Sheep On My Stuff

At Quilt Passions, Kailua-Kona, HI:

QP: Ooh! Decided you needed a little sock yarn?
Me: Yes! *sheepishly* Well. I don't know if I needed more sock yarn...
QP: Oh, but it's here! And you're here!
Me: *relieved and excited* Yes! Yes!
QP: And this is your Hawaii sock yarn!
Me: EXACTLY! Yes! Yes! You get it!

Actually, Quilt Passions was full of some really wonderful yarn I'd never seen before. This being Hawaii, it's mostly silk, bamboo, and cotton blends -- all really gorgeous. I didn't want to go overboard, though, so I picked up a couple of (large) balls of (very very nice) sock yarn from Cascade (I didn't even know they made sock yarn other than Fixation), which will probably be a shawl and not socks at all.

I do like to get yarn when I go places. When we were in New Zealand, I got some yarn. :) I've gotten yarn in California and yarn in Texas, and here I am in Hawaii with more souvenir yarn. I love the idea of knitting something out of it that I can look at and remember how wonderful this trip was -- and it has been wonderful!

Still nearly a week before we have to leave. I hear it was snowing in Seattle yesterday. The weather's kind of cloudy here, but we'll take it!

Sheldon the Turtle is finished, and almost unbearably cute!

He's very cuddly. Getting him in and out of his shell wasn't too tough, and I'm extremely happy with the mattress stitch right now, which is how I attached the legs -- it's a fairly seamless look, and mattress stitch is quite easy. I have the pattern for the Super Sheldon costume and the Officer Sheldon costume, so at some point I may end up making one or both of those -- but I'm pretty happy with him as he is.

Luckily for me, he seems very tolerant of the sheep:

Since my goal is to destash and not to finish a certain ratio of projects vs. starting them, I've felt free to start the occasional project when the whim takes me. Even so, I wasn't expecting this to be my post for today--

--but he's really very cute, even if his shell and legs aren't done!

I'm doing him in Swish Worsted (a couple of balls I had lying around to compare colors), size 3.5mm needles. It's turning out nicely, although I have my doubts as to whether I'll actually have enough of the light green to follow the pattern exactly -- I may end up using some dark green for some of it. No harm done, though!

I also have some other single balls of yarn sitting around, some in the adorable leopard tortoise colors. I might have to have more than one turtle!

I have one more square done for the Quilt Square Thing. Even having finished the ^2 blanket and five quilt square thingys, I still haven't made much of a dent in the Wool-Ease. It all fits in a very large tote bag now, though, which is a step in the right direction!

In other news, ZOMG! They're reprinting Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting!! I don't even do Fair Isle, and I know what a big deal that is. This book is basically legendary and has been out of print forever. People are really hoping that, with the huge positive response this is already getting, they'll also decide to reprint some of her other very hard-to-find books, such as Aran Knitting, which goes for $200 used if you can find it (seriously). I think Fair Isle was going for close to that before the reprint was announced. I'm tempted to preorder (even though, as I said, I don't do Fair Isle!) just to make sure I can get a copy when it comes out.

The one Alice Starmore book I do have is The Celtic Collection, and I've not yet knit anything from it, though I did buy yarn for something out of it. The only reason I haven't actually knit it up is because it's a fingering-weight project that, to get gauge, I need to do on 2mm needles. And it's a sweater. On the bright side, having put it off for a few years means I've gone down two sweater sizes, so woohoo! Less knitting FTW! :D (I am planning on starting that project this year.)

So happy!

It's been nearly a year since I started this (you can tell because the gallery was started on March 4, 2008), but it's done! Done! *does a happy dance around the living room*

Now I just need to weigh the leftover yarn and see what I ended up using. I think I may have inadvertently used some sportweight in the border, which I hadn't realized I still had. In any event, I'm extremely pleased -- it's a stashbusting project and it came out beautifully! Yay! I need more of those. :)

ETA: I was able to take 922g of yarn off the stash worksheets after finishing this project! (I obviously used more yarn than that, but the stash was weighed with this in progress.) I'm out of "yarn debt"! My destash weight is now at 555g -- a positive number for the first time this year!

It wasn't so long ago that I was talking about cannibalizing the Powers of Two blanket for yarn. It's not that I didn't like it, it's just that the pattern had been making me nuts for a while. It just wasn't fun for a while there, and I'd put off working on it and put off working on it and put off working on it until it seemed like I was never going to finish it.

I guess this was just one of those blankets that was meant to be small. Afghan-sized, even.

Uber-Woolo there is sitting in the little space which is all that remains unknit on this blanket. I am really looking forward to finishing it, which is making me work on it that much faster!

It'll need a border when it's done, probably in black, and when I'm done with that I'll need to decide if it needs a backing, too. It might. It might not. If it does, I'll look for something sheepy. :D

I'm up to four (and the center square plus first stripe on another). I'm definitely enjoying how these are coming out, although it'll be really ironic if I need to go buy more yarn in order to finish a scrap project. I keep telling myself I can make small blankets, but I'm not sure I believe me!

Again, it may not be knitting, but a finished project is a finished project:

Started 3/16/2007, finished 2/12/09. I think that's pretty fast for me.

It's all done, and I couldn't be happier! I'm suddenly very excited about getting to my next big cross-stitching project, so hopefully I'll make some progress on that while the enthusiasm is at a high. :)

For the last several years, I've thought about quilting. I love the idea of it; I love the idea of turning geometry into artwork. :) I love the idea of making things beautiful and neat and tidy and orderly, or going with the "crazy quilting" thing and making order out of chaos. Or chaos out of order! In short, it seems just awesome.

And thus I have stayed far, far, far away from it. I own a rotary cutter for sewing, but that's as close as I've ever gotten. I have lots and lots of hobbies, and never feel like I have enough time for any of them! Quilting would just be one more thing that would have to fight for its time with me, and I don't want to give up my knitting or cross-stitching or crocheting or reading or writing or World of Warcraft. (Although maybe that's something I should think about -- if I ever stop playing WoW, I can start quilting. It might help with the withdrawal pangs. But it's not too likely -- I just got myself a second account. >_>)

Anyway, recently -- probably due to my newfound lust for Vera Bradley bags (I own a book cover and three different bags and a wallet now. My only defense is that, since they're all in a discontinued fabric, they were severely discounted -- and also they're amazingly perfect as knitting bags, since they have tons of pockets but no zippers to catch on your work!) -- I started thinking that it might be cool to make my own bags and book covers. After all, then I could have bags and book covers with sheep-printed fabric!

After a while I ended up looking at books (I hear Eleanor Burns is awesome) and eyeing fabric and very, very nearly buying a self-healing mat and one of those enormous rulers. I held off at the last minute, and the urge seems to have passed... sort of.

I've had a bunch of Wool-Ease around forever; I had plans to make a mitered-square blanket with it. However, the mitered-square blanket has been languishing under the bed for months, and I had all these quilt pictures in my head, and I thought, "Scrap Log Cabin Blanket GO!" Two squares later, I haven't even made the slightest hint of a dent in the Wool-Ease. Not even a little. A square is about 80g, and I have a total of 2315g. It looks like I'll be able to make roughly 28 squares (without reclaiming the wool from the Powers of Two blanket); it would take 36 to make a queen-sized bedspread. On the bright side, squares take up very little space around the house and are easy to do while reading. On the not-so-bright side, I bet I won't be finished with this until September. On the other bright side, September is when blankets start becoming needed around the house...

Anyway, here's the other way in which quilts have insinuated themselves...

I own this beautiful book of cross-stitching patterns by (or inspired by?) Paula Vaughan -- one for each month of the year. This is the very beginning of the February quilt. I'll need to get more floss if I'm going to finish this one, but I can get along for quite a while just on the floss out of the stash.

...sigh. It sometimes seems like I'm never going to dig my way out of my stash or finish any projects.

But at least I haven't started quilting yet.

Would anyone be interested in beta-testing the Epic Bracers pattern? It will take about 100g (200 yards) of worsted-weight yarn, and is knit in the round.