Patience...

So, it's really hard to be patient, though, when you have all these colors just begging to be these mittens! Aren't they cute? I love them! I can think of about ten of my friends/family who would love them, too. Kate says she'll have the pattern ready soon, and thank goodness because we have a long, grey, snowy weekend ahead of us here. Perfect weather for knitting!

Her Loss...My Gain!

A woman who takes my Pilates classes mentioned the other day that she has a bunch of yarn left over from when she used to weave and would I be interested in any of it? Um....that's like asking Kodi if he wants a chewy! Yes! So, I got to go over to her house last weekend and peruse the stash. I picked out a few things:

Really rustic, pretty tweed wool. The color is sort of a greyish-brown, and the yarn is very coarse. I do think it will soften up a lot with washing, because just swatching it made it softer. I think it might make a nice hat or something.
And this gossamer silk is so beautiful. It's handspun, and just gorgeous. I have no idea what I might do with it, but I love it.

She had a few skeins that would be perfect for some raggy-wool socks, too. It's handspun, from a company in New Hampshire that I have no idea whether it exists anymore (this stuff is about 20 years old). It smells soo good, though, with all the lanolin. This is the forest green:
And then there were a couple shades of purples, this one being a true purple:

And a little bit bluer purple with tweedy flecks:
Not only that, but I have two shipments of yarn coming, one from Beaverslide and one from Bare Sheep. Yikes!

Powdered Courage! A Felted Chalk Bag

I just finished the pattern notes for this project and have to share--it's a felted chalk bag I like to call "Powdered Courage." I was sort of out for the climbing season this year, but I went along and took my knitting with me, and came up with this little bag for next year!

I made it so the draw cord also becomes the loop to attach the bag to your harness. Pretty convenient, huh?
The size is perfect for anyone's hand, and the inside is all nice and felty so you don't even need a fleece liner in it.
It knits up pretty quickly, and is also a great stash buster/scrap buster. Perfect for a little Christmas gift, too--just stuff some passes to the local climbing gym inside and voila! No Black Friday 4 am shopping for you! If you want the pattern, I'll send it to you for free. Just email adventurista_knits AT yahoo DOT com
(And for the Paul Harvey fans, here's "the rest of the story." So, I had knee surgery in May, which completely blew out my climbing or just having fun for the season, but I went to most of the climbs and just took knitting along. Hence, the knitted chalk bag. Okay, so I wanted my husband to model these pics for me, and we went to the Pocatello Pump, which is a local climbing competition, for the shots....the DAY after he completely tore his shoulder out of the socket. So, climbing fans, there's no rope and it's not because he's free climbing, it's because he's about a foot off the ground, probably screaming inside, while I'm trying to get my "bad" knee into position on the ground so I can take the shots. Not too heroic, but pretty funny. Finally.)

Cables in Tweedy Shetland

I've started a new project, something that caught me a little by surprise. I was getting some fabric cut a few weeks ago and was browsing through a Patons booklet. I found the most adorable cabled vest. I didn't buy the booklet, but thought about it several times and finally went back for it. I want to make the vest into a little tee, adding some sleeves, and I found the perfect yarn waaaay back in my stash for it:
I love the tweedy/heathery color, and it's sooo soft (real Shetland). I have a couple of Aran sweaters that I bought when I visited Innismore and Innisfree in 2000, and I remember watching the Aran women knitting, completely impressed not just by their skill, but their speed! These women rivaled machines! I like Aran sweaters and Aran wool, but I wanted something a little softer and more colorful for this project. So I cast on last night.
It's a tricky pattern. In an effort to save printed space, the directions are a little more than "pithy," as EZ would say, but you really have to wrap your head around the five panels, two with four-row repeats, two with eight-row repeats, and one with a thirty-two row repeat. So I get through the first four "set-up" rows and THEN I read that you're supposed to decrease on row three. Screw it, I'll decrease on row five (being constantly bugged by this fact, of course), and then when I got to about row seven or eight, realized I'd done a cable backwards! Aggghh! So I frogged back to the ribbing and now things are going better.


I started making notes on each row, then just on the odd numbered rows (since the evens are just reverse of the previous row). I just set up the start of each so I know which row of each of the five panels I'm doing, because it's pretty easy to forget. But I'm getting the hang of it, and also starting to memorize the patterns, which makes it a lot easier.
So far, I'm totally in love with it, and can't wait to finish. I'm debating on the sleeves though, and how to do them. There's a great article in the Winter IK about set-in sleeves that I plan to use, but I'm still trying to decide whether to do cables on them. Hmmm....something tells me I have a while to think about it!

Oh, hi....

So it's not like I forgot I have a blog, it's just that I've been busy. Doing stuff. Doing stuff, like:

1. Taking care of my husband who had shoulder surgery
2. Having knee surgery
3. Trying to revive choking Kodi because neither of us could carry him to the car to take him to the vet....okay, it wasn't totally that dramatic, but there was a point where we were looking up the vet's phone number at 10:00 at night, imagining how it would look for one family to have all members in the hospital in one month!

But I've been doing lots and lots of knitting (since there's not much else to do with a bandaged up leg!) and lots and lots of Ravelry-ing. I love Ravelry!

I've made a little knitting-circle of friends already at the physical therapy office, one of which owns a sheep/goat farm and has invited me out, and another to who it going to teach me how to steek sleeves! This is totally cracking my husband up and impressing him at the same time.

I also took a bead-felting class the other night, which was so much fun. I love the bright colors and the perfect little balls of felty wool. I just ordered some more roving to make a bunch for a necklace.

I taught my mom to knit (and purl) while we were in pre-op for my knee. DH wanted to take pics of me knitting in my hospital gown, IV quite firmly inserted into my hand (ouch!), but darn it all, we didn't have the camera. Anyway, my mother, who "couldn't knit," is now knitting. She wants to make baby hats, so I'm sending her to these cute Kate Gilbert patterns. And for whatever reason, I've been making lots of socks. Socks look funny without feet in them, but right now they'd look funny with my feet in them. Note that all were photographed in my little cocoon-world of brown quilt.

Red Cables and Ribs (BFF Socks by Cookie A)

SexyTweed Socks of my own design--I really like this, and they do look really kinda sexy on a guy's foot. I'll post the pattern if anyone's interested.
Stripey socks that are now much further along than this. I love the blues and browns of this self-striping wool. Gorgeous!

And that's about it for now. I'm swatching a bunch of new things, and I started one other pattern that I'll post maybe tomorrow. Until then...happy knitting!

The Importance of Being Decisive

Here's a quote I found a couple of days ago, which seems particularly poignant right now (and from what I've been reading on others' blogs, not just to me):

Because we don’t know what is really important to us, everything seems important. Because everything seems important, we have to do everything. Other people, unfortunately, see us doing everything, so they expect us to do everything. Doing everything keeps us so busy, we don’t have time to think about what is really important to us.
-Anon

That was fast!

I can't believe it--I just got my Ravelry invite! Wow--wasn't it only...yesterday...that I was 1200th in line? Woot!

I have a couple of new projects I was going to post, but I'm going to play on Ravelry instead. If you want to see me there, I'm AdventuristaKnit (the "s" didn't make it). Woohoo, woohoo, woohoo!

Holy Hectic!

My gosh! I just realized how long it's been since I've posted. The last couple of weeks have been crazy--mid-term exams for my MBA, working like a dog, at least three trips to the yarn store(s), two new pets...oh, and big huge shoulder sugery for my DH, which turned out to be a lot bigger deal than expected, so my knee surgery is postponed for a couple of weeks (thank goodness!).

The surgery stuff did mean a couple of days off playing nursemaid (and lots of knitting!). I started some socks, finished a present for my swap partner, and swatched up a ton of stuff. I've got a few new designs I'm working up, which is so much fun to watch something take shape. I actually love the swatching process---it's almost like painting or sketching, just in yarn. I also like how the ideas change and evolve during swatching--something I thought might work suddenly doesn't, while something else magically takes shape. And the yarns I've been finding lately are deee-vine.

Oh, and I found out that I'm still in the Ravelry queue. The bad news is that there are about 1200 people ahead of me. The good news is that there are 11,510 people behind me! Holy COW!

More tomorrow...it's nearly midnight and I should be sleeping!