FO Friday -- First Puff Edition

You know what the very best thing about knitting the Beekeeper's Quilt is?

This!

I get to take part in FO Friday whenever I want now.  All I have to do is sit down for half an hour or so and fiddle with some sock yarn, and voila!  Puff!
Isn't it cute?

And now it has a friend.  2 down, 382 to go!

Also, in case you missed it before, I'm hosting a mini skein sock yarn swap for Hexipuffers, current and future.  Here's a repeat of all the details:


 The Power Puff Mini Skein Swap (What?  I've always wanted to be a Power Puff Girl.)

Who:  You.  And your friends, and knitting buddies and whoever.  Up to 20 people.  And yes -- if you want to be 2 people, you can send 20 skeinlets and get 20 back.  Just let me know ahead of time.

What:  Sock yarn, baby.  I'd prefer to avoid acrylic, but anything else will work.  Send out something you'd love to receive and good things will come back to you (in a neatly packed envelope, no less).  Each skeinlet should be 20 yards in length.  Once sign ups are closed, I'll tell you how many to send.

When:  Sign up by October 3, and send your yarn (and a self-addressed stamped envelope) by October 15.  I'll turn it around as soon as it all arrives, hopefully no later than November 1.  I'd promise earlier, but we have a few international folks who want to play and I want to make sure we have time for everyone's yarn to get here.  On the international front, don't let the SASE thing scare you off.  If it's an issue let me know and we'll try to work something out.

Where:  Email me by clicking that cute little typewriter over on the right (or message me on Ravelry -- my ID is cagirlygirl), and send me your email address.  I'll send you my mailing address and you'll be Officially Signed Up.

Why:  Because ZOMG, SO cute!  Also, it's fun.  And swaps are neat.  And I'll be really sad if I hold a skeinlet-swapping party and nobody comes.  What more reason do you need?  Oh.  You need actual reasons?  Well then...  It's way more fun to do stuff like this together, and I'll host Power Puff progress parties, and we can trade links to cute puff decorations, and encouragement when you have one puff down and 383 to go is always a good thing. 

Questions?  Shout out in the comments, or shoot off an email and I'll come up with some sort of totally plausible answer.

At the moment, we have 9 confirmed swappers.  But you still have a few days to let me know if you're interested.  The more the merrier!

Now go visit all the super-talented fiberistas at Fiber Arts Friday and FO Friday and tell them how awesome they are (because they really, really are).  Then go have a spectacular weekend, please.

Work in Progress Wednesday v.60

Thanks so much for all the get-well wishes last week!  They seem to have worked, as I'm about 85% better.  I'm dying to head out for a trail run, but I don't want to anger my lungs so I'll hold out for another day or two.

I may only be 85%, but the knitting mojo is running at about 110%.  Would you believe that I actually have 4(!) projects on the needles right now?  I must be going through some sort of knitterly mid-life crisis, as I'm usually pretty monogamous with my yarn.  But not at the moment...

(Sorry about the crap photos, apparently the camera was in digital macro mode.  Who knew?  By the time I realized it, it was dark.  Sorry! -ed.)

Angostura is my current crush.  The back is finished, and I was all kinds of worried that it would be way too long.  I even frogged 6 rows of it.  It seems really, really long, but I laid my favorite sweater out on the bed, laid the vest over it and stretched it until they were the same width.  Once I did that, it was only about 1/2" longer the sweater, which I can totally live with.  Reassured, I plowed forward with the  front:

You guys, this is SUCH a fun knit.  It's really fast, and the cables and twisted stitches keep it interesting...

and there's this really fun detailing around the armholes and neckline that just sort of appears by  magic.  I heart it lots.

I'm also knitting Snug, which is a super cute baby hoodie that appears to exist only on Ravelry.  You'll have to click on the link or take my word for it, because at the moment, it looks a lot like an ill-conceived dishcloth:

I have high hopes, though.  The finished projects are adorable.  But Ravelers aren't kidding when they repeatedly say that it looks much easier than it is.  I have no idea how this is going to come together, but I'm going to just keep plugging along and hope for the best.  It's basically some square shapes made of garter stitch.  It can't be that hard, right?

Next is Sock, who despite being cute and lovely and fun to knit has been relegated to the cheap seats for the time being.

I swear I'll get back to it after I finish the vest.  Or the hoodie.  Or something.  Sock weather is looming, and I'll look a bit silly walking around in only 2/3 of one red sock. 

Finally, I dove in last weekend and started making puffs for the Beekeeper's Quilt.  They're so fun!  And so cute!  I have one finished, which you'll have to come back and see on Friday, and two more about to be on the needles:

They're educational, too:  I've never made a toe-up sock before, but apparently this is how you start one.  I've never done a 3-needle bind off until now, either.  Suffice to say, there was a lot of knitting video watching happening last weekend. 

And, if you find yourself hopelessly sucked into the vortex of hexi-puff knitting, there's still time to join the Sock Yarn Swap I'm hosting.  Details are here.  Once you've signed up (you know you want to), go check out all the other WIPW entries.  I'm betting there are one or two (or 30!) other quilts out there for inspiration...

FO Friday -- Power Puff Edition

I seriously had some grand plans for this entry.  I was all set to show you the first puff in my Beekeeper's Quilt odyssey, and officially launch our mini skein swap.  Unfortunately, the only thing that got finished around here was this:

Dudes, I am sick.  Not dying or anything... just at that stage of a cold where you vaguely wish you would.  Blerg. 

Anywho, I ran home from work, stopping to get a set of size 4 dpns, which oddly enough I didn't have.  Then I fished out the lovely stripedy sock yarn that I plan to swap and wound it into a cake.  Then I set about making my first puff, which currently looks like this:

Apparently, you start these little buggers the same way you would a toe-up sock.  Since I'm a rather monogamous top-down girl when it comes to socks, this was all new to me and took a little fiddling.  It'd be finished, but I didn't think it'd be wise to continue after emptying the bottle, above. 

And now what we've all been waiting for:

 The Power Puff Mini Skein Swap (What?  I've always wanted to be a Power Puff Girl.)

Who:  You.  And your friends, and knitting buddies and whoever.  Up to 20 people.  And yes -- if you want to be 2 people, you can send 20 skeinlets and get 20 back.  Just let me know ahead of time.

What:  Sock yarn, baby.  I'd prefer to avoid acrylic, but anything else will work.  Send out something you'd love to receive and good things will come back to you (in a neatly packed envelope, no less).  Each skeinlet should be 20 yards in length.  Once sign ups are closed, I'll tell you how many to send.

When:  Sign up by October 3, and send your yarn (and a self-addressed stamped envelope) by October 15.  I'll turn it around as soon as it all arrives, hopefully no later than November 1.  I'd promise earlier, but we have a few international folks who want to play and I want to make sure we have time for everyone's yarn to get here.  On the international front, don't let the SASE thing scare you off.  If it's an issue let me know and we'll try to work something out.

Where:  Email me by clicking that cute little typewriter over on the right (or message me on Ravelry -- my ID is cagirlygirl), and send me your email address.  I'll send you my mailing address and you'll be Officially Signed Up.

Why:  Because ZOMG, SO cute!  Also, it's fun.  And swaps are neat.  And I'll be really sad if I hold a skeinlet-swapping party and nobody comes.  What more reason do you need?  Oh.  You need actual reasons?  Well then...  It's way more fun to do stuff like this together, and I'll host Power Puff progress parties, and we can trade links to cute puff decorations, and encouragement when you have one puff down and 383 to go is always a good thing. 

Questions?  Shout out in the comments, or shoot off an email and I'll come up with some sort of totally plausible answer.

With that, I'm going to go pass out in a drug-induced stupor.  But when I wake up, I'm going to check out everyone's FO Friday posts.  I'm reasonably sure somebody else actually finished something other than Nyquil.  Ooh!  It's also Fiber Arts Friday!  Go visit them, too.

Cheers!

Work in Progress Wednesday v.59

The first day back from vacation is rough.  It's even rougher when you come back from vacation with some sort of creeping crud that makes your throat sore and your nose stuffy.  Boo.  I'm not really looking for sympathy here, just hoping you'll forgive the super-crappy pictures.  You will, right?  Good.

I knit Angostura all the way from Denver to DC, and then in the terminal, and then from DC to Philadelphia.  It's coming along really well, and the back is almost done.  Enter crappy picture #1 (where did the sunlight go?):

It would be almost done-er if I hadn't completed all 59 of the pattern-prescribed rows and then realized that it was going to be too long.  I ended up frogging 6 rows, since consensus on Ravelry is that Cascade 220 Superwash grows quite a bit when it's washed.  I'm working my way up the armholes now, and still loving knitting this.  I really, really hope it turns out to actually be wearable.  By me.  *fingers crossed*

The other project I worked on this week was my goal of visiting all 50 states.  Last time, my map looked like this, with 19 states under my belt:

Now, it looks like this.

That's officially 25 states, ladies and gentlemen.  I managed to knock out 3 in a single afternoon!  Quite the twilight zone experience for this California girl.  New additions to the list this trip were:  Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. 

I have a really cute vacation post all ready to go, but I forgot that after that nasty computer virus I had a couple of months ago my scanner no longer works.  As soon as I figure out how to fix it, I'll share all the good vacation details. 

And now, the reason I probably won't have much progress to show you next week:

Meet Lorenzo, aka Satan.  Lorenzo's family is on vacation in Hawaii this week, so he's staying with me.  He's quite the handful -- a super-hyper whirling dervish who bites (and not in a friendly way) when he's nervous.  Lucky for him he's seriously cute.  For her part, my dog is hiding in her bed.  Hopefully, she'll come out when she realizes she outweighs him by about 60 pounds. 

Finally, the sock yarn swap for the Beekeeper's Quilt is officially on.  More details to follow on Friday, but here's what I'm thinking so far:

• Send 20-yard mini skeins of sock yarn, any wool or animal fiber is fine, but I'd like to avoid acrylic.
• Include a self-addressed stamped envelope with appropriate postage.
• I'll send you new mini skeins of sock yarn from blanket-crazy bloggers far and wide.
• I'll post links to all the awesome puff charts and designs I can find.  (For now, go see Autumngeisha's Puff-design awesomeness!)
• Loads of happiness will ensue.  Probably also world peace.

 Let me know if you're interested in joining us or if there's anything in that list you find disagreeable. So far, the following fabulous swappers have raised a needle to the challenge:

BBatting
nursenikkiknits
Denise
MindingMyOwnStitches
autumngeisha

There's still time to let me know if you're interested.  Feel free to speak up in the comments or ping me via the contact button if you'd like to join.  Who can resist loads of happiness and world peace?

Not the folks at WIPW, that's for sure.  Go check out what they're up to this week.  While you do that, I'm going to stuff Satan in his crate for the night and load up on Nyquil.  It's a non-stop party around these parts!

Work in Progress Wednesday v,58

Greetings from Pennsylvania!  I'm officially on vacation as of this morning, so this will be short and sweet.  I'm officially in love with Little Red in the City.  It's so packed with good information, and useful stuff that I think it's worth the money even if you don't want to knit a single pattern in the book.  And I'm a cheapskate, so that's a pretty heavy endorsement.

I'm also officially in love with Angostura.  So in love, that were Angostura a person (instead of a pattern), there might be a restraining order involved.  Seriously.  I knit all the way across the country today, from Denver to Philadelphia.  First, on a jumbo jet from Denver to Washington DC.  Then on an eensy little plane from DC to Philly:

I can't remember the last time I walked across the tarmac to board a plane.  It was a little scary, but I was undeterred.  And, 2000 or so miles later, LOOK what I made:

This is most of the back.  I love how the cables look, and how they create shaping in this pattern.  This one pulls in at the small of the back, and the two smaller designs on the front do the same under the umm... front.  Right then.

Moving on... I also brought Sock with me, but it's definitely taken a back seat to the shiny new project.  I'll get back to it though because it's beginning to be a little bit Fall here, and the socks will be coming out soon.  I know this because I had the first Pumpkin Spice Latte of the season the other day.  It's sort of like the first robin of spring, but in reverse. 

Finally, lots of folks expressed interest in doing a sock yarn swap for the Beekeeper's Quilt.  Yay!  I'm happy to host. I still need to work out details, but for now, I have a burning question:  Do we want to use any and all sock yarn, or limit it to superwash?  Voice your vote in the comments.  If you haven't spoken up yet, there's plenty of time to join in.  I think we'll aim for getting things rolling around October 15.  More details to come once I'm home.  Stay tuned!

And now, if you'll excuse me I have some serious vacationing to do.  I promise to hit up all the WIPW blog entries at some point in the near future, though -- right after I hop down to Maryland for a crabcake tomorrow.

 Cheers!

Work In Progress Wednesday v.57

Welcome back to WIPW, where we're seeing RED this week, pretty much everywhere.  There are RED socks, which are poking along at a painfully slow (but still sort of respectable) pace:

I'm excited to have them to wear, but have been distracted by way too many other things lately.  Like knitting a swatch for a RED Angostura, for example:

Doesn't it look cool (if slightly blurry - sorry)?  I'm loving this pattern.  And, per Ysolda's perfectly reasonable instructions, I washed and blocked my little swatch when it was done.  This is my first time using Cascade 220 Superwash, and I was super excited about how soft it got.  It's lovely.

Anyway, the fabric seemed a little loose and the gauge wasn't quite there on the prescribed size 7 circs, so I'm starting over on 6s to see if that helps.  No cables this time since they make it harder to count stitches.  Plus which, I feel like I've got a pretty good feel for them now.  Meet Swatch the Second, also RED:

It's killing me to keep from just diving in and casting on, but after the Vest Fiasco, I'm determined to get this right.  So I'll keep swatching and measuring and counting until I'm super duper sure it's going to fit. 

Finally, I've got a confession... I've been semi-secretly drooling over the Beekeeper's Quilt that's been popping up everywhere lately.  Honestly, I'm kind of dying to make one.  And I'm wondering if there are any other lemmings out there who'd consider jumping in.  Maybe we could swap bits of sock yarn?  Let me know if you're interested.  If enough folks are on board, I'll see what I can put together for next week. 

That's pretty much all that's going on around these parts at the moment.  Hopefully, I'll have more exciting things to share next time.  Speaking of which, in case you missed it, I finally finished the Vest From Hell last week, had a tiny little rant (miniscule, really), and then torched the pattern -- complete with pictures.  Here. 

Now, go check out all the other amazing WIPsters.  They're lovely *and* talented.  What more could you ask for?

FO Friday -- Bonfire Edition!

I must say, I have NEVER been so beside-myelf-excited about the completion of a project before.  And here it is.  Ta Da!

It really is pretty.  And when I picked the pattern up almost a year (!) ago, I knew I was in a little bit over my head.  Not many folks had knitted it yet, and even fewer had finished it.  But what the heck, I thought as I dove in.  I made some mistakes early on that resulted in some frustration and some frogging, but once I got going, I was all excited and hopeful.  The trouble was, the farther I got, the worse it went.

The bottom line is, I just hate this pattern.  The designer creates some truly beautiful sweaters, and other folks don't seem to have this much trouble.  Go figure.  But the pattern wasn't cheap, and it was 14 pages long, which seems sort of silly.  And when I printed it out, I found that every single page contained an ad for the designer's web site, which was annoying, but whatever.  Then page 13 -- a full page ad.  Really?  Embedded in the pattern I just paid you for?  So glad I wasted ink to print that out.  Grrr.

The second major annoyance was that even with 13 pages of pattern, I had to write out the instructions by hand -- row by row -- in order to make any sense of several of the sections.  It's convoluted and unnecessarily complicated, which probably bugs me more than most since I used to write really good instructions for a living in a former life.

The third major annoyance was that the pattern, at least for my size, was FULL of errors.  I had to stop and count, and tink and fiddle at least three or four different times times only to find that the mistake wasn't mine, it was the designer's.  Curiously, there were no typos at all in any of the ads.  Another grrrr.

Finally, even though my gauge swatch was spot on, this thing is miles too big.  Granted, I've lost almost 30 pounds since I started it, but even 30 pounds ago, the bottom would've been too big.  See?

So now, all that work and all that yarn will be going to a lovely lady from my lunchtime knitting group.  Because it fits her, and she looks fabulous in it.  In return, she's offered to buy the yarn for my next sweater.  I'm pretty excited about this part, and counting on you all to help me pick the pattern.  We'll do that in the next couple of weeks.

Anyway, back to the evil pattern at hand.  With all of these difficulties and a year of frustration, I decided there was only one thing to do.  This:

Yay, fire!


I can't tell you how completely satisfying this was, and how I wish all of you had been there to experience it with me.  We could've toasted marshmallows and sung Kumbaya!

Thanks for hanging with me through this epic dredge of a project!  I swear the next one will have a happier ending, mostly because the pattern is by Ysolda Teague, who's brilliant and lovely and writes patterns that are elegantly constructed and crystal clear that turn into beautiful sweaters when all is said and done.  Hooray!

Once you've properly recovered from the shock of my impromptu pattern flambé, go check out the rest of the FO Friday posts -- lots of beautiful stuff, though I think this might be the only bonfire...

PS.  I'm linking up to Fiber Arts Friday for the first time today, too.  Even more fun!