Life as a Spectator Sport

Clarence was never the most stable person around, and since his stroke, he hasn't improved. He wants what he wants when he wants it, and if he doesn't get it, he has no inhibitions about making a scene, no internal controls on his behavior. He's like a two-year-old who has figured out that embarrassing his parents in public will get him whatever he was demanding. But a two-year-old is small enough to be picked up and removed if that's the only thing that works. A middle-aged grossly obese bald man can be not only spectacularly embarrassing, but dangerous.

On the way back from Virginia Beach yesterday, I detoured into North Carolina to visit The Woolery, as I mentioned in the last post. One way to get back to our usual route home would have been to take I-95 north to Emporia and then head west. But the TomTom routed us a different way, and as it was still mid-afternoon and we had plenty of time, I didn't see any reason to argue. I headed west on whatever highway we were on, and when the TomTom said to turn south on I-85, I turned. That would bring us to Greensboro, and in 45 minutes or so from there, we'd be home.

Clarence wasn't having any of that. "We're headed SOUTH!" he bellowed.

I tried to tell him we were on the way to Greensboro. "NO! South will take us to Durham! I don't want to go to Durham!"

I reminded him that I-85 and I-40 converge in Greensboro, which he knows as well as I do. I showed him the compass rose on the TomTom that indicated we were actually heading more west than south, regardless of the signage. Nothing worked. He subsided for a while, but after I got off the interstate to buy gas, he demanded that we turn down the adjacent street instead of getting back on the highway. "That's north," he announced. "That will take us back to Virginia."

It was north, all right, but it led into a residential area where we wandered around for ten or fifteen minutes, turning every time Clarence thought we could get farther north. Finally, we came to another interchange with I-85, and the road also picked up US 15. "Take 15 North!" Clarence ordered me. "That'll get us home."

Nothing I could do convinced him that taking 15 North would lead us way east of where we already were, and his violent gestures were beginning to interfere with driving. I don't think he would have been stupid enough to actually grab the steering wheel, but I didn't want to take the chance. So we headed north on 15, ending up in Clarksville, Virginia, about 60 miles east of where we had been, and an hour and a half later getting home.

By the time I finished processing and uploading the paperwork and photos, it was 1:00am, and I had to be up by 7:00 this morning to get ready for today's trip. I told Clarence not to EVER give me directions again, but that's no guarantee it won't happen. Or if he feels that he can't order me around that way any more, he'll find something else, something possibly even more unpleasant. I am beginning to think I just can't deal with this any more, but a nursing home is not an option either. So I don't know where things are headed. Just taking it one day at a time, and knitting or spinning to relieve the stress.

Aha!

It finally dawned on me what the blue yarn was that I found in a box and couldn't identify. It isn't yarn--it's weaving warp. I have a big inkle loom that I haven't used in about twenty years, and that's some leftover warp from the last time I made anything with it.

I stopped in The Woolery today on the way back from Virginia Beach, to buy a couple of small things and some pearl cotton so I could make something with the inkle loom again, and the manager asked me what I was going to use for warp.

"Some of this navy cotton," I said, reaching for a cone of it, and like an explosion going off in my brain, I realized what my mysterious blue stuff was. I've had it for so long that I had completely forgotten. So I'll have to untangle it and get it ready to use. I decided the pearl cotton was too expensive for the small project I have in mind--$16.00 a cone, and I wanted at least three colors. So I just bought some 8/4 warp cotton in smaller cones--red, a dark khaki and an olive green. I've got an Aztec design in mind, but I'll probably play with a couple of things and see what I like.

EDIT -- Well, that shows either how tired I was when I wrote this, or how long it's been since I used the loom. Or both. Inkle weave is a "warp-faced" weave. In other words, it is the warp threads that are visible in the finished product, not the weft. What the manager asked me was what I was going to use for the weft. And although the navy blue thread is technically a warp cotton, because on a regular loom it would be used as warping thread, on the inkle loom, I will use it as the hidden weft thread, beaten down under the different colored warp threads that actually make the pattern.

But no weaving this week, or dyeing either. I got home tonight to find two more inspections from the same area I worked in today, two way off on the other side of the state, and one in Richmond---all of which supposedly have to be turned in by Friday night, because the contract officer is going to be away from the office all next week. Uh-unhh. Ain't gonna happen. There aren't enough hours of daylight between now and Friday for me to do that much work, and on Friday I am driving to Baltimore to see my youngest get inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. I'm going to go be the proud momma, and then celebrate with her afterward. I sent an email off to the contract officer saying that I'd have the work turned in by the regular deadline, but emphatically not by the end of this week, so we'll see what kind of fireworks that results in.

Back to my paperwork for tomorrow's inspections, sigh.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Playing with color

I was pretty sure last night that I'd gotten the yarn too bright a yellow. It was the same yellow as the kitchen of my last house when I moved into it, about which I said, "This goes or I go." And this morning, after the skein had mostly dried, it wasn't any better. So I cut off a foot long strand of it and played with some food colors on a white plate to see how I could tone it down a bit. Admittedly, food colors aren't guaranteed to give the same result as one-shot chemical dyes, but all I wanted was to see whether I could shift it a bit away from that "Buttercup" shade on the label of the dye container.

You tone down a color by introducing its complement. On the color wheel, the complement of bright yellow is purple. So I mixed a drop of red with a drop of blue in a measuring cup, stirred it up well, and then syringed up about 30cc of it. I squirted that along the length of yarn on the plate, squeezed it in, and sure enough, it did exactly what I wanted. The color shifted toward gold, because of the red in the mixture, and the blue toned it down so it wasn't a bright gold. I took them both outside to check in daylight before continuing with the actual dyes, and then mixed a very dilute solution of approximately 1/8 teaspoon of "Cherry" and "Cornflower" dye in a cup of boiling water. Wow. Instant grape Kool-Aid, not that you'd want to drink it.

I put only half of that into the dye bath with the yarn and simmered it for about 15 minutes. The yellow was still too bright, so I added half of what was left and simmered a while longer.

Here is a totally uninspiring view of my stove, with what used to be the candy thermometer on the side of the dye pot. I say "used to be" because it really shouldn't be used again for candy. The measuring cup (which I had already retired from using for food because some bright person decided to pour hot fat into it and partially melted the bottom) is holding the last little bit of the purple before I dumped it into the dye pot.



The yarn is now a goldish-yellow, and in places there is the faintest haze of purple, where some strands took up the color faster than others--no doubt due to the fact that I was too lazy to stir it constantly. I love the effect, even more so because it was accidental.

It's obvious that I can't continue to dye in my soap pot, though. Trying to gauge whether a dye bath is exhausted when you're staring down into a dark blue speckled enamel pot is impossible. But the local True Value has a nice white pot that I decided not to buy the last time I was there. It's not big enough for a huge amount of yarn or fiber at one time, but I expect I'll be doing small quantities for the time being anyway.

More pictures after the yarn dries and I swatch a bit of it to see how it will look in the actual garment. And then I need to do small amounts of pink, green and blue, and perhaps some more purple. I think I'm going to wait on those until after I have the new dye pot, which means sometime later this week, since tomorrow is a drive-to-Tidewater-and-Fredericksburg day, boo hiss. Much more fun to play with fiber than to drive for eight or ten hours two days in a row, and pay for a hotel stay in between. If I didn't have to bring Clarence, I could go to Fredericksburg first and stay Monday night with Kate, whom I haven't seen since New Years, dammit!

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Cooking yarn

"What are you cooking?" Clarence yelled at me over the clatter of his tv.

"Yarn!" I hollered back. No response. I guess that meant that if it wasn't food, he wasn't interested.

What I was simmering in my old soap pot was in fact 4 ounces of undyed sport weight superwash merino, turning it yellow. Tomorrow, once this dries and I get an idea how bright it is, I'll dye an ounce each of pink, blue and green and use them for stripes in another Baby Surprise Jacket. I had thought of trying to make vari-colored spots on a yellow background, but decided that was too complicated for my first attempt at dying yarn.

I had thought I only had four ounces of merino, so it was a nice surprise to realize that it was indeed eight ounces. However, since I didn't want to dye the whole thing yellow, I had to wind off half of it. I am so glad I picked up a swift last week at The Woolery. I had to wind it by hand, because I did not buy a ball winder. I won't need a ball winder any time soon, I said to myself. Famous last words.

The swift's clamp wouldn't fasten onto my kitchen table, because the edge of the table is rounded. It wouldn't fasten to the kitchen counter because the countertop is too thick. But fortunately, it is one of those that bends at right angles, so I was able to affix it to the top slat of a sturdy chair.



Then, of course, I had to re-skein the ball on the niddy noddy, a bit of a task since my small niddy wasn't intended to wind almost 600 yards of yarn. But I finally finished, fastened the skein loosely in four places and away we went.

This is obviously going to be as addictive as spinning. In fact, I suspect I won't be buying much dyed roving in the future, because it's going to be lots more fun to dye my own.

While the dye pot was simmering, I kept hearing a banging noise from the front yard. I went quietly to the living room window and saw a couple of chickadees slamming their beaks against the steel hook holding the thistle feeder. I couldn't imagine what they were doing so I dug out the binoculars and watched them closely. They were picking up a sunflower seed from the big mixed seed feeder, carrying it over to the metal hook, and then smashing it with their beaks to get at the kernel inside. I have never seen chickadees do anything like this before. And on the ground, pecking at the bits flying out from the chickadees' efforts, were four quail. It's been years since I've seen quail here, so that was quite a treat.

Here is the dyed yarn, posing for its picture on the hook on which I usually hang my dishtowel to dry. It can't stay there, because it is dripping yellow spots onto my kitchen counter, but it was a convenient place to take a photo.

Friday, March 23, 2007

The finished Baby Surprise

The tie closure didn't work out the way I had hoped. When you tie it, the bow obscures the little i-cord scrolls. When I make the next one, I think I may add button bands to the front edges, so there will be more overlap for buttons. I dithered back and forth about picking up stitches for a collar, and finally decided to just use a reverse single-crochet edging, as I did along the front and bottom edges.



My niece likes bright, non-traditional colors, so I think she'll be happy with what I chose. The baby decided to come two weeks early, so the baby sweater didn't arrive before the baby after all, but it will go in the mail to her tomorrow.

Wish I had a big doll, or someone else's baby, to model it on. If I end up making more baby clothes, I may sew up a stuffed baby shape to show them off.

Happy Birthday, Lucinda, and your great-auntie hopes you like your sweater.

Chardonnay in the kitchen

I thought I had purchased a box of Cabernet Sauvignon juice concentrate. When I had everything ready this morning to start a new batch of wine, I discovered it was another box of Chardonnay. So we have a 6 gallon bucket of Chardonnay on the kitchen counter. Darn it, I really wanted to start a red wine this time, but I'm not going to wait until I have time to get up to the wine and beer supply place to buy more. By another week or so, my work is certainly going to start up again and I won't be home to keep an eye on the first, and most dicey, few days.

Now I have to find somewhere to put all the paraphenelia associated with this. It's been living in the primary fermenting bucket since I racked the last batch into the carboy, but I'd like to find a more permanent home for it.

And of course there are all the bits and pieces associated with spinning and knitting and sewing and soap-making, etc. Baskets of this and tote bags of that and things on shelves and things hanging on the kitchen walls. People who think living simply means having fewer things are either kidding themselves, or they just haven't tried it yet. Life is a heck of a lot simpler when everything comes from the grocery store.

But oh my, nothing is as good in the morning as freshly cracked wheat cooked just long enough to soften it, with homemade vanilla yoghurt on top and coffee from beans that were roasted just the day before. And although my wine is probably never going to be of world-class quality, it will be better than anything I'm willing to buy.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

More fiber, more yarn

Not good yarn yet. But better yarn, helped along by watching the first actual spinning I've seen in person, other than a very brief demonstration when I bought my hand spindle. I stopped at The Woolery in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, on the way in to Newport News, asked a couple of questions, and ended up watching as the owner of the business sat down before a wheel just like mine and showed me how it's supposed to be done.

So tonight I spun up the rest of the multi-colored roving that I made the first skein from, and what a difference. Still thick and thin, but on the average, much much thinner. Still a bit slubby, but only here and there, not every few inches. Still over-twisted, but again, only here and there.

I've gotten to where the treadling is not a problem, and I can even slow down when I need to without the whole works coming to a stop. I can draft faster or more slowly as I need to, and my fingers are coming to know what the yarn feels like when the diameter and the twist are right. So I just need lots more practice.

That means I need lots more fiber, heh heh.

I bought 4 ounces of the prettiest merino in a colorway called Thistle, kind of a silvery white with faintly lilac strands running through it. Also a big bag of undyed Romney that I will dye probably this weekend. That is obviously the least expensive way to learn, and I can play with dyeing at the same time.

The skein I spun tonight is hanging over the tub to dry, after I stuck it in warm water for a bit and then thwacked it hard against the side of the laundry tub to set the twist. It isn't fine enough to ply for socks, but there is enough of it to knit up the singles for a hat.

I added the TECHKnitting blog to the list of knitting sites. That woman's illustrations are nothing short of incredible, and if you look all the way back to the beginning, she starts out at the rank beginner's level. Lots of good things there for the intermediate to advanced knitter too, the category in which I would place myself.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

A make ready day

The World War II Navy vets I used to work with called this a "make ready" day. That's a day when you do all the things you have to do before you can do all the other things you have to do. For me it's a day of milling wheat into flour and into cracked wheat for our breakfast cereal (like Wheatena, for those of you old enough to remember that, only much better, because it's so fresh). Roasting coffee, doing the paperwork for tomorrow's road trip---wait a minute, how did that sneak in there???

Well anyway. Also some spinning and a batch of yoghurt and MORE laundry, and maybe trying to make some sock blockers from wire coat hangers, like the ones here.

If I have time, I'm going to start another batch of wine. I had meant to do this a couple of weeks ago, but dropped my hydrometer and broke it, and didn't have a chance to buy another one until Friday. And then a batch of bread, because we're down to the last two slices and I will not buy that nasty stuff labeled bread in the grocery store.

It's a good thing I have to go to Newport News tomorrow, because I am almost finished spinning up the little bag of green merino I had, and the only other fiber on hand is some lambs' wool that I want to save until I have the skill to do it justice. So I won't have anything left to spin when I finish with the merino, and that would be THE END OF THE WORLD. I am addicted to this spinning. But if I get an early enough start tomorrow, I can stop at The Woolery in North Carolina on the way back and get a fiber fix.

On to my paperwork.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Playing with the site

There is nothing so mindlessly monotonous as knitting 3-stitch i-cord. *Knit 3, give the tube a gentle tug to help the stitches merge into the back, slide the whole works to the right end of the dpn, repeat from * 2 gajillion times.

I rebelled after a while and fiddled with the Blogger template to add Matthew Harvey's ubiquitous "percentage complete" script that so many of the knit bloggers are using. This is modified slightly by Yvonne of CogKnition and further modified very slightly by myself, to use my preferred colors. I also removed the list of Finished Objects and put them in a drop-down list at the bottom of that section.

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but hesitated, because it pushes the political links down even farther than they were. And while I haven't been writing lately about political issues, that doesn't mean I've forgotten about them. I just can't let myself get angry any more; it poisons everything I do. I have great respect for the people who can write (for years now, some of them) about the political situation we're in without allowing it to touch and influence their day to day emotional state. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them. So I had to just step back and leave the awfulness to the people who can handle it. But the political links are still there and I don't want anyone to think I'm trying to push them down out of sight.

With that, back to the i-cord. I'm determined to finish the Baby Surprise and get it out of here and on the way to the baby.

My first actual real skein of yarn

I know, I'm obsessing about this. But now that I've got it, I don't want to knit anything with it after all. I want to just put it in my yarn basket and admire it.



It's not as though I never spun this much with the spindle. But I never had this much at one time. I'd get a spindle-full, wind it off into a snarly ball (because it was over-twisted) and try to set the twist (which never worked). By that time, what passed for yarn was felted into something the cats wouldn't even play with. Being able to spin a much larger amount at one time gave me some perspective about how my efforts compared with those in the internet instructions I've seen and the books I have.

I have to laugh at myself. The only way I was able to make a reasonably sized yarn was to pull off a foot or so of the roving, separate that into about eight sections, and then aggressivly pre-draft the smaller pieces, easing each one out to two or three times the starting length. I thought I was cheating because I wasn't able to spin directly from the original roving. Then I read through Shannon Okey's book, Spin to Knit, again and realized, Dummy! That's what you're supposed to do!

This is less than half of the wool top I started with, so I could easily make another bobbin-full and ply it with this. But I think I'm going to save this. I also have several ounces of green merino, and I'm going to spin that next and see whether I can get it fine enough to use for socks.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

And then there was yarn . . .

Singles, of course, not plied. I'm going to knit something with it anyway.

Now I need a swift and a ball winder. Don't I?

Instant gratification. And a sock.

I was bored with everything I had started, but I didn't want to undertake something that would turn into yet another unfinished project. So when I came across this pattern on Elizabeth's blog, I grabbed the cotton and a pair of number 5 needles and worked on it off and on all day yesterday, a row here and a row there. And no, it isn't blocked. And it isn't going to be. It's a dishcloth, for pete's sake.

The stitch pattern isn't obvious in this small image, but if you click on the picture and let the big one load, you can see it clearly. It's as simple as can be: bring the yarn forward, slip two stitches purlwise and bring the yarn back, wrapping it around the stitches you slipped and leaving a horizontal bar behind. On the next right side row you shift over two stitches and do the same thing. Wrong side rows are purled. I think it would make a lovely baby blanket in a different yarn and colorway. Monotonous knitting, of course, but sometimes that's all you want.


The sock is still just a sock, not a pair, but at least I've got that much finished. Today I have to do housework and laundry and make some marmalade before the calamondins I was given go bad. So probably not much knitting.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Whooee! I made yarn!

Not good yarn. Pretty awful yarn, in fact, thick and thin, full of slubs, gruesomely over-twisted. But it is yarn.

The label on this bag of fiber said only "wool top", but I'm pretty sure it's Romney, partly because of the staple length and partly because of the feel, and you almost don't have to spin Romney--the darn stuff felts itself together. Some of this yarn is pretty much felted instead of spun, too. But it is a much more consistent diameter than anything I ever made with a spindle. I could spin very fine yarn with the spindle. For about three feet, that is. And then it was the biggest mess you ever saw for another three feet. This yarn isn't as fine as the best I ever did with the spindle, but it is pretty much the same throughout.

I fixed the wheel's treadling problem by leanind a three-gallon rectangular water bottle against the back leg. It doesn't move now, but of course that makes it considerably less portable.

I'm quitting for tonight, but hope to fill the bobbin tomorrow and have some actual usable yarn.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Spinning. Well, sort of

My new Kromski Mazurka spinning wheel, with a few feet of yarn on the bobbin and a lot of dark fiber hanging out of the orifice.

Not a very good picture. There is no place in this cramped little trailer to take a picture of something without a lot of unwelcome background intruding. I tried numerous pictures of it sitting on the floor, but finally gave up and set it back on the newspaper covered table I assembled it on.

We aren't quite in tune with each other yet. This is a "castle" style wheel, which is what I wanted, but I didn't anticipate that its very light weight would make it difficult to treadle. Considering the number of years I sewed with an old Singer treadle sewing machine, I didn't anticipate any trouble with the treadling part of it at all, in fact. But this is not a heavy platform with a cast iron treadle. This wheel is so darn light that when I rock my heel back on the treadle, the whole contraption rocks backward toward me. Every time I rock my foot forward, it tries to walk away from me on the floor.

On the supposition that part of the problem was a need for lubrication, I dripped oil on everything I could reach. The treadling is minimally better. I think. It's hard to know whether the oil helped, or I just got better at holding my foot in the right place on the treadle. I should probably have gotten a double treadle wheel. I just didn't see the need to pay the extra money it would have cost, and I really did want a lightweight portable wheel.

The other thing I found was that the single drive setup, which is allegedly better for beginning spinners, didn't work at all for me. I absolutely could not get the Scotch tension set correctly, which meant that I could put horrendous amounts of twist in the fiber, but I could never get it to wind on to the bobbin. So I switched to the double drive setup and completely eliminated that problem.

This is obviously going to require a lot more practice than I expected, but I will make it work. I'm yearning to knit with my own yarn. In fact, when I get a bobbin full, I intend to go ahead and knit something with it, even if it's just a square hot pad.

But not tonight, since the powers that be decided to start sending out work again, after dead silence from them for nearly a week. So tomorrow I work, and tonight I get the paperwork ready for it.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Yarn crawl

I've decided that when I can, I will visit whatever yarn stores happen to be in the neighborhood of the grocery stores I inspect. Considering my workload, that is still going to be only an occasional treat, but even so, I'll get to more of them than I have done in the past.

A couple of weeks ago, I paid a visit to Yarn Barn, in Andersonville, Virginia. I had come across Yarn Barn originally when I was looking for a US supplier of Jamieson & Smith Shetland wool, and was very pleased to see they were located in an area I frequently visit. Owned by Pat Kirtland, the store is housed in a 200-year-old building that has seen use as both a tavern and a general store. At one early period, the second floor was the venue for the local Masons' ceremonies.

Not just the building, but the whole area is steeped in Revolutionary War history. Pat told me that Peter Francisco, the heroic soldier George Washington referred to as a "one man army" lived nearby. The name caught my attention, because there is a town named Francisco in North Carolina not far from where I live. I have no idea whether the Francisco's of Stokes County, North Carolina, have any relation at all to Peter Francisco, but one thing Peter is known for is his participation in the battle of Guilford Courthouse, located just north of nearby Greensboro. So it seems possible. Peter Francisco is buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery in Richmond, a neighborhood of Richmond that I am very familiar with. Many references came together for me in the name, and I appreciated Pat's mention of him.

The outside of Yarn Barn is not what one expects of a retail business--I drove past it at first, in fact. No prominent signage, no neon "Open" sign, just a very old building set almost on the highway, with "Yarn Barn" in vertical letters down the corner.



But inside, oh my! Bins and shelves and boxes of yarn, so much yarn you had to turn sideways to get down some of the aisles. Finished garments hanging on the walls, books and magazines and pattern leaflets on tables, accessories on revolving racks. By the door were two US Postal Service tubs, testament to Pat's large internet and mail order business, and everywhere was bright color and soft textures. Pat graciously showed me around the building and told me something of its history, and took me into the woodworking shop her husband Jim runs in the back. Since I'm a woodworker as well as a knitter, that was a special treat.






One of my favorite things was the huge inventory of older books and pattern leaflets. I love the old classic knits, and Pat had plenty for me to choose from. Besides that, she knew the publications so well that she could tell me which one was likely to have what I wanted, so I didn't have to leaf through hundreds of books.



I bought two skeins of Apple Laine, beautiful soft pink stuff in mohair, wool and silk, a couple of Reynolds Lopi pattern books and some other small items, and left with a smile on my face and plans to return the next time I'm in the area. Well worth the visit, Pat, thank you very much!

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Yet another FO

Except this one isn't a Finished Object. It's a Found Object. I was digging through a box hoping to find the Koigu I started a scarf with a couple of years ago, when this turned up.



Yep, it's a dishcloth. A generic half-double-crochet-in Peaches-'n'-Cream dishcloth. I have no idea who I made it for or why I stuck it in this box. But my present dishcloth is literally falling apart, and has long since lost whatever color it was to begin with--I don't even remember now. So this dishcloth is mine, all mine!

It's so pretty I hate to get it wet, much less wash dirty dishes with it. But there is plenty more Peaches 'n' Cream of various colors stashed away. I could probably make dishcloths for the whole neighborhood and not run out. For whatever reason, I bought a cone of variegated blue and white a couple of years ago. And then, forgetting that I already had a whole cone of the damn stuff, I bought another one in pink, yellow and white, the one this is made from. Plus there are the remains of several other balls of cotton purchased over the years. If all the oil in the world dries up tomorrow and all the ice melts at the same time, I still have enough Peaches 'n' Cream to make dishcloths for the rest of my natural life.

Is this not the most gorgeous yarn there ever was?

I love it so much that I uploaded two images, the small one you see here, and a big one you can see if you click on the small one, and have either a broadband connection or half an hour for it to load.



This is Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock Yarn in the Rainbow colorway. The image looks to me as though there is no true red in it, but that isn't so. I don't know whether the problem is with my digital camera, or with my monitor, but everything seems to be shifted up in frequency, making reds look orange, and orange look more orange. The same was true of the Baby Surprise. It looked far more orange to me than it actually was. I haven't seen these images on anyone else's computer at this point, so I'm not certain where the problem is. But this yarn shades from an intense true red through all the colors of the rainbow to a deep deep purple, and I just love it.

I'm making toe-up socks with it, using Magic Loop, just so I can say that I've done it once. I already know I have no desire to do it more than once, or at least not with Magic Loop. There is one good reason to do socks toe-up, and that is to make sure you have enough yarn to finish the sock. Start with eight or so cast on stitches for the toe, increase until it's the right size, knit the foot until it's long enough, work the gusset and heel, and then knit the leg until you run out of yarn. Repeat with the other skein. Lorna's Laces skeins only have about 215 yards in them and since I have big feet and big legs, I was worried about possibly having to buy a third skein to complete a pair. Hence the toe-up. But even if I do toe-up again, I'll do it on 5 dpns, thank you very much.

I've finished the Baby Surprise, except for buttons, and I find that I don't want to use buttons, because that requires the fronts to be lapped over each other and I want to leave them both showing. So I don't know what I'm going to do about closures. I fiddled with all the other aspects of finishing this one, redoing the reverse sc edging twice, playing with different ways to crochet the shoulder seams, and it appears that I'm going to do the same thing with the closures. I have in mind to try making ties out of I-cord, but while they would work, I know perfectly well that at least one of them would grow wings and disappear before the child wears the sweater twice. So I'm not going to do ties unless I can figure out some way to anchor them on the sweater.

I'm already planning the next Baby Surprise, except this one is going to be for my three year old grandson, so it will require some playing with the number of cast-on stitches and increases to make it big enough for him. And more ripping out, no doubt, sigh.

An almost finished Baby Surprise

Which is obviously going to be a toddler surprise, or at least a six to eight-month surprise. When I took this picture, I hadn't decided yet whether to do any kind of finishing stitch around the front and bottom edges, or to pick up stitches around the neckline for a collar. And it obviously needs to have the hanging yarn ends woven in. But this is essentially what it will look like when finished.

It has an almost Asian appearance, because of the patterned "border" and the solid color front panels. My previous version of the Baby Surprise was done in a solid color, and although the pattern of increases on the front showed up better, it wasn't as interesting.

I did learn something from this: a 24" circular needle is waaaay too short for this sweater using worsted weight yarn on a size 6 needle. The previous one was made on size 8 cable needles, and I almost went out and bought some size 6 cable needles for this one. But I was so close to being completed by the time I got really irritated with all the bunched-up stitches that I just went on and finished it with the Addi Turbo circular I started with. Part of the problem is that I just don't much like circular needles anyway, but it was compounded by the exceptionally slippery Addi's and the fact that the needle was too short to begin with. I dropped stitches with annoying regularity because they just slid right off the ends.

So now to complete the finishing. I tried a reverse single crochet edging, didn't like it and ripped it out, then a plain single crochet edging and liked that even less. Now I'm back to working the reverse sc, but very tight, with a smaller hook than appropriate for worsted weight yarn. It is not fun, but it looks good. I think I will pick up stitches around the neckline and make a plain little collar. Then I must find buttons for it, and then I will take one final picture and pack it up to send off to my niece.

Friday, March 09, 2007

You know you have too many electronic gadgets . . .

When something beeps and you have no earthly idea what it is.

It turned out to be the Nokia phone that I got for Clarence. On this last trip, I had twenty-some inspections in the same area, so we were in the same hotel for three nights. I suggested to him that he could stay in the hotel while I did the inspections, and to my enormous relief, he agreed. But I wanted some way that he could call me if he needed to, without having to make a long distance call from the room. So I got him a prepaid cell phone, and that's what was beeping.

I knew the sound was familiar, but I could not place it for the life of me. Then I realized suddenly why it was familiar--because that's what my old Nokia phone sounded like when the battery was dying. With that recollection, I dug through the stuff we brought back from Norfolk, found Clarence's phone and plugged it in. No more beeps.

It's been a slow week. One big batch of inspections finished and only two other stores to do, one of which I got yesterday. I know what that means: the field offices are concentrating on getting new work ready. March of each year is when a particular type of inspection is done, and I expect they will start spitting those stores out any minute now.

In the meantime, I have time to knit. I was determined to finish something today, and may get the Baby Surprise done by tonight. I have more UFO's right now than ever before. Three socks (that's not including the one I started and frogged). A felted tote, a baby sweater, and a knitted afghan that only needs four more squares to be done. That one was started about fifteen years ago, and disappeared into the huge pile of boxes in storage. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for something else and happened across it, complete with one square still on the needles, and also--very important--with the instruction book. So pictures of that will turn up here pretty soon. Oh, and there's a half finished crocheted Granny Square afghan, which was supposed to be using up the rest of my small remaining stash of acrylic yarns, but which ended up requiring the purchase of more of the nasty stuff because I was running out of colors.

So it's back to my knitting, and to my slow progress in assembling my spinning wheel. Should have had that done weeks ago, but I keep finding areas of wood that need more finishing. I want this one to be perfect.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

More Baby Surprise

I had to take some other pictures, so I hauled the Baby Surprise out of its bag and laid it out on the floor. It is nearly finished, and in fact I could very well have completed it in two days if I hadn't had anything else to do. I want to change back to the variegated yarn at some point, but haven't decided when. Design is assuredly not my strong point.

In the meantime, I ordered an acid dye sampler kit from Catnip Yarns. It comes with your choice of a skein of superwash merino fingering or superwash merino DK, and since the only US supplier of the fingering seems to be having a hard time getting it, I had to settle for the DK. I have no idea whatsoever what I'll make with it, but I'm sure something will suggest itself.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Baby surprise in progress

My absence for the last few days is due not to the typical overwork and lack of time, but because my blankety-blank hosting provider was spitting out the usual message of "No more space left on device." Even though I'm supposed to have unlimited disk space, this happens every few days. Eventually, the message gets passed along to someone that error messages are being generated on my account, and they allocate a marginally larger amount of disk space. I've complained loudly but nothing happens. The only way to get more disk space is to keep trying to upload something, generating an error message each time, until someone notices. I am SO in the market for another host!

Anyway, here is yesterday's progress on the Baby Surprise jacket.

You can see how the sleeves fold up, leaving open seams at the shoulders. As the knitting continues, the large space at the center fills up, a few stitches on each side are bound off for the neckline, and eventually you get to the middle, at which point you are more or less finished. Many people have picked up stitches around the neckline for a little collar, and I may do that too. Haven't decided yet.

I'm down to the point where the side stitches are slipped onto stitch holders and the back is knit by itself, but don't have time to take another picture right this minute.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Say what?

We didn't manage to see the lunar eclipse yesterday--there was heavy cloud cover in the east up to about 6:00pm, and even after that, enough haze for the moon to be obscured. But I did get an earful about it in a store I inspected.

One of the clerks was on the phone with his brother, who was apparently out in the Chesapeake Bay somewhere on a boat, trying to get a better look at the eclipse. His discussion caught the interest of several customers waiting in line at the register, who wanted to know what he was talking about.

"They're watching the lunar eclipse," the other clerk explained.

I was distressed, but not terribly surprised, at the number of people who said, "What's that?"

But I was amused at the clerk's answer. "That's when the moon is in the shadow of the earth," she explained. Right on. But then she said, "And a celestial eclipse is when the sun is in the shadow of the earth."

Oh well. Have to give her points for being aware enough of the world around her to at least know the eclipse was taking place.

We're still on the way home. But I did 30 stores in five days, even with Clarence along, which is some kind of record. I've also gotten about two inches finished on the leg of Katy's red and white sock, I'm half way through the heel flap of the cotton/wool Socka sock and about two inches into a Baby Surprise jacket with some Plymouth Encore that I picked up yesterday. I read today that one knitter had made a Baby Surprise in two days. All I can say is that she must not have done much of anything else in those two days. But I'll finish before the baby comes, which is all that's really important. Pictures when it's far enough along to show off how it goes together.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Rip it! Rip it!

I think I've spent more time frogging than knitting this week. Kay's pair of red and white generic cuff-down socks is on the needles for the third time. For whatever strange reason, I began a K1P1 cuff, which I never do. It isn't as stretchy as K2P2 and doesn't look as nice. I must have been off in la-la land when I began it, because I would never have done that on purpose. So I ripped it all back and started over. On the second attempt, I was nearly finished with as much ribbing as I wanted when I noticed a huge flaw on one row. I'm not one of those people who can rip back to a particular spot and take up the knitting again without making things worse than they were to begin with, so out it came again. The third time was actually a trial to see how a particular pattern of flat ribbing looked, and I did knit in a lifeline at the end of the cuff. I didn't like that pattern so back we went to the end of the cuff and started over from there. Now I'm doing a K4P2 flat rib that I like well enough to leave alone.

The Socka yarn tried to be a toe-up sock in the Six Sox Knit-along pattern called Springtime in Paris. Nope, not good. I really tried to like doing a toe-up sock and I just didn't. On top of that I didn't like how the pattern was working out. It stood out well enough that the socks would have been acceptable, but I just didn't like it, and since half the fun of hand-knitted socks is knitting them, I decided not to inflict on myself something that I just wasn't having fun knitting. So I ripped back about four inches of sock and started over with another cuff-down generic sock on 4 needles. That one is half way through the heel flap now, so it will be finished soon. It is lovely yarn, like all your favorite denim colors combined in one sock. But it's a cotton and wool blend, so it isn't as nice and soft and giving as pure wool would be. I still like the colors well enough not to mind how it feels.

I also started an Elizabeth Zimmerman Baby Surprise Jacket in Phildar Bubble, for my niece who is expecting in April. Bubble is a 100% nylon yarn in something approximating a DK or sport weight, with huge chunky-yarn-size bobbles at about half inch intervals, an absolute bitch to cast on. I managed to get three rows finished before I decided that this is just not a good yarn for knitting. Crochet would be a far more suitable technique for this particular yarn. So that one is wound back on its ball, waiting for inspiration to strike. I suspect it will make good 6" squares with ridged crochet rows (single crochet worked in the back loop to make ridges) set at right angles to each other. That's the plan anyway. I still want to make a Baby Surprise Jacket but I'll have to find another yarn to do it with.

I'll post pictures when I've had a little more sleep. This is the fifth day on the road this week with another long one coming up tomorrow.

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