Polar!

My two impulse-bought-bags of Rowan Polar came in today, and far from being humbled by it, now I want every color they make :P I got them here at this evil evil store who's selling it at half retail with FREE SHIPPING!!! I got a bag in Lettuce and a Bag in Dark Truffle.. ok ok, i'll borrow other people's pictures to show you:
Lettuce, yeah it's fuzzy, i didn't take the picture. It's also greener and prettier than that...

Lettuce will be the lace leaf pullover, and the Truffle will be a raglan turtleneck of my own design.

here's the truffle, which is really more of a warm dark chocolate, plus the other two colors I really want now: Jaffa (which is a bit more orange in person) and smirk, which is a bit more pink. I think they took these pictures on a cloudy day, but hey, they're from England, I hear real sun is a rare commodity :P




haven't gotten to swatch them yet, and I may try to avoid that as my Rogue is still in it's baby-phase and I want to work more on that. The best idea I think is to find it a good hiding place

Trigger Finger Mittens!

My boyfriend goes deer hunting every year in Wisconsin, and he asked me to make him some mittens. Not just any mittens, Custom WISCONSIN-WINTER-TRIGGER-FINGER-MITTENS!
It gets pretty damn cold in Wisconsin in November, so I made them out of tightly-knit Lambs Pride Bulky, and lined them with Angora, which is supposedly 8 times warmer than wool, and super soft too :)
Because mittens are warmer than gloves, he insisted that only the mitten on his left hand (he's left-handed) have the index finger free (so he can shoot stuff).
I told him not to get any deer blood on them.

by the way, No, that is not his deer-shooting-rifle.. it's just his new toy he's very proud of.




inside the mittens. I double-knit them


Also, I'm a little out of the loop. I JUST learned that Rowan Polar was discontinued, and that was my first venture into the wonderfull world of natural fibers and I love the stuff, and my LYS (where I work) doesn't carry Rowan... So I bought 2 whole bags of it in Lettuce green and dark truffle on ebay for less than half the retail price! Green will be the Lace Leaf Pullover, and brown will be the most luscious turtleneck ever. I'm so weak.. and poor..

Spinning!

(Because I need another hobby :P )
At the Knit Out last month I learned how to spin with a drop spindle, and came home and ordered a whole kit from This Seller's ebay store. For some reason paypal diverted my order from my normal mailing address to my old address (my moms house), but since i'm having my mail forwrded from there back here it eventually found me after all YAY :D So I got my big bag of wool and two drop spindles yesterday!


And here's my firt real attempt at spinning! haha it's all super-chunky.. I haven't quite got the hang of keeping it even yet. I wish I could brush it all out again and start over, but I think I'd need carders for that.


and here's a closer look at some of the lovely stuff I hope to be able to do justice someday!

Adding more life-stuff to the knitblog

I have another journal, on Livejournal, it's linked over there *points to sidebar* but I figure that I like reading knitblogs with a little more life in them, so I'm going to start adding more to mine, even if sometimes I might x-post from LJ.

The weather has been gorgeous here! Sunny, warm with a breeze, and all the leaves are turning now. What a nice fall! I was worried the leaves would just turn brown and fall off like they had been doing, but I guess fall just takes a little longer here.

Saturday Joe and I slept in and lounged around most of the day. I finished the 6th Harry Potter book (I think so far the 3rd and 4th are my favorites) and mostly-finished the first of Joe's hunting mittens for deer season in Wisconsin. They're black Lamb's Pride Bulky with pure angora double-knitted as a built in liner. He decided he wanted mittens out of that after we learned that Angora is 8 time warmer than wool! He doesn't like how fluffy it is, but since it's on the inside it's ok. I'm thinking of douplicate-stitching skull and crossbones on the backs hen they're done. If I have time maybe. I have two weeks to finish the second one, but since they're double-knit it's like knitting two mittens at once. takes longer.

We went and saw the movie "Jarhead" last night, with Jake Gyllenhal (sp) in it. It's by the director of American Beauty, based on the book by a marine who served in "Desert Storm". It was really good, the filming and direction was great, and so was Jake (little Donnie Darko's all grown up :P ). It's not a war action movie, especially since they didn't really get to fight, but more a drama about being there. I enjoyed it.

I work at the yarn shop today, working 6 days a week , but i don't mind being there. Tuesdays are going to be especially long: 4 hours at UPS followed by 4 at the yarn shop. I guess most people work 8 hour (at least) days, but it's different when you have to be in more than one place, and I'm not used to it anymore.

Chinese Luck Dragon Scarf

So remember I mentioned that I won that scarf contest, but didn't know if I could post the picture because it's going to be in the December Interweave Knits? Well, they're not publishing the pattern (it's just a picture with a blurb, which is cool too) so I'm free to do with it as I please :) At the yarn shop I work at in Ellicott City Maryland, and we'll be selling the pattern when I write it up sometime this month, and I will also be selling the pattern from my site, but I'm still working on that so I'll post a link when it's up.
The scarf was inspired by my time last year in Japan, where I learned a lot more about different eastern dragons, and by the charity causes being sponsored by the contest: All the scarves entered were donated to orphans or people suffering from the AIDS virus, and I figured that anyone in that position could use a little extra luck, hence THE LUCK DRAGON:


This was knit in two flat pieces with different stitch patterns for his scaly back and his belly, then crocheted together. I added features with i-cord, bobbles, and a ruffled mane. I used Lamb's Pride worsted (but I will use cascade 220 in the future) and Squiggle by Crystal Palace yarns

When worn, you pull his tail through his mouth to secure it:


Me with Nicky Epstein *squee!* and Binnie Fry


Me accepting First Prize :)

knitting geeks

hehe so while on the girlfromauntie site looking up rogue stuff, I found this, and it cracked me up :)
"This also might explain the plot, so to speak, in the hood of Rogue. See the part of the hood where the cables stop interweaving as a mesh, and pairs of cables twist for a single repeat before they rejoin as a mesh again? I made a deliberate decision to add that. For some reason, while knitting the prototype, I fixed on the notion that if the hood border continued as an uninterrupted woven mesh, I wouldn’t be able to hear things properly while wearing the hood.

No, I’m not delusional, and I don’t think the sweater is soundproof, or even that the additional density of fabric induced by a high frequency of cable twists would muffle noise. I was just captured by some fanciful idea that things that were trapped in nets might be able to escape between bars, so I needed to provide some bars just in case. I think those cable pairs occur at a point above the ears, but the fact that they were included somewhere in the border was enough to address this concern.

Some people think traditional fishermen’s sweaters were designed to allow families to identify drowned bodies, and link traditional cable designs to values like wealth and love. Maybe I think that cables increase your armour class but adversely affect your ability to cast arcane spells.

That makes sense–if arcane spellcasting is affected by cables, but divine spells aren’t. Druids cast divine spells. Ancient Celts had a Druid class. Celtic descendants introduced cables into their knitting repertoire (although that was long, long after the Druids). I like to design cables derived from Celtic art. See? It all fits, and clearly I should shut off this stream of consciousness now before it’s too late."

Starting Rogue

I finally found the perfect yarn for my Rogue Cardigan! Yay! It's exactly the color I wanted, and the texture and price was perfect too :) It's Galway Highland Heather in a lovely Rust color :) I was thinking of doing it in a donegal tweed, but after I got to feel a sweater knitted in that, I changed my mind. That stuff is soo..umm..rugged? The galway is a nice basic plied wool, and I knit up a nice big swatch and blocked it, and it's only a teeny teeny tiny bit off gauge, and I was going to make the larger size than I needed anyway, so it should be just right.
Here's my swatch!



I remember a time when I actually had some readers.... :(