Thursday, October 18, 2007

True Confessions

Uh-oh a pictureless blog entry! We're having some technical difficulty here at Whorlygig; I have finally gotten an excellent camera, but my primary computer is too antiquated to use the card reader. This leads to a weird situation where I take the pictures, download them to the laptop (which is not always here, or available, and actually belongs to my partner's work) and then use either a CD or a flash drive (also not mine) to move the images to the primary computer from which I can upload them to Photobucket. Don't ask me why I can't upload directly from the laptop; it must have something to do with the network or limitations on the office machines.

Anyway, the laptop isn't available to me today, and we're leaving town tomorrow. So...a pictureless blog entry from me. I think this is the first.

And it saves me from the embarrassing situation of having to explain why the projects I'm taking on my trip are being knit entirely of (gasp!) commercially spun yarn. Since you can't see the yarn, you don't know its commercially spun! Lets just say its handspun, shall we? It is! Honest. Very, very evenly handspun.

The really unusual thing is that I'm going on a week long trip with only two projects! And I really expect to mostly only work on one of them. The other is just in case of terminal boredom. The Project is the Braids Cardigan, a lovely pattern from Cabin Fever. I just need to get it done, and if I spend a week with it, with long stretches of sitting in the passenger seat of the car, I'm sure I'll make what would otherwise be months of progress. And I'm already up to the armholes, so what I'm hoping for is to be well on my way towards finishing it by the time I get home. The backup project is the teal lace wimple I posted a swatch of some months back. I'm still at a point of long-stretch-of-stockinette and it will be good for relief from ribs and cables.

Note that both these projects are seasonally appropriate. The tank top has been officially set aside until Spring is a little closer.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Delinquent

I've been away from my blog for too long. Its because I've been suddenly, kind of by surprise, trying to figure out my whole life. Everything feels alternately excitingly possible, and a little bit hopeless. Take the tank top, for intance. I love the yarn; it was worth the endless spinning. I love the drape. I love the pattern. And it fits! But...I want that bust line in the pattern to fit UNDER my breasts, and although the fabric is very stretchy, I'm still gonna need more than that little dab of fabric in the V neck to cover whatever bra I wear with this; or if no bra, then...well, to cover me.

Yep, I'm gonna have to rip. A tank top. In October. Sure, its not the biggest rip in the world, but its fall for sure in Wisconsin, and I'm not likely to get this done in time for the warm weather. I'm thinking I might rip it, put it on a string, and store it till late winter to free up some time for more seasonally appropriate projects.

And here's another example of hopeful/hopeless. This is the merino for my ongoing not-Koigu shawl. Yep, I've shown you pictures of the progress on this before, and I'm pretty sure it always looks exactly like this! Bored? Think how I feel!! It takes a looooong time to fill a bobbin with this tiny singles, and then I have to fill another one, and then I have to ply them.

True, then I get six skeins of not-Koigu, and I get to dye it, but...yikes! This is taking forever! And its not like the knitting is fast either. Suffice it to say, not much progress on the knitting for this project. That's because I'm spinning for it, and its NEVER going to be done!

Normally, I would just coast along spinning this every now and then forever, but I need to do some Secret Pal top secret spinning! Yes, I do have more bobbins, but I'm superstitious and think that if I leave this midproject, and spin something totally different, my fingers will forget exactly how I was going about this.

And another true confession from Martha: I don't particularly like to spin all white. I just love to spin things that are already dyed, or some groovy natural colored fiber. And I have this box of little goodies waiting for my attention! The white merino for the endless shawl is killing me! And I haven't even shown you my whole TRUNK full of unspun fiber, all gorgeous, and much of it already dyed. And I haven't shown you my little stash of yak down either...

Sigh. I'm going to have to just take that merino off my wheel and trust that I'll be able to resume where I left off, I guess.