Yarnification

Okay, finally here’s the Seraphina shawl (clickable):

I made it really big on purpose so it’d be warm and snuggly and all that. It’s about 36″ long and 72″ wide, and it took about 2½ or so skeins of RH Symphony (juniper).

Say you’re having a bad crafty sort of week already. And you have just worked a 12-hour shift (for the second day in a row) after too little sleep.

After you get home, what sounds like a good idea for a project, given that you’re too tired to even read a book? Why, trying to teach yourself to knit socks on dpns, of course!

That didn’t go well at all. Nobody was actually maimed or anything, but much cussing ensued.

I haven’t been able to get anywhere with any of my projects this week.

I still mean to get a photo of the shawl but haven’t been able to manage it yet.

I started the corset. I made some unfathomable mistake (despite all the obsessive counting) and had to frog a row, then made more mistakes and frogged the whole thing. Theory: I was too damn tired to be working on anything that complicated.

And socks. I have this pair of socks I’ve had going for the longest time. I’m on the ankle ribbing on the second sock. It’s done in sc rows, back loop, and every time I pick it up I screw it up in a new and different way.

This is possibly a little pathetic on account of how easy sc ribbing really is. I don’t know why I can’t just get through it.

Most recently, I can’t make the gauge match what I’ve already done. I have no clue what to do (use a smaller hook? frog the whole thing and start over since all I’ve got done is 50 rows of ribbing? but then what if it ends up not matching the first sock?)

I can’t imagine that my gauge has changed that much in the (gulp) year since I started this sock. But what else would explain that? My E hook was in the bag with the project all this time, so I’m sure it’s the hook I was using with it.

I dunno. It’s looking like having a go with a D hook would be the simplest thing.

Wish me luck—it’s not looking like skill is getting me far this week.

Truly priceless post at Threadbared: That Most Magical Time of the Year

In other news, I’ve acquired a set of dpns. Anyone in my immediate vicinity should probably be very, very afraid. I am a danger to myself and others with two normal knitting needles, let alone a set of four double-pointed ones.

Thanks for the advice, all…it seems I was missing the last stitch in the row. I did another swatch with white yarn and I didn’t have any problem with that, so I guess it was mainly a problem with trying to work with black yarn in a poorly-lit room full of distractions.

So anyway I got nothin’ today. I still haven’t lined those bags. The weekend was pretty busy, just no time for it. Also I was possibly just the faintest bit hung over yesterday (we won’t get into how sad it is that a few beers can leave me hung over—oh, but I will tell you that a really hot bartender hugged me. That was fun) and also had been up until 5:00 AM the night before, so I just wasn’t up to anything that required energy and didn’t positively have to be done.

I taught myself how to do Tunisian simple stitch a few weeks ago before I had all the stuff to make this thing, but now I’m having trouble.

I’m doing up a gauge swatch (have I ever mentioned how much I hate swatching?) and I keep losing stitches on the right-hand side of the piece. (That would be the left if you’re right-handed—the place where you end the forward row and start the return row.) I didn’t have this problem before when I was learning to do it, but I don’t know if that was because the yarn wasn’t black then or because I just got lucky.

Mainly I think I just need to do some more practice swatches with lighter-colored yarn until I’m sure I’ve got the hang of it, but if anyone has any clue why I might be losing stitches I’d be much appreciative…

Observation: Keeping track of Tunisian rows is a little problematic, what with that forward row/return row thing. I keep losing all track of how many rows I’ve done.

(Heheheh. I said boning heheheheh. Er. Sorry. Every time I say that, I start channeling Beavis and Butthead.)

The boning for the corset showed up today. That was amazingly fast. I ordered it Monday evening. It only had to come from Philly but still that was damn quick.

Now I get to start on the corset! Yay!

I need to decide which I want more, to start on the corset or get those bags lined. I could really use to have those bags finished—but I want to play with this pattern, too. Hmm.

I work till midnight tonight, though, so though there’s no way I’ll start lining the bags today, I’ll still have some time where I could start on this after I get home. I bought three times as much boning as I needed to meet their minimum order ($10—it was $1.35 a yard) so even if I screw it up a bit as a result of being all strung out from a twelve-hour shift I should be okay.

Swiped from Marvie.

Seen at Lori’s and Trish’s.

I did this yesterday and some of it looks a little weird now, like I marked the wrong books or something. I suppose it’s mostly accurate.

Meme instructions: Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby– F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird– Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi– Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story– George Orwell
The Hobbit– J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies– William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984– George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha– Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5– Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer – William Gibson
(Cryptonomicon) – Neal Stephenson
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights– Emily Bronte
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
(Cloud Atlas) – David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings– J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
(Atonement) – Ian McEwan
(The Shadow Of The Wind) – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale– Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune– Frank Herbert

After I couldn’t resist that pretty georgette for the peasant blouse and had such a hard time sewing with the stuff, I swore off pain-in-the-ass fabrics.

Except. The fabric I planned to use to line these two bags is nowhere to be found, and I went to Joann’s today and wandered around and found this interlock knit stuff on sale for $3 a yard, and it felt nice, and. Ack. I don’t know how to sew with knits.

I’m reading some articles, but they mostly talk about making clothes and this is a bag lining, so it’s not like it has to stretch. I think I’m just going to put a ballpoint needle in the machine and hope for the best.