Buttony Buzzkill.

I am just not sure what to do with this one yet. I ran out of yarn while binding off. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, except that I may put this project down while I decide, and start on something else. Yeah.

FO: Snivellus

Pattern: Bulky Baby Asymmetrical Cardigan, size 3-6 mos
Yarn: Blue Sky Alpacas Dyed Cotton in Graphite
Needles: size 9/5.5mm
Cast on: 12/13/07
Finished: 12/16/07

I love knitting baby stuff because you're done so fast. This sweater looks to me like something Severus Snape would wear when he was a young boy. Too big and a bit crooked. Therefore I am calling this "Snivellus". I really like how ragged it looks, very orphanesque. And the fact that you don't see near-black baby sweaters that often. The buttons are actually a bit greener in real life, as befitting a future Slytherin...

FO: Argyle Skull Satchel

Pattern: Satchel with Arrrgyle Socks Graph both modified to fit my needs.
Yarn: Lion Wool in Ebony, Cadet Blue, Lemongrass, Winter White.
Needles: size 10.5/6.5mm
Cast on: 11/3/07
Finished: 12/14/07 (it was done sooner but sat there for a while waiting for me to sew on the strap...)

I learned a lot from this project - mainly, what I will never do again, and what I will not do next time I knit a bag. I absolutely love the way the felted argyle pattern turned out, and may redo it on another bag some day. Perhaps I will gift this one to a non-knitter who won't notice it's many mistakes.

Which are:

• Applied i-cord edge... applied to the wrong side on the left and right sides of the flap. A shame, since the properly-applied edge looks so tidy, and the wrong side of it looks so crummy.
• Way too wide, not quite tall enough, flap too short, hangs all funny. I knit and felted 6 different swatches and crunched numbers for two days to make what I thought would be the perfect bag, but alas...

• Not so much a mistake, but the next bag I make like this will employ D-rings, dog-leash hooks (whatever they're called) and a canvas strap to save me the time and hassle of knitting/felting/blocking/sewing (then, oops! sewing on twisted and having to undo and redo and trim and then sew back on) a frigging strap.

Here is a shot of it in action!

And my Sears Catalog pose.

FO: Vulcan Knucks

.·:*¨¨*:·. .·:*¨¨*:·I am a geek.·:*¨¨*:·. .·:*¨¨*:·

These bad boys are finally done!! The embroidery is crap, but considering that I just learned how to embroider yesterday by watching an online video, I see it as a great victory that it's decipherable.

Pattern: Knucks
Yarn: Rowan Felted Tweed in Avocado
Needles: size 4 dpn, size 3 dpn for cuffs
Cast on: 11/21/07
Finished: 12/12/o7

I am happy that these are done, but not really all that happy with them. They fit pretty well, but the cuff is little saggy. Also, I wish I had used a different yarn. I dunno, I usually love this kind of horrible green, but by the end of the project I wished I had used red or blue, or non-tweed or something. I do have the yarn for the other knucks I was planning to knit, but I think I'll take a break from them. Making all the knuckle cuffs is tedious.

FO: Dobby Hat

Dobby Hat

I worked on my Dobby Hat quite a bit yesterday, and it took me a while to realize that I was being pretty half-assed about my decreases. First off, the pattern has a few mistakes in it or parts where it doesn't totally make sense (that could just be me being dense, though). But also I am knitting it in the round so that I don't have to seam it, and I noticed that following the pattern left my decreases heading in the wrong direction. So then I switched them up, and it looked much better. But I decided to rip the whole thing back to where the decreases start, so that it'll look nice and neat. So I made a lot of progress on it yesterday only to rip it back, start over, and get this far.

And also, I decided that, since I want to get into socks, it's time for me to learn an alternative to double pointed needles. I'm starting with Magic Loop. Since I have Denise's needles, that means I can automatically do Magic Loop with size 5 through 15 needles. That doesn't help me with socks, but it'll be less of an investment in the sock-sizes than, say, the two-circulars method. So far, it's super easy and I think I'm hooked.

Please forgive the pic. It was really friggen early.

Tomboy Purse

I knit up the pieces of this "purse" a week or two ago, and then it was sitting on my nightstand waiting to be blocked. I've never blocked anything before, but I figured it would make life easier when it came time to seam this bad boy together. I blocked it last night and it's dry this morning. I am in awe of the magic of this blocking business! I can see now that a project or two of mine that I hated might have been salvageable if only I had taken the time to block them.

There they are blocking. I'm also still trying to figure out some of this blogging business. I've been on blogger for many years, but have recently switched from pc to mac, internet explorer to safari and then to firefox, photobucket to flickr (since that's required for ravelry) and mspaint to iphoto. It's a bit much and I'm getting frustrated. I recognize and appreciate the many attributes of the new stuff over the old, but it seems like flickr has an issue with iphoto, and blogger has an issue with flickr, and nobody wants to get along right now at 5:30am real quick before I have to go to work.

So yeah.