ravelapse

So between that last post and this one, I've gone and moved to a whole 'nother country! Sort of. I mean, moving from Germany to the Netherlands is probably a bit like moving from Seattle to Vancouver, but you know, it's... kinda different.

Anyway, I packed up all my yarn, started some things, re-started some other things, tabled some other-other things, and kind of, um, misplaced a project or two, oops? And I can't find my camera... well, I haven't actually tried real hard because I don't like it, but I'm sure it's around somewhere. The light's been kinda crappy anyway - all right, scratch that last excuse. Today has been drizzly, but the first 29 days of September were actually pretty nice. Anyhoo. No camera. No internet for a week, and then VERY limited internet for two weeks, uploading photos is a PITA under the best circumstances, which these are not - and the result is that my knitting reality no longer bears much resemblance to my Ravelry project page.

I should do something about that.

love knitting, not sure about the other stuff

I used to think tucking in the ends was the most tedious part of a knitting project. Well, a successful one - frogging and fixing whatever you did wrong on an unsuccessful project would be the übertedious part, but in general, end-tucking used to seem like the most annoying use of my knitting time. I did that last night. Today I photographed, measured, washed, blocked, edited the photographs, uploaded them to Flickr, emailed them to the beta-knitters group, and then added them to the Ravelry project page. I mean, I did other things too, today, but documenting the finished-ness of the project has turned into a really involved process, hasn't it? And of course, mustn't forget the final step: BLOG IT!!

Laris's Cheesehead pattern, resized for teeny tiny babies at my request, double-knit in Wollmeise 100% on Knitpicks 2.25mm circs. Currently drying outside on the laundry rack, I sure hope no birds poop on them. (Yeah, you laugh, but guess why I had to re-wash the sheets last week.)

destashmania

Well, now I know that one skein of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted Multi is enough for a baby sweater, size newborn (probably). You never know, with babies. Lo, another 5-hour baby sweater, knitted in, um, a little over a week because I kept frogging and refining. And I had an annoying amount of yarn left over, too small to do anything useful with, too big to throw away.

But it's done, and sent off to a friend who has another friend who'll be having a baby in November, which is a good time for a wool sweater.

Next project: matching teeny-tiny sweaters and meathead hats in BMFA Socks that Rock, Mediumweight, for the twins next door, due in October. No photos yet. I'll get right on that.

Oh, and another test-knit for Laris, hopefully to make some real progress after several false starts. Here's false start #2:

Miss Sophie's Hands

This was a test-knit for the inimitable Laris (seriously, HOW does she do it?), sorry I couldn't get better color in the photos. But these are fancy princess-gloves, knit in Wollmeise Twin, colorway Merlot, two at a time on magic loop. They were very fun to make, even the bobbles, until I was done and had 20 (twenty! two-zero!) little ends to tuck in. And now I am giving them to my mother-in-law so that I have to make more for myself. Hee.

what I did yesterday

I bought a double CD case at Aldi for €2.99 (they were only available in gray, can you believe it?) and stuck all my circular needles in it. They're all sorted, first by size and then by cable length, with little labels so I don't have to keep measuring things to be sure I've got the right one.

I've been looking for a good way to store circs since - well, pretty much since I started knitting. The first thing I did was stick them all through a stitch marker and hang it from the ceiling, but then I had to measure to find the right one every time, and that was kind of annoying. It did make a very nice wind-chimey sound, but it didn't look very nice.

I saw recipes for a circular-needle-holding wall hangy-thing made out of old jeans, but that's not really the sort of thing I tend to hang on my wall. This is a prettier version, but still, it has all these needles hanging out of it.

Then I tried this linen silverware holder we have for the nice silver (which lives in a drawer right now, and so doesn't need its holder). The premise is good, but this is made for knives and forks, not for knitting needles, so it rolled up clunkily and there was no reasonable way to sort them by length. I also couldn't label the sizes, because I knew I'd want to use it as a silverware holder again.

So then I had this smaller square CD case, but the needle points stuck out too far. So I cut out all the little envelope-things, labeled them by size and length with a Sharpie, and stored them in a flat plastic box so I could flip through them, like we used to flip through records, back in the olden days. I ran out of envelopes before I ran out of sizes, though, and kept getting them out of order and being too lazy to put the needles back when I was done.

Here's an idea I love - but I tend to work with whatever materials I have to hand, and the binders I have have only two rings and the plastic sheet protectors are kind of baggy. The weight of the needles makes them sag, and the two rings that hold them are not enough to prevent that. If I ever do get the materials (there's a Muji in Munich), I probably will make one, but, you know. That could take forever.

It's a bit squeezy to shut it, and of course I don't have all my needles in it because I have 8 or 9 WIPs lying around, but there was also room in the back of the case for my DPNs - there sure are a lot of them! Some I bought, some were given to me, most of the sets are incomplete, and since I really only use them occasionally, as a cable needle or a pointer to help me count chart-squares, I probably don't need to organize them. If I ever do need a set, there's my needle gauge, voilà.

So. We'll see if the latest of my many systems works.

Also, I have now organized maybe 30 square centimeters of space. In my 140-square-meter house. Talk about your baby steps.

Pfaffenhofen and the Wollmeise Shop

Saturday I went to Pfaffenhofen! My friend Yasmin drove, she lives in a nearby town so we're practically neighbors. And we (she) found a parking place right in front of the shop and we saw lots and lots of people and hugged lots and lots of yarn and sat on couches and knitted and it was fun. And now some pictures. My photos here, Elemm's photos here, Goldbek's photos here, and here is Maria's post.

And I really wasn't going to buy any yarn. I just wanted to say hi to people and see the shop, and um, well, I didn't buy a lot, not really. I mean, compared to what I already have, it was actually quite a small amount.

Eh. Maybe that's not the best argument.

I got mail!

Today I went to Pfaffenhofen, but that post will have to wait till tomorrow, because before that, on Thursday, a box came in the mail. It looked like this:


When I opened it, there was newspaper.







Under the newspaper, there was this!
I almost stopped right there, because oo! Shiny! But eventually I remembered I was sort of a grown-up, and peered under the shiny. There was happy!

It's a swap, I'm sending some of my blue-and-green yarn in return.


Here's the not-yarn: Chocolate! Stitch markers! A teeny-tiny sock and a very nice note!

And here's the yarn:
Merlot.
Buxkranzl.
Der letzte Versuch.













And roter Himbeermund.

Ooooo.

a handy tip that is also a very bad tip

So I picked up this habit, when I knit socks, of jotting notes on the back of the ball band about gauge, cast-on, things to remember about the heel turn, etc. I suppose it would also work for hats and gloves.

You know what it doesn't work for? A sweater for a largish man. I'm making a sweater for DrBob, designing it myself because I have a problem with authority am wholly incapable of following directions am creative like that, and the bottom of my knitting bag now holds a salad of pointy, slippery, pencilled gibberish. There's a design that will never get published.

Hm. Perhaps I should learn from this experience...

...nah.