Showing posts with label afghan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label afghan. Show all posts

Friday, June 26, 2009

It's All In Where You Stand

Wednesday, I started a post that was so boring, it made me depressed just to read the introduction. Thursday morning, there were little patches of blue trying to join hands across the sky, and an errant ray of sunshine intermittently tickling the sun porch, and everything seemed a whole lot more manageable. This might also have had something to do with starting to recover from the extreme lack of sleep I suffered over the weekend or it may have been the two solid weeks of rain. Probably both. Of course I didn't make it as far as actually posting anything due to a severe attack of employment, but hey, these things happen. And employment is a good thing to have, so I can't complain.

During the deluge, my husband and I wondered if the the dry-adapted Colorado wildflowers were going to make it. But despite being beaten down by the ceaseless streams of water, they seem to have survived with only minor damage. We've even got new varieties starting to bloom.
New flowers in the wildflower garden

They're picking up the slack from the violas, which are finally calling it quits after nearly two months of continuous flowers. My mother reminded me that I could keep them going longer by picking off the dying blooms, but we want them to re-seed, so we're letting them go.

So- extreme lack of sleep over the musical weekend. I wish I could say this was the result of staying up late listening to music (which it partly was) but it actually had more to do with waking up early despite staying up late. How does this happen, I want to know? I mean, I'm perfectly capable of rolling over and going back to sleep- with or without shutting off the alarm- on a work day. But apparently not this weekend. On the plus side there was crafting. I started a new pair of socks.
fantasy socks

The yarn is Lana Gross Fantasy- I really liked the colors in the skein- and at first was ambivalent about them as they knit up (this seems to be how I often feel about self-patterning yarn when I cast on with it). But it's growing on me.

Thanks to general brain deadness, none of the more complicated things I brought with me got much attention. But I did do rather a lot of crocheting- I'm almost halfway done with the new baby-or-lap afghan.
lap afghan

The observant crocheters will note that I have mastered a fourth stitch, double crochet (hey, slow but steady learns the new craft). It's actually much prettier than this photo makes it look- off white and navy blue in a bulky weight yarn. All that white yarn for the afghan, about 16 skeins of it? Was a gift from my mother's friend Sandy, who has been doing a little de-stashing. She also gave me a huge amount of beautiful sport-weight cream-colored wool, more than enough for a sweater. I'm still playing with ideas for that. I'm torn between dying some of it, and doing a Norwegian-style colorwork ski sweater, or casting on something extremely textured. In a sport weight yarn I could get a lot of detail. Or I could dye all of it. Decisions, decisions! That's probably not going to be for a few months though, as I have two other sweaters queued ahead of it.

For now, it's Friday, the weekend is blessedly not scheduled for anything, and I have all sorts of things to do, knit, crochet, weed...hmm. Strangely, housework did not appear on that list, but there ought to be some of that, too.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Out With the Old

The great thing about doing small fast projects--is that you can do more small fast projects. Here's the crochet baby blanket, all washed and ready to go. It was fast and fun, and most importantly? The yarn is happy.
Baby Afghan Finis

It did come out slightly trapezoidal, something I partially (but not completely) corrected by blocking. Probably something to do with the way I did the ripples. I'll try some different ideas next time. By the time it was nearing completion, it was appealingly warm and toasty on my lap, enough that I was sorry to finish, so clearly a slight lack of rectangularity isn't going to interfere with its function.

In other news, the ranks of red socks have grown by two feet. Or at least a pair.
More Red Socks

I don't as a rule have trouble with Second Sock Syndrome, however by the end of sock number four, I confess I was starting to feel a wee bit of malaise. On the other hand, the red socks were my 'small easy traveling project', and mainly worked on at times when I couldn't have given it my full attention anyway, so it all worked out. And what's nice about these, is with four matching socks, losing one won't condemn the wearer to mismatchingness. (Okay, they're for a guy. To wear under boots. I can't help thinking about these things, it's the double X chromosomes.)

Coming up on our next exciting installment, the return of the Icewine Mittens.