing, I had no clue how to pick up the right number of stitches to make sure the ribbing — which I was doing in the original weight of yarn that the pattern called for — came out right.

The other day I was staring at the remarkably cluttered craft room, in which said UFO vest was sitting underneath my spinning chair, and I realized I could just arbitrarily pick up stitches along the armholes and neckline however I wanted, and knit the ribbing, and if I didn't like the result, I could rip it out and redo it. Duhhh.

This tactic worked, and the vest is now sitting and waiting for the ends to be woven in. No pictures yet ... but send knitwear-photographing vibes, and maybe I'll take some soon.

Wholesome knitting for the home

There's something refreshing about knitting a simple, straightforward, pretty item that's going to get used in a practical way. It's sort of — wholesome and nourishing, and re-energizing in a not-overstimulated way, like a knitter's Master Cleanse. ;) (Of course, I've never done the Master Cleanse, but it reminds me of what people have said about it. Moving on...)

I call it the Palate Cleanser because it's helping me get my taste for my larger, more complicated projects back, but it's really a ChiChi Tea Towel from Yarnplay at Home.


A super-simple knit in what They like to call "dishcloth cotton," and it's strangely addictive. I may end up knitting a whole drawer full of these.

I'm a Buttonhead, knitting an Argante

I finished knitting my first handspun hat! Yayyy!




Too bad it's hard to take photos of things that are on my own head. If it weren't so, I'd have a decent photo of me wearing it. (Okay, okay. If you really want to see it, there's a photo of me wearing the Buttonhead on my Flickr account.)

I also cast on an Argante shawl this week. The shawl is designed by Corrina Ferguson of Picnic Knits, who did a shawl-knitting demo at the Florida Fiber-In this year, and who is doing her first Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure this year. Aside from both happening this year, these two things are related in that if you go this week and buy a Picnic Knits pattern (say, a shawl?), you get a discount and the proceeds go toward the three-day walk.

I am super-enjoying knitting my Argante shawl so far, so if you have any inclination to support the fight against breast cancer and get a pretty pattern to boot, check out the Picnic Knits pattern shop and pick something up. You'll get to say you participated in the Boobie Blitz, too — bonus. ;)


The beginning of my Argante shawl. It is much bigger than this as I type.

Knitting away: the finished Bainbridge Scarf and a Buttonhead

My knitting mojo is in, for the moment, like a tide of creativity. Sometime, it'll go out again, and the shore will be bare, and all those sea creatures that live in the boundary zone will be exposed for a little while, visible to us land-dwellers ... er, where was I? Oh, yeah. For now, the knit stitches are swelling. When they recede, they'll leave behind lots of new knit projects for all to see. Does that make more sense? ;)

Of course, let me ruin my cute little metaphor by prematurely showing you what the waves have brought in. No need to wait for the tide to go back out. It's the finished Bainbridge Scarf!


Is it ridiculous, or what? You really need to see it on me — it can be tied a couple of different ways and it's really ridiculous (in a good way) when worn. But you may have to wait for cooler weather to come down southward before I feel like taking a picture. Or maybe I'll get impatient and snap a horrible mirror photo. ;)

I also cast on a Buttonhead hat with some handspun, for the knitalong on the Leethal Knitters group. This handspun, to be precise:


You can see another view of the yarn here.
This is the beginning of what promises to be a very texturey, colorful, personality-ful hat.


It looks like it's going to be a quick knit, too. Look for the finished hat in the next week or two, depending on what happens with my life, universe, and everything.

Learning to knit continental with the Bainbridge Scarf; also, bread

Post-Debacle recovery continues apace. My broken knitting needle cable is keeping me from finishing the last bit of ribbing on my hooded shrug (arrrrgh!), so I cast on a quick new project while I'm waiting for the cable replacement to arrive (or for myself to get impatient enough to just go buy a new circular needle). Also, new project = because I really needed to practice continental knitting before what I learned at the Florida Fiber-In wore off.

My chosen pattern for the First Continental Knitting Project is the Bainbridge Scarf (which you can find as a free PDF download on Pepperknit). So far:


Yelllooooooowwww...
In case you're wondering what the crap happened to the corset project I was working on right before Dragon*Con, I really would have liked to get back to that immediately after coming back from Atlanta, but the pattern pieces and the mock-up corset were among the things that got rearranged and/or thrown out in the Debacle. I actually found the corset mock-up when we dug through the trash last Friday (so THERE to the person who threw it out to begin with!) but it's currently awaiting its turn in the washing machine, so I haven't been able to bring myself to work on that again. Plus, the craft room is a bit of a mess, since the person who rearranged part of the house decided to use that room as a holding area for nearly everything that didn't get thrown out.

Anyway, today I also made bread.


Beer bread, to be specific. It was from a mix someone gifted us a while ago, but after the sad loss of my sourdough starter (yes, another casualty of the Debacle), it helped remind me of exactly why I need to get off my butt and bake more. Besides, it smells just as good as bread made from scratch, and I'm sure it'll taste yummy, too. Maybe I'll go find out right now. ;)

Piratical homebodying: of purple knitting and revisiting scones

So although I was a slacker and didn't blog almost at all while I was in New York, I did capture photographic evidence of my craftiness. See? Look!


That's the sleeve of a hooded shrug I'm test-knitting. (Right now I'm stuck in the sea of stockinette stitch that is the back of the shrug, but I only have a few inches left. I'll make it out soon!)

And last night I was finally driven to action by the endless march of food shows that the first mate and I tend to watch. I wanted cupcakes, but I made scones:




Date and raisin scones, to be precise. The cupcake avoidance was partly due to lack of ingredients, and partly due to having No Clue about how to make the kind of cupcakes that I really want to make. I crave the irrationally gourmet kind of cupcake — the kind I'd be happy to pay $2.50 for two bites of. I was never a cupcake fan, by the way, before I worked at an office job where someone with good taste, a lot of money, and a kindly heart got me addicted to the uber-awesome variety. But now? Now I NEED to figure out how to make my own. Any book or blog recommendations, me hearties? ;)

Anyway, the scones turned out pretty well, considering I've taken a five- or six-year hiatus between batches. We didn't have any baking soda, so I had to limit myself to baking powder, and dates and raisins were all we had enough of, so in they went. But all in all, they still kick the butt of all the scones I've ever bought from anyone else. And that's a win. :D

Blast from the past: my first finished (knitted) object

There it is. Possibly the very first finished object I ever knit, enshrined in all its old-school, film-camera, scanned-into-the-computer-at-a-low-resolution-that-seemed-reasonable-at-the-time glory.

I was going through old photos on the computer today and found this one in my 2002 scrapbook folder, and I can't remember ever seeing it before. I'm pretty sure I gave the bag away to someone — was it one of my sister's friends? It was squeaky acrylic yarn that might have come from some kind of "learn to knit" kit, and I know I'd started knitting some beginner project with it as soon as I got the yarn years before ... but the experience was so unsatisfying, so outright frustrating, that I mistaked the crappy yarn and crappy plastic needles for my own inability to knit, and put the project down.

Years later, I found it and decided I would finish a project, dammit, and nothing would stop me — so I ripped out the old project (which was probably a scarf anyway, and who needs an acrylic scarf in Florida?) in my very first official project frogging, and reknit it in a new pattern, horrible squeaky yarn and all. And maybe it's the fact that it's completely blurry, but looking at it now, I actually think I like the thing. Sure, it didn't match anything I owned or would ever wear, but I like the colors. I like the tassel-y ties. I like the shape of the little pouch. I have no clue what pattern I used so if I want a new one I'll have to go pattern-hunting or invent my own.

The weirdest thing about this is that if my file hierarchy is correct — which it probably is; I hadn't lost my mind and my organization skills yet in 2002 ;) — I knit this way earlier than I can remember knowing how to knit. I think I didn't knit a lot after that project, as the next time I picked up the yarn arts, it was with crochet first ... but now that this photo has been excavated from the depths of the hard drive, I feel pretty comfortable pushing back the date from which I can count myelf an official knitter. Come on — I made a pretty little pouch that someone else liked so much I gave it to her! That means I was a real knitter, right? Even if I forgot for a couple more years before rediscovering it?

Maybe every day isn't a new discovery, but every couple of years is. ;) And this is why I don't like to get rid of stuff, even old blurry photos of things I think are horrible and ugly at the time. ;D There's always a chance I'll find something old and ugly and see it in a completely new perspective, or be able to use it to relearn something about myself that I'd forgotten.

To steek, or not to steek?

Once upon a time, I knit a tank top for my mom in under a week. It was Christmas, and I was determined. Held my own little endurance-knitting contest. WIN! It was finished in time. It was beautiful. I gave it to her. DONE.

But there was one flaw in the performance: The top was knit in the round from bottom to top, and although I bound off reeaaaaallly loosely for the neckline, as my mom puts it, her head is too big for the hole. ;) (It does fit over her head, but I take it she doesn't like how it feels when she pulls it on.) The neckline in question:



So I took the thing back and told her I'd fix it. I don't want it just sitting in her clothing pile, wasting away for lack of attention. I could just undo the bind-off (little though I relished that idea) and re-bind-off with a much stretchier method. Right? Sure ... As I tried to make off with it, she asked me one of those questions that non-knitters ask with such nonchalance, but that make knitters cringe: "Can you just put a slit in the front?"

I told her that would probably be a little bit beyond me, but because my brain works like this, the idea keeps popping back into my head. I hate to think a thing is impossible, and the more I think about it, the more I remember that to give a good gift, one should give what's wanted and not what one wants to give ... and I'm one of those people who gets crazy ideas, and likes the idea of doing the crazy thing just to show it can be done, never mind whether it's the most practical thing. I could do any number of other things to make the neckline looser; I could even undo part of it and reknit it back-and-forth to make a slit in the front. But like I said, I'm a little crazy. So here I am, thinking of steeking the thing. And I've never steeked before.

I looked up some steeking resources this afternoon. Kristin Nicholas waxes poetic about steeking on her blog, and over some sweaters that look totally worth it. Mary Ann Stevens wrote a nice, thorough tutorial on how to steek, including her fancy (and currently incomprehensible to me, but still very attractive) covered steeking method. The more I read about steeking, the more I want to try it. Those colorwork sweaters are so pretty (and so impractical for the semitropical Floridian clime), and it looks like it'd be fun to knit a tube sweater and then cut holes for the sleeves (never mind that I'm not sure what that style of sweater looks like on me) ... but none of that answers the question of whether a steek will easily solve my mom's tank top problem, or whether it will be more likely to make me want to stab myself with my knitting needles because I have now created a completely mucked-up tangle of yarn that dreams of the days when it was a tank top.

Maybe I'm ahead of myself. Maybe there are people reading along who are like What the F is a steek???? and/or Why are steeks so scary, already??

Well, this is what a steek is: It's a place where you cut a big hole in your knitting and try to force the thing not to unravel. It's a little like purposefully putting a huuuge run in your stockings because you want them to button up the front — or really, a little worse, because a run is more like a dropped stitch, not a big fat wad of cut ends. (Want to see some scary scissors + knitting photos? Check out the unreinforced steek portion of Eunny Jang's Steeking Chronicles.)

I'm dramatizing it, of course. ;) Apparently, steeking with self-loving, felty-in-a-good-way Shetland wool is virtually a breeze. But my mother's top, being a tank top, being knit for Florida weather, is not made of Shetland wool. It's not even made of wool. It's made of cotton. Slippery, smooth, cool-wearing cotton. Which is probably one of the worst things it could be in terms of steeking potential. And I'd have to put the steek in right at the shaping decreases.

Which means I should probably not try it. But still. The thought won't go away. Maybe the answer is to practice steeking ... to practice steeking a lot ... before I make the final decision. And in the meantime, I'll sneak in a new bind-off on the neckline. ;D If it works, then maybe I won't have to worry any more about steeking this particular top.

But the steeking bug has bitten. And now it's only a matter of time...

Day 2 of the Ravelympics: Day of the Filey Sock Leg

Yesterday — Day 1 of the Ravelympics — I made it through the cuff ribbing of one of Brian's late Christmas socks, a while (I can't remember what that means; an hour? more?) after the opening ceremonies ended. Am I slow? I wasn't sure. There was one knitter who made it all the way through a pair of socks DURING the ceremonies. Sheesh. This is as far as I got:


Then, today (I'm using Baxil Standard Time, meaning even though it's technically the 14th as I write this, I haven't slept, so it's still the 13th BST), I made it through the leg of Sock 1:


And also as I type, there are eight people past the Sock Hockey finish line (Rav link). But I can see why most of them are there — most of them are knitting smallish socks, or knitting with largish yarn, or both, with one exception, who specifically noted that she knit aaaalllll day (another Rav link). The Sock Hockey progress thread (yet another Rav link) looks pretty promising, too — meaning that no one there looks like they're waaaay ahead of me.

So what gives with that one person who finished an entire pair of socks during the opening ceremonies?? Is she just the fastest knitter on the planet???

Oh.

Duh.

She used a knitting machine.

WHEW.

Guess I'm doing okay after all. :D

Of course, my poor TwitKAL has been sitting abandoned for two days, which I don't want to make a habit, or I really will end up with another UFO — and I'm right in the middle of a lace repeat, too, so if that turns into a UFO, I'll be pretty lost when I pick it up, not-terribly-complicated-pattern or not. Note to self: Finish that lace pattern repeat tonight or tomorrow.

Tomorrow's Ravelympics goal: Turn heel on Brian's Filey Sock 1, knit as much of foot as possible. If Sock 1 is finished, immediately cast on Sock 2 so as to avoid the dreaded Second Sock Syndrome.

And now, off for the night. Go teams!