Blocking Magic

Hosted a quilting party last night. Didn't get home til two, but everyone had a damned good time. I managed to finish my Devon swatch, and today, I took my entrelac sleeve to Wallyworld so I could wait out an oil change. That was a sight-lugging a ball of Kauni and a cone of Selkirk 2/9 all over the darned store.

Despite some vague instructions on edge triangles, I finished the sleeve and cast on for the coat body. I'll have to stop and do another sleeve when I get 'round to the mauve again. Don't know why these patterns have NO finishing on the edges. When I cast on for my coat, I did three rows of rib (the needle was 3 sizes larger, but I think the hem will need the give) just so I won't have a weirdo unfinished edge.

I couldn't stand the suspense, so I dipped one corner of my sleeve into some water, just to see how it would look. (upper right) It flattened nicely, I am right on gauge, and it doesn't look so much like accoustical foam.

Needle little love?

I am the only person in the county that knits. Or so you would think. Which is a little lonely, but it also means that I get stash/needle/pattern enhancing stuff any time anyone dies/goes to see Aunt Irene/stumbles across stuff at a garage sale. A lot of times the stuff is yuck. Once in a while, it's nice. Regardless whether these needles are rusty, solo, or still in their vintage plastic case, boasting a neon TG&Y sticker, I look at them all.

They are dear.

Sorry, dumbass, it doesn't WORK like that-

I read a news blurb about Obama yesterday. The headline read
Obama Stops Wearing Flag Pin

I totally understand why he doesn't. I don't have a yellow "We support our troops" magnet on my car. I spent my magnet money making goody boxes to send to deployed people I know. (An Old Navy St. Paddy's Day shirt is a pretty good morale booster, ya know.) I sent goody boxes to other people's family members. That's a good use of my magnet money.

But as someone who actually wants to represent our country, doncha think Obama ought to reconsider?

The jaw-dropping part of the article was

"At one stop, he called for new restrictions on deployment of National Guard and Reserve troops along with an expansion of benefits for them and their families.

"I will not be a president who extends tours for our Guard units overseas while Americans are stranded on rooftops right here at home," Obama said."

OMG. OMG. It doesn't work like that.

For one thing, it would take at LEAST three days to bring troops home. And a bazillion dollars. If Nagin couldn't think to issue an evacuation order three days prior, he surely wouldn't have thought to request troops.

And that is the big sticking point. Since Guardsmen are a STATE asset, they have to be requested. Invited. Ushered in. Our Texas Guard waited, packed and ready, for their invitations.

For two days.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8S2K3UO0&show_article=1

It's Entrelac-tober and I started-

nothing, yet. Actually, that's not true, I have almost a whole sleeve done. But I haven't worked on it in a week.

There's still plenty of time to KAL.

http://entrelac-kal.blogspot.com/

Ravelry update-

Found you!
You signed up on August 2, 2007
You are #22642 on the list.
825 people are ahead of you in line.
16051 people are behind you in line.
56% of the list has been invited so far

Swatch-hitter

Here's a swatch of Van Dyke Leaf Lace from BW #2. I am convinced there is an error in row 24, because I had to fudge an extra stitch out of thin air three times in a row. This is easily solved by working SL1, K1, PSSO, instead of SL2, K1, P2SSO in that row. You will notice that early in the square, the leaf veins look different. I liked the look of slipping both stitches together at once, as if to knit. I think it looks very clean. Took me a while to figure it out.

And there's my boo-boo. And the fact that trying to knit anything of a particular size has me nudging in, not easing out.

Sigh. I like the stitch pattern. I think it would be BEAUTIFUL worked on sleeves.

Free stuff from a good company-

I've long been a fan of Penzeys spices. They've got a great offer this month. When you place your order, you can get a jar of one of their new spices, free!

When you are placing your order online, just go to the express tab, and add in

29454C for Smoky 4/S seasoning salt
29359C for Spicey 4/S seasoning salt
or
16555c for Tuscan Sunset salt free seasoning.

Standard shipping rates apply, and it's good til 20 Oct. This offer works for online orders.

There you go!

A drum roll please-

Let's listen to EZ!

And did I rock the boat too much?

Last night, I placed an order at DiscontinuedNameBrandYarn.com. I had fun picking out Christmas Yarnzies for my yarn buds. A few minutes after I hit send, I got this in my inbox.

Your order number is 509

Product Name Quantity Price Item Total
witw-fnf4 Feelin' Fuzzy : Outrageous 3 $ 9.99 $ 29.97
witw-fnf1 Feelin' Fuzzy : Thief in the Night 6 $ 9.99 $ 59.94
witw-cyc9 Cyclone : Color Me Karen 2 $ 9.99 $ 19.98
witw-har4 Harmony : Gem Jubilee 2 $ 11.99 $ 23.98
witw-pb Project Bag : Project Bag 2 $ 10.00 $ 20.00
PLB-15 Bella Colour : Cotton Candy 15 $ 1.99 $ 29.85
PLB-13 Bella Colour : Tawny Fawn 1 $ 1.99 $ 1.99
Subtotal: $185.71
Shipping: $0.00
Tax: $0.00
Total: $185.71

Credit Card Information:

Card Type: MasterCard

Card Number: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

Expiration Date: 05 / 0?

Shipping Method: $75.00 & UP

Shipping Address:

Name: The Junior Goddess

Address: 19 XXXXX

City State Zip: East Cupcake, TX

Phone: XXXXXXXXXXXXX

Billing Address: Same as Shipping Address


This morning, I sent them a follow-up email that said, basically-

Just verifying that the project bags price will be subtracted!

Thanks

To which they replied:
Betsy:

You receive 1 free project bag with an order. Do you want only one? If you want two, we will need to charge you for one of them.

Regards,
Tina

To which I replied:
Oh-
The way the copy reads, you get one per 50.00 worth of WiW yarns. It's written in a way that's up for interpretation, so you might wanna change that. I was gonna use this yarn for Christmas prezzies-that's why I was looking for the extra bags. If I have to buy the second, no, I will skip it.

Thanks!

To which they replied:
That's the copy for the goodie bags. The copy for the project bags reads:


Receive a free project totebag with yarn purchase!
Click here to add a project bag to your shopping cart!


We will remove the extra project bag from your order.

Regards,
Tina

To which I replied:
"Don't forget your FREE Wool in the Woods' Project Bag with $50.00
purchase of Wool in the Woods yarn.
Also, Goodie Bags are back with $50.00 purchase of Trash & Treasure or
Clearance Yarns. "

Is what it reads at checkout. I think I am pretty average-I am
probably not the first person to wonder about it.

Bets

(Stick with me guys, I know this is longgggg!)

And they wrote back-

Thanks for pointing that out. I've changed that. But for either offer
we are sending only 1 bag per order.

Regards,
Tina

And I said

Um, ok, I got that.

All this transpired at about 9 this morning.

Just now, I got an email which said
Just to let you know that we cannot process your order as it came
through incomplete. If you would still like your yarn, please go to
www.discontinuedbrandnameyarn.com and try again! Thank you from the
Yarn Girls!



You gotta be kidding me. Part of me wonders if I am being punished for feedback I gave the folks at Cherry Tree Hill (they're affiliated) on their Sugar Maple color, which I basically said was a pretty hard color for most people to wear. Cheryl Potter wrote me back, personally. She was not amused. That's part of me. The other part says "Well I just bought my lime disaster from Cherry Tree Hill." That came out fine-after I fixed it. But I didn't whine or complain to the company. That's the crapshoot you get with mystery bags.

Breaking news (Friday Morning): I just got an email that said

Sorry about the confusion. Yes, your order was been filled and shipped. Regards, Tina

Well, what the hell was all that about? I get such good service from other places (namely Ann and the folks at Elann) that this really makes me scratch my head.

I think they just have big technical issues!

In the natural world, parents can eat their offspring...

"He would never admit to screwing the pooch, even if the puppies looked like him." The Valletta Homilies, 2007

A fashion statement

Hillary TV
by
betsyarnho

Get this custom shirt at Zazzle

Enough with the designer labels, already.

Hillary Clinton was a governor's wife who worked for a law firm. Her husband was elected President. She served on a committee. First Ladies do not traditionally have actual political or diplomatic duties. She changed her residency to New York State and convinced them to elect her to the Senate. Now this junior senator is running for president. And has a decent shot.

You gotta be kidding me. When I'm sick, my dang doctor has more experience in his job than she does. It's like a student teacher taking over the Superintendent of School's position.

Swatched and started

I'm afraid my intended yarn combination won't work. That's the 2/6 yarn (reads as light grey) at the bottom of the swatch. The bluer portion is 2/9 wool carried with my Kauni. That's a lot closer to the required gauge, and the yarns are balanced, so nothing jockeys for position. This swatch was knit on a 4 mm needle.

Of course, I couldn't stand it anymore, and had to cast on. (Never mind that I have two sleeves on the needles now from my 'current project'. That's kind of a problem, because sleeves are SOOO boring.) But I wanted to see what it would look like, and how the colors go.

This pattern isn't all that hot. The sleeves have little "wings" (yeah, like maxi-pads) to give them shaping. That's good design right there, I'll tell ya. (Insert eye-rolling here.)

I am sorely disappointed with this yarn. The texture is as expected, the weight is as expected, but I feel like I could have done the color mixing on my own. With color runs 100 yards long, I could just spit splice entire balls of yarn together, and knit them up. Look at the freaking joins on Noro Kureyon, and tell me that's not so.

Boo-hoo, yeah, I know. I wasn't expecting any sympathy.

Kauni, deconstructed

I wound my Kauni today. I have heard quite a bit about how LONG the color runs are. Since I wound my yarn by HAND (it wasn't going to fit on the ball winder without breaks) I can tell you all about that. My hank was about 30" long, and weighed 250 grams, in colourway E-F. According to my math, this should be about 1000 meters. I went thru a green, plum, blue, and mauve color sequence TWICE-with maybe 15 yards back into the green. According to my guesstimations, one color in this 4 color sequence was about 59 loops (yes, I counted them. What else was I gonna do?) or roughly 100 yards. Including the color transitions, this works out about right. So each color swatch shown on Astrid's site displays the variances expected in a 125 gm quantity. Know it!

Yarnwise, it's semi-sheepy, and my hands feel softer for the handling. I am kind of glad I took all the time to wind it by hand, because I know EXACTLY what to expect when I knit it. I will probably knit the sleeves first, because I will engineer them. I can't stand mismatching sleeves. I may knit my fronts and backs together to the underarm, I haven't quite decided about that.

I am a little disappointed by how long the color runs ARE. That makes the entrelac layout a little difficult, because my pattern's not in the round. It should either match closely, or vary wildly at the fronts. Anything else is a cheesy look. I am trying to picture how far I would get if I knit this using 25 gram balls of fingering weight, because, in an odd way, that's exactly what I am working with. Winding this took a long time, but I've wound CTH BabyLoop before, and this was pretty straightforward.

If they ever have a colorway you like wound into 150 gram balls, buy it. The price is the same!

I just want to keep this in mind-

I've seen a lot of unconstructed jackets this fall. Mostly, they are too deconstructed to translate into knitwear; a flat piece of fabric will always be a flat piece, and if done in too large of a gauge....Eww.

This is nice. Wide open top down that flares out on the sleeves and bodice. Floaty, not floppy. This may be a November project.

The Entrelac of my dreams

Number 38 from Vogue Knitting Fall 2006. Knit from Kauni-EF carried with a light blue grey tweed I already own. My yarn came in from Astrid's today. Holy crap, that's a lot of yarn to wind. It pretty much looks like this.


I'd like to make it shorter, skip the belt, and change up the neckline to make a vee. This is entirely do-able. But I am gonna need a lot of cheerleading

Entrelac-Tober

W e're starting up Entrelac-tober! Yay! Joan has the blogsite up and running, and has several project ideas listed!

A Tam 4 Afghans

I don't know why I love to knit tams. I just do. I don't even like to WEAR hats. I think I love them like other people like socks. Once you know how to do them, you can go on auto-knit.

Here's one for A4A. Nothing special, but I can see it on a little boy or girl with dark hair and flashing eyes. Of course, if it goes to a little boy it should just be pulled around his ears, or snatched off by an older brother. Hopefully, someone will be a little warmer this winter. The simple fact that this hat could go to a child of either gender made me pull back on design whimsy. I've read The Kite Runner. No one needs to get beat up. I avoided anything that smacked of florals! I wish I had jimmied the numbers a little to get an odd number of segments. I like those better.

It's been stressful around here lately. We've had espresso machine troubles for two days running, the car repairs are on my last nerve, and I had to call the credit union and complain today. I must be middle aged.

Sunday, I pulled up to the ATM and double checked my balance before heading out to Shopaholic Land (aka the outlet mall.) My savings account was low. Several thousand dollars low. Talk about killing my shopping buzz! I racked my brain-ID theft? Did I SPEND it? I was SCARED. As it turns out, I deposited a large check a few weeks ago. As customary, they held 2/3rds of it until it cleared. As it turns out, they were still holding it, but for no particular reason, other than the automatic clearing date did not trigger the transfer. Whew.

Diary of a madwoman

Lime Time

Then.

Now.

I think I dyed and went to heaven.