The Knitting Post.

I mentioned I have been doing a lot of knitting lately. I can knit at work when things are slow and I am there for 50 hours a week now, plus commuting time on the train to knit, plus it's cold and dark anytime I'm at home, so I knit while watching TV. Here's what I've been doing:

Rose Bud Beanie. OK, to be fair, I made this in the Spring. It just only made it to its recipient recently and got its photo taken. It was my first lacy project and it was pretty challenging to start. I think it turned out all right in the end.

Texas Sweater. I made my mom a cardigan. She's always cold, but it is still Texas, so it's a nice, light sweater if you leave it draped, or you can wrap it to make it warmer. I splurged on the yarn - it was so nice and soft! I kind of want to make one for myself now.

Hat by Request. I whipped this one up for my sister-in-law's birthday. I had been toying with cables, but this is the first finished project using them. I didn't think it was working very well the whole time it was on the needles, but once I got it off and finished and on a head - it looked great!

Sky Scarf. I posted about starting this one a couple months ago. One row a day, color dependent on the weather. As you can see we've had a surprisingly blue winter. There was that one week in there that was soppy, but we've had no rain and either clear or foggy skies for over a week now. Wacky.

Portland Fog. These were my traveling project over Thanksgiving. I had 10 hours of flying time to work on them. I finished them really quickly, despite being a more complex pattern. It was about 2 good days of knitting per hand. They are my favorite accessory now. I want to be wearing them constantly.

Phew. So, that's a lot of knitting! I didn't even realize it until I put it all in one place. I have several work-in-progress going right now too. "Not So Secret Christmas Hat", some leg warmers for those cold morning bike rides, and a cabled cowl that may or may not ever get finished. I kind of lost my gusto on that one. If you are a Raveler you can find me there as bomburdoo. Happy winter knitting y'all!

Winter is Coming.

The garden has been given up on, as has any hopes for a social life. My job has finally broken me and I'm just not even trying anymore. Sure, I'm still making bread every couple weeks and when the milk starts to turn I make yogurt. Maybe next year we'll rip out the grass and expand the garden, but maybe not. I'm just not even going to think about it right now. Winter is coming and the biggest thing on my mind right now is knitting and preparing for the long, dark, wet of it.

We are finally getting new windows for the house. It's going to be glorious. We're upgrading from single-paned and aluminum framed to triple-paned and insulated vinyl framed. It should lower the heating bills substantially and make sitting on the far side of the living room bearable without an extra layer.

The cooler and shorter days are making knitting seem much more pleasurable too. I had to force myself to knit through the summer. There were so many other things I could be doing and needed to be doing, but now it seems a lot more seasonal. I'm about three-quarters of the way through my current big project. I've got two more projects in the queue with yarn already bought and I just started up a new experimental project last night. I went a little nutty with the online yarn ordering. It was all so cheap!




I'm starting on a "conceptual knitting" project, a Sky Scarf. The idea is you knit one row every day. The color of that row depends on the color of the sky. I have also seen people do mood scarves, with a different color for each mood and even an exercise scarf, tracking their different activities with greens and reds and gray for days they didn't do anything. That's good motivation - try for as little gray as possible!




For my Sky Scarf I have three shades of blue and three shades on gray. I'll be done when the scarf is long enough to suit my fancy. It will probably be done in the late Spring. I think it will be a pretty cool thing and end up mostly gray in the middle, flecked with short spurts of brilliant blue.