Pink and shiny

For months I've been good about holding off on buying yarn. I even got to the point where I just started purging it -- I obviously can't knit fast enough to use most of what I've got, so why not sell it and use the Paypal funds to buy something cute on Etsy?



And these are just *two* of the four rings I've bought recently on Etsy. The teeny peonies are from jennykim, and the foxy fox with the diamond chip eyes is from Michellechangjewelry. These two lovelies will give me something pretty to look at while I'm knitting.

So, getting rid of a lot of yarn felt good. Until I had a little extra Paypal cash and found this grab bag of 5 skeins Koigu KPPPM in pinks, 50% off from Jimmy Beans Wool.



These are likely going to become little Hexipuffs from the latest craze, tiny owl knits' beekeeper's quilt. You know you want one.

And I knew I wanted mine in pink (plus that's what was on sale, of course). I'm waiting on another skein of deep pink yarn, this one coming from a destash. From a very popular German dyer whose yarns I haven't tried yet. It'll become my Twisted Flower socks, in time for VKL I hope.



Oh, I also picked up this skein of Lorna's Laces Solemate sock in Kerfuffle. Solemate is made with some fascinating space-age technology that's supposed to cool your feet with teeny nanobots or something like that. We'll see if it passes the DH test.

Get ready

In about a month I'll be heading out to LA for a weekend of knitting, yarn shopping, drinking (mixed and caffeinated) and, most of all, sleeping. Goodbye family, hello me, me, ME time!!!

Can you tell I'm excited? But I've got much planning to do before I get there: plotting a stashing strategy, planning where to get some good eats, and just figuring out what to do with so much time to myself (!!!). It'll also be nice to hang out with some fellow knitters - I don't really get to do that at home. So I'm jazzed.

I'm finishing up the Cria I've been working on for nearly 3 months. Argh. Should be ready in a few days.

That's my boy

We had some time to kill, so HD (Handsome Dude) No. 1 and I stopped by one of my LYSes that has recently changed hands. Thank goodness the new owner has kept much of the store's feel (and stock) the same, and even added some wonderful new stuff, like Madelinetosh. The boy went right for the Tosh Merino in Pop Rocks and wouldn't let go.



The boy has taste (it's obvious who he got that from, and I swear there was no coaxing going on here) and wouldn't give up the goods for the more kid-friendly Spud and Chloe -- I mean, that color! I totally know how he feels. He's gonna love the hat (and a hat for his teeny elephant) that this will make.

Home away from home

Where do people knit? I'm guessing the majority of people knit at home, during a commute or at a knit night/knitting group.

I tend to knit at home mostly, but when it's too busy/noisy/annoying there (most of the time), I escape elsewhere with my knitting. Last night I decided I needed a few good hours of solid knitting time and realized that it was Tuesday, which meant that the yarn store I used to work at was having its knit night that night.

But instead of heading down there to be social, I chose to hit a coffee house down the street. I guess when I have very little time to knit, I want to focus on that and not on chatting.

Well, unfortunately, some folks at the coffee house were in a chatty mood -- so chatty and loud that I could hear them though my iPod was cranked way up. I don't mind people talking, but I hate it when one person dominates what's supposed to be a conversation, and that's what this one guy did -- talk at his two friends. For an hour and a half.

Then I realized I screwed up the button band on my Cria and didn't have enough light or a crochet hook to fix it. I thought about starting some socks with that new sock yarn I bought but didn't have a cable needle to do them two-at-a-time toe-up. Ugh, it was so distracting and dark and annoying ... then I remembered something -- haedn't I wanted to try knitting two socks at a time, one inside the other? What?!!??

A quick search led me to Knitty Fall 2006, Extreme Knitting: 2 socks in 1. Wow, this looks like a challenge, but one I think I need right now. Plus, I had a bright idea to help me tell the difference between the two balls of yarn I'll be using:



Knit two different colored socks! Both pairs will be for DH, so I can knit them identical. Woohoo!

Also, I finally found the square needles -- do they look that square to you? It's hard to tell.

Under construction

Here's how much of my Cria I've been able to complete in a month:



Not really as much as I'd have liked. It's been the only project I'm working on and I'm getting a little impatient about how long it's taking, but what did I expect knitting sport-weight yarn on size 5 needles?



My buttonholes look a bit wonky, so I've decided to just keep the 3 up top and ditch the rest.

I wanted to have some socks to work on when I wasn't in the mood to work on the Cria, but I've misplaced some new square DPNs from Kollage, size 0, that I wanted to try to see if they could help with my extremely loose knitting. I was going to use those new needles with some new, erm, sock yarn I bought ...







That's Paton's Stretch Socks, 41% cotton, 39% wool, 13% nylon and 7% elastic. I've been looking for not-so-wooly sock yarn to knit some socks for the DH and myself (and perhaps the little ones, I've never done a child's sock before, it must be the easiest thing in the world!) and when I found this stuff at $2.97 a ball at Jo-ann the other day (but for some reason it's not on sale on the website), I grabbed enough for 3 pairs.

But it only occurred to me, leaving the Jo-ann parking lot again yesterday (yes, I went back to buy enough for another 2 pairs, sue me), I hadn't looked up any projects using this on Ravelry or looked for any reviews. I assumed this stuff was pretty hard-wearing with the fairly high wool and nylon content, but I have no idea.

If I can't find the freaking Kollage needles soon, I might try knitting a pair of these toe-up two at a time using the Silver's Sock Class tutorial, which I heard about on one of my favorite new knitting podcasts, A Playful Day. She completed a gorgeous pair of knee-highs using that method, so I thought I'd try my hand too.

Forget what I said

I broke my own rule about not starting a new project before I cast on for a new one. It's Cria, Ysolda's latest design from her upcoming Little Red in the City book.



Go on, Ysolda, it's your birthday -- you're just as excited about this sweater as I am!

Seeing as I'm half-brain dead these days, even Ysolda's cool schematics and diagrams on the crazy construction of this top-down sweater didn't make sense to me. So I threw caution to the wind (or decided to go ahead and be lazy) and cast on anyway.

Right now it looks like a teeny bikini top.



Part of the reason I dove headlong into this project was because I had one of the recommended yarns, Madelinetosh Pashmina. My goodness, I've never knit with anything like this before. It's sooo soft and sproingy, it made my first gauge swatch (I went down to U.S. 3 from the recommended 4 because I'm a weirdly loose knitter who throws {sort of} with her left hand) actually turn out really, really small, way smaller than the recommended gauge. That never happens to me! So I know this yarn has some magical properties.

There's a Cria KAL going on on the Ysolda board on Ravelry. I'm tempted to join, even though KALs don't usually turn out so well for me. We'll see.

What the what?

I was just cleaning up my subscriptions in my blog reader (does anyone read blogs anymore? anyone?) and found more than a dozen that 1) haven't posted since at least 2008 (around the time I started actively reading blogs {I am always, always behind the times}) and 2) I can't even remember subscribing to them. Interesting to see how people have moved on in their lives and in their crafting.



I've finished the first of my Honey Bee socks. I'm on a WIP kick right now, tackling long-marinating projects with a little gusto. I'm bouncing back and forth between socks (I'm trying to finish my Baudelaires so that I can say I've knit a pair of Cookie A socks, who I supposedly will be sitting with and some other participants for some Vogue Knitting Live! dinner -- more on that another day), my Cerisara from last summer (should be pretty easy to jump right back into that, I hope) and the Maude Honeycomb blanket for an unnamed baby.