knitting "knews"

I'm going to attempt to give knitting updates on Tuesdays from here on out...

Many things on the knitting front this week:

After finishing the Good Bias shrug a couple weeks ago, I've worn it a couple times and have decided that it needs some help. The back is way to wide. I considered taking out the center back seam, ripping out a few rows from each side, and reseaming, but the sleeves are also a bit too short. Thus, I'm seaming up the sleeves a little bit more. Not the perfect solution, but I think it will work okay. I sewed a bit of one seam on the bus yesterday but haven't checked the new fit. Sleeves seem to be a continual problem for me!! Either the length is wrong or the armscye is incorrect.

Fortunately, the sleeves on the Fairly Easy Fair Isle cardigan sweater are pretty good. Maybe another inch or so would have been better, but it works (I just like my sleeves extra long). At least my arm fits into the armhole without getting squeezed! I finished knitting on the button and button-hole bands (added an extra button-hole because I added some length to the body of the sweater), wove in all the extra ends, and then headed out to find some buttons. The first store I went to didn't have what I was looking for...so I went to Jo-Ann on Saturday night. They didn't have quite what I wanted, either - I was looking for large periwinkle squares or circles - but I found some wood-look buttons that I thought would work well if sewn on with the periwinkle yarn. I was right! Another finished object for me! Below is a picture of my FEFI cardi in its new home - my freezing cold lab.



Also while at Jo-Ann to find buttons I decided to check out the price of Wool-Ease. I've decided to use Wool-Ease for a Maine Islands sweater called Starry Night which I fell in love with soon after I learned how to knit. Now I feel like I actually possess the skills to knit the beloved sweater! I was sooooo excited when I got to Jo-Ann and found out that the Wool-Ease (worsted) was ON SALE!!! I had been watchin the ads from Jo-Ann and Michaels for months lookig for a sale on Wool-Ease, and here it was, unadvertised. I felt so lucky. I grabbed the balls I needed and started swatching on size 8's aiming for 18 stitches/4 inches.

I had yet another experience with the Aran sweater that contributed to the love-hate relationship we have. I will really LOVE it when this sweater is done, and I hate that it's going to take forever. It takes extra long when I work the wrong stitch, as I did last week in the super-easy braided cable, and don't realize it until 4 rows (or more) up the pattern and then have to rip out the stitches. I'm getting better at weaving my needle into the row that I want to rip down to; however, it's still difficult for me to keep the needle on the same row the whole way across. After this unfortunate rip and do-over event, I've been going pretty well. Worked the Aran on the bus most days last week. I can get about 4 rows done per day that way...not very much, but every little bit matters.

And finally, the moment I've been waiting for...Knit One, the new yarn store by my house, is OPEN!!! I saw a huge "OPEN" flag outside their door yesterday on the bus home from work, and even though I still needed to go to the store, buy powdered sugar, make frosting, and frost cupcakes for my Bible study that was going to begin in an hour, I still hopped off at the stop near the store and dashed to their front door. They were not really open; the door was locked. They're actually closed on Mondays; the flag was more an in-general announcement. "We're open for business...the store just isn't open today..." But the nice lady unlocked the door and let me in. SO MUCH YARN. And it's spread out, too, so I don't feel like I'm going to knock over a whole case of skeins as I turn around. I am SOOOO looking forward to going there and hopefully just sitting and knitting. I hope they let people do that. I bought the latest Vogue Knitting magazine (I felt I should buy something since they'd opened the door for me!) and took delighted note of some cute totes made of recycled sweaters. I wanna make one...! Much joy and celebrating.

Oh, one last thing - I picked up Knitting from the Netherlands from the library today. My ancestors are Dutch, and I've always been intrigued by traditional patterns. I excitedly paged through the book over lunch today and found lots of things that will be neat to try out!

done, done and getting done

DONE - with the hockey tournament. Yow, was it something else. We lost 2 games and tied a third but won none. I did, however, win at the shot-stopping challenge in the skills competition, but that was rather ridiculous and wasn't a good judge of who was a good or bad goalie, in my opinion (nor was it a fair judge of who was a good or bad shooter). I won a new stick, and I can't feel too bad about winning the unfair contest because the new stick has a paddle about 3 inches too short thanks to my long legs. The tourney was okay, pretty fun, I felt good about how I was playing and now feel motivated to practice/work out some. It was also tiring and has caused my body to be in a large amount of pain, particularly in the upper parts of my legs in basically every muscle.

DONE - with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. It was cute, funny, and a little witty. Still felt like a fairly small child's book despite a rumor from someone I talked to the other day that said the books were never intended for kids but were written for adults. I would tend to argue against that. I've begun on the second book, the first two chapters of which made me want to put it down and never read it because I dislike Dobby so very much. Sure he's just trying to do what's nice, but he's not doing it in a very nice manner. No matter what anyone says, he didn't go about his warning task in the correct manner whatsoever.

GETTING DONE - with the Fair Isle sweater. I rode in the car with 3 players this weekend out to Philadelphia/Delaware, and then back, and to and from the ice rink a time or two every day. That's a lot of hours for knitting! I finished the two sleeves in the round, and yesterday when I went to take my 2002 Civic sedan in to the Honda dealership to get looked over for its 40,000 mile check, I joined the sleeves and the body part together and have done a few rows. I have decided that I totally stink at the stranding technique and can't for the life of me control the yarn tension at all. I need some practice on something. I hate practicing knitting, because I feel like it's such a waste. I spend all that time making stitches and don't get anything out of it that's useful other than the mastery of a technique. I'd rather learn while I go. Maybe I'd actually better learn to withstand practice, otherwise all my projects are going to look like crap.

Anyhow, the sweater is huge now, but a good huge. It's just a big thing to plop onto one's lap to work on. Definitely can't take it on the bus to knit, because it requires its own quite large bag to fit into. Really, think about stuffing a full-size bulky sweater into something to carry around. That's what this is. So I'll just keep working on it at home. I hope that the weather stays cooler like I has been the past couple days around here, because it's awful trying to knit with the wool/mohair blend when it's 90+ degrees Fahrenheit INSIDE the house (which it gets to be).

Other knitting news: WEBS has confirmed that they're sending out the Cotton Fleece I'd ordered on June 22 and has finally arrived from the manufacturer. Yay! Perhaps I'll start knitting that on the bus. Harry Potter might win out, now that I've gotten past the make-me-want-to-kick-house-elves part.

Also, that new knitting store going up around the corner and up the hill from me is getting more and more done. There were lights on when I went past this morning on the bus, and the place looks HUGE and cute. I just can not wait for it to open!!

The news at work: One experiment I started last Friday worked great. One I started last Friday didn't work great but wasn't totally awful. The one I'm doing today is not going well at all. Grr.

new room

Before I begin, I want to say that for anyone who's watching, I did NOT just amazingly speed through the Fair Isle cardigan - I simply realized that I had forgotten to take into account that I've already knit up to the armscyes on the body portion and was only counting the 5ish rows I've done on the sleeves. Oops. Makes me feel better, though.

Onto the news of the day...

Here at work my lab has been granted 2 new rooms which were "recently" (like...in January it seems like) vacated by a different lab. One room will go to my coworker Ming, and another will be used by my sort-of-supervisor Yue Chen, my coworker Lori, and myself. Renovations have been going on in these two rooms for quite some time, and we're anxious to move into the new place but must wait for all the renovations to be completed. We'd peek into the rooms every day, and often several times every day, to check on the progress. In the middle of July the rooms were pretty much complete. The new counters and shelves had been installed, and the desks we had reserved for the rooms (including my new desk - new to me, at least - which has a lot of room and shelves in it - yay!) had been moved in. However, we still couldn't really move any of our lab equipment in (and thus couldn't start working in the room) because the old - and by old I mean OLD - locks on the old doors were rusted from the inside out and thus couldn't be used anymore unless we wanted to lock the door and never be able to get it open again. So we have been waiting for new doors and new locks. And we also realized that we needed to put in a separate work order for the installation of phone lines and ethernet ports (I'm getting my own ethernet port!!!!! Amazing!!!!!!!!). In order to do that we had to search the rooms for if there already were any phone jacks or ethernet ports and detail their locations so they wouldn't install or move more than we needed.

This week it seems like a ton has occurred in the little rooms. The old doors came off and the new doors went in yesterday, and glass was installed in the door windows today. Also today the phone jacks and ethernet ports were moved, and we even got the phones I had to order Monday (yeah, when you ask the University to put in a new jack they don't bother telling you that you also need to order a phone to go with the jack...). The phones now work, although the University voice mail system isn't set up yet, so I had to make one more call about getting that to be worked out (this also isn't assumed when you request a new phone line...). Tomorrow the locksmith is coming, and so we should be good to go by the end of the week! !!!!! Hooray!!!!!

Can't wait to start moving things in...!

Tonight I'm headed to the Cheesecake Factory with the gals from my Bible study group. I hope I can stay awake. I'm awfully tired today, although I got a lot of sleep last night. Suppose Monday night's lack finally caught up with me.