Christmas Knitting Part 1

Well, now I am unemployed. So you would think I would be knitting LOTS, right? Not really. You feel guilty knitting while unemployed. You just keep thinking "hmmm, I should be applying for a job right now..."

Despite that guilt, I have been knitting.

Behold!


A Christmas present finished before Christmas Eve! (Gasp!) I give you a Lace Ribbon Scarf in Bristol Yarn Gallery Buckingham color 1042 (love this yarn)




I got a wider stitch on one side of the repeat by using a wide stitch marker (hair-ties). I like the effect -- it's more open and a little bit funky.




It has been wrapped up and shipped off to be opened by its new owner. I always feel a little sad sending off my lace projects. Not as much with other projects, but lace somehow has that effect on me.

The only other Christmas knitting this year is to be a hat. It's just a simple Norwegian Star hat in Berroco Ultra Alpaca.




I plan on duplicate stitching blue onto the four little white bits in the center of each star. I might also add a fleece lining. We'll see how motivated I am.

And that, my friends, is all. I'll post pictures of the recipients modeling the projects when I get them.

Where has the Newman gone?

Let's see...since the last time I actually remembered to update this thing....

I got a new computer. (A wonderful MacBook :) )



I graduated from Cornell.




I moved to the Adirondacks where I have a job as an interpretive naturalist at a museum.




And I knit hardly anything worth mention. But I'll mention some anyway.

Here is a Katamari:



It's from the video game Katamari Damacy. Really awesome game, incredibly addictive, and you'd probably think it's weird.


I knit a purse, which is not yet finished. I had intended to finish it for graduation. Yeah...that worked well.



I started my Christmas knitting early. Super early. May early. I had good intentions to get my Christmas knitting done for Christmas. But my knitting has fallen short. And so my Christmas knitting only looks like this now:




And I knit and Obama hat. :) The "O" is duplicate stitched. I still need to add another row of four blue at the top and add a crocheted edging. But it's close.





Now I'm making a promise to myself that I won't let my knitting blog go so long without being updated. This also means that I am making a promise to myself to knit more...and knit things worth blogging about. We'll see how that works out. You guys should help by yelling at me if I start to suck at keeping my promise. :p

I think the hardest thing about living in the Adirondacks is the lack of a good knitting store close by.

Christmas '07

Christmas has come and gone. Oh hey look! It's 2008 already! Yeah, probably time to post a Christmas knitting update, eh?

Firstly, remember that big green thing? Yeah, no way that was happening. So I focused myself on two pairs of socks. That's all. I know, I know, kind of a lame year for Christmas knitting. Deal with it. The socks were both made from Knitpicks Bare, Kool-Aid dyed. The first you saw in the previous post. The second was dyed with lots of grape and berry blue. The pink ones went to sister Jill, and the blue/purple to sister Lori. Both were knit using Knitty's universal toe-up formula. They were my first toe-up socks. And let me tell you, I'm in love with toe-up now.




Interestingly, I'd spent weeks hemming and hawing over trying to find a suitable non-wool sock yarn for Lori who is allergic to wool. I even knit a whole sock in Cascade fixation effect (which I do not recommend) and ended up frustrated with the finished product. When Lori got here, I shoved some Knitpicks Bare in her face and said "does it bother you?" Aaaand...it didn't. I could have been knitting her socks with that the whole time. hrmph.



Anyway... They came out great, even though Lori only had a sock and a half on Christmas morning.





In other news. I finally have pictures of my mom with Bristow on! It looks aweosme, long sleeves and all. Mom switched the buttons to some bigger buttons which stay better, and they look really good.




And prehaps most excitingly I'm on Ravelry now!! Yay! The waiting time nearly killed me I was so excited to get on it. I can't stop just playing with things. It's so awesome. :)

I can't figure out how to get the button in my sidebar though. *idiot*

I meant to do that.

I decided tonight to dye some of my Knitpicks Bare from my stash for some more Christmas knitting. I've used Kool-Aid to dye roving before, but I haven't dyed yarn. So I thought I knew what I was doing.

But apparently I should have put more water in the Kool-Aid solution before plopping my (prepped) yarn in and adding the necessary amount of water to cover it. Instead of a solid-colored batch of yarn, I ended up with an interesting variegated pattern. I was nervous at first. But...I think I like it.



So I'm just going to say "I meant to do that!"


And now for some things I meant to post a few weeks ago...

A few weeks back was my Grandmother's funeral. I realized on Wednesday that my cousin would be coming up with her new baby (the service was on Saturday). So I decided to knit the baby a hat.



Knitty's Flower Power. Seen here with mother Lisa. Couldn't get a good picture of Elle (the baby) with the hat on.

I also decided I would need a scarf to wear to the service, since it would be cold. So I whipped up this:



Self-designed pattern. It's a semi-reversible cabled scarf. I may post the pattern if I get around to typing it up. It's Plymouth Baby Alpaca Grande color 3317, which is really a much nicer blue than it looks here.... And it needs to be blocked still.


That picture shows it a bit better.

That's it for now. I'll try to post more in the coming weeks, now that classes are over :) I just have two finals, a paper, and the GREs between me and winter break.

Let the Christmas knitting begin!

And now comes the time of year when I can't really talk about anything I'm knitting....because it could be for you ;)

But now that Solar Decathlon is over and done with, I can start to get back on track with my knitting. After this past weekend's hockey games (we won both...by a lot) in which I earned my battle scars including this:

and possibly a minor concussion (too stubborn to go to the doctor), I've got my Christmas knitting underway! I've started on it a little (a lot) later than I would have liked, but at least it got started at all.

I have just a tiny bit of this:


With a whole lot more where that came from:


And I'm eying these babies from my stash as some possible candidates for some smaller presents.

This is entirely overambitious and I would probably never be able to finish these projects by Christmas if I had the power to bend time. However, I am pressing on. This could get messy.

Another knitting lull

Why haven't I been knitting?

This is why:



The Solar Decathlon. Solar powered houses designed and built by university students. It doesn't get much cooler. I'm on the communication subteam for the Cornell team.

http://cusd.cornell.edu

and

http://solardecathlon.org

The house is up and running on the Mall in D.C. We've been running tours since Friday morning. I lead tours through our (awesome) house. I was there all this past weekend. I've come back to Ithaca for a short stint, but I'm heading back down to D.C. to give more tours and help see us through the end of the competition on Wednesday.

I led over 100 tours this past weekend. I'm amazed I still have a voice. I'm psyched to go back down for more. :)

In terms of knitting:

The teaser picture at the end of my last entry? That was the sleeves of Bristow. I finished them, blocked them and sewed them together and onto the body of the sweater just in time to frantically put the sweater in a gift bag to give to my mom for her birthday. This means that I don't have a picture of the finished Bristow :( I'll try to get my mom to model it for me the next time I see her.

H'okay so...

I promised you pictures of Hedera sunbathing in Hawai'i.

So here they are!


Tanning on the black sand beach.


Looking for sea turtles.


Oh and my beautiful family :)


Aaaaand I probably, no...definitely, should have Hedera finished by now, but I've been dedicating what little free time I have to a different project.


Recognize it? Any guesses? Any scolding me for taking this long to get back to it?

More on that later. For now I must sleep so I don't go completely insane O_o

I'm not dead! Really!

No I didn't die. I just had a crazy summer. :)

First was the family vacation to Hawaii. This vacation saw much sunshine, snorkeling, beaches, volcanoes, i'iwis, and the birth of Hedera, with Knitpicks Gloss woodland sage(loooove this yarn).

Hedera enjoyed some beach time (here on a black sand beach) (OK, so....image coming soon, cause I forgot the cord to connect to my external hard drive. D'oh), with the family. And some funny looks from other beach visitors who thought it was quite odd to be taking pictures of yarn on a beach in Hawaii. Silly tourists. What do they know. The hawksbill sea turtles didn't care much.

After the Hawaii vacation I took a job with the Student Conservation Association at Mount Rainier National Park. I was the public information intern for the Mount Rainier Recovery Corps. Translation: I took lots of pictures of people working, did some work myself, and wrote about it for the public, donors, and grants.



Hedera and Icarus traveled with me to Rainier and lived under my cot in my tent for the summer. But they didn't get much time out unfortunately. I think I took Hedera out once.

Needless to say, I didn't get much knitting done this summer. Such a polar opposite from last summer where I was cooped up with my foot up for weeks and knitting was pretty much the only thing I did.

Also notable (very notable): My chinchillas had their very first kit in mid August. He's a healthy little bundle. We call him Ace.



I picked Hedera up again this afternoon after class. (Oh yeah..I'm a senior! Crazy!) I've just started on the heal flap. Pictures to come later.

Sharing the love

It's study week! So I've actually gotten to a point where I have time to knit! I haven't done anything picture-worthy though. Mostly I've just been working on the sleeve of Mom's Christmas Bristow.

However....

For those of you who wish to see my speech on the yarn addiction rehabilitation center, I have added a widget for you on the left. It's a box.net filesharing widget. I've put in there both the Powerpoint presentation and the speech outline. Some things changed from the outline to when I actually did the speech, but you can get the basic drift from that.

Go ahead and download it and enjoy it. But please, don't use any of it without giving me some credit :)

Also, I assure you it was funnier when I actually presented it. Just imagine someone speaking very very seriously about yarn addiction as if it were akin to alcohol and drug addiction.

Random yarn-related things

Not much on the knitting front. Just picked up the sleeve of Mom's Christmas sweater again. I swear that thing's never going to be finished.

However, I found this on someone else's knitting blog and felt like posting mine here. So here it is:

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

The only reason my vice is hitting the snooze button is because yarn wasn't a choice. :p


Oh! For my business and professional speaking class this past week I gave an "After Dinner speech" (funny) about the "Shetland Rehabilitation Center." What? You don't know what that is? Haha. My speech was on "yarn addiction" and trying to sell the Shetland Rehab. Center (totally made up) to friends and family of yarn addicts.

I was worried people wouldn't find it amusing. But it turns out that yarn addiction is a funny topic. I had everyone laughing. :)

Maybe I'll post the speech here later.

Green Fiber Mill

Another awesome discovery today in the world of knitting/fiber and my ecological tendencies.

I clicked on a link from the Yarn Harlot's post today and lo and behold! I found happy :)

Buckwheat Bridge Angoras
It's a solar powered fiber mill in the Hudson Valley.

Does life get any better than that?


Oh! The first post is up on Ithaquest. Head on over for a look.

Finished (Fudged) Fetching

After working and reworking things several times I have myself a tweaked version of Fetching.

First I wasn't sure I was happy with the way the yarn looked in cables, but I kept going just to see if I liked it in the end. I did. So, I finished one glove, then decided to cast on the second with fewer stitches because the first one seemed big. I liked the smaller version better so I undid the big one and redid it like the second. Good thing they knit up in just a few hours :)

Here's the result:

That's my (huge) kitty, Ezra. He's a sweetie.

Fetching?

Remember that Eden yarn from the last post? Remember how I said maybe the hat would get me back on track?


That's what I did when I got back from class this afternoon. Guess I'm getting back on track, eh?

I'm trying to figure out if it's going to work. It's a bit of an adaptation of Fetching. The yarn is a bulky yarn, and the pattern calls for Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. Not to mention the different stetch of this yarn as compared to the Debbie Bliss yarn, which I've used before. Playing with gauge is a dangerous thing, but I think it might work. We'll see. I'm also not sure if I quite like the way the cables look with this yarn. I could end up frogging it all tomorrow.

I think I'll sleep on it.

Hat!

So my LYS had a sale on EVERYTHING! this past weekend so I couldn't resist. I went with my mother and probably bored her to death while I spent quite a long time hemming and hawing over which yarns I should get and how much I could afford. I ended up spending my gift certificate my aunt had gotten me for $21.21 for my 21st birthday...pluuuus just a bit (bit may not be the correct word here) more.

I only got



2 hanks of this absolutely luscious yarn: Eden from The Fibre Company.

And


Two balls of Plymouth's Suri Merino with which to make


Center Square!

I said I would make it. I said I'd do it before the cold disappeared, but the cold seems to have disappeared :( Not to worry! This being Central New York I'm sure it'll be snowing in a week :)

Anyhow, it was a quick and easy knit and I like how it turned out! It is a bit big on me, though. But I'll deal.

The end note to this is that hopefully this will get me back into the swing of things with my knitting. Especially with spring break coming up next week my knitting future looks bright.

Knitblog neglect

Yeah...soooo...I've been neglecting my knitblogging and my knitting as well :(

It's a very sad thing in the life of a knitter when your classes get in the way of your knitting. In all seriousness I have only had enough time so far this semester to knit a few rows on a sock.

"That's not possible," I hear you say, "there is always time for knitting!" I would tend to agree. However, this semester is turning out to be fairly writing-intensive - and along with chinchillas, a boyfriend, and eating enough food and sleeping enough to stay alive -I'm finding my hands tied up for almost all of my time.

So the Newman Knits sadly will probably remain slow for the rest of the semester. I will try to write in it whenever I can.

I do have a couple things to share, though!

First of all I couldn't help but post this post from treehugger.com (a really awesome eco-blog) about green fabrics, including some yarns. Here.

Secondly, I now have a second little blog I'm nurturing along. It is a class project, but I hope for it to become much more than just a class project. I see a lot of potential in this new blog of mine. It is meant to be a place where Cornell (and Ithaca College) students can find things to do in Ithaca that involve going out into nature. I'm hoping it will also be used by area schoolkids and Ithacans. Each post will have a cool place, species, ecological event, etc. how to get there, how to find it, what to do, and the science behind it. There is not much there yet (really...pretty much nothing) but you canh op over and take a look. And hopefully you'll come back later when I start with the juicy stuff. Anyway...that would be.... here.

Enjoy :) And maybe I'll get some knitting done soon :p (I am hoping to make a center square before the cold disappears.)

Christmas, Bahamas, the good life

Sorry to drop of the face of the Earth like that. I left for the Bahamas the morning after Christmas, so I didn't have time to catalogue Christmas or anything.

I ended up wrapping up Bristow sleeveless for my mom. I stayed up really late sewing together the pieces I had - I got two hours of sleep...uggh. She liked it anyway, and now I can work on the sleeves in front of her, and not just late at night.

I didn't get one single knitting related gift from my family for Christmas. Oh well. I got some late presents from Scott and his family when we got back from the Bahamas though! Scott gave me the Harlot's Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much. And his parents gave me a huuuge bag o' yarn which included some Schaefer yarn, Noro, Blue Sky, and I can't remember what else. I had to leave most of it in New Jersey so that I could fly back to Syracuse without checking anything (and thus avoiding huge lines). I'll have it all soon enough, they're going to send it up to me :)

Now: Bahamas! It was a nice trip. Very warm :) This was my first time seeing blue tropical waters. SOOOO nice! The water was really warm. It was nice to be able to relax someplace nice and warm with Scott and his family. I started Icarus on the plane down. Got a modest amount done on the plane rides and while sunning by the pool.

Since I got back this afternoon I've finished the scarf for Scott's dad. Seen here with everyone's favorite angrycat! This is Zingo. He has 25 toes and a temper worse than my own (and that's saying something). He was in a particularly good mood, and thus let me put the scarf right on him. Hehe :)

branching out = done

Here's Branching out blocked out:

Here's it in the box!

Yaay! I got something else done! On time even! It blocked really well :) This was my first chance to use my new blocking wires, and I love them.

Now if I can just get Bristow done. I blocked the back and front pieces tonight, but have yet to make the sleeves. So at least I can sew those bits together. Mom could end up unwrapping a sleeveless sweater on Christmas.

And finally: Go chek out today's Google logo! There are two kangaroos knitting! I have no idea why this is the logo, but it makes me very happy!

Progress

I finished Jill's Branching Out tonight. Yay! It's such a fast and easy lace pattern, good for a present. Hope she likes it! I'm going to block it out when I get up tomorrow.

Also, satchel is all done. (Here with Pippin, the family corgi)

But I think I'm giving up on MancalaMia...I'll finish it after Christmas for Lori's birthday in January. It's just too much, I need time to work on Mom's sweater. But now I have to think of something else to get for her....


Also today, Mom and I made pugoch! The BEST cookies to ever exist...eveeer. They're a Christmas tradition in the Newman household :) Pastry cookies with jelly in the center, soooooo delicious and buttery.

Looking past Christmas knitting, I mentioned earlier that I was hoping to start a shawl on my trip to the Bahamas after Christmas...well I got the yarn today! I was very excited, I ordered the yarn (The Alpaca Yarn Company's Suri Elegance) on Friday night and I wasn't sure it would get here before I leave on the 26th, but it did! :) I'm going to be making the Icarus shawl from this past summer's Interweave Knits. I've been eying the pattern since it came out. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm very much looking forward to doing another large(ish) lace project, and one that I don't have to rush on. I can just take my time and enjoy the process. It will be wonderful.

To add to that, I bought my very first pair of Addi Turbos specifically for the project, I can't wait to use them. I took them out after I bought them and..well..they're wonderful..and I didn't even knit anything with them yet! This could be bad, I'm probably going to want Addis in every size now. I can't afford that as a poor college student :/

Now to get some sleep so I can knit more tomorrow! Time is running out.

Christmas crunch pain

I've been pretty much knitting constantly since I got home on Saturday. My hands are killing me. My thumb was actually bleeding when i stopped knitting tonight. Guess I didn't have as good a callus built up as I thought I had.

The biggest show for all the knitting I've been doing is Brian's satchel. It's been felted, has dried for over a day, and is ready to assemble now.

Pre-felting:

post-felting, ready to dry:


This was my first time felting...and it was really cool! I'll be assembling that in the morning.

I have two thirds of the base for MancalaMia done plus six of the 14 cups knitted. I should have taken pictures of them...but I was tired of looking at them.... Hopefully I can get other six small cups, two big cups, and the rest of the base knitted and felted tomorrow, plus dried and assembled in time to ship them (plus satchel) out on Thursday. I just might go crazy.

After that I have to finish Jill's Branching Out and Mom's Bristow.

I'm starting to think this isn't going to happen. Especially if the joints in my hands don't start feeling better. My thumb I can put a band aid on, but there's not much I can do about the joints :(

Let's hope things start looking up with my Christmas knitting....