Cotton at Elann

I’ve always wanted to knit more garments than I do–I tend to be all about the scarves and blankets and handbags, mostly because they don’t require much yarn.  If I have three skeins of Cascade 220, I know it’s enough to make a felted bag; two skeins of novelty yarn will get me a decent scarf; four skeins of Plymouth Encore makes a great Big Bad Baby Blanket.  I don’t usually purchase yarn in greater numbers than that.  Plus, when I buy yarn because I just can’t resist it, it’s usually an alpaca or other wool blend.  Sure, I sometimes buy enough of it to make a tank, but really, who needs a tank made of wool or alpaca?  Tanks should be cotton, and I very very rarely buy cotton.

But two Christmasses ago, JoAnn’s was having their post-Christmas sale, and I picked up ten balls of Lion ribbon yarn (among other stuff), and as I mentioned in a previous post, I’m now making a tank out of it.  Dunno how it’ll turn out, but it’ll be my first adult garment, so yay!  I’m excited about making something new and cool and that I might actually be able to wear.

And then, Elann.com sends out their monthly newsletter of sales, and omigod, the cotton!  Such beautiful colors, and at only $1.98 for over 100 yards! Omigod I want this yarn soooo much!  Gah!  I’m starting to feel the cotton love, ’cause I want to be making more clothing, dammit, and fewer scarves!

But how can I justify buying more yarn of any type, when I have about three tons of yarn scattered all about the house, waiting to be used?  Not to mention the ginormous garbage bag of yarn in the trunk of my car waiting to go to a good charity.

Want!  Dammit!

Categories
Knitting and Crochet

New project

The blankets are finished!  Well, sort of–the yarn has been bound off, but I still have to finish weaving all the ends in.  Blech.  Not a big fan of the weaving, not at all.

Once I finished the knitting part, I immediately started thinking of my next project.  It was originally going to be more blankets for the twins, but once I saw how many blankets their grandmother had already knitted for them, well…. mebbe they don’t need more blankets just now.  And besides, I need a break from the baby stuff, I think.  And the blankets.  So, after much thinking and flipping through some books, and the current issues of Vogue Knitting and KnitSimple, I decided it was time to make my first ever tank top–woo!  I chose the yellow tank on page 36 of KnitSimple, except mine’s going to look nothing like that, since I’m doing it in ribbon yarn.  It was the only thing I had on hand that a) isn’t wool, and b) I already have enough of on hand.  I upped the needles to 10, since that’s the recommended needle for the ribbon, and because let’s face it, an XL on a pattern is rarely *really* an XL, and I’d rather it be a smidge big than a smidge small.  (Swatch it? Me?  Yeah, not so much.)

So that’s my latest project.  Hopefully it won’t be a total disaster, but even disasters are useful, and really, truth be told, I knit for the process.  I have so many scarves I rarely use, but that’s ok, ’cause it was made for the making, and not for the end product. 🙂

Knit One, Kill Two: a book review

I’ve recently become a big fan of LibraryThing.com, a website that allows you to catalog and tag your books, write reviews, compare your library to others’, and talk incessantly about books.  Through their knitting group, I learned of several book series and standalone novels that involve knitting in some significant way, and immediately purchased several to try them out.

The one I most recently finished is Knit One, Kill Two, a murder mystery by Maggie Sefton.  Sadly, I was not a fan of this book. I wanted to be, so much–a mystery, set around a yarn shop, with lots of knitting….sounded perfect! And I did grow to like most of the characters (although I still couldn’t tell you the difference between Meghan and Lisa). But for me, the plot holes killed it dead.

For one thing, criminals don’t just confess, and certainly not when confronted with flimsy circumstantial evidence. Ok, maybe in “Murder She Wrote,” and if that’s the audience Sefton is writing for, then go team her! But I’m not in that audience, and I expect more at the end of a mystery.

For another, anything involving knitting and/or yarn was written so completely and lovingly that it was clear the author not only adored her subject, but knew it very well. This just made it oh so obvious how much she *didn’t* research any of the other technical details of the story–DNA testing, for instance. I can’t get into it further without risking spoilers, but let’s just say that when an expert is comparing two separate DNA samples, two things are noticed immediately, and if the expert has seen enough of the samples to know the answer to one of those things, he can’t possibly *not* know the answer to the other–literally not possible….unless you’re the DNA expert in Sefton’s Colorado, apparently. This mistake (and the unbelievably rapid turnaround for the DNA results) was such a big one that my head hurts every time I think about it, and it made me want to throw the book across the room.

And the ending? Or should I say, lack thereof? There were so many questions left hanging at the end, I had to doublecheck the page numbers to see if a chapter had been ripped out. (Sadly, no.)

Those are the biggest (but not only) plot problems I had. Then there was the annoying writing style in which the characters included the name of the person they were speaking to in nearly every speaking turn. Take, for instance, page 178. Seven paragraphs of dialog, taking up 2/3 of the page–not even a complete page. Martha speaks to Kelly three times, and uses Kelly’s name each time. Kelly speaks to Martha four times, and uses Martha’s name twice. They’re the only two people in the room! And this happened throughout the whole book!

I know for some people these may be small, nitpicky details that are better glossed over in favor of enjoying the story, but for me, they got in the way of the story, taking me out of the book in repeated exasperation, with frequent mutterings of, “doesn’t she have an editor??”

As I said before, I did grow to like the characters, despite their constant uses of names, but unless someone can assure me that these plot and style problems have been worked out in later books, I won’t be reading anymore Sefton books.

Categories
Knitting and Crochet

Le update

I’ve been working steadily on the little blankets for Grace and Noah.  Noah’s is finished except for the few ends I still have to weave (the main reason I rarely work in stripes).  Grace’s is about half-finished.  No pictures yet of either, I’m afraid.  Grace’s would be finished by now, except I stressed myself out so much trying to finish Noah’s as fast as I could, and worrying about running out of yarn, that I couldn’t bear to touch the needles for three days after it was finished.  I hate when that happens, when my fingers feel like they never want to be in those positions again.  Fortunately it wore off, as it usually does, and her blanket is now coming along nicely.

I keep the bag of yarn from Unwind next to my desk at home, the cotton yarn that I bought specifically for more Grace and Noah blankets, and the brilliantly bright colors keep calling to me.  I can’t wait to finish the current one so I can get started on those delicious colors.

Mom's BlanketAnd since I hate to write a post without including at least one picture, here is a pic of my very first blanket, made in 2004 for my mom’s birthday.  It was made with Cascade’s Lana D’Oro series, long since discontinued, to my great dismay.  It was my first experience with alpaca, and I’ve been in love ever since.  The blanket itself is terribly ugly–it was my first experience with squares, and they weren’t the same size, and I didn’t know how to crochet then to even out the smaller ones.  I ran out of time, and so I didn’t have the right balance of colors, and since they were all oddly sized, their placement depended on where each would fit, instead of where the color would look best.  Seriously, the ugliest blanket ever.  And I remember so clearly spending the entire day before Mom arrived for her visit stitching it together–a terribly hot day to be working with alpaca and wool.

But she said she loved it, and got mad when I apologized for its ugliness.  I wanted to include it in her coffin when she died, but I didn’t find it until a few days after her funeral, wrapped up and packed away to protect it from the cats.  It’s now wrapped up and packed away to protect it from my cats.  Sometimes I think about taking it out and trying to fix it–maybe adding more squares to balance the colors, or embroidering some designs on the plainer blocks, or adding a crocheted border around the edges.  Maybe I’ll make that a goal for the rest of 2007.

Categories
Knitting and Crochet

Pictures

I swiped the batteries from my old, deceased A300.

Hats
This is a picture of the two hats. The pen is there for scale. They both fit rather nicely over my middle three fingers, which reminds me of Mr. Hand from South Park, which is probably not a good association for itty bitty baby hats, but there ya go. [Pattern here.]

Noah's blanket (WIP)
This will be Noah’s blanket when it’s finished. I’m using the light pink from Grace’s hat for the accent color, and I’ll be using the light green for Grace’s accent color. [Pattern here.]