A Little Pink Will Help

Well, Pi is taking so much of my knitting time that I fear my blog is beginning to get boring every time I whine talk about it. So-o-o-o-o-o-o-o...


Here is a refreshing thing. The sweetest pink, actually named Blush. It is the prettiest color of all in Knit Picks Palette yarn. See link to Knit Picks in my sidebar. This is my ck-ing (car knitting) which I also carry in to work with me and have a little quick "knit" on my breaks. I would call that a quickie, but you all would think that means something else. Admit it, ok?

The pattern is from Favorite Socks. Lots of wonderful patterns in that book. I like this one by Evelyn A Clark called Waving Lace Socks. So adorable.
Tonight is Friday Night Knitting at Ben Franklin. I enjoy it so much. Wonderful friends, three whole hours of knitting. Who can beat that? I'll be a bit late, since I work until 6:30, but two hours of knitting is better than none. Now. Should I take Pi, or this cute little sock?

Endless Pi and an Apology

Yes, this is what you think it is. Endless Pi. I don't remember being this dense before, but it has finally happened. My elevator didn't reach the top floor. My lights were on, but no one was home. My choo-choo train wasn't on the tracks. And any other sayings you can dream up.


Let me 'splain, Lucy. I finished the beautiful "Gull Stitch" portion of the shawl. Now to choose a border. EZ calls for either a crocheted border (that would have been completed in one day, most likely) or a "knitted on" border. Now, being the big headed sophisticated knitter that I pretend to be, I chose the knitted on. Knitting on a border means that you are working sideways around your shawl, just catching a stitch at a time and knitting it to the border you choose. So you knit away from the shawl, then knit back. And when you knit back, you catch one, just one stitch of the shawl on your needles along with the last knitted border stitch. That attaches the border to the edge of your shawl. With me so far? Well, Miss Fancy-Pants here chose a beautiful scalloped border, as you know.

Very pretty. Each scallop takes 16 stitches to complete. "No problem", says I. Famous last words. Here 1/2 month later, I am still working on this border. AND, I miscalulated. I had done math. BAD idea. At the end of the gull stitch section, where I was working on 574 stitches around, I had increased two stitches and then divided 576 by 16 to get 36. OK. I thought 36 repeats are do-able. Do you see my mistake yet? Never once did it cross my mind that for each of the 576 stitches I would have to knit TWO rows of the scalloped border. One row away from the shawl, and one row back, catching just one stitch of the shawl. So instead of 36 repeats, I would really be doing ...oh help me...more math.....36+36=SEVENTY-TWO!!!!!!!!!!!

So, here I am, knitting endless pi, shaking my head and wondering where my math teacher went wrong with me. Sorry, Mrs. Stewart. You tried.

Real Men Knit

About a year ago, I "adopted" a son. Or should I say, he adopted me. Well, lets just say that he came for dinner one day and fell in love with my youngest daughter. Since then, he is over here almost every evening. I think it may have been the pizza....

Anyway, Josh has been lots of fun, is sweet to the whole family and treats our daughter with great respect and adoration. He is talented and fun to have around. But the nicest thing about Josh is the fact that he allowed Lizzie to teach him to knit. Ok, I had my own 2 cents to put in once in a while, too.

Yes, he is a bit crazy sometimes...
He refers to his method as "Extreme Knitting".

But we love him. Here are a couple of the hats he knit. Josh learned the "formula" for knitting a hat, and decided that patterns are not for him. He knits each hat without a formal pattern, just whatever design he can think up. He is fearless that way.

He adds this little feature to each of his hats...
Can you tell what it is? A little tail so he can tell where the back of the hat is.

He has given most of his hats away to friends or to Lizzie.

Here they are being silly...

Josh is a gifted bass player, drummer, guitar player, and singer. Check out his band, resDeus, and also Evergreen, which is Lizzie and Josh's music.

Most of all, he is just Josh. Fun guy and faithful friend. I'm glad he's around. With three daughters, it is sure nice to have a "son" around for a change, and Lizzie's sisters appreciate having a "brother" around, too. Someone besides Danny who will squash spiders and lift heavy objects when we need it. Josh certainly has been raised right...(us Mom's have to stick together)

Mary had a Little Frog.....

Frogging AGAIN??? Is that all I do? Well, no-o-o-o-o, but I thought of how boring Pi is right now. I am on the umpteenth repeat of the knitted on border so there really isn't anything to report. However, my car knitting has been driving me nuts. ('Scuse the pun) A sock that looks very cute in my Favorite Socks book is not so cute in person. I knit the whole leg and had even knit the heel flap and turned the heel. That is when things went weird with this little sock. Suddenly, I could care less about whether I finished it or not. No passion for said sock. None. So I, who couldn't wait to get the Favorite Sock book, I who went to the knit shop on purpose to pick up some fun color of Baby Ull to use for the first socks from that book, I who cast on feverishly, anxious to knit a pair of socks in a pattern other than just my usual sock pattern which I got from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's book "Knitting Rules", (easy but plain) found myself feeling less than enthusiastic...no...bored...no...ambivalent over...no...hating The Sock. Now you know how serious this is when I can use such a word to describe my feelings about a little innocent and unfinished sock. A sock still in the early stages of development like this is usually nurtured and cared for. But here is a peek at the first little frogging:

Poor little thing...all exposed like that. Well, it was over with fairly quickly and painlessly...

Notice the halo-like quality of the yarn in these pictures. Do you think that was just the camera? Or is there something about The Sock that I didn't know? Hmmmmm. Hey! What is that in the background of this picture?

I'm so fickle...
Well, it was over and done with. Here is The Sock, no longer a sock at all...just a harmless ball of yarn, waiting to become what it was meant to be all along, I guess.
Part of The Stash.

On the Edge

Hello...seems like forever since my last post. Didn't mean for that to happen. Sometimes my knitting is going slowly, and I feel like I don't have much to talk about. Kind of some of those quiet days, you know?

Actually, it's been sort of a quiet weekend, but I don't mind at all. We had some cloudy days here in the Puget Sound area, and a bit of rain, but today the sun is out and glorious. So Danny and I went and washed the car (got "the works"!), shopped for some pants (didn't find any) and had some lunch. Just a nice day. The rest of the time this weekend and this afternoon has been spent trying to figure out and execute the border for Pi.

I was going to use the Cockleshell edging found in the book Knitting Around, by EZ. So, I posted questions I had about doing a knitted on border, etc. on the wonderful yahoo group that I've mentioned before..."Elizabeth's Year". Lots of helpful answers. Then, sitting down to test the pattern, I could NOT make it come out right. Something about the final row. It seems to stop in the middle of the row and leave you hanging. I checked Schoolhouse Press for corrections and couldn't find any to do with the Cockleshell Edging. Since I had been surfing online for edging patterns I had printed one out that I had found at Knitting-and.com. It is called Kilgorie edge and is very pretty. Looks very much like the Cockleshell, but the instructions were complete. (perhaps the instructions in the book were complete, too, but I couldn't figure them out) Anyway, here is a picture of my edging so far:




And another: Kind of blurry at the edges, but you can see what I'm after, right? I've completed 6 repeats...only 30 to go...sigh.

Knitting Bunny

A little cartoon I found on youtube.com...since I don't have any pictures today, I thought some entertainment was in order.

Just thinking about knitting and how it has taken over...I mean...affected my life. For the better. I find it is so wonderful to always have something to keep my hands and mind busy. It is so calming and relaxing, and the Lord knows I need as much of that as I can get in my life. Each stitch is a prayer sometimes. It has given me some wonderful friends, especially the Friday Night Knitting Group. I have wonderful sweaters, etc. and so do my family. These are all simple basic things that knitting does for me...also is the fact that it connects me to the women in my past. Thinking mostly of Gram, who knitted for every new baby in the family and helped me take my first knitting stitches when I was small. (And didn't panic when I wasn't really interested...she knew the "bug" would bite me someday!) If you are reading today and this makes you thankful for knitting, please leave a comment for me. Just click on the comments at the bottom of this post. It would be lovely to hear your thoughts on knitting, even if you aren't a knitter. (I appreciated other's knitting long before I was a knitter!)

Hamster Pi

Well, Pi is shaping up, although you'd never guess it from this picture. It still looks like a potato sack on the circ's. But I am on row 41 of Gull stitch, having done 10 repeats.
This is all the yarn I have left. After several more rounds of Gull stitch, I will use the remaining yarn to work a simple knitted on border instead of "casting off" the usual way. of sweaters and such. And surprise! Here is Corinne's pet hamster, Leela. She is exploring Pi. She liked going in the sack and poking her nose through the holes in the lace stitches.
Love...love...love...love...love! What do I love??? Jamieson's shetland wool! That's right! I had this in my stash and when I wanted a different yarn from the laceweight I had started with, I knew that my 11 skeins of this wonderful wool that was parked in my stash was going to be perfect for Pi, and it is.
Today is the perfect day for cleaning house as I will be soon going back to work. I have had lots of time "off" because of having a foot surgery that created a DVT(Deep Vein Thrombosis or huge deep blood clot), that created a pumonary embolism. All that said, it meant a number of surgeries and lots of recovery time (1 1/2 years!) and also lots of prayer. The foot trouble is still there, but finally I am able to walk around fairly normally! Yaaay! Anyway, going back to work is going to seriously cut into my knitting time, but I plan to carry it with me and work on my projects on my breaks and lunchtime as much as I can.