Oh me of little faith . . .

I really didn't think this would work. I was sure I'd be booking passage to the Pacific Northwest and leaving an offering in the woods for Bigfoot. He must have big hands, too? Failing that I envisioned myself hiding these huge, strange, misshapen, blue things deep-deep, having them surface periodically to prove my incompetence before I stuffed them out of sight again.

The euphoria of last night when I finished knitting the second mitt is nothing to how incredibly self-satisfied I am now. The little voice in my head is muttering "Hubris! Hubris!" Not this time. I assume it's storing itself up for later.

This is the result of the first round of felting - which really is shorthand for zip into a pillow protector and put through a hot water wash/cold water rinse. Based on the control there on the left, they were the right length.













And isn't this sad proof of how over-due I am for new oven mitts? Time and past time, indeed.














But my hands seemed to swim in them and the thumbs were too long and too wide. Besides, I wanted them fuzzier. Feltier. Less stitch definition. So back they went for round two.

They shrunk considerably more length-wise than they did width-wise. Considerably more. But they still come down well past my wrist. More importantly, they fit my hand now. Custom oven mitts. Can you stand it? And they're thick. Really thick. As in I no longer fear for the skin on my hands if I try to use them.













Wouldn't these make great Christmas gifts? In red maybe, with a snowflake sort of thing needle-felted on the back? Assuming I manage to conquer needle-felting. Surely, my mother and sister, at least, won't be able to resist?

Yarn and process specifics: Brown Sheep Company Lamb's Pride Bulky in Blue Flannel. Size 11 bamboo DPNs from Crystal Palace. Pattern was a class handout by Knitablilty. Each mitt zipped into a separate pillow protector (I had visions of them felting to each other - Siamese twin oven mitts). Washed with a pair of jeans, in hot water with half a capful of Tide Free. Rinsed in cold water. Repeated and left to air dry/block. Note that the pillow protector bit really is necessary. There was a lot of blue fuzz left inside.

Addendum

Yes! Give the little cupie a lady doll!
















They already look a little fraternal, but, as the class mantras went, "They're only oven mitts" and "It'll all felt out."

Oh we're going to Felt City. Gonna have some fun . . .

It's not that I'm easily distracted

It's just that when I'm knitting rows and rows of garter stitch, my mind takes these little trips to Elsewhere. Lately the Elsewhere has been felting.

I have this Yeti mitten I made during my Stitches Midwest class with Gwen Bortner of Knitability. It's supposed to get transformed (read:felted) into an oven mitt. It remains untransformed because I'm one of those people with two hands. I need a pair. I'm afraid if I felt it solo I will never be able to recreate the process for the second one. I don't want sibling mitts; I want identical twin mitts.

Besides, family is coming over this Saturday for John's long-delayed birthday party. I want them all envious so I can justify making these for Christmas presents. It's time and past time to get the second one made.











Note the toddler-sized DPNs. Kind of like those crayons you see in preschool/kindergarten classrooms.

The nice thing about this project, if I can ever join the stitches in such a way that I don't end up with two inches of free-range yarn after I knit the first row, is that I can finish the knitting in a day.

Meanwhile, I'm collecting information on felting.

I picked up the Fall 2006 Knitscene for "Felt it UP! Fun, fearless felting 101."

Even though Knitscene styles make me realize just how old I really am.

Which leads me into the final stages of the Great Oven Mitt Plan. I want them to be pretty. I know I could just embroider something, but frankly, my free-hand embroidery closely resembles the attempts of a one-year-old to color. Before they closed, Tangled Web (another not-quite-local yarn store) had a felted bag on display that had been embellished with needle felting. That's how I want to finish off my oven mitts.

I Googled "felting needles." Turns out Jo-Ann's Online carries all kinds of needle felting supplies. Too bad they take forever to process and deliver an order. I had a clever idea. I Googled the name of their supplier: Wistyria Editions. Yes, an annoyingly precious spelling, but they are all about needle felting. And they are just across the lake in Grand Haven, MI. My order shipped out this morning.

I'm playing around with three possible designs. No laughing. My artistic ability is only slightly better than my free-hand embroidery.













Why can't I get Blogger to line these up?

I'm leaning toward the second one, although the third might be easier. And the swirly one is growing on me. Rapidly. Maybe they don't need to be identical oven mitts? Fraternal could work.

I Can Quit Anytime. Really.

Hello. I'm Julie and I'm an Afghanaholic. I offer the following as evidence.

It all started back when I didn't learn to knit. My grandmother did manage to teach me to crochet. I made my first descent into afghans when I was an adolescent.














It went latent for a while. Skulking at the edges of my consciousness. Rising up periodically when I would buy books of afghan patterns. It reappeared in adulthood. My two younger brothers and their wives were expecting their first child(ren? Only one apiece). I decided to crochet baby blankets. This is when my children discovered I knew how to make things from yarn. They wanted to know why I hadn't made anything for them. Oh, Um. Well. Ahem. You see . . .

The next step was the afghan that never ends (except it finally did). It's Clare's.

















She managed to choose, and then change, multiple shades of blue. No change was compatible with the blues on hand. I finally found the last one in a little yarn shop in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. She also changed patterns. Twice (I think). Further complications arose when Marco discovered how much fun it is to unzip crochet. I would pick up the afghan and find the previous day's work in a tangle of yarn. Sometimes more than the previous day's work. I learned to fasten off firmly. I started this when (I think) Clare was in 7th grade. I finished it when she was a freshman - in college. Last year, in fact.

This is where things get ugly. After all those years, wouldn't you think I'd have had enough? I thought I would. Not so. As I realized I was nearing the end of the everlasting afghan, I had one of those fits of inspiration. (Yes. I get those a lot.) Afghans for my siblings for Christmas gifts. Five of them. No pictures - I had no idea I would be blogging less than a year later. And I did it. Big yarn. V-stitch. Stripes. Fringe. Loads of fun. Thank heaven I didn't know how to knit. The only way to finish so insane a project was with the speed of crochet. Okay, so I was weaving in the ends on the last one on the way to the party. In the car. In the dark. And hiding in my sister's home office while I finished the fringe.

Then I got hit with a combination of At Knit's End ( picked up at Barnes & Noble while in line at the Starbuck's), the Knitting Olympics (No, I didn't join. I couldn't knit, remember?), and the Splendid Sofa blanket. Known in another incarnation as Cat Bordhi's Island Embrace Blanket (it's free). This concatenation of circumstances is what made me decide that this time, by Harry, I would conquer this knitting thing.

I love working on this blanket. Many heartfelt thanks to Ms. Bordhi.

Three different yarns. Size 11 Addi Turbos. Knit a row with one yarn. Pick up the second yarn and knit back. Pick up the third one and knit across again. Pick up the first yarn and just keep on keepin' on. Cool yarn is very important for this project. It's ideal Friday-Night-DVDs-with-the-kids knitting.

Obviously, the addiction is only re-manifesting itself in the mitered square thing.



















I just hope my sewing up skills have improved since I was 13.

I'm Reviewing the Situation

I actually had any number of titles for this post. "Fools rush in." "Tonto, Don't Go to Town." "Friends Don't Let Friends Experiment With Yarn." "Don't Try This At Home." Oh well. Someone has to be the horrible lesson. Might as well be me. Time spent learning isn't entirely wasted, right?

Let me take you on a tour of my weekend knitting. Going clockwise from upper left.

1) Like any good scientist, I know the importance of a control. So swatch #1 is knit strictly according to pattern. You can tell by the little tag of yarn sprouting from the middle where I did the cut and slide around thing. 2) My first clever thought. Purl back on row 10, follow the pattern exactly from there on. It gave me a wider break between garter stitches, and the stockinette on the wrong side. 3) Purl back on row 9, knit row 10, continue according to pattern. This got the stockinette back on the right side, but the break in the garter stitch on the wrong side. 4) Purl the first 9 rows, return to pattern with knitting row 10. This is what the right side of that looked like. I know it's the right side based on the tail from my cast-on.

But.

Look at the 4th swatch from the wrong side. The experiment is on the left, the control on the right.


Note the tails from the respective cast-ons.

Look at that.
The break between the stitches at the right place and the right width. The stockinette stitch on the same side as the break in the garter stitches.

And no cutting the yarn.

I would love to take credit for this idea, but honesty compels me to admit, it was Diane's. The same Diane who pointed out the obvious about my note on removing my stitch marker. This is why it's important to have coffee with your knitting friends. Credit given where credit is due.

Of course, I had to purl the whole first nine rows. The longest rows in the whole square. I hate purling. The question now is, which do I hate more? The 160 ends, or the 610 extra purl stitches per square?

"I think I'd better think it out again."

P.S. I admit to being childishly excited that someone besides Diane read my blog, so (in case Kathleen ever comes back), I'm working with the "Weird Partial Garter Miter" from Kay's post on Mason-Dixon Knitting titled "Clip 'n Save for Miterheads." Not the mitered square from the book.

Attractive Nuisance

I'm having a hard time explaining my undeniable attraction to the mitered square. This is mindless knitting without the advantage of mindlessness. I know because Ive already sent a whole miter to live, like Iolanthe, among the frogs. Miters are all counting, all the time. And tracking the right and wrong side. Stitch markers as vital mnemonics. Sounds kind of annoying, doesn't it? Yet here I am knitting hey-go-mad through the home stretch of my sixth miter so I can get to the seventh.

This is why I make copies of patterns. Note all the little idiot messages to remind me what I should have at the completion of each pattern row.

















I also have a reminder to remove the center stitch marker before I start the stockinette/three decrease section in row 17.

So far, this note isn't working. I'm six for six here. (Diane points out that it might be more useful at the start of the instruction. Diane knits fair isle. Diane is knitting Icarus. Diane may be the voice of experience I should be heeding. I'll add the note.)

Even more annoying than forgetting those wrong-side decreases, or that third decrease after all the rows of decreasing twice, are the mistakes I think I've made that I haven't. The current favorite is in the stockinette section. As I'm purling back, I become convinced that I did a "SSK twice, K2tog" where I should have "SSK, K2tog (twice)." Or vice-versa. Every time I tink back to check, I've done it right. I am getting better at reading the knitting I have done. Soon I will be able to keep straight which one produces the left-leaning decrease and which produces the right-leaning decrease without having to look it up. (It's not as if I like tinking.)

That's a lot of annoyance for a 2 color 8 inch square miter. Yet miters have replaced ball-bands as my reward knitting. How did that happen? Straight garter and stockinette stitch with those two and three center decreases sneaking up on you if you're not watching. I've learned to pay attention.

Well, mostly. There's one niggling little detail that keeps distracting me. In the middle of the garter stitch section, the pattern requires that I cut the yarn, slide the stitches around, and rejoin the same color before I knit across. This produces the nice little break in the garter stitches. I hope you can see it here.

This is the part that creates 2 more ends to weave in on every square. For an 80 square afghan, that means 160 ends. I really want to find a way around this.

Not being a particularly experienced knitter, I can't quite imagine the consequences of some of the options I'm contemplating. What if I just purled back instead of sliding around and knitting? What if I purled the row before? What if I sort of reversed the first set of garter stitch, before I cut the yarn - did purl/purl instead of knit/knit?

I suspect Mason-Dixon Kay has already experimented with all these permutations. And so I knit according to the recipe. But I'm wondering. 160 fewer ends to weave in is powerful motivation. It may be that I'll have to do some experimental knitting of my own this weekend.

I promise pictures of the subsequent disasters.

An Attack of Inarticulacy

I've been trying to write about mitering, but the words don't want to come, so here's some worth-a-thousand.


















And an update on the Red Scarf Project to confirm yesterday's post.

*Tuesday's! It was Tuesday's post. Yeesh. Not only can't I find my way through a sentence, I can't figure out what day it is.*








It really is reversible. Gad, knitters are clever.







Maybe the words will be back tomorrow . . .

This is a turning song . . .

Ive been winding Cascade these last few days. Yeah, no kidding. Two hundred and twenty yards per skein and six skeins to get one of each color. That's one thousand three hundred and twenty yards.

Consider that if the estimate in MDK is correct, I'll need to wind about 20 skeins, possibly 24, since I'm working with multiples of six. That works out to between four thousand four hundred yards and five thousand two hundred eighty. Just how many yards are in a mile? I don't want to think about it.

It makes me realise how much I love my yarn swift.


















No reaching around and around a chair back. No imposing on restless sons. No testing the devotion of the husband who thinks I just might be going a little too far back to nature with this knitting thing.

I don't feel the need for a ball-winder. I like touching the yarn and I don't really want to work with a center-pull ball anyway. My whirl-a-gig and I are a great pair.

Look at this. It's better than straw into gold.

The best money I've spent, at least on something that wasn't yarn. It's quiet. Hardworking. Ready to go with minimal set-up.

It folds up into sculpture when I'm done.

Who needs Rumpelstiltskin?

Oh. And lest I forget again. The Red Scarf marches on. I've finished the eleventh repeat which, I figure, puts me just a smidgen past the half-way point!

What a Plan!

I am suffering from inspiration.

Before I get to that, though, let me confirm. The UPS man did, indeed, arrive Friday. That man is my hero.













I found all three of these at Yarn Country.

Here is a family portrait. All of these are from Cascade's "Heathers" Collection. They are designed, I think, for those of us who might otherwise be easily distracted. Or who might fall asleep while slogging through the rows of garter and stockinette stitch. This way, instead of nodding off and impaling something with our Inox circulars, we can be kept alert by the subtle changes in the yarn. This saves on emergency room visits and reduces trauma to the children. I can just imagine John explaining, "Yeah. My mom had this accident with her knitting . . ."

A little more background here. (Bear with me. Inspiration will be striking momentarily.) I was really taken with Amber's post on the KAL on Sept. 14 about the Random Log Cabin. Her post sent me to January One for the full story. I was sitting here, trying to figure out a plan for my afghan (I like plans. I have been known to draw pictures and make diagrams on graph paper.) and it occurred to me, (this is where I became afflicted with inspiration): Random Miters! I have six colors to work with. There are six sides to a single dice. Surely it's kismet.

So, now I have a not-Plan. I randomly (really, close my eyes and turn the box around a bunch of times and everything) select the colors. First one out is number one and so on. Then I throw the die twice to select the colors for the squares. The first throw is the color I cast on with. The second throw is the color I use to complete the square. I keep track of the throws, and that determines the order I use to sew the squares together. To keep myself from cheating, I sew as I go. This would have the added advantage of not being confronted with hundreds of ends to weave in post-assembly. The only rule would be no solid squares. This could work.

Here's where things stand this morning. The colors and their assigned numbers are, #1, Mallard (the blue); #2, Charcoal (the grey); # 3, Provence (the red); #4, Kansas (the gold); #5, Shire (the green); #6, Pumpkin Spice, (the brown). The first five squares came up Mallard and Kansas, Provence and Charcoal, Pumpkin Spice and Shire, Mallard and Kansas, and Kansas and Charcoal.

Ta-da! Miter Number One as dictated by the Non-Plan.

Oh. I could get to like this.

Now I have to decide whether to sew the individual miters into blocks or strips. I'm leaning toward strips. That first set of four as a block would have two Mallard and Kansas miters adjacent to each other. That might be too random for me.

Feeding the Stash

I'm expecting treasure from the UPS man today.

I should explain that I don't have a LYS. I have favorite yarn stores, but they are not local. The care and well-being of my stash, small as it is, requires expeditions. Excursions. Planning and execution.

There's My Sister's Knits in Beverly where the Yarn Harlot signed my copy of The Secret Life of a Knitter.



How do you think she knew? Could it be that I was one of the last 5 people in a line that stretched out the store and down the block?

Nana's Knitting is in Oak Lawn. I got the scarily huge tree branches, I mean, size 17 bamboo circulars that I used for Scribble there.










Knitche is my favorite.

It's actually my sister's local yarn store, so I never get lost when I go there. I've gone with both boys and left still feeling relaxed and happy about yarn shopping. No mean feat. The boys have even consented to return sojourns. Of course, that may be because I can bribe them with cookies when we're there, thanks to the coffee bar.

Sadly, as I turned mitered-squarish, none of them had the yarn I wanted in all the colors I wanted. Since I don't have the gift for or the guts to buy one or two colors at one store, schlep them to another and hope to find another one or two that will work, and then head off with the whole lot to a third store and . . . well, you get the idea.

Instead, I decided to give up the tactile experience and fling myself in blind trust into the Ethernet. Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? Except that I have had reasonably good luck in the past . (Well, okay. There are those pop-art colored skeins of Noro Iro. What I thought was a foliage green and red turned out to be acid green and hot pink. Oops.) Besides, I do have Cascade 220 in my stash. So I Googled, took a chance on my monitor, my imagination and the names of the colors: Provence, Kansas and Pumpkin Spice. Should go wonderfully well with the Mallard, Shire and Charcoal.

Let me pause here to note the perfidy of a knitting daughter. I actually had 5 skeins of Pumpkin Spice before she left for college. "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." *

So, where is the UPS truck already? Shouldn't it have been here by the time I finished this post? The suspense is starting to tell.

Oh. And will somebody please open a yarn store here?

* Thoreau in his Journals. Referring to a dairymen's strike when there were suspicions of watered milk. I love this quote.

A Paean to John

John is 12 today and already as tall as I am (It's official, we measured him this morning as part of the birthday tradition.) So this post is to John. And believe me, there's a lot to celebrate.

John is the two year old who climbed everything, including the 6 foot bookshelves in the front room where he got stuck. Twice. You still can't tell him anything.

John fights me. He calls me on stuff. He tells me when I need a time out - the first time when he was maybe four. When I complain about this to my mother, she just smiles.

John despises Math Facts. He also, I am finally beginning to realise, is actually really good at math, but will second guess himself into the wrong answer when you ask him how he got the right one. (Yeah, but just try to get him to believe that if he practiced the basics he be more confident in his skills. The math equivalent of swatching.)

John keeps me in touch with popular culture. Admittedly, I find this a mixed blessing; there's a lot of popular culture about which I would really rather not know. **Okay, pause for a complete non sequitur here, but you know, I have got to learn that a preposition is a perfectly good word with which to end a sentence. I mean to end a sentence with. Sorry, Sister Marcella. ** Anyway, because of John I can speak about Pikachu and Ash, the Green Ranger, and Ron Stoppable's naked mole rat, Rufus. John is my TV-watching, Gameboy, computer freak.

He wants to write comic strips when he grows up and his most prized possession in his low-tech comic journal.

So here is the day planned out by John as king of said day (and I mostly quote):

School, because birthdays don't get you everything.
Doughnuts and presents after school, because that's what we do.
Homework, because you can't get out of that either.
Pizza for supper.
A DVD of his choosing in the middle of the week. This is a special treat as there is no TV in this house after supper on school nights. Just call me Attila.



This is the kid who wanted to be driven to school today, but asked for a ride while there was still time to walk. Is he great, or what?

All hail John.







PS. Knitting content will return with the next post. I just make no promises about when that will be. I have reached the middle of the dreaded fourth repeat in the chevron scarf. This is the point in most projects where it's knit one row, rip two back. Knitting without tears, ha!

Rushing, Running Rivulets

And the rain, rain, rain

Came down, down, down,

When the rain, rain, rain

Came down, down, down.*

For days, now. I'm trying to remember if the last time I saw the sun was Saturday or Sunday. Or Friday? The point being, that it feels like weeks.

I got to drive the expressways through the deluge for two days straight. I'm not sure which was more nerve-wracking - the slow, bumper-to-bumper crawl, or the trying to drive to speed (Which in Chicago means 65 - 70 mph. The speeds posted are merely suggestions. Starting speeds, as it were.), with visibility non-existent because of the spume churning up from the tires. Don't get me started on the joys of hydro-planing.

Any wonder, then, that I abandoned my "real" knitting last night and came up with this?



Sunshine,
blue skies,
and
green grass.

The cure for sunshine deprivation.

* Special thanks to "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day."

Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

First, I would like to report that Scribble is finished!
Is she not most beautiful? I know I was wildly extravagant in my choice for the thin yarn (it's Fleece Artist/Handmaiden Seasilk in "ebony"). But I am so pleased. It was lovely to use while I knit and now it's so soft.

I love her, all 5 plus feet of her.

I can feel the need growing to make another in a brighter colorway as well. Although I love the subtle richness of this black into brown with the highlights of dark green.











On to new things! While noodling around in Cyberspace (because one scarf is done, so I must, of course, have another one), I came upon this . I've never done any knitting for a cause. Okay, so I've hardly done any knitting period. I've only just figured out the process. Still, I've always figured there were plenty of people out there who 1) knit better than I, 2) knit faster than I, and 3) actually found knitting to a deadline a pleasant experience.

I will, though, need to knit something for the Red Scarf Project.

I remember when I was introduced to the concept of foster children. One of the things we did (at our parents behest, we were not particularly generous-spirited children) was spend an occasional afternoon helping out a family who had opened their home to children who, for some reason or another, were not eligible for adoption. I still remember Rosie.

The request is for unisex scarves in any shade of red, 6 to 8 inches wide and about 60 inches long. This is what I came up with.

The pattern is "Chevron" from Barbara Walker's first stitch dictionary. (Schoolhouse Press carries it.) I especially like that it's reversible.

The yarn is a beautiful hand-spun merino sport-weight that I got for incredible cheap on eBay. (So what if I had to buy the whole lot of 10 skeins.) I'm double stranding it to get it up to worsted weight for this scarf.

So, for Rosie and the other kids whose names I don't remember 40 years later, I'll be knitting. I promise I'll finish on time. Only 20 or so repeats to go

Oh No! They Got Me!

I swear it. I was going to do a non-Mason-Dixon project next. It seems, however, that as soon as I near the end of one, I answer the siren call of another. This time it is all because I read yesterday's post on the Mason-Dixon blog.

I have to admit, the miter-square blanket has held no appeal for me. All that cotton. It has to weigh a ton. All those ends to work in. And, frankly, I'm not really in love with stockinette stitch. If I'm going to knit mindlessly, I'll do garter stitch. And I already have a nice big no-brain knitting project going.


















And once that's done, I have already promised to knit another one.














So I'm set for afghans. I'm set for Movie Night knitting. I have no need to start dreaming.



Besides, if I were going to go all miter-y, I planned to work out of this. It's part of the booty I acquired at Stitches Midwest.



Then Kay came up with the "weird partial miter." Go back to the link and scroll down a bit. You'll see it. A two-color miter with texture. How cool is that. I'm still not looking to do a big cotton project, but I have a color scheme in mind using Cascade 220.

Not only that, it will reduce stash. Sort of. Okay, not really since I'll need to buy Cascade in three or four more colors. And probably 3 or 4 skeins of each. But that's all I'll buy. Honest. Well, maybe I should buy 5 each just to be on the safe side. I will walk into my favorite yarn store firm in my resolve to stop there. Sure I will.

I'll swear it on my mitered blanket.

Halcyon

My mornings have developed a new pattern: Dishes and knitting.

Now, don't start. Trust me. I know. I was raised by a Polish mother who was deeply committed to the credo that "Dishes cannot be left overnight." After all, there might be a fire and then the firemen and the neighbors would all know. This is right up there with the "always wear nice underwear in case you're hit by a car" law.

But... School is starting. My older son is feeling anxious. He has Down Syndrome and, while he loves his high school, he has 15 years of early intervention/preschool/inclusive classroom/self-contained classroom experience and only 2 years here. An anxious Marco is a Marco who needs attention.

This is not acceptable to his younger brother, John. John finds an anxious Marco an annoying Marco. This leads to a cycle of tease, have an attack of conscience, get reassurance, be lovable and kind, repeat. Proof positive that there is no need to encourage competition among siblings. They'll find it just fine all on their own, thank you very much.

On the plus side, I get a lot of hugs. The downside is that it's hard to keep your stitch count straight when your arms are pinned to your sides at irregular intervals.

Anyway, my evenings are full of children these days. And it's not like the dishes won't wait.













So mornings and dishes have become the still point in my turning day. I bring a modicum of order to my favorite room, and I knit.

Scribble

I lied. There are circumstances under which you will rip back over 2 and 1/2 feet of knitting. Even knitting that you laboriously did the drop-the-mistake-off-your-needle-to-fix for the first time. (Yes!) It's when you realise you forgot another one of the lessons you learned on your first stockinette stitch project. Yes, Virginia. There really is a right (and thus, WRONG) side to your knitting and you, by all the saints, had better not forget which side you are working on.

Alas, poor Scribble. It went swimming with the frogs and resurfaced at about 10 inches.

But (and here's one of the things I love about knitting): it's fixable. And once I realized that I really like this scarf/shawl (sharf? scawl? scarl?), and loved working with the ribbon and silk, it really mattered to me that it be right. Not filled with unintentional creativity.

(I haven't stopped feathering and fanning. Actually, the fan seems conspicuous in its absence. I will heretofore refer to "feather" or "feathering." But I need variety. Hence all this Scribbling.)

So, happily, with some extra time and attention, the Scribble scarf has almost recovered.


















I have put another safe-guard in place. This is scribble with its first set of stitch markers (and lifelines).












Here it is with the new set of stitch markers. If I'm on the end with the blue one, I'm supposed to be knitting. If I'm starting with gold, I'm supposed to be purling.












And it seems to be working!

Oh, just shoot me.

Okay, so lifelines and stitch counters won't always save you and sometimes you have to spend the day getting brave enough to let the stitch you dropped ladder down and then hook it back up. And (truly scary) isolate the stitch you added and drop that one on purpose (see my eye twitch?). I managed to do this between one set of stitch markers, so the stitch count stayed the same. Not only that, I did it in the row directly above the lifeline so the dropped stitch didn't ladder down. I know, I know. These things happen. But when your Scribble scarf has reached 2 and 1/2 feet, there is no way on God's green earth that you are going to rip back.

It also means you don't get to your knitting blog, even though you promised yourself when you started that you would absolutely, positively, no excuses accepted, commit to posting at least three times a week/every other day. Oh well.

So, no knitting progress, unless you want to count lessons learned (that's a euphemism for finding mistakes).

But I found something I thought was fun.

You Are Bert

Extremely serious and a little eccentric, people find you lovable - even if you don't love them! You are usually feeling: Logical - you rarely let your emotions rule you You are famous for: Being smart, a total neat freak, and maybe just a little evil How you life your life: With passion, even if your odd passions (like bottle caps and pigeons) are baffling to others

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

I almost posted this yesterday. Then decided it was too goofy (and I didn't want to admit I do this kind of thing). See how the mighty are fallen.

Lovable neat freak. Ha!

But then there's that bit about collecting odd things. Yarn... Pointed sticks... The perfect knitting bag...