Photo Shoot

Well, once again I'm reunited with technology that lets me get pictures off the camera. It's been a busy couple of weeks, not least because I haven't been home much.  But to console me for missing all that house and yard work, I've been packing a heavy load of knitting.  That's what finally allowed me to finish the mitered square baby blanket.  

I was inspired by Valerie of Wandering Cat Studio who wrote some excellent instructions.  But since I mainly had pastel solids I decided to borrow an idea from quilting and worked from the center out so I could assemble the squares in an overall pattern. 

I also released the Celtic Cable Sweater from time out, ripped back the collar,  re-knit it smaller, and sewed the ends of the zipper back in.   From the front:

And from the back:

Naturally it's now too warm to wear it.  But I'm looking forward to wearing it in the fall. 

Then there was the blue beret.  Sometimes you just need a project you can whip through in a couple of days.  

And then, because Toni-in-Idaho was beaming sock thoughts at me...okay, and because I needed a project that didn't require a large bag to carry it around, I cast on socks.  You will note that they are neither gray, nor solid, nor pastel.  I thought at this point I needed a little color in my life.

So there it is, the last couple of weeks in yarn.  Astonishing how much you can get done when you have a lousy internet connection, isn't it?  

Monogamy is Overrated

Project monogamy, anyway.   The blanket is a mere few rounds (of nearly 1000 stitches each) from finished, but I am giving it a breather in favor of a new pair of socks, and a crocheted beret. 

Having the computer with the SD card reader, when you forget the USB A to B cable, however is not overrated.   Photos will have to wait until I can force my devices to talk to one another. 

Oh, the Excitement!

In a nearly unprecedented show of project monogamy, I'm still working on the blanket.  Who the heck am I, and where is Robin?

Same Again

So the project that has wound up holding my attention the last couple of days has been the mitered square blanket.  Somewhat to my surprise I succeeded in getting the whole thing on one circular (here is where my habit of always getting the longest circular I can find pays off) and I've rather compulsively been beavering away.

Surprising since at the moment I've got over 700 stitches in a single round, and the border is growing so slowly I can actually see the amount of yarn in the skein getting smaller more noticeably than the border is growing.  But the combination of wanting social knitting, warm weather (making acrylic more attractive to knit with than wool or alpaca),  and just being a somewhat obsessive personality have combined to keep me at it. 

Also it lets me watch hot cats strike silly poses.

What can I say?  Apparently I'm easily entertained.

In Which I Start to Become Suspicious

See, the reading binge has been continuing unabated (I'm at 94 books for the year as of today), and as a result, various home maintenance projects planned for the summer have stalled completely.    Now, reading *is* a lot more fun than home maintenance, but usually I manage a bit of balance.   I'm starting to think that part of this reading thing is not so much an urgent desire to read (however pleasurable) but a sneaky, not-entirely-conscious excuse for Not Doing Other Things. 

This is one of those moments where I look back at the list of plans and goals I made back in January, and say, "Ahah.  The plan is not surviving contact with the enemy....and I'm the enemy."   

Aside from books, I was prioritizing getting the pool clean for the Fourth, and I pretty much managed that.  (Amazing how attractive a chore cleaning the pool is when it's really hot!)   Which means, it's time to get some other things moving.  What things, you ask?  (Have you ever noticed that my imaginary blog audience always asks the right questions?   You're so good that way!)

1.    First and foremost- finish patching the garage ceiling.  That will free up the ladder for other duties, and let me clean up the wood shop so my husband can start the next round of bookcases.  For some reason, he has not been urging me to get this done.  But I'm sure that secretly, he really wants to get to work on bookcases.  (This would be so secretly he doesn't admit it to himself, I suspect.  But I know him so well, I can tell.)

2.    Fix the broken door-closer on my kitchen screen door.  It's kind of a pain because I need to take out a chunk of wood (which the old screws have pulled out of) and put in a new piece that I can screw the door-closer back to.   Haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do that yet. 

3.  And next up after that….hard to say.  There's a rather long list of odds and ends of things that need to be done. 

On the sewing and knitting front:

1.    The Celtic cabled sweater has gained a zipper and two sleeves, and then lost it's collar and part of the zipper.  Once I got the zipper in and zipped it up, I saw that the neckline was way too loose, and did not look at all like what I wanted. 

2.    The Stealth project has swallowed several skeins of yarn without a burp.

3.    The fine-gauge bamboo sweater, after soaking up hours and hours of knitting, suddenly grew to a length where I need to start thinking about armscyes.  I'd be more excited, except that this is the back, and it's taken me years to get this far.  Mind you, actually knitting on it does seem to help. 

4.    I've picked up the sleeveless top several times and each time, I wound up throwing it aside in frustration because I just could not get the facing to lie flat.   Finally, I unpicked the seam, and cut the facing….and it's definitely too short.  I have no idea how I managed this, since I've actually made this top before (and don't recall having any problems with it).  But there it is.  It's now waiting for me to piece in a little triangle of cloth so it will lie properly flat.  My working hypothesis is that the cat moved the pattern while I was pinning.   (I don't actually think this, but it gives me someone to blame.)

5.   And then, yesterday I was looking for some simple social knitting and pulled out my mitred square baby blanket.  It's at a hundred squares at the moment and I've decided that I'm not up for another round.  So I'm going to see if I can get the whole border on one long circular needle, and then start working a border in the round.  At the moment the jury is out on whether I'm going to get the whole thing on one circ or not.  I could have sworn I had a second circular in that size, but I haven't managed to turn it up.  We'll see how that goes. 

So, not so much with the FOs...and a bunch of other projects starting to clamor for attention.  I've taken today and tomorrow off for a long weekend, so we'll have to see if I can't make some better progress over the next few days.