Hey wait! It's still February!

I had plans, big plans I tell ya, for Fair Isle February. I really want to make the Tropical Garden Vest from Knit 2 Together.

I've been flip-flopping between making the vest or reducing my stash all month. In the end stash reduction won. After all, there are plenty of small stranded projects I can do with what I already have. Plus I have to admit I am not 100% happy yet with my mad stranded skillz. I've done a couple of small projects and so far I haven't mastered the art of even stranded knitting. Everything comes out kind of lumpy. But my Fair Isle February project, a Bea Ellis traditional hat in Dale of Norway Heilo is my most even yet. The snowflakes aren't lumpy at all!



The hat has been gift-wrapped and sent up north to a friend. I'll start the Tropical Garden Vest (sort of a tropical inspired Fair Isle pattern more appropriate for Florida than a snowflake hat) soon. I've put it at the end of the queue, after a few more pairs of socks and a cable vest I already have the yarn for. Does the list get longer and longer for all knitters?!

I caved.

I had to buy it. I had so much fun making my first baby sweater. Then I saw this at my LYS and I couldn't help myself. The photo doesn't do the color justice. It's not dark blue, its more jewel-toned. Like that blue night sky in winter, when it gets dark too early but that electric blue hangs around for an hour and the world seems rather magical. All I needed was one skein to make the sweater. That's not so bad, right?


I even like the strange arrow shaped pooling.

The Great 2007 Stash Bustin' Snoozefest

New rule: I can't buy any new yarn until I de-stashed a bit (arrgh, I'm knitting as fast as I can!). I'm not being as strict as the Knit From Your Stash 2007 folks in terms of rules about when my de-stashing will be over. I just have absolutely no storage space in my small house (two tiny closets, people!). There is yarn crammed into every available space. My office, once used only for my work, has now been taken over by plastic boxes full of yarn. Bedroom dresser: yarn stuffed in between t-shirts and sweaters. Open the storage/sofa end tables, where once housed DVD's and CD's? Yarn.

The one indulgence I am allowing myself is the Socks That Rock! Socks Club; the first shipment of which should arrive ANY DAY NOW. I've been hovering around my mailbox like Ralphie waiting for his secret decoder ring. (If the first sock yarn shipment has anything to do with Ovaltine I will lose it!)

In the meantime, I continue to de-stash. Most of 2006 for me was a blur of out-of-control yarn purchases (I'm not the only one, right?!). Unfortunately I wasn't very smart about my purchases. Not realizing that I would actually be confident enough to one day knit a whole sweater, I bought yarn 2 to 3 skeins at a time. The result is that I now have tons of yarn but can't knit any big projects with it (well, maybe if I took the time and got creative about it, but that seems like a lot of work). My idea? Baby sweaters. The people in my life have gone all baby crazy and said babies are at the age where I can knit them sweaters with 2 to 3 skeins. I figure it's destashing and acquiring some sweater know-how all in one.

Here's my first sweater. It's a test sweater, really, but came out better than I expected. It's made from yarn I bought within my first month of knitting, before I realized there was yarn besides Jo-Ann Fabrics. It's a Jo-Ann's yarn, Bellezza Collection Dolcetto (what is up with that full of it name?!). It has the same yarn content and feels exactly like Rowan Soft Baby. It's not plied (is that the correct term?) so the yarn would probably look better as a blanket, but the sweater is cute anyway. The pattern is Knitting Pure and Simple's Baby Pullover. It took less than 2 skeins (for 6 month size):


Up next, ribbed socks made from this worsted weight little lovely:

Prism Yarn, Andee in colorway Garden. I would've used this for a baby sweater, but all the babies I know are boys. Plus, I really want some nice warm socks made with this.

The Pirate Life

Ahoy! I finally finished the "We Call Them Pirates" hat - just in time for my friend Todd's visit. I made him the hat to commemorate his first visit to Gasparilla. I say first visit but really one Gasparilla will pretty much do for most people over 25. I was however impressed with Todd's bead catching skills. The St. Petersburg Times said 400,000 people came to watch the invasion and I believe it. Bayshore was packed.

Back to the hat: it was the second We Call Them Pirates hat I made the past two weeks. The first hat I knitted with the recommended needle size. I used the same yarn, Dale of Norway Hauk (same colors even). I checked my gauge like a good little knitter. But when I was done with it I could barely fit it over my head. My knitting got tighter when I used two colors. My swatch was with just one color. That means I either need to do stranded gauge tests for stranded projects or learn how to do stranded knitting correctly. I went up one size, US 4, for the second hat and it worked much better. No longer felt as if pirates were squeezing my brain.

It was too warm to wear the hat for Gasparilla, but Todd graciously agreed to model the next day, when it was a bit cooler:


We even took the hat out for some pirate-y shuffleboard action before Todd had to fly back to DC. Pirates love shuffleboard:

Log Cabin Fever

Woo hoo!! I am finished making Log Cabin socks (at least until next Christmas)! I made four of these as gifts this Christmas. Although I am so, so happy to be able to move on to other patterns, I will probably make more next Christmas, as these are phenomenal house socks. Of the three I made earlier, two were made with Berroco Ultra Alpaca, and one was made with Classic Elite Wings. I used the yarn the pattern called for, Cascade Pastaza, for this final pair, a gift for my brother. He knows he's getting them; Christmas morning he unwrapped half a sock still on the dpns. Pastaza is a pain to knit with. Split yarn everywhere. But boy they are beautiful, warm, soft socks. I wish I had used it for all four socks. I will use it for more house socks in the future.

Pattern: Log Cabin socks from Handknit Holidays
Yarn: Cascade Pastaza, color 027
Needles: Clover dpns US5
Modifications: Used US5 dpns instead of US6, because although the gauge was correct on US6 the socks were huge.

I've been experimenting with different backgrounds in my knitting photos. The first one is taken on my front porch with my cuban tiles as the background. You can see the problem in this photo; turns out dogs, particularly Jackson, love Log Cabin socks.


The detail in these photos isn't very good. I wanted to get a close up of the heel. I love the cabled heel. It looks great on the foot, but since my brother wears size 12's, my feet look like they have elfin magic when I wear these. He's promised to send me a photo of him wearing the socks.

Sasha's favorite spot

My youngest dog, Sasha, has discovered how pleasant it is to sit on my front porch. The other two dogs use the front porch as a lookout station; always ready to bark and whine at whomever walks by.


But Sasha can sit on the ottoman for hours, just staring at the street. Long after I've dragged the other two dogs back inside the house, tired of their barking, she'll sit there quietly.


I'd like to think she's contemplating deep thoughts, but I suspect she's looking for squirrels. PS: black glob under her eye is a wad of dirt, acquired from her morning backyard dig. In my backyard she looks like a wild boar rooting for truffles. But on the front porch she's a sweet little girl.

Socks That Rock! vs. Bank That Sucks

I have a little secret to share: people in Florida don't wear socks (outdoors; what people wear indoors is their own business). That is, people who live in Florida and wear socks are often looked upon by non-sock wearers as crackpots or goofballs, or at the very least "people who are oblivious to where they live and OMG don't they know what can grow on the feet of sock wearers in this freaking swamp?!" But as a knitter, there are few knitting joys as satisfying to me as turning a heel. And buying a hank of hand-painted sock yarn is so much more affordable than buying hand-painted yarn for a whole sweater. And gosh I never get to wear sweaters, either. And sock yarn is so, so pretty.

So logically, rationally, reasonably, I plunked down a bunch of cash to join the Socks That Rock! Rockin' Socks Club, to buy a bunch of yarn I've never used before in order to make socks I'll hardly get to wear. Yes, I plan to keep them all for myself! I will wear them with pride and ignore the worried stares of my non-sock wearing neighbors, at least through March, when it gets too hot outside. I joined because I love sock yarn. I have a theory that knowing I have sock yarn arriving every other month might curtail my sock yarn buying habit for awhile. I've heard great things about the company, Blue Moon Fiber Arts and their yarn. But I really joined because I wanted to be in a club called the Rockin' Socks Club. How cool is that?!

I got my "Bank Error Please Read" email a couple days ago. Needless to say I was stunned. May the suits at the bank who caused the Blue Moon STR! shut-down one day have someone in their lives who knits so they may know the joy of wearing handmade socks. I won't recap the long story; it has spread all through blogland by now, especially here and here. But now I really feel like part of the knitting community, because not only do I belong to a club called the Rockin' Socks Club, but a bank had the audacity to shut it down! Thanks, mystery bank!