Lamb and Frog

At last indeed. For those of you who didn’t get the e-mail, Stinky’s school transfer was approved. You can’t imagine my relief…well, maybe you can. I know some of you can. A huge thank you to all who sent good wishes and prayers. I’m finished with school bulls*** until August 1st!

The Books

I know you’re all waiting with baited breath (or not) for the knitting portion of this post, but I wanted to update the book list real quick.

• Falling Man by Don DeLillo (audio)
• One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie (audio)
• Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich (hardcopy of my favorite guilty pleasure)
• Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (hardcopy and the book club’s pick for June)

They’re all good. None great, but all worth reading.

Drumroll please…

The Knitting!

My mom is hosting her annual breast cancer fundraiser ‘Walk the Rock’ in Tonopah, Nevada, next weekend. I decided to send some hand made stuff for prizes. I’ve almost got it all finished. I finished the second of the two market bags:

Inside the market bag will be an awareness ribbon illusion cloth, a plain pink and white striped wash cloth (uh, yeah, I still need to weave in the ends on those), and a pair of pink anklets:

The final anklet is still OTN, but I expect to finish it sometime this weekend.

I also finished a pair of anklets for my MIL for Mother’s Day:

They’re huge, but the yarn felts, so I’m hoping that after she washes them a couple of times they’ll fit perfectly. Of course, these have not been mailed yet. Nothing (my Dad’s birthday present, Mother’s Day cards or gifts) has been mailed yet. That’s my project for early next week (that and a mammogram, oh joy!).

As previously mentioned, I finished Kentucky Julia’s birthday socks and the most recent big blanket of doom.

I finished the first Devil’s Tower sock and I’m on the foot part of the second one (even though the picture shows me at the heel flap).

And there you have it. Of course, there’s tons of stuff OTN and a few books in process. With any luck I’ll be back at ya next FO Friday!

Just a quick update…

I pulled Stinky out of school yesterday for the rest of the school year. Now I’m really hoping his transfer has been approved, otherwise I’ll be spending my summer looking for a new school for him and the Duck. (The ‘up’ side of ‘the Stinky situation’, if there is an ‘up’ side, is that since he’s in day care for the next few weeks I should have a little extra time to work and blog.)

I keep forgetting to tell everyone who sent prayers and donations for Baby Ted…his mom loves all of you. She printed copies of ALL of the good wishes and put them in his keepsake book.

I’m still working on ‘the Rock’ but I think I submitted the final draft this afternoon.

The ‘Big 4-0′ was yesterday. Happy birthday to me…more on that later (unless I can’t find you, or unless I forget).

I broke ‘Da Rules’ and started two new blankets and some red Nutkin socks for me. So sue me.

Here’s a link to some good news for whales.

And here’s a link to one of the coolest things ‘out there’.

Happy knitting!

It’s been so long since I’ve done an FO Friday post, that I’ve finished quite a few ‘regular’ and audio books. The DH was on work-related travel a few weeks ago and during that time I was able to turn off the TV and read like crazy. I haven’t read much since, but I’m still plugging away at a few items. Here’s what’s been finished to date:

Audio Books (in no particular order)

• The Wife by Anton Chekov
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

‘Regular’ Books (also in no particular order)

Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho by Jon Katz–This is an excellent book and I’ve recommended it to many of you via e-mail already. If you are a geek, the parent of a geek, the teacher of a geek, or the friend, spouse, or significant other of a geek, this book provides a great deal of valuable insight. It also provides some welcome reassurance that the isolation geeks feel is largely environmental. There are lots of us out in the world, we just need to find ways of identifying and connecting with each other.

Eternals by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by John Romita, Jr.–This is a graphic novel, by an author well known to many geeks. It introduces a line of comic books. I love Neil Gaiman’s work and this was no exception. And, while I don’t think I’ll be following up with the comics, I can still recommend this as good (and pretty) stand-alone reading

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson–Excellent. Simply excellent. The Lottery is perhaps the best known story of the bunch, but I found all of them compelling.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff–This is my book club’s pick for May. (I didn’t finish Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach, which was the selection for April.) It’s not great literature by any means, but it was a good, fun, quick read. Mind bendy, but not freakishly so. It’s science fiction, but not too freaky for those who don’t normally read the genre. Again, I’d recommend it.

The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need by Juliet B. Schor–Another excellent piece of non-fiction. It’s a little dated and (spoiler alert) the optimism she has at the end of the book is, unfortunately, not borne out by recent events. Still, it is not out of the question that in the near future Americans will learn to limit their consumption…it just may be involuntary.

There’s not a book in the lot that I wouldn’t recommend. The Old Man and the Sea is still my favorite by Hemingway though.

Here’s a little preview of the next knitting-related FO Friday (I just wrote a book-related one that will post on May 2nd). I finished those blankety blank blank green socks! They were for Kentucky Julia for her birthday, which was April 11th. Happy birthday (again) Kentucky!

These are, to date, the prettiest socks I’ve ever finished (but I still have no intention of knitting anything with green yarn in the near future). Julia got them and loved them. Besides being a birthday present, they were sort of a ‘make up’ present for her gracious acceptance of the ugliest socks in the universe.

They were made with Colinette Jitterbug in the ‘Velvet Leaf’ colorway. The pattern is called ‘Nutkin’ and it’s available on Ravelry (or probably with Google). The yarn is awesome (there’s more non-green in the stash, lucky me!), the pattern (as I may have already mentioned) was challenging enough but still pretty easy to memorize. I used size 2 dpns. I learned two new techniques too: short-row heel/toe and the three-needle bind off.

I liked the yarn and the pattern (I’m diggin’ those short-row heels) so much that I used some of the birthday money I got from my Dad (no, it’s not my birthday yet, I’ll post on that later) to buy this:

Colinette Jitterbug in the ‘Morello Mash’ colorway (it’s a little more purple than it looks in this picture). I haven’t broken Da’ Rules so far (except for completely blowing off Earth Day…more on that later too), but let me tell you, the next pair of Nutkins is MINE ALL MINE!

OK, first, why is ’smackdown’ getting marked as an error by my spell checker? It’s a perfectly good word. I would argue it’s a great word. It’s way better than ‘ginormous’, which I first heard on Lime & Violet’s knitting podcast, and which has become freakishly overused in the podosphere (podosphere like blogosphere, another good word). Ginormous is a word that, every day, I wish would be purged from the lexicon of the over-connected and any mainstream users who may have picked up on it. Anyway…

ARGH!!!!

What, oh what, did I do to anger the knitting goddess? Not enough posts about knitting on the knitting blog? Not enough blogging in general? I don’t know, but she smacked me down in spades on Saturday night.

Even though I haven’t been posting (too much other, mostly work-related, writing going on), I have been knitting my booty off (too bad it’s not actually getting any smaller). Saturday night I was cruising through ball twelve of twelve on the huge pink and green blanket of doom.

I was almost finished when I realized…I’m going to run out of yarn. And run out I did. I had this many stitches left on the needles (that’s a 60-inch, yes 60-inch, circular there by the way):

Not many. And decreasing by one each row down to the last four stitches. But alas, not enough yarn to finish the blanket. And I mean really finish the blanket. A long time ago I had woven in all the ends from the first half of the blanket (the first six balls). Last week I wove in all the ends from the second half except for where I started ball twelve. So I would have only three ends to weave in once I had done the bind off. In other words, once the knitting was done, I didn’t have much ‘finishing’ before the blanket was really finished.

But, as I said, I ran out of yarn. On Saturday night at about 8:00. Of course, the yarn is the Hobby Lobby store brand ‘Italia’ (in the Genoa colorway if you care). Hobby Lobby, which is owned by evangelical Christians, is not open on Sunday and was already closed at the point of no return on Saturday night. Thus, the blanket of doom was not destined to be finished this weekend. I went to bed really, really cranky on Saturday night. I worked on other stuff Sunday.

This morning, after I got the kids to school, I went to Hobby Lobby and bought ball thirteen of twelve. (I was so peeved about the entire situation I even paid full price for it!)

Even though adding another ball means two more ends to weave in, this blanket will be finished, and I mean finished, today.

I’m a ‘glass half full’ kind of girl, so this wasn’t a totally horrifying smackdown. It could have been worse. I learned a while back, when I decided I needed one more ball of another Hobby Lobby brand yarn, that Hobby Lobby can have yarn in the same dye lot in stock for more than a year. Ball thirteen is the same dye lot as the other twelve balls and for that I count my knitting blessings.

In the meantime, I would like all of you knitters to contemplate how it is possible to be knitting a square blanket and to do the first half of the square with six balls of yarn, but not be able to knit the other half with the other six balls. Maybe I’ve been knitting so long my gauge has changed. I don’t think so, I’m one of those freakishly consistent knitters, but I guess you never know. Otherwise, the manufacturer is playing seriously fast and loose with the yardage measurements on those ball bands. Something that bears remembering next time you’re out shopping for yarn.