Knit Once, Purl Forever

The One With All the Knitting

That's what has been going on here. Lots of knitting and very little else. Okay, there may have been a few episodes of Friends involved in the knitting. Okay, all of the episodes of Season 10.

AND  maybe the entire first season of Grey's Anatomy was also viewed. But at least we have proof of the knitting that was accomplished:

We only have 16 more pattern rows and the ribbed collar to go. I'm not sure how long that will take as I've been taking my time. I've had to tink* a few stitches here and there, but nothing major and I've been trying to pay attention to detail as I go.

Here's a closeup of the pattern:

and here's the flip side:

I can't wait to finish this sweater as I really like how it's turning out. I've tried it on here and there and I really likey!

The only problem with the One With All the Knitting is it doesn't leave much time or energy for the One With All the Blogging.

*Tink backwards is knit. To tink means to unknit (if that's a word) a stitch or two. Or more.

Searching in Circles

It's funny how this Stashalong thing is working out for me. I thought it might be difficult to keep it real and interesting without adding yarn to the stash, but it isn't difficult at all. In fact, it almost seems as though a project planner peeked into my stash as these perfect, stash-matching projects keep falling from the sky.

A Little Bit Wobbly Now

I haven't made a bag for a while, so when I saw this tote in the latest issue of IK--and realized that I have tons of felt-worthy yarn in my stash--I was thrilled. Better yet, Monkey Knits is hosting a Wobbly Knitalong. I'm all about the Wobbly knitting, so you know I signed up for this baby!

And it starts on tax day, which works out perfectly because I should be able to wrap up the Snowflake Sweater by then.

I Keep on Searching Now

For a complete and total distraction from all the Olympics and the Olympic knitting, I give you a peek into some of the recent search strings used to find the Knit Once blog.

1. What is Knit the Knits, Purl the Purls. I don't know. My first thought was that it means to continue knitting the pattern. To knit where the previous knit stitches are and to purl the previous purl stitches. But then I thought a little more, as I'm prone to do, and I realized that there are no knits until you knit them as there are no purls until you purl them. And since you use knit and/or purl in every pattern, the end results could vary. So yeah, not really sure. I think it means continue in pattern, but it probably depends on the context.

2. Knitting mistakes. Faithful readers are not shocked that this string leads to the Knit Once blog. I'm perfectly fine with this as I learn best from my mistakes. My mantra in life is to try not to make the same mistake twice--I try to fuck it up in a different way the next time. Knitting is no different.

3. Knitting AND mistakes. I'm sure it's pure coincidence that the "and" is capitalized. AND, of course, it leads here.

4. Got Soul, but I'm Not a Soldier real song title. This is a great song, so I'll comply: The title of this song is All These Things That I've Done by the Killers. Love that song!

5. People eating worms. Mention worms once, as in dirt dessert with gummy worms, and you're forever linked to worms. Next thing you know, you're labeled as obsessed with worms and it shows up on your word cloud. Well, at least the latter is true. And please don't tell the hubby I'm obsessed with worms. I'm sure he'll try to change this into a whole different meaning.

6. Knitting is hard, I need a video. I KNOW! While I don't think knitting is hard, when I'm learning something new I do so much better when there's a video available. I'm a very visual person, but black and white photos of knit stitches can be confusing. This is just my opinion, of course.

And, last but not least, here's lucky number seven.

7. Brad Pitt's. This might be my all-time favorite search string. EVER. I fancy the notion that I belong to Brad. That connection is purely fictional, and the fact that I almost believe it probably indicates that I'm a bit delusional, but I fancy it nonetheless.

Forever Changed

The Hubby likes to cook and he excels at it as well. His specialty is the ability to duplicate dishes we have tasted and loved, and to recreate these same menu items at home. To do so he often scours cookbooks and on-line recipe sites for insight on how the desired item is prepared. All Recipes dot com is one of his favorite sites.

You're probably familiar with the site as they have the recipe for ANYTHING. If you want to make it, they can probably tell you how. I like that most of the items are reviewed by our peers. In fact, I think it's more fun to read the reviews than it is to search for recipes.

The Hubby looks at the reviews as well, but he has issues with a tendency for people to give a recipe a rave review and then mention the fact that they changed many of the ingredients of said recipe. For example, one might take a recipe including chicken, peas, and carrots, and state that it was excellent when they substituted beef, corn, and potatoes instead. They change it so much that it barely resembles the same recipe and then they rate it. When he sees this, the Hubby is like, "WTF?"

Snowflake Sweater To-Date

While contemplating recent changes I'm making on the Snowflake sweater, I wondered if my modifications on any given knitting pattern are similar to these offensive recipe modifications. How much can one change a pattern before it no longer resembles the original pattern as designed? And how do designers feel about these modifications?

Snowflake Sweater Modifications*

Take Gioia**, as a recent example. I originally purchased the pattern because I caught a glimpse of the pattern stitch on another blog and I love making scarfs. I noticed that the pictured item resembled a shawl rather than a scarf, but I thought that the pattern included instructions for each. As I began the project, I soon discovered that wasn't the case. However, I loved the pattern so much that I modified it as a scarf and pushed ahead, ignoring all the instructions for shaping the shawl, but ending with a scarf I absolutely love.

My question tonight is did I cross a line? How much creative license should you take with somebody's design?

When you take a design and alter the yarn choice, shaping, and other elements of the design can you truly say you recreated that design? Can you give a rave review of the chocolate cake when you baked a vanilla cake? And wouldn't the same apply to knitting? Isn't it plausible that a designer could see the modified finished object and say, "WTF?"

What do you think?

*The changes to the Snowflake Sweater are minor compared to Gioia. The pattern calls for 3-inch ribbing on the sleeves and body. I tend to be a bit thick in the middle, and I think that 3-inches of ribbing would be a bit excessive for me so I trimmed the ribbing on the body back to 1 1/2 inches.

**Wendy, Gioia's designer, left a very gracious comment here regarding my modifications to Gioia. She did not seem to be offended by those modifications and I sincerely hope that she wasn't offended.

Bad, Bad Blogger

I've been a bad, bad blogger. A silent and busy blogger. One might think that I were knee-deep in Olympic project knitting,  but I'm participating in the other Olympic knitalong, which includes copious amounts of beer drinking and lacks focus on knitting. One could say that I've been excelling at this knit along, since I've been knee-deep in celebrating, helping with homework, well wishing, and just plain relaxing with good friends.

The Celebrating. The hubby and I celebrated Valentines Day with a nice dinner at our favorite restaurant. And we weren't supposed to exchange gifts (his rule), but somehow earrings (for me) and chocolate turtles (for him) were exchanged. I know he got the short end of the stick, but he seemed perfectly happy with the chocolates. He's soooo hard to shop for because he already has everything he needs/wants.

The helping with Homework. Ever feel like you're back in school with your child? Our schools (mostly just the Middle School) assign projects that require, sometimes serious amounts, of input and assistance from parents. The latest project consisted of preparing and mounting several posters and pictures to a large display board for an upcoming presentation. I don't mind helping out, but I question how much is actually learned from doing this. My son simply printed graphics from the Internet and I helped him glue them to his board. I'm thinking the real learning occurred when he was doing the research and writing the report that accompanied the display board. However, the display board accounts for a larger percentage of his grade. Just a tiny beef I have with this particular school. And his display board turned out great--if I say so myself!

The Well-wishing slash going-away party. A good friend has been activated into the National Guard and will be shipping off to Iraq soon. He will be the first person I actually know who has been shipped off. I know a lot of people who have a friend or family member overseas in harms way, and now I do as well. I'm scared out of my mind for him, but hoping everything will be fine. He doesn't seem to be worried in the least. He's a police officer so I guess he's used to facing risks.

The relaxing with good friends. We were supposed to knit together and to teach the new people how to knit. Instead too many Cosmopolitans were consumed, resulting in too little knitting. It was great fun though.

The knitting. Notice how I didn't really mention knitting up top? I've been knitting a bit here and there. I've managed to finish both sleeves and I began the body of the Snowflake sweater yesterday. Actually, it seems like I've made a lot of progress considering the small amount of time I've put into knitting this thing.

Sorry for the boring update. But at least it's an update, right. Something is better than nothing. It's the best I can do as I currently have a pounding headache. Think it's related to the copious amounts of beer drinking and partying?  DOH!

L.O.V.E.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm talkin' 'bout love
L,O,L,O,L,O,L.O.V.E
L,O,L,O,L,O*

Hope your Valentine's day was everything you hoped for. It was a beautiful day here, absolutely perfect from start to finish. Especially since it began with the adorable Folk Art Knitted Heart pattern (pictured above) in my Knitting Pattern-a-day calendar. I don't usually dig this kind of thing, but I think the hearts are adorable. I would have knitted them up for today had I discovered this pattern earlier.

There's always next year, I guess. And hopefully there's a more interesting entry for tomorrow as well.

*  Just a little message from the latest Ashlee Simpson song, just for you. See how you rate! I love you, man!

It's DOH! Time

It's true. It's either DOH time or it's GO time for all of us Knitting Olympians! I'm participating in the Homer Simpson variety of Olympic knitting because I know I couldn't take the pressure of the other challenge, but I think it will be fun to see how the other Olympians do in their events! You can find the other Olympic participants on the Yarn Harlot's list.

Great fun!

Now for my Olympic/Stashalong knitting, I will be working on this Snowflake Sweater as I find time. You may recall my babbling about starting a sleeve or two, which is true. I like to begin on Sleeve Island so that I don't end up there eventually anyway, plus the sleeve usually serves as my swatch as well. Unless I run into great difficulties, that is.

The snowflake sweater is also known as the Winter Snow Scene in the January 2006 issue of Creative Knitting. I've never knit anything from this magazine before, but a couple of items in this issue caught my eye.  This is probably just the first you hear of this, as long as all goes well, that is.

Of course, my Olympic project also doubles as my Stashalong project. I'm using Cascade 220 from my stash in these shade of blue (and cream). I really didn't have a lot of choice in these colors as they were about all I could find locally when I shopped for this yarn back in December. Apparently, there had been a run on blue and this is what I was stuck with. I'm a bit concerned with the medium blue shade. What do you think? Do they go together?

Here's a progress picture taken a couple of days ago. The object is a bit longer than it appears in this photo, but not significantly so.

This project is perfect for two reasons: I'm using yarn from stash, and I feel inspired to complete the solid portions so I can get to the color work where the fun truly begins! And that's where this project qualifies for the Homer Simpson Olympics because I'm sure it will be slow knitting once I hit that spot.

In any case, there may be a few knitting and knit blogging delays ahead, just so you know. The Knit Once household is embarking on some home renovations along the lines of ripping up old carpet and restoring hardwood floors. This is not something in which I have ANY experience, so wish me luck! =)

Painting Pictures

Let me paint the scene for you.

Date: Today

Time: Ass-early in the morning

Place: The torture chamber otherwise known as my usual treadmill at the gym

The voice of Reason, "Pain. Every step is sheer pain. I think I have a broken ass."

The voice of pure evil fitness guru me, "You couldn't have broken your ass. You didn't fall."

VOR: I'm sure it's broken. I can tell. It hurts to breath, let alone to walk. I should go home.

VOFG: Remember what they say, 'No pain, no gain."

VOR: I can't even walk right--I look like a freak. People are staring.

VOFG: Nobody is staring at you. JUST DO IT!

VOR: I can't. The pain--the agony.

VOFG: You just need to work through the pain. Let's kick it up a notch.

VOR: My legs. My legs. Falling. Off. Owwwwww.

VOFG: Your legs will not fall off, you baby. Suck it up.

VOR: Owww-owwwww-owwww. OWW!

VOFG (Channeling Jillian from The Biggest Loser): Don't make me handcuff your ass to this machine...

VOR: You mean my broken ass?

VOFG: Oh brother...

I never said it was a pretty picture.  Not at all.

On a Cloud

I still don't have much to say, so imagine my delight in finding the word cloud. So cool.

 

I'm on a cloud because the word cloud speaks for me tonight.

Gee, a Finished Object

Meet the Gioia scarf.

The pattern:  Gioia, designed by Wendy.

Yarn: 4 skeins of Noro Kureyon in colorway 124.

Needles: US 9s

Modifications: I followed the pattern as written, but didn't do any of the shaping making it a typical scarf instead of a shawl.

I love, love, LOVE how this turned out. I like the colorway and the diagonal striping. I think it will be fun to wear.

Blogio Silence

I'm not a moody person. In fact, I find it difficult to relate to or interact with extremely moody people. I'm generally considered to be a happy, bouncy, bubbly person. I'm very social and very chatty most of the time.

But sometimes I prefer to hang out with my friends and family and let them take the center stage while I hold back and listen. Sometimes I just want to listen. I don't want to speak. I'm quiet. Silent. Brooding. Boring. I cheerfully maintain my side of the conversation while my friends and family are so busy talking about themselves and sharing their thoughts that I don't think they notice that I'm quieter than usual.

It's a little difficult to be silent whilst maintaining a blog.

Too bad my blog can't hold up its side of the conversation.  Instead, I need to acknowledge that there will be periods of blogio silence. It's unavoidable.