The kettle-dyed Wool of the Andes wasn't quite colorfast (I am still not sure all the loose dye came out, though it does not appear to have shed onto Grant's shirt), so it took forever, but eventually the sweater was complete. And today (his first day back to work since the blocking was finished), he even wore it. Awwwww. What a sweetheart.

Grant models his birthday sweater!

(Yet another bad cell phone picture, this one from the iPhone. We're just out of luck on cameras lately.)

He appears to like it! We're currently pondering which sweater will be his holiday sweater from me. Now that I've gotten started making sweaters, I don't seem inclined to stop. :)

It's also hard to say, because some days I work on a project for ten minutes here, half an hour there, and other times I am literally slamming out stitches as quickly as I can for as many hours as my hands will put up with it. That's been the case yesterday and today (although today I had to go run errands as well). And 4.5 st/1″ still knits up hella fast. So:

2009 Birthday Sweater, Day 2

It's almost impossible to tell scale and progress here, but the sweater is finished (save for some weaving under the armpits — sixteen stitches per side) up to about 3″ above the armpits. The cables on the sleeves are going to go all the way up to the collar, and they're mirror images of each other. (I am very proud of myself for not having screwed them up yet; cables are kinda new for me, but now that I've been working them on this project and they've been turning out so well, I'm hungry for MORE MORE MORE.) All measurements indicate that this should fit, although if it's a bit snug, this particular sort of wool will block a little big.

I've been experiencing so much pattern scatteredness lately — I keep starting projects and starting projects and starting projects, and finishing nothing. It's nice to have something where I've just been able to work it and see it coming together almost instantly under my hands. I just hope it looks as good on Grant as it does on the needles, because it is really looking pretty great on the needles!

Also, I'm sort of envious. Now I want one of these for myself! Except that my version would need side shaping, bust darts, and a V-neck, and I'd probably give it cables up the front, too. Maybe next project… hmm… maybe I should order yarn. >_>

I do not know how the seed stitch blanket project is going; haven't measured it lately. It is still on the needles, and I am approaching the end of The Largest Single Continuous Ball Of Yarn I Have Ever Had In The House (due to splicing from the project I unraveled to start the seed stitch blanket). It is finally cold enough I'm excited about working on it, though!

I have several (new) pairs of socks on the needles, and am thrilled about them all. :)

However, my whole world is currently being consumed by the following project. (Sorry for the horrible cell phone picture; our camera batteries are all refusing to recharge…)

Grant's birthday sweater, 2009, after one day of work.

This is what's known as "last-minute birthday insanity". My adorable Grant is more than a little hard to shop for, and I had thought I didn't have time to knit him a birthday present. But then this morning I had a flash of inspiration, figured out what I wanted to knit, and knew I had the right yarn in the house for the job. What's more, that yarn knits up at 4.5 st/1″, which makes it a quick-knitting project.

I had never really thought of myself as a fast knitter, but it seems that when a deadline is looming and I have a dozen episodes of Enterprise to catch up on, I can really move. ^_^ The sweater currently has half its body (up to the armpits) and 1.25 sleeves (up to the armpits); the worrisome part is that at the armpit point, I will be about halfway done. I still think I can do it, but a.) not secretly (which would require me to stop knitting when Grant is home), and b.) I won't be able to have it washed and blocked by the actual birthday, which is unfortunate, because it will definitely require both (the yarn is not quite colorfast).

On the other hand, he seems quite enthusiastic about it, and the cable on the sleeves is the only complicated thing about it; the rest is so easy I can do it while reading. (I've been reading the World of Warcraft comic — I didn't realize the Varian Wrynn storyline was written by Walter Simonson. o_O And I've been reading Rise of the Lich King by Christie Golden and only haven't been throwing it across the room repeatedly because it's on my Kindle, which wouldn't tolerate such treatment.) I'll still take good-luck wishes, though. XD

Seed Stitch Blanket progress

The blanket is actually quite wide — wide enough to cover a queen-sized bed. The real question is… how long is it going to be?

Bam! (said the lady). Not just 20", but 24"!

I made it to 24″, and I've still got a TON of yarn left. Maybe next week I'll be up to 36″ of blanket!

I'm also seriously considering moving my destashing criteria from weight to yardage. That's going to be a little harder to count, but I think it'd be worth it in order to make me stop avoiding socks and shawls (which I love, but which don't weigh much).

I have a fingering-weight scarf on the needles, but no pictures of that just yet! I've ripped it out and restarted it several times, but I think I'm finally happy with the (tubular) cast-on…

So in the interests of actually getting more knitting done (I'm never going to knit down my stash at this rate), I'm going to see if I can get back to at least once a week, checking in and giving an update on what I've been knitting!

Lately it's been a grey and white bulky-weight seed-stitch blanket. No pattern, just miles and miles of seed stitch. This is actually what I'm in the mood for right now. Something easy, simple, soothing, something that can be done while I read, write, edit, watch TV, or in downtime during my raid.

Seed stitch blanket, 11/06/2009

I have started and restarted and restarted this blanket over and over and over. It has been many things. This is what I've liked best, and more importantly, what I've liked knitting the best. It's now 14.5″ of seed stitch. I'd like it to be at least 20″ by the next time I check in; wish me luck!

It'd be hard to be happier with this project than I am. It's not just the fact that I knit three-quarters of it while I was in Hawaii (:D), it's also the awesome blocking squares from KnitPicks. These are 1′x1′ squares that fit together like puzzle pieces to create whatever size blocking surface you need. They come in six-packs, so I bought two sets, thinking that'd probably cover me for my shawl knitting. I might actually need a couple more, but they're very easy to store.

They look, feel, and even smell (!) like brand-new flip-flops. Go figure. The foam is non-absorbent, which I think is going to reduce my drying times somewhat — having wet knitting on top of a wet blanket just means you have to dry out both things, not just the knitting, which was never quick. I'm definitely looking forward to blocking more projects on these!

I'd pick up more KnitPicks accessories, but I already have a ball winder, and I really have all the stitch markers I'll ever need. >_< The sock blockers… maybe. I've gotten along fine without them so far, but they're the only things I see on their accessories page that I'd use (and don't already have). But if you don't have a ball winder already, it might be worth picking one up from there — that's a really good price!

Yes! Erica's Shawl is done. :D :D :D It's just waiting for my new blocking squares so I can block it, weave in the ends, and send it off. \o/

I worked on just one project: Erica's Shawl, which got to this point:

I hope it's about 33% done, but it's impossible to tell right now. I'm just going to keep going until I run out of yarn. :)

How ready am I to be back to normal life? Only so ready. We're unpacked (except, I guess, for our carry-ons), almost all the laundry has been done, but oh God, I don't adjust to time changes well! I went to bed around 11 last night and woke up around 7:45, and while that ought to be plenty of sleep, internally I have no idea what time it is. It could be 5:30. It could be 8:30. It could in fact be 3:30pm, and I would not argue the point.

I was relieved when I saw a quote from the Yarn Harlot (and now I can't remember where I saw it; perhaps on her page-a-day calendar!) saying something to the effect of "No matter how big a sock you're knitting, people will always ask if it's a baby sock." I was once knitting a sock for Grant in navy blue, and when I told the waiter who'd asked that I was knitting a sock, he replied, "Oh, a baby's sock," as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. I boggled at him. This was eight inches of ribbing and a turned heel the size of an adult man's foot. A not-too-small adult man's foot. What baby has feet like that? But apparently people are just crazy, and assume that all knitting is for babies or something. It wasn't just me!

Lace mystifies people, but most people take it in stride once I tell them I'm making a lace shawl. Now that Erica's Shawl is big enough, I can hold it up and people see what I'm talking about. They do ooh and ahh quite a bit — and deservedly so; the yarn is lovely and the pattern is clear even before blocking — but most people just get it and don't keep at me about it.

(It's about twice that long now, and I seem to have finally begun to make a dent in the yarn.)

Today's waiter was… a little more aggressive. He said it looked like I was almost done — dude, I have a foot and a half of shawl! I said no — it was barely started, and it'll be six feet long (I hope) before it's done. I held up the ball of yarn I was working with.

Waiter: How many of those will it take to be six feet long?
Me: Just the one.
Waiter: *jawdrop*
Me: *smugly* That's why it makes such great vacation knitting — it packs up really small.
Waiter: *grabs bag of yarn, gauges weight* *to my UTTER SHOCK AND HORROR, attempts to GRAB NEEDLES OUT OF MY HANDS to feel weight of shawl*
Me: AUGHN NO NO NO NO STOP!!!
Waiter: *still pulling, oblivious to fact that I am in the MIDDLE OF THE ROW* Oh, I just–
Me: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! STOP! *tries to keep stitches on needles, grabs back*
Waiter: *finally lets go* Oh, I was just trying to see…
Me: *desperately checking needles and praying I haven't lost hours of work — guess who doesn't work with lifelines?* I need to take care of this now.
Waiter: Oh! Sorry! Sorry! *departs*
Grant: Ack, sorry about that.
Me: Whew. Didn't lose any stitches. Sheesh!

What on earth do you guys do when that happens to you? Does that sort of thing happen? I tell you what: I have shown off lace shawls to many people, and nobody has ever attempted to yank knitting out of my hands before! (The waiter was very lucky Grant tends to pay for meals, I'll say that.)

It's strange to be an introvert who does such attention-getting things. Knitting garners a lot of attention. Reading on my Kindle garners a bit of attention. People see me doing unusual things and get really excited and interested in them. I don't mind explaining it, and I don't mind answering a few polite questions about my knitting. But holy cats! Just because I'm showing you my lace does not mean you can grab my needles out of my hands! Crazy! o_O

Tomorrow I'm going on a trip to the summit of Mauna Kea, where there will be stargazing. The trip's a long one, so I plan to bring my knitting. I'm not sure how much attention I'll get, but I do know I'm not going to let anyone close enough to grab my needles. It had never occurred to me I needed to keep a close grip on them before — no one's ever done that before — but now I know.

So what it is you guys do when people ask you about your knitting? What would you do if someone tried to grab your needles out of your hands? How do you answer people who are just saying crazy stuff, like asking if your gigantosock is for a baby or insisting that you're crocheting when you're knitting on five dpns?

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:

–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!

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!

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!

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.

I finally used up the last of this yarn making a 1×1 rib scarf. I'm afraid the wool isn't very soft (it ain't Merino; my best guess is it's Romney, since that's what most sheep are there), and even a soak in Eucalan didn't make it really soft, but I could wear it out if it were cold, which is what I plan to do with it. :) I'm not giving this scarf to anyone; it's mine! It's a souvenir from the best vacation I've ever taken, and I'm really happy with it. :)

I made it out of Cascade 220, with a heathery light grey for the main portion and some really nice print/hand-dyed yarn for the red and green. I had some leftover blue and yellow for the little lines…

…which, in retrospect, and if I ever do argyle again, I'll do them in duplicate stitch; doing them as part of the pattern was an unnecessary pain in the butt! But for my first argyle project, I wanted to do it the old-fashioned way. Next time I'll save myself the work! :)

One thing I used that was really, really helpful was — well, were; I used several — fish-shaped yarn bobbins from Pony. I ordered mine from SpinBlessing.com, where they're now on backorder, but if you poke around you may be able to turn them up. The shape is great, and the bobbins are substantial enough not to feel like they're getting all bent out of shape as I wind yarn around them. :)

All in all, a wonderful success — the only problem now is that I don't have a stocking of my own! But I've got an aran one in the works. :)

And it was lovely! :)

I had it done in plenty of time to ship, but ended up procrastinating and then bringing it with me to the wedding. I hope she liked it!

The only thing I'm not loving is that I'm having trouble figuring out how to calculate gauge for it. I tried a normal stockinette test swatch with the proportion of my head (56 cm) and got something that seemed like it was about five triangles too big. Then I tried cutting out those five triangles and got something that wouldn't fit a newborn. I'm working in between now. When I get it figured out, ZOMG! ENTRELAC FOR EVERYONE!!!!!! I'm thinking scarves. I'm thinking mittens. Socks. Felted and non-felted bags. Pot holders. Entrelac is good for everything!

What I'd really like, after my holiday knitting is over, is to make myself a big fluffy soft warm wool blanket. :) We'll see if I get the time to do that before winter ends. I really hope I do!

Step 1: Begin knitting.
Step 2: Knit about 40 rows.
Step 3: Realize that I'm knitting the wrong number of stitches.
Step 4: Rip out about 40 rows.
Step 5: Repeat step 1.
Step 6: Knit about 80 rows.
Step 7: Realize that I left something out around row 40.
Step 8: Repeat step 4.
Step 9: Repeat step 1.

With any luck, I have now gotten all necessary mistakes out of my system and will be able to continue without error (well, much error) from here. But sheesh. Twice?!

In other news, I picked up a copy of Knitting For Peace by Betty Christiansen recently. It's a collection of stories about charity knitting organizations, with a few patterns gathered up for some of those organizations. The point isn't the patterns, though, it's the ideas and suggestions for sending knitting to charities. It's full of great ones, and instead of giving out addresses and contact information that could be out-of-date by the time you get the book, they provide websites and email addresses that are more likely to be updated regularly or at least stick around indefinitely, as well as giving some tips on how to Google for the information you might need to track down more local charities. I'm really excited about the prospect of dovetailing my stashbusting with some charity knitting — next year!

For a rainbow sheep,

* Cast on in purple.
* Change to blue after row 9.
* Change to green after row 13.
* Change to yellow after row 21.
* Change to orange after row 27.
* Change to red after row 33.
* Head is red.
* Face is black.
* Inner legs/tummy, hooves, tail and ears are black.

(I also sewed a small piece of gold ribbon on this one to indicate that he is a married queer sheep.)

For a Bi Pride sheep,

* Cast on in blue.
* Change to purple after row 13.
* Change to pink after row 27.
* Head is pink.
* Face is dark grey.
* Inner legs/tummy, hooves, tail, and ears are all dark grey.

Despite the simplicity of this design, this is probably my favorite sheep mod of the bunch. I adore my Bi Pride sheep! :D :D :D

How about a sheep that evokes that Jayne Hat look? A sheep like this walks down the street, you know he's not afraid of anything!

* Cast on in orange.
* Change to yellow after row 13.
* Head is yellow.
* Face is orange.
* Inner legs/tummy, hooves, ears, and tail are red.
* Make a small (I use a 3/4″ pompom maker) pompom for its head.
* Optional: Instead of a red tail, make a larger (1″) pompom for its tail.

You can overlap colors from the rainbow sheep to make the Jayne Hat sheep if you like, though I used a darker red for Jayne than I did for the rainbow sheep.

What about a Leather Pride Sheep?

* Cast on in black.
* Change to navy after row 5.
* Change back to black after row 9.
* Change back to navy after row 11.
* I cast off in black on rows 12 and 13, but this is nitpicky and optional.
* Change to white after row 17.
* Change back to navy after row 23.
* On rows 27 and 28, I cast on in black, but this is nitpicky and optional.
* Change back to black after row 29.
* Change back to navy after row 33.
* Change back to black after row 38.
* Finish body in black.
* Head is black.
* Face is white.
* Ears are white.
* Inner legs/tummy, hooves, and tail are black.
* For the heart, make an appropriate amount of I-cord in red, then sew on in a heart shape. It will felt down into a more heart-like shape than it looks when you sew it on, but you can shape it with your fingers once it's out of the washing machine if it needs a little more help.
* Optional: Find something to use as a collar — I got this piece of vinyl-with-rivets ribbon from the quilting department at my local craft store. o_O (They have ones in camoflauge, too.) Or perhaps you could find a hat!

But those of you who are comic book fans will understand the title of the post once you see this:

A pair of superheroic sheep, made as a gift. :)

I'm not much for sewing, so the costumes were rather difficult for me. And I used a nice permanent marker for the emblems on Supersheep. However, the modding (this is the FiberTrends "A Felt Flock" pattern from Bev Galeskas once again) was quite fun!

Baatman is made entirely in black, all parts. No tail, as it would interfere with the cape. Not too tough!

Supersheep, however, is cast on in blue. I switched to red for rows… I want to say 8-13, with the legs maintained in blue. Then blue for the rest of the sheep, white for the head, red for the back hooves, white for the front hooves. Ears in white. No tail, as it would interfere with the cape.

I have to say, when I started taking pictures in the window of the craft room, I didn't realize what a neat background that would give me. I really like the leaves. :)

In celebration, today he got a gorgeous sweater and a surprise pair of socks. :D Here are the socks:

Yarn used: Knit Picks Essential Oak Kettle-Dyed. Needle size: 2.5mm.

The pattern's improvised to be ribbed down the leg with ribbing on the top of the foot as well. I finally have his stitch/row count down (75 rounds ribbing, 60 rounds on the foot, 64 stitches), which means I can improvise in the future. I'm curious how the ribbing on the top of the foot will work out for him; I think it'll be a nice way to keep the sock snug.

And of course, the sweater!

My dashingly handsome husband in the sweater:

Yarn used: Swish DK in Merlot Heather. It took just over 13 balls, just under 14. It's knit in the smallest size. Grant normally wears a medium. It blocked just a wee bit longer than anticipated.

and a closeup of JUST the sweater:

and detail on the pattern:

I am pretty absurdly proud of the seams:

It looks great on the inside, though I don't have any pictures of that. But I would show this to any knitter in the world and be perfectly proud of my work, inside and out.

And because he loves me, he was willing to pose with a sheep to fit the theme of my knitting blog:

This is the Wondrous Woven Cabling (by Nancy Marchant) pattern from Arans & Celtics: The Best of Knitter's Magazine, and it was lovely to work! I also want to credit, as always, The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques by Nancie Wiseman. For you Ravelers:

I love you, honey! Happy 8th anniversary, and may we have as many years together as life extension technology can possibly provide us! :)

The sleeves are done and blocking and still damp. I keep wanting to go in there with a hair dryer, but I know better! I'm so close to having Grant's sweater done — and he's been going to work in sweaters this week, because it's been so cold! Aaaaaaaa!

I said before I was going to use all that lovely Cobblestone Heather we bought for a sweater for me, but screw that. If he's willing to wear sweaters I make after all this time, I am so knitting him another one.

I originally had — I thought — sixteen balls of Merlot Heather. I have 12 ball bands for sure from used balls, and there's a half-ball left with which I'll be doing the neckline and sewing seams, plus two full balls after that. That makes 15 — which means either one ball has gone entirely missing, or I tossed a ball band before I realized I wanted to hang on to them for easy yarn tracking (which is more than possible). I'm going to assume that I did, in fact, use up that missing ball, which means I have now used 13.5 balls of yarn on this sweater, or nearly 14 balls (nearly 1722 yards) of DK-weight yarn by the time I'm through. Whoa. That's a lot of yarn! Almost a mile! You can imagine I'm pretty thrilled about what this does to my stash totals (using up nearly 700g for a single sweater = WIN).

It does leave me with a little extra yarn, with which I'll probably make a hat of some kind. :) But not until after I finish most of those mystery projects. Man, there are a lot.

The husband sweater is going really well. Front and back are done, blocked, and seamed at the shoulders and sides. One sleeve is done; the other's about 30% done. Once they're both done, I'll block them, and then I just need to seam them, sew them in, and do the neckline. Yay!

Note the difference in how the cables look unblocked vs. blocked. Big difference!

I've been going kind of crazy in the last couple of days. It's not that I'm tired of the husband sweater — I just have a lot on my plate for the upcoming months. First of all, I'm knitting a shawl for my cousin Kristen's wedding. (It's the first time anyone in my family has gotten married since me and Grant, so I'm excited, and I want to knit something beautiful and meaningful for it!)

After that, I need to be sure to knit my mom's traditional Christmas hat. (I knit one every year, but this time I'm using very exciting yarn and a brand-new pattern!) I know it's only October, but it's never too early!)

(I have, of course, cast on for both of these.)

I'm expecting yarn in the mail from another friend, who actually knows that I'm knitting for her because she was in charge of sending me the wool. :) When I get that, I'll have a shawl to cast on.

I may or may not have time to knit a couple of toys for a friend of mine from WoW — I won't know until the shawl, the shawl, and the hat are done. — ETA: Don't have time, unfortunately!

And I went kind of nuts and thought "Oh, hey! If I rush it, maybe I can make socks for my anniversary for Grant!" So I've been working on that, too.

And did I mention I'm making sheep for charity?

I wouldn't mind knitting a _______ _______ _____ for my ______________, either, and if I finish my ______ ______ _____ or my _______ _____, I'll probably give one of those to my ___________ for _________ — but man, that's a pipe dream right now.

As you can guess from all the blanks, these are all surprise projects or secret projects, and many of the people I'm knitting for either know about this blog or get linked to it frequently via other sources. :) I promise I'll know what I'm talking about when the gifts are delivered to the people they're being knit for — but for the time being, blanks are the way to go. ^_^

(I did finish one of the charity sheep, but it isn't felted, stuffed, or sewn up yet.)

I do have one hint: in all the projects above, I'm using wool and silk and that's it. ^_^

It's not that I haven't tried. Oh, I've tried. However, perhaps part of the problem is that I was trying to knit him sweaters with leftover bits of Wool-Ease. Which is 80% acrylic, and not colors he was really excited by ("Hey, I have 14 balls of Woods print! You like Woods print, right?" "…").

So this time I made him grope my yarn in order to pick out a fiber, and we went to the website to look at colors together, and then I ordered some of the tentative first choice and one ball of the tentative second choice. Of course, that meant the second choice came in first, and so I ordered more of that. :D

Then we needed to find a pattern. And you know something that this whole process has taught me? Don't give people too many choices. Seriously. If I thrust three types of wool at him and say "pick one!", then it's easy for him to make a decision. If I gave him one ball of every kind of fiber in my stash, there's no way he could make a choice. Looking at colors wasn't tough — there were a lot of colors, but only a few were of interest. Then we narrowed it down to two — and again, it was very easy to make a choice between two colors.

As I was saying, then we needed to find a pattern. I suggested a couple different things — plain? Textured? Cables? Grant said that he liked Aran patterns. Armed with the knowledge that too many choices is kinda dangerous, I grabbed up my copy of Arans & Celtics, marked five or so patterns I thought he'd like, and showed them off. They got responses like "No", "No", "No", and "Hey, that's kind of neat", and finally "Oh! I like that — would you like knitting that?"

\o/ \o/ \o/

And so I have begun! I have completed the back piece and started on the front piece. At that point, it's two sleeves and a lot of seaming. In the interest of making the seaming really easy on myself, I have added two knit stitches of selvage per side on each piece. (In retrospect, I could have knit this in the round, but I was being cautious.) I'll want to block the pieces before trying to seam them. (I may end up blocking the back piece today, since it's done and I want to see what it'll look like blocked.)

The only alteration (besides the selvage stitches) is that I've done the shoulders in short-rows, and rather than binding them off, I plan on doing a three-needle bind-off. However, instead of just picking up stitches for the collar, I really did bind them off. I'm trying to remember who it was that pointed out that a bind-off at the collar is done for a reason, to add stability to a sweater. Ah ha! It was the Yarn Harlot. I have been there and done that with neck bind-offs, and I will not repeat that mistake this time!

So far so good. The sheep are helping.

Clearly the ideal project was… a scoop of fudge ripple ice cream?

No, seriously, I've been taking advantage of Ravelry's pattern finder lately. I did a search for any project that would take between 600 and 800 yards of an Aran-weight yarn, and came up with the Hemlock Ring blanket by Jared Flood. It's a lap-sized blanket with a center motif and a LOT of feather and fan extending out from the center.

I'm intrigued to see that many people managed to get a perfectly flat blanket out of the deal, and many other people had a very ripply blanket (like I did, although blocking helped). This is one of those lovely things about Ravelry — it's always great to see the different things different knitters come up with. :)

Mine, as I say, started very ripply:

and got better after blocking:

Cuddly and sheep-approved!

This marks the first time I've ever had to block a blanket. It's also the first blanket I've ever made that's 100% wool — no acrylic whatsoever. :) And I'm very happy to say that after a bath in Eucalan-enhanced water, it smells a bit of eucalyptus and a bit of damp sheep, but not at all like paint (the paint smell dissipated pretty fast once I started working up the blanket).

I will grant you, it is a somewhat schlumphfy-looking bag. It's basically a prototype. It was also something for me to do with the leftover yarn I had once I was done with the Deep Purple Sweater. And since it was made in a wool I probably won't use again (and may not even be able to find again), I'm going to be writing down the pattern not for this yarn, but for a much more accessible felting wool, Patons Classic Merino. (It shouldn't take more than I have left, which is a little less than two balls. I hope.) I don't have a lot of experience felting, so I even made a gauge swatch for this. And I'm glad I did; this yarn reduces by about 33%, whereas the Patons Classic Merino reduced by 22% width-wise, but only by about 5% height-wise. (You can bet that'll require some different calculations as I work up the second bag.)

I am very pleased with how close to my mental image this bag turned out to be, though! And the flap was a cinch. Between this and a felted wool trivet, of which I do not yet have pictures, I managed to use up the rest of the yarn I had left from the Deep Purple project, which makes me very happy, too. And I'm getting better with the photos, I think, even if they're all being taken in the same windowsill. Credit to Jared Flood and David Reidy — Jared Flood for the tip, David Reidy for the interview in which Jared gave the tip. (The tip was to use natural light, but try to get it sideways to your project rather than right behind it. It turns out the craft room windows are perfect for that.)

I'm really happy with it. It's made with Sierra Pacific Glenisla, a 100% wool, feltable yarn which happened to be the Yarn of the Month at my favorite LYS. The pattern, worked from the top down, was really easy to follow and involved no (!) seaming. And, most importantly for me, it fits properly! (I made the 40″ version; there's a smaller one at 36″, and it goes up to 56″.) I was a little worried about that, because I'm short, and knitting it for the first time, I had no idea how I would go about shortening the thing — it's not constructed in a simple manner, as you can see.

The yarn could be nicer. It's just a little on the scratchy side, and I'm going to try washing it to see if that helps any. As for the pattern itself, I'd like more waist shaping — another thing that I didn't have any idea how to implement the first time through. It looks kinda bulky from behind on me.

But ultimately, it makes me really happy. :) I'm really pleased with the way it came out, and I might be tempted to make it again at some point — but there are so many things out there I'd like to knit that repeating a project seems silly until I've gotten through some others. My Ravelry queue is 117 items long, for heck's sake! And I have three projects on needles, and two I haven't started that have early December deadlines.

I also have a bit of leftover yarn from this sweater project, and an idea in my head for a felted bag to make with it. I'm looking forward to seeing if I can make it come out the way it looks in my head. :)

However, luckily for this blog, the recipient (the person who's sewing the squares together) took some pictures of the squares as they came in! Hooray! And so here's the rest of the squares I made for the acrylic/synthetic blanket:

I got thirteen of those suckers done in a weekend, destashed all of my yellow, blue, and red Shine Sport, used up a bit of my Dark Horse Fantasy, and helped complete a blanket. :)

I have also managed to create six wool rainbow squares. Unlike the synthetic blanket, I'm not making squares with interesting stitch patterns; I'm just making stockinette squares and letting the color provide the interesting part. (I'm using leftover yarn from the rainbow sheep.)

Love comes in many colors.

It was ridiculously fun, and as the pictures prove, this is a good house in which to be a sheep:

Do I know what I'm going to do with this shawl? No. Orange is not really my color, so… no, I have no idea. And yet it's finished and it's lovely.

I am really quite proud of it. :) However, the urge to knit lace hasn't gone anywhere. I'm currently working on the Flower Basket Shawl and Mystery Stole 4 (which I'm doing in grey with purple beads, and will be taking pictures of as I work through the clues). Hurry up if you want to join the Mystery Stole 4 group — signups are going on through the 12th and then you're out of luck until the pattern comes out (and it won't be free then).

Anyway, in order to keep track of how fast I need to knit to make my target goal, I've made another spreadsheet.

(For those of you curious about formulas and such, it's a Google Doc!)

Since it spirals out from the center, I actually counted the number of stitches, not the number of rows, so as to be able to divide them out equally. There are over 92,000 stitches in the shawl! Will I make it? If so, it's going to be close.

Well, it turns out Sneaky Sheep has been going on missions. So far he's managed to infiltrate the study, while I was raiding Tempest Keep:

…the bathroom, as I was brushing my teeth…

…my bedroom window, as I was going to sleep…

…and now the kitchen cabinets!

(For fun and prizes, find the bonus sheep in each of those pictures. There are eight, plus an "extra".)

I do have other things going! I've been working on shopping bags, and two friends have graciously agreed to help me test a pattern. (It's crochet, requires about 300 yards of not-too-stretchy yarn, and roughly an H hook — mileage varies.) I'm also working on a shawl project, but it's a gift for someone; as such, I won't be posting pictures of it until it's complete and in the hands of the recipient. :)

Who eventually was joined by one grey sheep:

And life continued as usual. Then I got it in my head to make a rainbow sheep… and I bought some grey variegated yarn… and and and and…

And then I started knitting sheep for charity. Eventually the flock looked like this:

Yarn used for nearly all the sheep: Cascade 220. The camo sheep is made with Patons Classic Merino. Needle size: 6.5mm (US 10 1/2).

The front row have gone to their new homes, raising money for the California Marriage Equality initiatives; the back row… those are mine, and now I need to find places to display them. :)

Here's the sheep assembly line!

And a close-up of sheeps in progress:

Plus a picture of how they are size-wise as compared to a sheep that's been felted just once. Bear in mind the sheep is not stuffed — he'd look a lot bigger if he were!

The KnitPicks Options needles have been a godsend for this project. I just move the needle tips from cord to cord as I go — easy as could be!

I did start another blue/grey variegated sheep, but after working a couple of rows, I realized I'd rather be working on a color I haven't worked before. So I'll be casting on a camouflage sheep tonight. :D

I'm currently working on some Rainbow Sheep for a charity auction, but of course one of the sheep is staying home with me. :)

From left to right, we have the Original Felted Sheep (who I made very early in my knitting career), Boober Sheep (who came a few years later), and finally Grey Polled Sheep, Bi Pride Sheep, and Rainbow Sheep. I'm knitting five Rainbow Sheep to raise money for marriage equality in California — one of them has already gone out to someone who donated money to one of the marriage equality organizations, one of them is earmarked for another person, and three more are still being bid on. :) It looks like, all in all, I will have raised well over $150 in sheep alone (getting close to $200, actually). A custom knit shawl is currently going for $80, and the Jayne Hat Bag is going for $20. :)

I'm not going to be quite done with sheep with the end of the auction sheep, though. I'd like another grey sheep to go with the polled sheep, and I have a teal (!) variegated yarn that I'd like to make into sheep. I have one more "pride" sheep to go, too.

All these sheep are being knit with Cascade 220, which is one of my favorite feltable wools. (The horns on the Grey Polled Sheep are done in Lion Wool, which is also a nice feltable wool.) The pattern is A Felt Flock, by FiberTrends. Having now knit six of these sheep (with four more coming), I can honestly say I'm enjoying it a lot, and the short row shaping is ingenious!

(And this is why I was late on the last two posts. I have been knitting sheep practically nonstop for almost a week now, and I'm not done yet! Tomorrow, I'll get a post up on time, though — I'll be showing off the sheep assembly line. :) )

Yarn used: Essential Multi in Shale print. Needles used: …

Look! Zigzags! Awesome zigzags!

Sometimes, self-striping yarn totally breaks your heart. In this case, I couldn't replicate that pattern, even though I had another ball of yarn in the same dye lot. I tried six different needles in two different materials — no dice. I tried swapping needles as I went — no dice. At least I have a sheep to comfort me.

So this sock stands as a testament to the finicky nature of self-striping sock yarn — which I have pretty much Gotten Over, to be honest — and also a lovely practice sock. As it turns out, I did an afterthought heel for the first time on this sock, and I really like the way it turned out. Now I can refer to this sock when trying to figure out how much leg/foot I need for an afterthought heel, which is a bit more than I might have expected. And I really did like the afterthought heel — it seems to fit me much better than the standard slip-stitch heel does. Yay!

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight. Needle size: 4.25mm.

Pink Pads Sheep is confused about why I'd ever want to feature a project without her. She's that kind of sheep, you know; the sort that's about half wool (and polyester fiberfill), and half ego.

Oh, excuse me. She's now bleating that it's more like one-quarter wool and fiberfill, and three-quarters ego.

Now she wants me to go get her a nice patch of organic wheatgrass.

The things we do for sheep.

Here's what the MHR Shawl looked like before I blocked it. A lot of people think lace looks like crap before it's blocked; I think it looked pretty good, honestly. This is a very geometric pattern, and it's based on garter stitch, so it lies quite flat. Except for the border.

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Yarn used: Bare Merino Laceweight from KnitPicks. Needles: 4mm.

Here it is pinned out and wet-blocked. It was dry just in time for the trip!

And here it is in action. :)

It was perfect — the day was wet and cold, but we had to go outside anyway — had we not, we would have missed the ceremonial firing of the cannon!!! However, my shawl kept me dry and warm and comfortable. Yay!

Thursday: the finished Obama socks! I may dig up some pictures of me working on the Obama socks, too, as people took pictures of me knitting all weekend long. (Trivia: It does wonderful things for your ego when Oleg Volk says that pictures of you are cute.)

…work continues on the Obama socks; one sock down, one leg in progress!

…I started working on the Powers of Two blanket again!

…and the Meditation Knitting project continues, too!

Also, I frogged the Anya scarf; I could not deal with lace on every row and not just the odd-numbered rows. C'est la vie; I'll find another project for that orange laceweight, I'm sure!

So it's been a productive weekend/beginning of week, just not so much with the camera. Pictures to come on Thursday!

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Yarn used: Bare Merino Laceweight from KnitPicks. Needles: 4mm.

At 4.25 repeats, I'm still ahead of the goal for today — 20 rows ahead, according to Excel.

Yes. I am that kind of nerd. If I need to finish something on a deadline, I put it on Excel.

As you can see from the screenshot, I have exceeded my goal every day, although some days have certainly been better from others. The green rows are weekends, when I'm less likely to get things done as I'm spending time with SheepLad. :)

I am rather boggled by the lack of time left before I need to have this project completed, but since I'm on track, I'm not worried. :)

Anyway, here's the progress on the Many Happy Returns shawl:

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Yarn used: Bare Merino Laceweight from KnitPicks. Needles: 4mm.

YCHWM-Sheep has been bleating a lot of encouragement as I work through this project. For one thing, she's been keeping me on schedule! I'm currently 16 rows ahead of today's target, and will be knitting more tonight. (I admit that my Excel chart is also partially responsible for the ability to stay on track, but the sheep is even more important!)

As well as being invaluable in keeping track of my chart and keeping me on schedule, YCHWM-Sheep has been instrumental in helping me figure out when to stop knitting. It turns out that this particular lace pattern is just a touch too complicated to do while I'm tired, so at night, my sheep bleats at me when I tip over to "too tired to follow the chart".

And when I keep knitting anyway, she patiently helps me unravel the stitches I've screwed up so I can re-knit them. On the bright side, I've gotten much better at unraveling from the center of a project rather than having to rip all the way back… on the less bright side, I've had to do that way too many times so far. Gah.

There is, however, a difference between being "too tired to knit lace" and "too tired to knit". I thought to myself: what have I got on the needles that's easy, easy, easy?

Well! I have the Obama socks!

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Yarn used: Navy Essential from KnitPicks. Needle size: 2.5mm.

These are called the Obama socks not because they have the Obama logo on them, but because I started them at the Democrat caucus in Washington, back in March. As is usual for me, the first sock was slow-going (two and a half months, sheesh — but this is not a record by any means), but the second sock is likely to be much quicker. I always think "must finish second sock! Then I'll have a pair!" Plus socks are nice and portable, which means I can take them out to dinner (they like tacos).

And because I couldn't resist a few more pictures of this wonderful, adorable sheep, here:

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This is Cute Little Dorset Horn Sheep, who is not the only Dorset Horn sheep in my collection, but is the only one who looks like this. :) He is so cute it boggles the mind. He normally lives near the television, in a flock-of-two with Librarian Sheep. Like many of the sheep that have been featured on this blog, he's from New Zealand! He traveled all the way home with me and has said that he really enjoys the States. He expected to miss seeing so many sheep around, but apparently he feels right at home in my house, where you can pretty much find sheep (and we are not talking a small amount of sheep) in every room.

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Yarn used: Bare Merino Laceweight from KnitPicks. Needles: 4mm.

I'm just about through two full repeats (out of 5.5), and I'm nearly a full day ahead of schedule — the only problem being that I haven't actually made my quota (35 rows) except for two out of the five days I've been working on it. I may be ahead now, but will I stay that way? CUE SCARY MUSIC!

The pattern's getting easier to follow as I go; I'm spending less time counting and more time just matching up holes. The reverse rows are all lightning-fast, since they're all knit. And the geometry is looking gorgeous. This is just making me want to knit tons and tons of lace, which, of course, I have plenty of ahead of me. ^_^ Good thing, eh?

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Yarn used: Bare Merino Laceweight from KnitPicks. Needles: 4mm.

"You're-Coming-Home-With-Me" Sheep is a meticulous sheep, as you can see. She's carefully inspecting my shawl for any mistakes. So far she's caught all of them, and I haven't had to do any unfortunate ripping back. :)

How did she get such a long name? It was Easter, and I was at a Hallmark store. There was a display of stuffed animals, seasonally appropriate, stacked on top of a shelf at my-eyes-height. I took one look at YCHWM Sheep, grabbed her by the face, said "Yep! You're coming home with me," and proceeded to snuggle her until I was ready to check out. She is cute, adorable, snuggly, and gets far too little attention, because she lives (with another sheep, usually) in a sheep basket (yes, a basket that is also a sheep (of which we have three (Easter is like that))) on the subwoofer. Poor darling.

So she'll be getting more attention over the next few weeks as I work on this.

Now, I know I can finish a lace shawl in a short amount of time. I did the Sheep Shawl in 14 days, and even if it's not bigger (and I kind of think it was), it sure felt bigger. Plus I had several days of faffing about and not working on it much.

For this one, I have 18 days to work (I'm now on day 3), and I'm ahead of schedule. I'm planning to wear this when I go to a friend's wedding — assuming it's cool enough, of course. It'll be late May in Montana, so it's hard to say. (Hence why I want the shawl — if it's cold, I don't want to have to drag out my coat.)

I found this on Ravelry when one of my friends linked to it. (Thank you!) It's lovely — so geometric! But the picture in the book wasn't very flattering, so I would never have noticed it if I hadn't seen the sample pic on Ravelry. As you can see, the geometric pattern is already clear in it, but it's going to look SO DAMN GOOD once it's blocked. All other projects have been pushed aside, and who cares if I'm currently blowing my finished-to-started ratio? (It's down to 1.3, goal for the year is 1.5.) There's tons of year left!!

Yarn used: Lily Sugar 'n' Cream. Needles: 4mm.

The three sheep pictured are the Sheeplinglings. Um… maybe I should have had Sheepling (their father) pose first! They are Precious Moments sheep. Precious Moments makes some weird-looking, but strangely adorable, sheep.

Lately I've been having an urge for complicated projects, probably because my daily 1.5 hours of guaranteed knitting time has been devoted to less complicated projects (things I can knit on the bus). At first, I thought I could satisfy this urge by picking up a languishing WIP:

Yarn used: Gossamer, Rose Garden, Knit Picks. Needles: 3.75mm.

The sheep modeling this scarf-in-progress is a Sleepy Sheep we got in New Zealand. She squeaks if you squeeze her. AWWW!

(Incidentally, if my mom or my mother-in-law are reading this, my nightstand totally looks like that all the time and I did not have to move any chocolate wrappers off it to take this picture.)

This is the Candle Flame scarf. And it turns out there's something to be said for putting a pattern away for a month or two several months close to a year, because you might start off working with a chart that looks like this:

and, when you pick it up again, discover that there is a NEW PRINTING of the chart that looks like this:

(This, btw, is a free pattern from Knit Picks — don't squint at the pictures, download the thing yourself! See how nice the new chart is?)

Seriously, that first printing was the worst chart I've ever worked from, bar none — I'm really glad they reprinted it.

After a couple of days of trying to work on this, though, I realized that what I really wanted was to cast on new lace. Okay. I tried three different patterns before settling on Anya:

Yarn used: Shadow, Campfire, Knit Picks. Needles: 3.75mm… I think.

The sheep in this picture is another of our New Zealand sheep. Look how cute! I don't think this sheep gets enough attention.

Naturally, after I cast on Anya, Interweave Press released The Top 5: The Best of Interweave Knits Readers' Choice Awards as a free download (until May 15th — if it is after 5/15/2008, you're out of luck, guys, so hurry!), and I was overcome with the urge to cast on a Cable-Down Raglan. Only in grey, because everything I knit (that I plan to wear) is grey. Okay, it's not, but I love grey.

Yarn used: Zitron Polo, Grey. Needles: 3.75mm.

This would be Ovistine again (I'm reasonably sure she's modeled on the blog before). I'm 14 rows into the first repeat on the center (and sleeves) cable, and so far so good. It is just possible that I didn't swatch as thoroughly as I should have, but if it's coming out oddly, I can rip back and restart. I have a ton of this yarn, so I'm glad I finally found something to do with it!

Other things on the needles now: Baby Surprise Jacket #2 (bus knitting), Obama socks (I keep not posting a picture of those — it's okay, they're boring navy socks, nothing to see here, move along), and a few hibernating projects (like the Powers of Two blanket). But I'm happy; I got my post in on time today. ^_^

There will be pictures, but I seriously forgot about posting today in the wake of finishing a work project yesterday and getting my epic flying mount in World of Warcraft. Oops! Thursday!

ETA:

Here's the This Is A Triumph wrap sweater!

Yarn used: Microspun, Royal Blue and Mango. Needle size: 4mm.

I was actually told by one person that those are Denver Bronco colors — so I guess this could be a Denver Bronco sweater as well as a Portal Sweater. Makes no difference to me! I'm happy it's finished. :)

However, today I've got the finished pictures of the Grey Lacework Sweater:

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Yarn used: Wool of the Andes Bulky Hand-Dyed in Storm, a little less than 5 skeins. Needles used: 7mm.

It fits like a charm, though I had some issues with the neckline. Necklines are still, apparently, my bane. This one is more or less square, but looks more like a scoop neck on me. I worked back and forth on the shoulder and back stitches for about 6 rows, continuing to decrease at the raglan points, then worked back and forth without shaping for another four or so rows. Then I picked up stitches around the gaps made by not knitting the front stitches (three per side was enough, and luckily, the lace pattern hides the holes neatly), knit one row around, and bound off. In the front, the bind-off was fine as-was, but in the back, I bound off and decreased 1/3 of the stitches as I did it (so the bind-off alternated k1 and k2tog in order to keep that neckline from being saggy in the back). Worked like a charm, though the neckline is no longer what I'd call "stretchy". OTOH, I'm not sure I wanted it stretchy.

Baabet is so enamored of this sweater she keeps trying to convince herself she can block it to her own measurements. I'm afraid that just isn't the case, Baabet! Sorry!

I'm down to just 10 projects on needles at this point, which of course means I'm starting up something new. I have several skeins of leftover Microspun, and I'm going to be putting them into a project here shortly. Just needed to swatch first. More and more lately, I'm finding that I'd rather swatch to a gauge that's appropriate for the yarn and needles (needles big enough to provide appropriate drape), and then adjust the pattern to fit the yarn rather than adjusting my yarn and needles to fit the pattern. It's working out well enough for me so far!

Once you've thrown out the entire pattern and you're not even looking at its measurements anymore, you are not really knitting the same sweater. I borrowed the lace pattern. That was it. Here's how we're doing so far, with a bit of aid from Baabet:

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Yarn used: Wool of the Andes Bulky in Storm. Needle size: 7mm.

I'm getting 5.5″ to one pattern repeat horizontally, and 1″ to one pattern repeat vertically (more or less, with blocking taken into consideration). I might add that this is a wider gauge than the pattern calls for, on smaller needles. Yes, I am a Loose Knitter. ^_^

Introducing Baabet properly, she is a lovely pink sheep by Ty, part of the Ty "2.0″ collection that, I gather, is out there to compete with Webkinz. Basically, you register your plushie online, and you can then play games (and the website stores your toys, too, so you have a "collection" online as well as off).

I would have bought all three if I had found them (there are purple and white ones, too), and I really didn't buy them for the online component. :D But the games are adorable. Because there are three sheep toys, there are also three sheep games! They're very, very cute.

But back to the sweater! I've got quite the curvy figure, so I need waist shaping. But how to accomplish waist shaping in lace? I had two options:

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Fill in the spots with stockinette, or fill them in with yarnovers? I finally decided that the yarnovers looked better. If only I'd decided that earlier. :) But this is knitting up so quickly I can't complain about much. My next big decision is going to be what the heck to do about sleeves!

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease (worsted) in Black and Pines. Needles: 5mm.

As expected, I didn't have enough Pines to finish this project. Also as expected, I was able to use black to cover the shortfall. The black yarn is on the shoulders in back and front, stopping 13 stitches short of the edge of the garment (thus maintaining a Pines-colored shawl collar all the way up). I had no trouble grafting the garter-stitch at the top of the collar, thanks to all that practice with my Bog Jacket. :)

Dorset Horn approves of my colorwork! She's obviously a very discerning sheep. ^_^

After all this, I get to start Cherie Amour (and I'm very excited, because it's getting toward the time in the year where it'd be too warm to wear it). I just need to wind up some yarn and then swatch. :)

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sportweight in Wheat. Needles: 3.75mm.

Total yarn for this project: say 4 balls of Sportweight to be safe, which is maybe 1500 yards. Beautiful Sheep, I couldn't have done it without you!

Of course, this project is not without its flaws. For one thing, I did not realize that all those short rows were not just tapering the sleeves (and I have to say, they did a great job of that), but also turning the sweater into a V-neck. The original plan calls for a straight high collar, and if you look at what I did to disguise that, you'll see it right away:

As you can see, what I did was just to pick up stitches at the appropriate V-neck place. It came out looking pretty good. I think I should probably sew a couple lines of thread through the fake inner plackets and then cut them off — if I'm going to do more work on this thing, that is.

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Yeah, it's sort of mutated, and when I put it on, one side's longer than the other (and I have no idea how that's even possible, because it's the same number of rows exactly). But it's mine, and it's finished. I did it. :) And, hey, I think it fits quite well — it's the right length on body and sleeves, it buttons over the breasts, it has waist shaping. I can only go up from there.

And meanwhile, I have some more work on the Powers of Two blanket:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight. Needle size: 4.25mm.

Pretty spiffy! The squares just above the big green square on the left mark the upper left-hand corner. I'll be expanding to the right to fill it out and define the upper edge. When it's wide enough, it'll be time to start it growing down.

It turns out that I have a TON of the "white" (actually natural), light brown, dark grey, and red yarns in my stash, so I'll be using those fast and furious as I go. I'm hoping I won't run into problems with having nothing but those colors by the end of the blanket.

Last but not least, I've dragged something out of the UFO (unfinished objects) pile:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight, "Pines". Needle size: 5mm.

The adorable sheep modeling this vest is Dorset Horn. She (yes, she — in the Dorset Horn breed of sheep, both rams and ewes have large, impressive horns) comes all the way from New Zealand! One of my many sheep from the New Zealand flock. In New Zealand, the tourist shops are full of sheep. It is nothing short of a woolly paradise.

The vest looks like a whole lot of nothing right now, for which I can only apologize and say: It is a lot of nothing right now. It's simple garter up to the armpits, which is about one inch further than I've got it at the moment. Sorry! It'll look more interesting next time, especially if I run out of yarn and have to substitute in some black. Most importantly, this comes from the UFO pile. I have no idea how long it's been sitting around unknit, but it's no short amount of time. It definitely predates the beginning of the year. Not only will knitting this up net me a vest, it'll get my ratio up.

Current stats for the year:
15 projects started up new
22 completed/tossed/frogged projects
11 completed for the year to date (yay!)

WIPs:
7 have been on needles since before the beginning of the year
14 currently in progress/hibernating

And the vast majority of this year's projects have been from stashed yarn (almost a 5:1 ratio of stash:new), which is also making me pretty happy. (Of course, that doesn't count the yarn that came into the house for projects but hasn't been used yet… which bumps that ratio down some. But I'll take my victories where I can get 'em!)

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease sportweight in Wheat. Needles: 3.75mm.

I've got one half done completely, except for edging and perhaps notions, and the other half is nearly there, too. Strangely enough, all those short rows are leading to a V-neck — which I don't mind, but it's a surprise, I'll say that!

I'm not sure what I'll do for fastening. I may do a zipper. Buttons are probably out, although I might be able to create buttonholes if I do an I-cord edging. The fit looks good so far, but I'm sure a second edition of this sweater would look even nicer. I'm pretty happy with the sleeve length and the waist shaping, though!

Meanwhile, the Powers of Two blanket is going along, as is the second project from Mindful Knitting. I've got a few more squares done on PoT, but nothing really worth taking pictures of. And as per the last time around on Mindful Knitting, I'm waiting until I have a finished project to post any pictures.

Tuesday! Will I have a finished sweater, or will weekend mean spending all my time with the adored SheepLad? I'm betting on the husband, but I think I'll get the knitting — if not the edging or the fastenings — done. :)

Instead of knitting sweaters, I have been knitting scarves. Let me point you at the following:

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Yarn used: For the Meditation Scarf (red/orange/yellow), Shepherd Multi in Flames by Lorna's Laces, needles 7mm. For the Triple Rib scarf (grey), Wool-Ease in Oxford Grey, needles 5mm.

The sheep modeling the Meditation scarf (on the left, red/orange/yellow) are a pair of wooden sheep with a wool outer coat. Are they doorstops? Footrests? Outdoor sheep? Honestly, I have no clue, but they've been around for years. For a while there, they were my circular needle holders, but that looked messy. And for a while, they lived in the bathtub upstairs, startling both me and SheepLad when we would open the shower curtain to find… SHEEP! (It was the middle bathroom; we don't shower there very often.) Now they live in the library, because we really cannot think of anywhere to put them, but neither do we want to release them into the wild. They have been part of our flock since we lived in Indiana. :)

I have been working on the Meditation scarf since January. I've decided to try meditative knitting, based primarily on the book Mindful Knitting by Tara Jon Manning. The first project is a garter stitch scarf, and the suggested yarn is variegated. I decided to splurge and buy myself some nice new yarn for the project, since all my variegated yarn is acrylic. When I saw the Shepherd yarn from Lorna's Laces (which, by the way, is superwash — not that I can really imagine machine washing this thing, but you could), I thought "ah ha! An excuse to try this yarn out!"

Well, it turns out the Shepherd yarn is gorgeous, glorious, beautiful, fantastic, and lovely to work with. I couldn't be happier about it. :) I took a ton of pictures (one per day's work — I did not successfully get to the meditation knitting every day or it would've been done far sooner), and have linked you to their album. Click on the image to see!

The sheep modeling the scarf on the right — the Triple Rib (grey) scarf — is named Ultra Soft Lamb. That's what F.A.O. Schwartz (in partnership, I can only gather, with Russ Berrie, for there is a smaller sheep that looks just like her made by Russ directly) named her, and that's what we call her. She is, in fact, ultra soft, and she's one of the few sheep who really isn't very anthropomorphized at all. She's got hooves, four legs… lamb shanks, so to speak. But don't worry! She is not on the menu. (Lamb is never on the menu around here. Would you eat kitten? How about puppy? This is how I feel about eating lamb.)

The Triple Rib scarf is based on a pattern from a stitch dictionary (k3 p3 on the right side, p1 k1 on the wrong side), and while I love the pattern to little bits, I'm just becoming less and less fond of Wool-Ease as time goes by. I know the sheep are giving it their best! I know they're contributing all the sheepy glory they can! But, alas, there's not much that can be done. It's still mostly acrylic, and I still don't care for the stuff!

But I care enough about it to try to use up the rest of it in another blanket project. Behold, the Powers of Two blanket:

Yarn used: So far, five different colors of Wool-Ease by Lion Brand. Needles: 4.25mm, subject to change without warning.

You may look at that sheep and think, "Oh, another sheep." But no! That's a special, glorious sheep. That's Pink Pads Sheep (ignore the tag, which reads "Muttons" — what an undignified name for such a wondrous sheep). Pink Pads has the distinction of being the sheep with the largest ego in the entire flock. In my flock, that's one hell of an achievement. All my sheep are awesome, and all of them know how great they are, but Pink Pads sort of takes it to a whole new level. When you hug her? She knows it's because she's the best sheep in all the world. When she sits upon the shelf, she tends to climb to the highest vantage point (on top of the other sheep, don't you know) and survey all the bedroom around her, thinking to herself And they got all this just to impress me! How excellent of them.

Pink Pads claims that she is the only sheep cool enough, fashionable enough, to model such an awesome project as the Powers of Two blanket, and thus I have acceded to her wishes and given her the modeling job.

The Powers of Two blanket is a mitered square project. It's a scrap blanket, all in all. My self-imposed restraint is that each square must have a number of rows/ridges equal to a power of two. So 2² (4), 2³ (8), 2⁴ (16), 2⁵ (32), and so on. (So far the largest squares have 32 ridges, and the smallest have 8. I will probably go as high as 64 or 128, and as low as 4.) The fact that I can work on this project away from home as well as at home is great — I can seam or work in squares as I progress. There will never be trouble finding a place to put them, because each square can fit perfectly in other squares. If all else fails, all I need to do is make tiny squares to fill in room. :) I look forward to seeing how this shapes up; I have a lot of Wool-Ease I can put into this blanket.

Yarn used… you know this already, right? Wool-Ease sportweight in Wheat, size 4mm needles.

Even Beautiful Sheep is having trouble making it look interesting. I've finally cast on the extra sleeve stitches, though (I did short rows first). Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of a sweater to show you.

To make up for that, here are two completed dishcloths that have been sitting in a box in my yarn closet for months.

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Yarn used: Sugar 'n' Cream solids, size 4.25mm needles.

Finally, finally, finally. Say hello to Little Ty Sheep, returning to model the dishcloths. Awww.

The yarn closet is looking better now! Well, actually, it's looking much the same (full of yarn). However, I have found the rest of the craft room, and I am delighted. The unfinished objects now have a place. The finished objects that may or may not find their way to Etsy have found a place. And I got rid of another couple of projects in the bargain — one frogged, several tossed. This delights me — and bumps my completed/frogged/tossed-to-new ratio all the way up to 1.6 for the year. Yay!

Here's a picture of all the Wool-Ease I have left. Some people stash Homespun and then try to get rid of it; for some it's Red Heart. For me, it's Wool-Ease:

Yarn exhibited: A shit-ton of Wool-Ease in every imaginable color. Most of it is Worsted, a little bit of it is Sport.

Exhibited along with the yarn is the cutest Kleenex box cover ever made. I could try to make something out of crochet or plastic canvas, but I couldn't beat that, and I don't think I can be bothered to try. That Kleenex box cover comes from New Zealand (you can't really see it, but there is a New Zealand logo on its front). Those are two of the sixteen to eighteen sheep that came back with us from New Zealand in 2005. :) Yes, I brought home a flock. (Also some souvenir yarn. Most of it is still in the stash. I almost don't want to knit with it! Some of it is gorgeous, though — hand spun, even — so someday I'm sure I will.)

What am I gonna do with all that Wool-Ease?, you may be wondering. I'm going to make practice sweaters. I would like to make sweaters that look like they belong on a human body, and this is where I'm gonna start. The Bog Jacket 2 is actually part of this project, being made out of (so far) two balls of Wool-Ease sportweight. (It will take about three by my current estimations… maybe a little more, maybe a little less.)

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease sportweight in Wheat. Needle size: 4mm.

I've reached the part where I put in the yarn that separates the front of the sweater from the sleeves, and I've been doing my short rows again. This time I've decided to just say "the heck with doing them at random". Instead of being random, they form a V pattern that goes in sort of a reverse-raglan shape from the center of the back towards the arms. When I go "up and over", I'll reverse the shaping on the other side. I hope it turns out okay; the whole idea is to get nicely-shaped sleeves, and I'm just at the point now where I've cast on (invisibly) for those extra sleeve stitches. Pleaseworkpleaseworkpleasework!

Speaking of working, look how hard Beautiful Sheep is working at her modeling job! Ignore the part where she's nibbling a small piece of grass out of the waste yarn in the short row detail picture. She's helping, really!

Well, one day I left it at Qdoba. We called to make sure they'd picked it up, and they had, but when we went to get it the next day, it had disappeared. Oh, well. I lost a half-knit pair of socks, a grey bag, and a tape measure. Luckily, I carry my wallet in my jeans.

Once upon a time, I made a Jayne Hat. I had a lot of leftovers, since I'd used Cascade 220, and a hat doesn't take nearly 660 yards of yarn.

So, since the Booga Bag had been so fun, and I had the colors left over…

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Yarn used: Yellow, orange, and red Cascade 220, felted once. Needles used: 6.5mm.

Lily says hello and remarks that the Jayne Hat Booga Bag is not a terribly comfortable sleeping bag. It's just not sheep-shaped.

This project has been lying around for nearly two and a half years. It was finished, all the parts were felted, I just hadn't assembled it. Today, realizing that I'd done next to nothing on the Bog Jacket, I decided to go ahead and finish this up for the blog post. Hey, a Tuesday/Thursday schedule is turning out to be pretty good for me. ^_^

As a bonus, this got me up to a ratio of 12:13 completed-to-cast-on-new projects. That's a 0.9 ratio. Not the 1.5 ratio I'd like to have for the year… but I'm getting there!

On an unrelated note, I've been listening to knitting podcasts lately. For those of you who may be curious about which podcasts I subscribe to, here are the ones I've got so far:

• Cast On. I haven't caught up on this one yet, but I've listened to the first few episodes and am looking forward to more!
• Knit Picks' Podcast. I started listening to this back in March or so; it was the first knitting podcast (and, in fact, the first podcast) I'd ever listened to. I'm behind by a bunch, but look forward to catching up.
• Knit Spirit. This is a bite-sized podcast, which I love. I'm nearly caught up on this one, and I'm really enjoying it.
• Pointy Sticks. I've only listened to the first couple of episodes, and this one seems to be permanently on hiatus.
• Ready Set Knit. I listened to the first show, but the second show contains a knit-a-long, and until I can sit down to do the knit-a-long, I'll be putting this one on the bottom of the listening queue! (Audio knit-a-longs: AWESOME IDEA.)
• Sticks & String Podcast. This one's a podcast by "an Australian bloke who knits". I've only listened to the first episode so far, but can't wait to hear more!
• Subknit. I've listened to the archives for this one and am all caught up. This is a podcast about knitting and kink, and it's a lot of fun.
• YarnCraft. Definitely looking forward to listening to more of this one — I love the idea of hearing what life is like around Lion Brand, even if I'm not using much of their yarn anymore! >_>

I hear a lot of good things about Lime & Violet, but I haven't yet tracked that one down. Any other knitting podcast suggestions?

Yarn used: Sugar 'n' Cream cotton in purple. Hook used: I (5mm) by Susan Bates/Boyes).

I like loofas. I use a loofa daily. When I saw the crocheted, cotton bath puff, I thought it was kind of a neat idea. And it was indeed fun to crochet! It also used most of a ball of cotton yarn, which was handy — I have tons of that put away in various places. But in terms of usability, not so much. It's heavy, doesn't absorb water well, and doesn't lather much. I'll stick with washcloths. Well, really, I'll stick with my loofa, but sometimes I use washcloths when traveling.

The sheep loofa is decorative only. I wouldn't want to risk destroying a SHEEP! by showering with it too often! And no… that isn't the only sheep loofa in my collection.

Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sprinkles in Burgundy Heather. Needles used: 5mm.

Here's another of my "use up the Wool-Ease" projects. This one's a farrow-rib scarf, and I have to say, farrow-rib is becoming one of my favorite stitch patterns. This is probably kid-sized. The knitting part was finished ages ago; it took me about a month to bother sewing in the one remaining yarn end. Oops.

Not-A-Blanket-Either Lamb is happy to be featured on the blog; her twin brother showed up to model the March of Dimes Blanket, but she hadn't gotten a turn in the spotlight lately. :)

Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sportweight in Wheat. Needles used: 3.75mm.

The second Bog Jacket is working up a lot faster than I'd expected! Given that there's an extra 70 stitches on the needle due to the gauge change, I was expecting it to take forever to get to this point. Instead, I've nearly gotten it done up to the armpits, where I then get to do interesting stuff again. The garter's not so bad, though! It gives me something to do while I read, watch movies, and so on.

Beautiful Sheep is happy to be returning, and bleats that she will volunteer to keep modeling Bog Jackets for as long as I keep making them. I'm not sure if that's a vote of confidence or not. *eyes sheep suspiciously*

So I've decided to modify my stashbusting/WIP-completing goal for the year (seen here).

• Old goal: "work or throw out one in-progress project for every two new projects I start"
• New goal: Complete, frog, or throw out 1.5 projects for every 1 project I start.

1.5? Well, it's a ratio, and the point is merely to finish more than I start (rather than to finish only half as much as I start, as was the previous goal, or to finish as many as I start, which is only keeping even). So far, my ratio is 10:13 (or 0.8:1), which is not so great. But I did toss or frog four projects I was never going to complete over the weekend, which bumped up my stats and cleared out one of the secret caches in which I store my stash. Ideally, by the time we hit the midway point for the year, I will have cleared the yarn caches out of every room except the yarn room (which is where the yarn stash belongs), and the yarn room will be clean instead of having yarn piled on the futon.

Don't get me wrong; I love having a stash. But my stash contains a lot of yarn I don't love, and I'd like to be able to rotate out yarn I don't love in favor of yarn I do love. I'd also like it more organized. And, oh yeah, on Ravelry. But a smaller yarn footprint is one step towards all of that (or so I hope), and thus I am going to try to keep completing projects just a little faster than I start them.

The end of a bog jacket, as modeled by Beautiful Sheep.

Now, I know I should listen to Elizabeth Zimmermann when she says things like "12-13% of [k]". I know this! But I looked at my knitting and I looked at my arms and I thought, Oh, geez, 16 stitches won't be nearly enough to make full-length sleeves! So I cast on 40.

A rough estimate about how many stitches I am over the mark? 24. *facepalms*

Well, there was that. There was running out of yarn. All these, oh yes, I was prepared to deal with. But then… take a look at the picture.

Take a look at where the tan waste yarn is on the left, and at the beautiful grafting job I did on the right.

*&@$*&@$!!! I grafted the wrong *&*&*&%#% part! TWICE!!! (Because I had to rip out the first grafting due to doing it wrong.)

OMG, y'all. There are times it's worth struggling with a project to make it come out right, and times when it's not. When you've got sleeves that are about a foot too long, that's not a time to struggle the rest of the project into shape.

Now, I do want to make another Bog Jacket. I really, really do. The side shaping was fantastic, and the garter actually looks good draped against my body. Seriously, this has potential, it does.

But not this time. And this is why I decided to make my test sweater projects out of stash yarn — so I wouldn't feel bad when I threw it the hell away.

I'll be swatching and casting on again today, but this version of the bog jacket is toast.

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Yarn used: The now-discontinued Merino Light in maroon (#8 on the color card), Lion Brand Wool-Ease (worsted and sport-weight doubled) in Black. Needles used: US10.5 — 6.5mm.

The gist of the sweater is that (shaping aside) you're knitting a square, and where the tan waste yarn is, I'll separate sleeves from body and later weave things together. (I'll take more pictures of the process when I get there.) I did discover that I'm running out of maroon yarn faster than the project is reaching completion, so I've dug some black Wool-Ease out of the stash and started using that as a stripe on the top. Hopefully it'll look good… and I won't run out of that before I'm done. I suppose I could dig out ivory Wool-Ease at that point, but I do hope it won't come to that.

I'm not really a big fan of knitting with Wool-Ease (though I don't mind crocheting with it) due to the high acrylic content. It just hurts my hands to work with it, since there's no give. However, this should flush a bit more of it out of my stash!

Smile for the camera, girls!

Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Lily White, Royal Blue, and (now discontinued) Silver Grey. Hook used: G (4.25mm).

The pattern (as noted last time) is from Lion Brand (registration required), but now that you can see the finished elekk, you can see all my modifications. It's the legs, the tusks, the helmet, saddle, and banners that make her an elekk, and I left off a lot of the detail. Still — very cute, no?

 Also in the works: a new scarf (same as the old scarf):

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Yarn used: SWS [Soy Wool] from Patons. Needle size: Supposedly 4mm, from Boyes, but it is a LIE. They're closer to 4.25mm.

Last time I posed ÃœnterSchëpenfloppen with the scarf; now I'm posing the scarf with FloppenCousin, a close (but larger) relative. The pattern is the same (Farrow Rib), and the colorway is the same (Natural Earth). This scarf is being done by request, and unless someone else I really love wants something made out of this fabric, that's it for me — it splits even more than Microspun, which is saying something! Still, it's very soft and looks really nice.

Yarn used: The now-discontinued Merino Light in maroon (#8 on the color card). Needles used: US10.5 — 6.5mm.

Beautiful Sheep bleats hello!  Here's our check-in to see how I'm doing on the Bog Jacket. Answer: Quite well; I'm nearly up to the bit where I split off the arms and add some more stitches to the arms. It stopped being mindless garter when I had to do waist shaping (waist shaping is my friend, since I have a quite large bustline and quite small waist), and I'm sort of sorry for that, as I was enjoying having something I didn't have to look at at all. But it seems to be working out nicely, and the yarn is much, much nicer-looking on 6.5mm needles than it was on 4.5mm needles.

Thursday I hope to have a finished SWS plus a bit of progress on that Bog Jacket.  Maybe something exciting like the arm-dividing bit?  We'll see.

Yarn used: Lion Brand Wool in Blue and Orange. Needles: 4mm.

This sheep hails from the mall. She comes from a baby store, and is actually the third of her family to join the flock. There's another one who looks just like her but happens to be twice her size, and there's the original, who has been in the flock just over a year, and is holiday-themed. She has earmuffs (though, strangely, they are not on her ears) and a nice red-and-white scarf. I may need to knit scarves for the other sheep sometime soon.

The pattern… well, it's being improvised, and it's double knitting, which is new to me. I'm not sure how it's going, but at least I haven't ripped it out yet.

Yarn used: Essential in Shale Multi, KnitPicks. Needles: 2.5mm.

I cannot for the life of me remember where this sheep came from, which makes me think it was probably a present from my parents. :) I just keep looking at this picture and going "AWWWW!" So. Cute.

I wish I had even the faintest clue what I was doing with the socks. So far I got nothin'. I'm sure I'll figure it out once I'm done with the ribbing section.

Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Silver Grey. Needles: 4.5mm.

This sheep plays music, much like Twinkle Sheep, but I can't remember what song. I know it's not "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." It might be "Mary Had A Little Lamb." (A not-very-surprising number of musical sheep play that one.

So this project has a bit more story than most. A friend of mine recently had a baby — two months early! While in the midst of reading about her adventures as the brand-new mom of a preemie, I got a knitting newsletter whose charity of the month happens to be a knitting program for premature babies. I'm not knitting for that specific charity — it's in Iowa and I was hoping for something more local — but I did a bit of research and found that the local chapter of the March of Dimes collects blankets and other knitted items for preemies, and that Microspun is one of the preferred fibers, as it's very soft and machine-washable.

I have issues with acrylic yarn. It hurts my hands to work with it, and I'm not fond of it. However, like most knitters, I cut my teeth on it, and so I still have some left in my stash here and there. I happen to have just enough of this to make a nice blanket (and, honestly, might have enough left over to make some tiny preemie caps), and I'm very happy to be able to get it out of my stash. (At some point, I may break down and collect all my leftover acrylic and take it to Goodwill, where knitters who are looking for a bargain and don't mind acrylic will hopefully find it and take it home.)

At any rate, the pattern is a very simple k10/p10 (repeat for a total of 160 stitches), 14 rows per square. I eyeballed the height, but that should be about right — they may be just a little long. I plan to do a couple of rows of single crochet around the edge when I'm done with the knitting; it curls just a teeny tiny bit, since the squares are stockinette, and that should even it out some.

Musical Sheep is in fact sitting on a crocheted project of mine. I can take a picture if anyone's interested in an ancient crocheted blanket. It is really very cool-looking. :)

There are still three projects hiding around my house that I haven't gotten onto the blog, so if I don't make significant progress on my current WIPs by Tuesday, that's what you'll be seeing. >_> With any luck, I'll finish up the blanket, at least, and maybe pick up another one of my languishing WIPs.

I think I sent out only one of my pre-made scarves. Oh well.

So here are the scarves I finished in the last month or so:

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Yarn used, from first to last: Patons Soy Wool in "Natural Earth", 3 skeins (primarily because I wanted to match colors seamlessly), size 4mm needles.  Schaefer Yarns' "Little Lola" in Georgia O'Keefe, 1 skein, size 4mm needles.  Lion Brand Wool-Ease Sprinkes, Green Heather, 5mm needles.  Cascade 220 Quattro, 2 skeins (with lots of leftovers), size 4mm needles.  Cascade 220 Superwash, 1 skein, 5mm needles.  Patons Classic Merino in Forest, 1 skein, 4mm needles.

Lest you think these are all the scarves I'm working on, I also have one "traveling" knitting project on needles and one garter stitch scarf I'm doing as a meditation/knitting project.  Oh, and I finished another scarf, whose picture has not made it into this colleection.

The stitch patterns: Farrow rib, 2×2 rib, garter, 2×2 rib with pompoms, broken rib, 2×2 rib. The traveling project is triple rib.

The sheep who are being so kind as to model my projects are, from first to last: ÜnterSchëpenfloppen, a Steiff sheep from Las Vegas; Twinkle Sheep, who has a wind-up music box in her back; Agnes, from the Auckland International Airport; Sweetest Softest Lambie, from Bath and Body Works in the Redmond Town Center; Lavender Sheep, an aromatherapy sheep with a warmable pouch in her tummy, from the Discovery Channel Store in Bellevue, WA (before it closed); and Woolo, who hails from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. All of these are cherished parts of my sheep collection. :)

Scarves are awesome for travel knitting. A pair of needles, a ball of yarn, and I'm off to the races. I can crank out one in an afternoon (the finished one not shown here is one of those), and they often don't require a lot of attention. A 2×2 rib scarf is a perfect thing to take to the movies; the last of those scarves was knit almost entirely during "I Am Legend". (No, I don't need light to knit by for a project like that.)

I travel-knit when I'm out to eat, when I'm at the movies, when I'm over at a friend's house, when I'm on a long car ride, on the bus, or any other time I know I'm going to need to fill more than a few minutes. The only trouble with using scarves for this is that it tends to leave me with a lot of new projects, which sort of goes against my New Year's goal. Still, I've been keeping that goal, having finished four projects, thrown out one WIP I was never going to finish, and started only… counting the travel knitting, right?… five. I'm at parity!

Giving myself permission to toss WIPs I'll never finish is really handy. I'm hoping to do more of that in the upcoming weeks. Who knows — it might clear out enough of my stash closet to get the yarn currently living on the craft room sofa into the closet itself. Maybe. >_> <_<

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Knitting bag for me!

Look at all the sheep. :) The sheep next to the bag is Ovistine, who is named for one of my most-often-played WoW characters. Then there are the sheep on the bags, and finally there's the sheep in the bag — a measuring tape! Pull her tail and you get a measuring tape; squeeze her tummy and it retracts. Somehow I have only two of these sheep, but they are of course my favorite measuring tapes.

Here's the hedgehog I knitted, in various stages of completion:

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Yarn used: Cascade 220 for the dark brown, Wool of the Andes in Chestnut for the paws, and Lion Brand Fun Fur for the "spines".

As you can see, felting shrinks a project a good deal (and here we have a good argument for using the same sheep throughout the photography process!). The pen sheep… I have no idea where she came from, but it's not the only pen/sheep combination I have. This one lives in the study, in a pencil cup, near other desk sheep. :)

Next up: Holiday (and later) scarves!

First up, there's the Regia 4-ply mouline socks in brown. (You may remember them from the post on WIPs or this post on socks.) They're finally done! Here are a couple of pictures…

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Yarn used: Regia 4-ply mouline in brown. Needle size: 2.5mm.

Modeled here by a mom and two lambs, and then that small Ty sheep, who bleats that there should be some continuity in pictures of sheep and projects; I'll try to take pictures of projects with the same sheep throughout all the parts of their creation.

Then there's the pair of brown socks that I found 1/4 of the way done in a drawer, oops that I just finished. These are for me, and took a surprisingly short amount of time once I got them out of the drawer.

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Yarn used: Essential by KnitPicks, in Cocoa. Needle size: 2mm.

Modeled here by a Russ Berrie sheep I call Woola; she's part of a family whose tags all proclaim them "Woolo", but seems much more a ewe than a ram, and anyway we have several Woolos. It's good to be individual, even in a flock. :)

Now, as for goals for the new year:

I've decided I want to start working up some of the stash. I have a very nice room in my house devoted to stash yarn, and a lot of nice little boxes to keep yarn in. Yarn should, therefore, not be taking over the rest of the house. (A lofty goal that I bet few of us, craft room or no, can actually achieve.) In the interests of working with the stash (and after all, I love the yarn, or why else would I have it?), this year I plan to:

• work two stash projects for every one new-yarn project

• work or throw out one in-progress project for every two new projects I start

This gets sort of complicated when I have an in-progress project that needs another ball of yarn (that's new yarn, but it's a WIP! But…), but I'll figure out how to work it as I go.

The two projects above are languishing WIPs, which means I could start up to four new projects under my own rules. ^_^ But I have so many WIPs hanging around — and I finally seem to have the desire to finish them — that I'm just going to hold onto those "new project" vouchers until I can't resist anymore. :)

I also have a non-knitting-related goal for the year: a fitness goal! This year I'd like to get into shape and run my first organized 5k. In fact, I'd like to run a lot more than one. :) For every organized 5k I run this year, someone's getting a sheep. I'll be donating a sheep to a family via Heifer International every time I finish an organized 5k.

How am I doing so far? Well, I'm working through the Couch to 5k running plan. I'm halfway through week 4, although I've actually gotten as far as week 7 in the past. I'm really motivated this time around, and I look forward to tracking my progress. I'll be updating the fitness goal page as I go, so check there for updates. :)

Ta da! I have a finished pair of ankle socks. The leg length is perfect — 4″ seems to do the trick, even though it looks far longer than ankle-height on the needles. I am quite pleased with them, even though I had to rip back parts of the second sock twice. Both times were a matter of symmetry, which is something I don't normally have to do for the plain socks I make, but becomes more important when you're working a pattern of some variety.

Anyway, now that these are out of the way, I have two other pairs of socks to finish and a shawl to bring out of hibernation. The timing couldn't be nicer on these socks, though. It's cold today, and I am happy to have a finished project and a warm pair of socks on my feet.

Yarn used: Essential by KnitPicks, in Burgundy. Needle size: 2.5mm.

Douglas bleats that she's happy to be back, and promises to convince me to model the socks in a slightly more interesting fashion when I have them finished.

It's a pretty standard pattern — 2×2 rib down the leg for four inches, then one of those heel flaps where you do s1 k1 across and p across the next row. Ribbing continues on the top of the foot. Toe is kitchenered.

I actually found this pair of socks in a closet, with about 2″ done on the second sock. I was immediately overcome with the need to finish the second sock, so despite the fact that I have two other pairs of socks in progress — not to mention a shawl, dammit — this one got bumped to the top of the queue.

Two other pairs of socks in progress: one of them has been resurrected from the knitting queue, where it's been langushing a while. It's a simple pair of socks, this one for SheepLad. Made of a brown "mouline" yarn from Regia, it's an attempt at recreating his favorite pair ever of handknit socks.

Yarn used: Regia 4-ply mouline in brown. Needle size: 2.5mm.

Small Ty Sheep returns (from the post on Current WIPs, which are not so current anymore), bleating insistently that she didn't get a finished project picture, either, and therefore deserves another shot at the spotlight. Since I like to keep my flock happy, I went ahead and posed her with SheepLad's socks-to-be. (Sock-to-be?) We'll check in with her again when I've made some more progress on the socks.

After a few projects with 2mm sock needles, 2.5mm feels huge. And to think I used to work exclusively on 3mm Inox dpns. :) My last pair of socks — no picture yet — is another pair of ankle socks in a white/black ragg yarn from Regia. I think that one's on 2mm needles, but I'll need to check again when I'm taking pictures.

Last time I mentioned I was working on a mystery project. It's not that much of a mystery if you link right to it, though, and now that the project is done and in the mail, I feel good about posting about it. So:

Helmet Liners, for Operation: Helmetliner. Yarn used: Brown is Chestnut, Wool of the Andes, KnitPicks; Olive is Deep Olive, Classic Wool Merino, Patons; Grey is Pearl Grey, Lion Wool, Lion Brand.

The sheep so nicely modeling the helmet liner is Bridal Sheep, who spent several years wearing a "Bride-to-Be" veil that I had somehow gotten when I was engaged to SheepLad. The veil eventually got passed to another of my friends, and the sheep… you know, I'm not sure if she ever did get married. She's a very heavy, sturdy sheep, and so she spends a lot of time in the summer sitting in the doorway, making sure our door doesn't slam shut.

This was an awesome project. It's quick, it used up some stash yarn (okay, I went out and sampled two kinds of yarn that weren't in the stash because I was curious how they were to work with!), and it's for a good cause. The pattern took a little bit of fussing at the very end, but for the most part it was very easy. I ended up doing the decreases with a combination of the two-circulars method and the magic loop method, as it turns out, and oh man, I might not want to do the magic loop for socks (too much work), but I love it. I might have to keep it in mind for small things like hats and such in the future.

After the helmetliners — five of them! — I wanted to start up the Sea Turtle project from Kath Dalmeny's World of Knitted Toys. But the truth is, I wanted a tortoise, not a sea turtle, so I decided to start improvising my own pattern:

Yarn used: Essential sock yarn from KnitPicks in tan, brown, and black.

The sheep there on my desk is a tiny little plastic sheep, possibly related to Pokemon in some way. It was a gift from my dad! It lives on the desk full-time, near one or the other of the monitors.

I suppose you can't really see the scale on this project, but that's sock yarn being knit on 2mm needles. As a result, it was hurting my hands a bit, and I was improvising the pattern, and it was making me slightly nuts, so in a fit of desire to do something that didn't require a pattern…

Yarn used: Trekking XXL, as if you can't see that!

I started socks. I like ankle socks, so I can get several pairs of socks out of one large ball, or one pair of socks for sure out of a smaller ball.

The sheep so happily modeling the sock and the sock yarn is a little black-faced Suffolk ewe named Douglas. Why is a ewe named Douglas? I don't know. I'm sure she's a girl, but her tag proclaims her name to be "Douglas", and unlike the sheep I have named "Muttons" and "Jiggles", I don't think that name's objectionable, even for a ewe. So she's named Douglas. That's all right; my favorite fictional astrophysicist genius is really named Meredith.

But the socks, the socks. You know, strangely enough, I don't have second sock syndrome. It's the first sock that trips me up. If I finish the first, I'm very, very motivated to finish the second, because then I'll have a pair. Until the first is done, though, I just have yet another knitting WIP.

In this case, thwarting my own desire to do something pattern-free, I decided to experiment with a different kind of heel shaping. I'm doing an afterthought heel on this one, which I've done only a couple of other times before, ever, and I'm not sure how I'll like it. What I really want to try out is a short row heel, which I think would be terrific, but I haven't found good instructions for that yet, and I'm not ready to strike out on my own!

Hopefully next time I'll have a finished pair of socks and some more progress on either the Flower Basket Shawl or the Tortoise. Happy bleatings!

*
To the left, pre-felted hedgehog; to the right, post-felted/stuffed/face-added hedgehog! Same sheep in both pictures for size comparison. Yarn used: Cascade 220 for the grey wool, an inadvertent scrap of Wool-Ease for the black, and I'm afraid I can't recall what the eyelash yarn is. Eyes and nose are the small plastic kind that you poke in from the front and secure with a button thingy.

I'm terribly pleased with how he came out. He's cute and soft and fluffy!

The sheep in these images is a Russ sheep, one of my favorites. He's about a handful worth of sheep, and usually lives on my bedframe. :) I can't remember where we got him, but I think he's a post-Seattle sheep.

Now for the other thing I've been working on (in addition to the Flower Basket Shawl, which looks much the same as last time):

Yarn used: KnitPicks Wool of the Andes, Chestnut. A little over a skein so far.

It looks kind of like a misshapen lump, doesn't it? Well, hopefully it'll be out of that uncomfortable adolescence soon and headed toward the finishing stages, because I've got yarn for about four more of these in that brown, plus one or so in light grey and one in drab olive (all different 100% wool yarns). What is it? I'll give you a hint in the form of a link. Next time I should have it done, and the next one will probably be on needles.

The sheep in this picture is another sheep from Russ Berrie. Russ makes wonderful sheep! This sheep always seems to be offering a flower (and he's not the first sheep in the collection who looks like that). I think it makes for a very spring lamb-type look, but it decidedly isn't spring anymore! Indeed, we are getting into winter, and I plan on getting socks going again soon. SheepLad needs warm feet! :)

Though this is a longtime member of the flock, I'm afraid he's a sheep with no name! I am simply calling him "Small Sheep" in the gallery. There are, of course, more pictures of this project in the October 2007 gallery.

This project has been in the works for a while. I've wanted to do this shawl ever since I saw it in Cheryl Oberle's "Folk Shawls", and I know I cast it on eons ago, but when exactly? I'm not sure. At any rate, it only picked up speed once I'd taken a break from the Mystery Stole, which languished and languished and languished, but I finally blocked the sucker on the 24th.

For a while there, I really thought the (Not) Black Shawl was going to be on my needles forever. It starts from the center and spirals out, so you're knitting progressively more and more stitches until your head threatens to explode. Luckily, mine never did. Whew!

I used a number of needles on this project. I started out on DPNs, then moved to 3.75mm Addi Turbos, then changed to 3.75mm Addi Turbo Lace needles, then finally ended up on KnitPicks Options 3.75mm needles, and stayed there, switching out the cable and eventually ending up on a 47″. Of these, I have to say that the Options were my favorites. I'm liking them even better than the Addis right now, and that's saying something.

I'd originally wanted to use the Rose Garden colorway because I'd tried it out before on a Pi Shawl and found the spirals of variegated color really endearing. Unfortunately, I really don't like the way it came out on a square shawl. The spiral effect makes for an optical illusion that makes my nice square look kind of crooked. I'm sure most people won't even notice, but it makes me a little batty. This, too, will not be the shawl I keep, and if I make it again, I'll be making it in a solid color.

What else is on needles? Well, a pair of socks that's languishing, and a potential blanket project in which I'll be knitting squares. Apart from that, though, my thirst for lace has not yet given up:

Yarn used: KnitPicks "Shadow" in Jewels Heather. Needles: 3.75mm Options Harmony.

It's the Flower Basket Shawl from this post, modeled this time by Zodiac Sheep. Zodiac Sheep is a little Ty sheep that's meant to represent Aries the Ram, and the year of the ram and such. However, being by Ty, it is not threatening, but rather fluffy, made of pastel colors, with a little bit of glitter. He's a diva ram, that's for sure. I love him. :D

As you can see, it's grown a bit since the last time. I think I had three chart repeats done that time; now I have eight and am working on the 9th. I just wish I could commit the pattern to memory; it doesn't seem to be sticking so far. It's short — ten rows, five of which are plain purl; 10-st repeat — but that doesn't seem to be helping me just yet. In any event, I'm enjoying this pattern a lot more than I expected to! The only catch is that I don't know how long my yarn will hold out. I have just two balls of this stuff, and while I've barely made a dent in the first, a full-size shawl will take an awful lot more than 8 repeats, and since this is one of those patterns that gets bigger every row, I won't be able to count my repeats at the end of the first ball and say "Okay, X number of repeats minus one for the edging." I'll probably just start adding a lifeline every repeat when I hit the second ball — with the Options needles (and that little hole for the key), that should be easy enough. Tip of the needles to Ginger, who passed that idea along to me. :)

The sheep posing in this picture is Barrel Sheep, who was a Christmas present from my parents one year. She's actually one of the more popular sheep among houseguests; she's just the right size to be an armrest or a pillow on the couch, and has been used as such by many, many visitors. She is named Barrel Sheep partly because of her shape (quite barrel-like) but partly because she does excellent barrel rolls, usually at the hands of SheepLad.

I am delighted to have this blocking job finished! It took us a couple of weeks to get the house cleaned up enough to even contemplate grabbing a section of the living room floor for blocking, and then it took me another week to get up the oomph to go and do it. This is a basic wet blocking job (soak the shawl in water for a half-hour, then lay out and pin down), but it's also by far the most elaborate blocking job I've ever done.

My first couple lace projects, I didn't have any kind of blocking items other than straight pins. However, I eventually got some lovely blocking wires, and this is the first time I've really gone all-out and used as many as I darn well needed. So I used large-gauge blocking wires on the sides of the V-section, the V of the V-section, and the top of the wing section. Medium-gauge wires were used for the inner lines of the V-section and the sides. Another large-gauge wire was used for the dividing line. Fine-gauge wires were used to block the curve. I think it looks pretty great!

The basic (not) black shawl continues apace, nearly finished by now. I daresay I'll have it done by the end of the week. After that, it'll be back to the flower basket shawl, and then I'll think of some other lace project to knit, probably. I've been really into lace lately; I just need to make a lace project for myself. I haven't done that yet (and I'm not keeping this one).

I also have a nearly-finished project in the works. It just needs a few notions and it'll be done. This one has a deadline of Saturday, 'cause I want to show it off to the nice people who got me the pattern for my birthday. :)

Basic Black Shawl (yes, I know it's not black) in KnitPicks' Gossamer (Rose Garden), on Addi Turbo lace needles, size 5. Pattern from Cheryl Oberle's Folk Shawls.

is actually going to be much, much larger than you ever contemplated, and may indeed take the rest of your natural life to finish… that's the day you should start a new shawl.

Flower Basket Lace Shawl in KnitPicks' Shadow (Jewels Heather), on KnitPicks Options, size 5. Pattern from Fiber Trends.

At the top, you can see BaaBaa the sheep. BaaBaa is a Ty sheep, one of their larger, fluffier ones — not one the size of a single hank of yarn, let's put it that way. I have a few of these sheep from Ty in different colors and wool styles. BaaBaa is a college-era sheep, but late college — maybe 1999 or so.

At the bottom, you can see Tulip Sheep. Tulip Sheep is in fact the first sheep ever added to my collection. My mom got her for me one year at Easter. At the time, I was quite confused (I was accustomed to getting rabbits), but Mom thought she was adorable, and so she went into the Easter basket! In later years, of course, I could see just how wise Mom had been, because look at that face. She is totally adorable!

And now a quick word about the KnitPicks Options needles. I love them. OMG. So far they're working out just beautifully — comfortable to the touch, the wire has little memory and no drag, I can't feel the join at all. I never thought a set of interchangeable needles would become my primary needles, but these have earned it. They're outstanding. So far I'm liking them even better than the Addi Turbo lace needles, but I'm not overly fond of really really really sharp tips, which the Addi Lace needles have.

Yarn used: KnitPicks Bare Merino Lace Weight. Beads: My tube reads: "Toho 8T222 / 8/0 Triangle Copper". They are tiny triangular beads in a lovely dark brown metallic color.

(The sheep on my shawl is Small Woolrich Sheep, which came from the Wool & Ewe Shop at the Indiana State Fair one year. It's a very cute sheep!)

However, this is what my house presently looks like:

and thus there is nowhere to block it. But the house painting is done (it's needed painting badly, since we moved in six years ago), and we can start getting things back to normal. When that shawl is blocked, I'll take another picture with another sheep. :)

Same yarn as the last time.

when a tragedy occurred.

Okay, maybe you can't see the tragedy.

How 'bout now? I dropped stitches. One minute I was sitting on the couch, watching Prison Break, and the next minute a handful of stitches had fallen off the needles, leaving me with a gap and no idea where it came from. ARGH. I was so close to being done, too!

In the interests of not making myself crazy, I'll probably be ripping back a few stitches at a time, instead of all at once. It may be six or seven rows before I get past the part that fell off the needles, and I'm not looking forward to that. This project might've just bumped itself to the bottom of my list.

In cuter news, that sheep is the smaller version of Lily (from the last post). Bought at the same store, part of the flock for about the same length of time, but she's about half the size of the larger Lily. Just as cute, but still not a troublemaker!

Well, I really do want to finish it (it's lovely), so I got started again this week. I'm now finished up through Clue 4, and am ready to start on the short rows. I love short rows. :)

Yarn used: KnitPicks Bare Merino Lace Weight. Beads: My tube reads: "Toho 8T222 / 8/0 Triangle Copper". They are tiny triangular beads in a lovely dark brown metallic color.

The sheep modeling the shawl is Lily, one of the few dark brown sheep in my collection. (Most plush sheep are either white, beige, or cream… that general range. Even "black" sheep tend to be black, despite the fact that black sheep in the wild seem to be a dark brown themselves.) I got her many years ago, back at a store in Bloomington, IN that probably doesn't exist any longer (at the College Mall). Her name is not very dignified ("Li'l Trubbles") nor very apropos to the sheep, in my opinion. I mean, really. Does that look like a troublemaker to you?

"Hoosier Fan Scarf", as modeled by Not-A-Blanket Sheep. One ball of Cranberry and Fisherman Wool-Ease, this was part of the ongoing Get That Wool-Ease Out Of My Stash And Make Christmas Presents Early For A Change project. The scarf is about 6′ long and was made on 10mm needles (from Lantern Moon, which are beautiful and nice but damn, they got heavy in the long run).

Not-A-Blanket Sheep is one I picked up in my local yarn store, Ben Franklin. I was in the checkout line when someone behind me pointed at him and said "You're not going to cut him up and make him into a blanket, are you?", sounding very defensive of the sheep. Horrified, I clutched the sheep to me! "No!" She seemed satisfied.

2.
Yarn used: Wool-Ease, 80% acrylic/20% wool.

"Stripey Hat", as modeled by Godiva Sheep. 5mm needles. Leftover bits of Dk. Rose Heather and Rose Heather Wool-Ease, part of the abovementioned project. Coordinates with a scarf I finished recently.

Godiva Sheep was picked up at a Barnes & Noble in the U-District after one Easter. It originally came with a small package of chocolate which I did not eat, because at the time I was clearly insane.

3.
Yarn used: Wool-Ease, 80% acrylic/20% wool.

"Blue And Navy Ragg Scarf", as modeled by Deathbleat. The scarf is simple, 2×2 rib on 5mm needles.

You may be wondering how such a cute sheep got the name "Deathbleat". Deathbleat was (is, if I ever return to it) my first-person shooter name. This was the sheep who sat on my lap while I played such games — she was new and cute and cuddly and who doesn't like to have a sheep in their lap while they flak their friends to death? (Don't answer that. I know, I know…) Anyway, her name according to the manufacturer is not very dignified*, so I rechristened her Deathbleat. She continues to keep me company when I play violent video games.

4.
Yarn used: Lily Sugar'n Cream, standard kitchen cotton.

"Random Dishcloths", as modeled by Not-Blankets-Either Lambs. This is pretty self-explanatory. The lambs were found at the same Ben Franklin, only this time I picked up both the one with pink hooves and the one with blue hooves.

5.
Yarn used: Lily Sugar'n Cream, standard kitchen cotton.

"Finished Half-Pique Washcloth", as modeled by Gund Sheep With Rattle. I'm still not that thrilled with this washcloth, but I will pawn it off on someone for Christmas. The sheep is one of the ones that tends to live on or around my desk, and he has a rattle in his tummy, making him very difficult to pose!

* "Jiggles".