Yarnification

I finished the first one of the pair and thus had to post a (blurry, and the yarn is a much darker red than it looks like) photo, but I’m inclined to pick that seam apart and have another go at it because I did not properly grok the mattress stitch.

It’s one repeat shorter than the pattern calls for—I didn’t really want something that would come halfway to my elbows, just something to keep my hands warm while I’m working at the ’puter. Single crochet cast-off because I have a fear of casting off the regular way (I remember what happened last time, and I didn’t have any needles that are a size or two bigger than these to keep it from happening again).

I downloaded the Irish hiker scarf pattern, too, and I think I’m going to make it with some more of this color. Red is my new favorite color.

After you all were so encouraging, I went and cast on for the Irish hiker pattern. I got through the first repeat and a half, decided it was a mess, and started again. I’m on the third repeat now:

Note that I made a major screwup on the last cable row. I was working merrily along when suddenly the needle holding the stitches materialized six inches to the left of my project, leaving me scrambling to get the stitches back on the needle before it all came apart. I was a little uncertain as to which direction the stitches go back on, and I think I guessed wrong.

Other than that? There are mistakes and messes here and there, but it’s coming along a lot better than I could have hoped for.

Well, I looked at those knitting videos. Guess what? I’ve been wrapping the yarn the wrong way ’round on purl stitches. So I’ve been doing something like combined knitting with the purls (you can go on ahead and read “something like combined knitting” to mean “doing it wrong”) while still using English knitting on the knits, and voilà! A giant mess!

I’m going to keep on with designing the ones in crochet, but I’m going to try the Irish Hiker pattern, too. I just got back from Joann’s, and they do not have cable needles (I’m sure such a thing exists; I’ve seen them before) but I vaguely recall that you can do cables with a spare needle—it sounds awkward to me, but then everything about knitting still feels awkward to me so it probably doesn’t matter—so I picked up a second, shorter set of the size needles I needed with my 40% off coupon. ($2! Woo! Not that I shoud be spending money on anything extra right now, but for $2 that was pretty cheap retail therapy.)

Now, someone please tell me that you really can do cables with an extra straight needle?

…and therefore I am making those fingerless gloves in crochet. I don’t have a pattern; I figure it can’t be that hard. I have two skeins of this fantastic mohair blend yarn, not sure what weight, maybe sock/fingering weight, maybe sport but I don’t think it’s that thick, and I’m working it up with a G hook (that would be an E or an F to the rest of you) in spiral rounds of hdc. Will figure out the parts that aren’t just a tube when I get to them. If I can do socks, then I can do this, right? I needed to do something, anyway. My hands hurt.

I’m still tempted to take my 40% off one item coupon and go to Joann’s and get a cable needle because the Irish Hiker wrist warmer pattern is calling to me.

But now, see, the problem here? Is that I can’t purl to save my life. Everything goes great till I start trying to purl, and suddenly the stitches are all squidged up together and twisted all around and everything’s getting way too tight and there are holes—holes!—appearing out of nowhere and I become filled with despair and frog the whole thing. I have downloaded a bunch of videos from knittinghelp.com but have not yet had the time to stare at them to figure out what I’m doing wrong.

Maybe this will make me feel better about knitting. It’s terribly cute, and it’s done on a circular needle with no purls to be found anywhere.

1) What is wrong with me that I think it’ll work out if I start a project on dpns at 1:00 AM? I need to stop doing this. It doesn’t matter that this is the only time when I have enough peace and quiet to get it started. It will not work.

2) Slipping knitwise is not the same thing as slipping purlwise. Perhaps if it weren’t for #1 above, I would’ve noticed that in the instructions first time through.

3) With regard to the car meme that’s popping up on everyone’s blogs (and which I am too lazy to fill out and post), has anyone actually had sex in a car since the age of seventeen or so? (The back seat of a Chevette = the most uncomfortable place I ever had sex. Hands down.)

Oh, wait, to answer my own question: I have. Oops. Almost forgot about that.

I’ve been using this for a while now for patterns I get online that I don’t want to either print right away or save in Word format (inevitably, if I save a pattern in Word, I will mess it up when I go to reopen it later and then spend ten minutes trying to get the formatting back the way it’s supposed to be). And I know I’ve seen a few people here and there wondering if there’s cheap PDF software for publishing patterns, too.

Anyway: PDFCreator. It’s free, and it works great. You can use it from any windows program—it gets installed as a printer driver, so you just go to print and pick the PDFCreator as your printer, and it’ll save whatever file you’ve got as a PDF file. It’s been working out really well for me. This is the first free one I’ve ever run across; everything else I’d seen that would do this was shareware and I am all about the free software, so I jumped on this when I saw the link in one of my newsletters…

Swiped from Deneen.

I’m a little puzzled about how this came out. I have never lived in the South, though I have lived with Southerners so maybe it rubbed off some. I don’t know anymore what sort of accent I have, really, but I’m pretty sure it’s not southern much.

(Kari? Marvie? What kind of accent do I really have?)

I don’t know why the little barzamathingies are not showing up–I’m pretty sure I pasted the right thing–but it was south 69%, midland 65%, and gradually getting smaller from there till it hit boston 25%, which is funny because that’s where I, y’know, learned to talk.