The love you take is equal to the love you make

I think the other eggs seem a little taken aback; what do you think?

I'm glad I did this, but I am also glad it's done. Happy Thingaday all around.

Now get back to work.

all work and no play makes Homer something something

14 hour work day! Still came home and knitted most of an egg cozy. Guilt is powerful.

Will finish tomorrow.

Also, my life is pretty lonely these days, but I am happy to report that my cat still loves me. Just look at the way he cuddles!

Excahuse me waitair...

... zis croissant, he is a bit petit, non?

I can't believe it took me this long to knit a croissant. Still trying to decide if I should have that guy I live with come up with a french face for it.

Where did these things come from anyway?

The bathroom mirror in our house is dynamic. Since we have such weird work/sleep/life patterns, we find ourselves with things we would like to share without waking each other up. And so, there is the dry erase marker. Luckily, he is as bored with the idea of knitting sweaters as I am, so he has no problems with the bookshelves becoming overrun with weird critters. In fact, I have pressed him to contribute, and so the mirror gives me fun projects. Sometimes, though, I'll get a proper sketch:

And that is just all the more frustrating because, dammit, he's pretty good with a pencil and I've been just making this stuff up as I go along... (Patterns, what happened to using patterns?) But I take my best shot.
I totally dig the eyebrows, but could never do this again because I have no idea what I did. Regardless, the quadtropus.

Apparently I am making a giant eyeball next. (Also for the record, totally doing crochet with round stuff and knit with straight because I haven't figured out how to crochet a square.)

Mochimochiland is having a photo contest...

... should I enter the deviant beet? I'd probably reshoot the picture, but hey, the name "beet of my heart" is soo very perfect to ensure they knew what I started from.

Ha!

You Knit What?

The name says it all....

Cake, meet ice cream

I'm sure these two will be fast friends.....


also, I have been teaching myself crochet. My first finished crochet was a cat toy, filled with catnip, which my cats have been studiously avoiding since I gave it to them. I should stick with food.

do NOT mess with this computer, man

i will totally cut you.

I've heard of Tipsy Cakes...

... but Surly Cake is a new one on me.

It makes me very, very happy, though. Surly Cake is adapted from this pattern. I'm very tempted now to go to various restaurants with Surly Cake and snap pictures of him with their dessert plates. Because I'm just that way.

Thanks for the birthday wishes. P.S. Rach, how do you bake a card? :)

It's a gazillion degrees outside, let me wrap my hands in warm fiber.

Record heat and humidity. Everyone is being told "Stay indoors or we can not be held accountable for your immediate raisinification". (Hey, if spaghettification can be a scientific term, so can raisinification.)

Of course, I have been knitting.

I made a pop tart phone cover which made me very happy and which I promptly gave away, so I have no pictures. It looked a lot like this, only without the evil evil acrylic yarn, instead using happy sugar and cream cotton yarn.

I made an mp3 player cover in an effort to work my way into making a good looking mp3 player cover. No pictures.

I also completed a hat for a person-to-be. It is blue, much to the chagrin of the mom who really really wanted a girl. I went to take a picture and the camera batteries are, shockingly, dead. I really should go out and buy some new rechargable batteries.

Ok, is anyone particularly good at switching colors in knitting to make a design? I feel like there is something I'm missing when I do it, probably relating to the word "intarsia" which I have no clue about. I tried to make a pickle on the mp3 player cover, but it came out all lumped and embossed looking. No, I won't take a picture and show you. It's weird.

She will always be taller and younger and thinner, now this!?!

My sister is cooler than me.

Not only did she find red plastic bags to knit with, she told me what she is going to make with them and it is excellent. However, when we were on our travels together and we found a random convenience store that used red bags, she totally understood that I had to ask the cashier for extra bags. Now I just have to think of something that isn't a copycat of what she is doing.

As for an update with my plastic bag knitting, I've revised the plan slightly for how the final plastic mat will come together. Instead of icord forming the the majority of the mat, I'm braiding instead and will use icord for design purposes. We'll see how it all comes together...

I always knew I had deviance in me.....

My sister demands pictures and well, what else could I do but supply them, which meant finishing this little critter here. Ok but wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.


Like I said, I've been all up ons the mochimochiland little projects... anything that I can accomplish in a day makes me feel better about the universe.

So The first I made was the misshapen multicolored heart. The shape was as much a product of that yarn as it was my way fabulous knitting skills coping with a new way to increase and decrease stitches I had never tried. Then came the Blade of Grass. He's a bit more minty green than you can tell in this picture. So much fun to make this, I have no idea why. But then... I went awry.
It's not like I have to follow recipes to the T or anything, but I lack confidence and skill to depart from most crafty patterns. But that's what I did. That orange guy there? He was a heart. He became the Deviant Beet. I even deviated from my sister's suggestion for the leaves! Craziness! And then, to make matters worse, I made Purple Robot there without a pattern at all. What am I turning into?

Well, apparently, someone who knits plastic bags. Eventually this will become the welcome mat that can be stolen without heartbreak. For now, I'm still odd.



Just wait, someone asked me to make them a beanie this week.

I understand the idea of diminishing returns but i hate the rechargeable batteries anyway.

One of my coworkers today mentioned something about needing a part-time job because he had "too much free time" right now. We haven't really hit the slow season at work, but we're very close and I admit, my work weeks have been hovering under the forty hour line. But what is this free time of which he speaks? I know no such thing! Then I realize two very important factors of the equation:

1. He is a kind-of-single manwhore who has a veritable bevy of suitors desperate to do things like his laundry for him. Seriously, they even do his ironing. I should enjoy such perks in my world.

2. My house has sprouted knitty, crafty things. Not quite sure how it happened, and it is probably due in part to all those cute little projects on mochimochiland. Seriously, I even finished a bunch of these things! And made up some stuff on my own!

I blame this website.

Eventually I'll just start spinning yarn out of cat hair to cut out the middle man.

Kathy called me up (left a message, actually. Curse the need to mow the lawn over the weekend!) saying, "I've deviated from the pattern. Now I have a problem, but I think you can help me."

Well, I suppose that's exactly why we started this thing; now we can help each other out, and provide visual aids! Rad.

Let me provide a little back story, though. See, Kathy is a pastry chef. That means she has to be good at following recipes, because if you fail to follow a pastry recipe, Bad Things Happen(tm). Me? I am not good at following recipes. In fact, I actively chafe against recipes, and, as a general rule, if I want to cook something I've never made before, I look through 5 to 10 different recipes for that thing, get the gist of what I am going for, and then fly blind when it comes to actual meal preparation. This tends to work much better for me than actually following a recipe would. I'm not completely sure why, but I am guessing it probably reflects some general need to blaze my own trail. (Listen, it's not my fault I'm the youngest. And no, I don't buy into any of that birth order crap, thank you very much.)

Point is, Kathy made a beet instead of a heart. And I am very proud of her! But now the beet needs greens, and she's stuck. So she called me, and since she rejected my initial idea of latch-hooking (she wanted proper leaves, apparently), I had to invent a leaf pattern while we were on the phone. So here is one side of the resulting leaf:and the other side:Here's a closer shot of the leaf to show the neat little vein detail:Now for the pattern:
Notes - when I say "m1", I am referring to the make one back increase that you can see a video for here.
cast on 3
do a 3 stitch i-cord for whatever length is appropriate for your stem
k1, m1, k1, m1, k1 (you should now have 5 stitches on your needle)
k1, m1, k1, p1, k1, m1, k1 (it's a seven stitch palindrome!)
repeat the following two (marked in square brackets) rows until the body of the leaf is as long as you want it:
[knit across the row
k3, p1, k3]
k2tog, k3, k2tog (should be 5 sts on your needle now)
k2, p1, k2
k2tog, k1, k2tog (three stitches left)
k3tog (one stitch left!)
bind off your sad one stitch. So lonely!

That's it! Pretty easy, right?

Kathy also has been begging me to post an update on the status of my halter top for about a week now. So here it is:I swear he sat down and started glaring at me like that before I had even finished putting the damn thing on the bed. Apparently this particular item did not yet contain enough cat hair. For crying out loud.

I took this picture while holding him out of the frame with my left hand. No small task, that cat weighs 14 pounds, and it's all muscle! Well, and fur. And a shockingly large number of facial whiskers (seriously, check out the eyebrow whiskers in the previous picture. My cat practically has a cuttlefish growing out of his face.) Anyway:So, yes, I am, in fact, making progress. And I haven't started any other projects since I posted about my excess of projects!

Well, I haven't started any knitting projects.

...except for the leaf for Kathy. And that hardly counts, right? I SWEAR I CAN STOP ANY TIME.

Kathy's Being Modest

Check out the awesome present she made for my little boy:




Thanks, Kathy!!

Mars Needs Links

I just posted a couple of my favorite craft sites over there in the links section... or at least the ones I could think of here way early in the morning. Leave a comment with some other ones we should post and we'll add 'em.

I've been going through and adding a few labels to various posts so we can reference them later - following the lead of my sister they are things like "knit" "unfinished" "scrapbook" and the like. Feel free to add labels as you like to Posts of the Future.

also, I finished that half a sock. but then I went and watched Pirates 3 and so I have not started my little mosaic project. Maybe I'll make some I-cord coasters. or something.

A sock and a half

My job is about time. Specifically, that point in time when some part of what I'm making is "done". All day, I'm getting to that moment, and preferably making that moment happen before it needs to be on a plate in front of a living, breathing, opinionated person.

And it had better be pretty dammit.

So I admit that the appeal of doing these crafty projects is that there is no deadline, mostly. There is a desire to finish, sure, but the projects that make me most crazy are the ones I feel need to be done by X time. Then it just feels like work.

Maybe that's why I am so bad about getting birthday presents to people on their birthday.

But, there in the part of my brain labeled Virgo (what's the scientific name for that spot, Julia?) all of these half projects laying around make me kinda tweaked. Because I really like starting new projects and can't help but wag the finger and say "You can't do that until you finish something!" Case in point. I painted my table:


Now, I still want to do a seaglass mosaic on the top, because that color is screaming for it. But, since I haven't done a mosaic before, I want to jog over to the thrift store this second, find a footstool or something and make that my weekend thing. I could even do a budget challenge for myself and see if I could do it for like 20 bucks! Whee! I'm excited! Sounds fun!

But there is half a sock.

How many half projects is it ok to have?

In contrast, I am quite good about finishing leftovers.

One of the terrible things about no longer living in a cramped apartment is that it is easy to lose track of all of the things that I've started and failed to finish.

Okay, actually, that's not true. I don't forget the things that I've started and failed to finish. Instead, I feel a tremendous weight of incompleteness, a supreme form of guilt as the projects sit gathering dust in corners, stitches quietly loosening in a desperate attempt at knitting project suicide. I would be a prolific crafter if I could ever manage to finish anything--instead I mentally assemble dear John letters to my swatches and skeins, "Dear part of a blue sweater that has been sitting in the hall closet for 9 months, I love you, but I'm not in love with you."

It is my sincere hope that this effort to document my progress will help me stay on task long enough to finish some of these orphaned projects. To that end, I present my gallery of shame.

Exhibit A: hats for babies that are already too big for these hats (also it is the summer).Simple projects, simple yarns. a 2x2 ribbing pattern, knit a long piece, decrease toward the top, sew up the seam, you get a hat. Easy, except for the bit where my attention span is so short I can't

Exhibit B: baby sweater for same rapidly growing babies (did I mention that my three year old nephew is almost as big as I am?)This was something I started after finding some of Scott's grandmother's yarn in the attic in Nashville. There wasn't much of the old yarn, but it had a lovely soft texture that I couldn't let go to waste. With any luck there will be a small person in the family when I finally do manage to finish this one.

Exhibit C: Toe-up socksI was feeling ambitious, and I had received some lovely brown yarn for Christmas back in 2005, so I found a sock pattern that looked promising. I liked this one, because you started from the toes, which meant you could check the size against the actual foot you were knitting for, and start making the turn for the heel at the spot that was just right for the intended wearer. Neat! Too bad I never got to that point, eh?

Exhibit D: Fuzzy Scarf (I think it got up to 90 degrees today)
I was watching television at about 5 in the morning one day, and a knitting show came on and they were talking about how wonderful things can happen when you knit two strands of yarn together. I thought, "hey, I may be a complete newb, but I can probably manage that." This scarf was what started happening when I knit together a strand of super cheapo orange acrylic yarn and some pricier fuzzy red yarn. It's very fuzzy!

Maybe I can finish it in time for next winter.

Exhibit E: baby blanket
No pithy comments here. I started this when I got pregnant, stopped when I miscarried. I haven't had the heart to work on it since then.

Exhibit F: crochet purse
It had started to bother me that I could knit pretty well, but had no earthly idea how to crochet. The same Christmas gathering where I received that brown yarn, I also got a crochet lesson from my mother-in-law. I promptly forgot how almost immediately thereafter. Fortunately, our friend and co-blogger MilkKissed came to the rescue, bearing about 5 or 6 different crochet instruction books. I spent a whole weekend cussing at crochet hooks before I finally fit my head around the basics, and started working on this project, which will eventually be a cute little handbag.

Exhibit G: would-be adorable halter topI have high hopes for this project, actually. This is a multicolored all-cotton yarn (yay for easy to wash!), and I'm building a halter top based on a pattern I found on knitty. With any luck, I'll actually finish this one while it is still warm out. Regardless, of all of my projects-in-progress, this is the one I'm going to focus on right now, and I'm not going to start any more projects until this one is done. Wish me luck!