Tea and Cake...or Death?

With apologies to Rene Magritte. :) Love the surrealists.

Anyway, this is D's Yule gift in all it's glory...seven shades of beige with a chart of two moose fornicating, copulating, doin' what comes natural.



The initial idea was based upon the beige game...how many ways can we describe "beige" without actually SAYING "beige." Then somewhere in one of the Pantheacon sleep dep late nights when we were discussing sigils and I suggested a beige on beige sigil for those of us happily subverting...uh, serving, yeah, serving...our corporate masters.

And then I learned Fair Isle. And it all fell into place. Let's see the colors I used are: Vinci, sparrow, doeskin heather, aspen heather, river rock, oyster and smoke.




And you have a hat made of awesome. :)

and




I must say that I LOVE this hat. I will have to make one for me sometime. :)

I haven't posted in a little while...but I finished the fair isle hat shortly after I posted the progress pic. And in the meantime, I've started Lu's Yule gift, made another hat, frogged it and re-knit it, and made a pair of fingerless mitts as a birthday gift.

First...the fair isle hat



Lu's Yule gift will be a hat that I'm calling "dem bones." It's in sugar skull territory and in the same colors as those mitts I made. The hat band has a bone ribbing -- looks kinda like femurs. :) And then the body of the hat has stranded dancing skeletons. Perfect for the gothlet grrl. The hat band is on the wide side, but I think it works oh, so well.



I started work on dem bones again today and I'm up on the spine...about to hit the ribcage, so there will be more pics soon.

The other hat is a chunky cabled hat. I had to go up a needle size, which I realized AFTER I'd finished. It's blocking now.

And then these are a pair of Fetchings I made for a birthday gift -- two at a time, magic loop, with a rockin' thumb gusset. LOVE the yarn. Manos del Uruguay merino/silk blend in the Wildflower colorway.



I'm also finally blocking the wrap I made for my mom's Yule gift -- the one I learned to graft while doing. I should have some photos soon.

And I'm plotting another Fair Isle hat (insert maniacal laughter here)!

I've done some stranded colorwork, but I'm making an actual Fair Isle hat now. It's coming together nicely, and I'll probably have some photos tomorrow.

Is it wrong of me to be so excited about learning a new technique that will enable me to perpetrate a long cherished dream of some obscure visual jokes/puns on my friends and relations? Because when this hat is finished, the first stage of my evil plot will be set in motion.

I've already ordered the yarn for stage two.

mwa hahahahaha!

In the wee hours of the morning, I finished binding off the mitts. Then I picked up the thumb stitches and started on the thumbs. 8:01am, bound off the second thumb.

Yup, stayed up most of the night for vigil and knitted. :) I ended up crashing for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours because I never did manage a nap yesterday...even though it was part of the plan.





Last last night/early this morning, Usna was happily killing the new catnip salamander. He flipped onto his back, which is his favorite position -- whether for scritches or for fighting -- and I dropped the salamander on his belly. He appeared rather confused. Long enough for me to grab the camera and document it. :)



Very. Very. Tired. But too wired to sleep.

Happy New Year, all!

I've read that you should try to learn something new every day. Well, this morning I learned how to take an image and convert it to a colorwork chart. :)

Here's an Arts & Crafts image of an iris border:



And here's the basic colorwork chart:



I did this conversion using GIMP. I had to do a bit of translating, because the original directions were written for Photoshop, and GIMP has its own quirks. But I'm rather pleased with this. Now, if I wish, I can create my own patterns. :)

Be afraid.

When I'm sick, I usually want soup. Warm, lovely soup. Today I was at work, hot and cold at the same time with a throat the felt like someone had taken sandpaper to it, and thought I want chicken noodle soup.

I don't have any chicken noodle soup, and I almost went to buy some, but then I remembered my go-to soup. It only takes about 5-10 minutes to make from scratch, and you can add almost anything to it that you have on hand.

Tonight's version was:

chicken broth
butter
roated garlic
sliced green onions
shredded rotisserie chicken
red pepper flakes
two beaten eggs

Heat up the broth, butter and garlic until you get a rolling boil. Turn down to simmer and add other ingredients (except eggs) and simmer until heated through. Beat eggs with a fork, and pour into soup while whisking.

Serve in a ginormous mug, crawl into bed and curl up with cats on various parts of the bed and sip your soup.

Yup, I've jumped into the pool with stranded colorwork. Two-handed knitting. It feels most awkward, and it's weird to be holding the main color in my right hand when I'm normally a Continental style knitter.

I'm also using a method that allows you to weave the yarns in such a way that there are no floats! It makes a much more evenly tensioned fabric, at least in my opinion. However, it's also a bit slower. But since I think the end product is so worthwhile, that's a fairly small price to pay. And as I practice, I'm sure I'll get a bit faster. :)

I've even taken pictures...



This is the project with both balls of yarn. The class called for two skeins of Mochi Plus in two different colorways. Bright Rainbow (CC) and Neptune's Rainbow (MC). Naturally the Bright Rainbow started with blues/greens/purple, so it's harder to see the contrast in the bottom part. Oh well.

Here's a close up...



And here's how the inside of the hat looks using the weaving technique. I did do some floats before I got the rhythm. :-)



I also redid the chart to make it easier to read. I am such a geek.

I guess that I've decided to be a balls to the wall type of knitter. After all, it's only string and if I fuck it up, I can always rip it out and try again.

I'm trying Kitchener -- or grafting -- for the first time. On a wrap for my mother's Yule gift. In pattern -- Garter stitch on both edges, purling and knitting within the wrap. At least I had a couple of rows of straight knit/purl pattern instead of the lace itself. I've finished the first segment of garter stitch and the first knit/purl section. It doesn't look awful and it's actually working -- I ended one side on a knit row and the other on a purl row, which helps keep the garter stitch grafting "even" looking. I'm grateful to Wooly Wormhead, who wrote a tutorial on the variations of stockinette, reverse stockinette and garter stitch grafting.

Pictures will follow after the process is complete.

But it's after midnight now, and when I try to knit much past that magic hour, things tend to go wahooni shaped pretty quickly. So I've put away the project for now.