Monday, October 31, 2005

Heppy Halloveen


Do you see the booty here???

How many of you got Lebkuchen for Halloween, eh? :)

Eroica!!


Oops! We did it again!


Another successful (if not wallet-draining) Yarn Tour stormed through Wuerzburg on Saturday.

This is Erica laughing at me because I made fun of her map-turning. Although she totally gets the most-organized award for highlighting the yarn shop streets and actually getting us there.

At the second yarn shop, I only stopped drooling over the multitude of sock yarn when I noticed Erica stopped in front of an shelf unit full of boring old normal yarn. I was about to tell her to open her eyes and smell the Regia when she pointed out that this beautiful 50/50 wool/nylon mix was only 1.50 Euro per 50grams. Well, hello Shirley!! I started to pile it in my basket. Can we say "kids sweaters!???" Then I noticed that the name was Eroica. I don't even want to imagine how they came up with this name, but it was what I called my shopping partner for the rest of the day LOL!

We even found Opal, so I snagged myself some of the tiger yarn. Not sure who's getting them yet, but they would have been handy for chilly trick-or-treating tonight :)

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Knitters


It's a shame this is so dark, but what you see here are two kindred knitters, plying their trade whilst their brethern play X-Box not 2 feet away. Talk about yer old-school miracles.

Patrick is learning to knit at school and came to me with needles held together by knots and a plea for help. So I got him off and running and Ciara immediately tore the house apart, looking for the poncho she started for Cian like 4 months ago.

How cute is this???

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Nachmachen

Nachmachen in German means imitate, which is what I was trying to do after I saw Steph's mommy/belly/work-in-progress pic. Denisa held up the blankie I've been working on for Max but her belly looked all lumpy and funny.

Further investigation lead to the discovery of a 5 month old feline who loves yarn and knitting almost as much as me :)


Jackson, say hello!


Mommy only has 2 more months to go, but I think I'll manage the rest of the blanket before then. I've been adding to it off and on for the past couple of months and haven't posted anything becuase I didn't want to document the time it was taking to knit it for fear of de-motivation, hehe.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Plaid
















I really wish these pictures had come out a bit truer to life. The greens blend in to each other a bit better and the whole thing looks a lot more uniform than whatcha see right here. I'm getting kind of excited about trying this out with other colour combinations. It's a bit of a shame that this pair will take so long since they're a whopping size 12!! Is it just me, or have you noticed the high occurance of sock knitters having significant others having montrously large feet? I think Harloty commented on this recently, too.

Friday, October 14, 2005

I've Gone Plaid

I'm having some serious camera issues these days. Not exactly mechanical problems with the camera, per se. But more issues with synchronizing finding charged batteries with locating the memory card AND the camera at the same time that I have a split second to snap a shot of my Opus sock before the sun goes down (which it's started doing about an hour after sunrise!).

My sock, my glorious surprisingly pretty pretty sock.

This was the sock that pinned me under the dreaded "Sock Curse" this summer. I started it 4 times with 2 different patterns and came up snake eyes everytime with the fit. Stupid Lana Grossa Green Tweed!!
So I tricked it!

I started a sock with the Canadian Color Regia I picked up last Friday (lovely fall colours!). I didn't even look in the direction of the haggardly-worn, oft-ripped tweed as I hummed to myself and pretended like I had absolutely no idea who the recipient was...

I worked 25 rows of ribbing and 3 rows into the leg of the sock, I feined a completely innocent frustration with the colour-pooling and glanced at the cursed sock wool and wondered aloud if "these wools would look really cool together."

After ripping back to the rib, I settled on a knit 1 round of Canadian Color, knit 1 round of Lana Grossa forrest green tweed. And then, I thought I might try to work in the Flammegarn sock pattern from Nancy Bush's Folk Socks (the original pattern that cursed me in August). So my CC round was knit 4, sl 1 and my LG round was knit all the way. I knit for an entire afternoon, soaking up of my favourite old ER episodes (when Noah shaves his beard off - be still, my heart!!) and more and when I looked down at my sock, I found a totally cool effect that the Irishman calls "plaid".

The sock has an underlying forest green tone with bright autumnal reds, oranges and blues popping up all over the place and the slipped stitches make up lines of green running down the side (for me, a picture usually replaces TEN thousand words - succinctness is a virtue). Now I'm experimenting wildly with the heel (read: never heard of this technique and highly doubtful it will even work) by knitting across with K1 CC, K1 LG and purl back with the 2 strands held together. It's my technique to avoid using bigger needles but still incorporating the mixed yarn.

I have to admit, whether the blasted heel (which is taking AGES to knit because I'm doing it on 38 stitches) works out or not, I'm glad to be back in the woolly saddle again and excited about 2 sticks and string!!

God bless autumn!

Monday, October 10, 2005

The Sound of One Door Closing.....

Popped into my local yarn shop the other day because I saw 40% off signs while driving by. And discovered they are closing at the end of the month. Okay, it didn't disappoint me too much since they were never too nice and their selectioni wasn't as great my old locals. But it was the only yarn shop in walking distance and now they are no more.
As I was sulkily walking home, I cut through a street in our neighborhood with a pharmacy, bank and corner shop. And then I noticed that the corner shop had yarn in the window, then I noticed that she had Regia in the window!!! So I took a quick look inside and found a tiny corner, well-stocked with affordable baby-yarn, Fun-Fur, Regia Ringel and loads of Regia Canadian Color :)
And this store is only 40 seconds from my house! How cool is that??!!!

Have to go now, the new kitten is systematically chewing through the yarn that's supposed to turn into the neighbor's baby blanket......