fishie’s aquarium

I wish the reason I haven’t updated in a month was because I was obsessively knitting. Unfortunately, life has been happening so the knitting has been a little stalled. I think getting so emotionally invested in getting accepted for publication, and then having the book canceled has also affected my knitting mojo quite a bit. Spending money on knitting, however, has been going in full force, in spite of my *cough* yarn diet.

Before I gush about all the yarn I bought at The Fiber Gallery’s anniversary sale, or the fact that I just registered for the Make 1 Yarn Studio Fall Fiber Arts Retreat in the Rockies outside of Calgary, I has to show you this hat:

Yarn is Noro Silk Garden, the pattern is Coronet from Knitty, although I modified it a bit. I didn’t feel the need to have a double layer where the brim folded, and I wouldn’t have had enough yarn for it anyway. Instead, I picked up stitches for the crown with the right side of the band facing, and did a row of purls before I dove into stockinette. I did the decreases a little too soon, so I plan to unravel the crown, spit felt the remaining yarn on, and do a few more rows before starting the decreases. I knit the whole hat in two days. Until I fix up my Styrofoam head to be the same size as my head, it will remain unblocked. But I’ll live.

I’ve also been working on a tank inspired by the Drawstring Chemise in the Spring ‘08 issue of Interweave Knits. I really like the look of it, but if I followed the pattern I’d look like a freaking pregnant woman. Instead, I used it as inspiration. I cast on this tank in mid-March, and I’m just now starting the lace bits on the bottom.

Progress a week ago

Made with three skeins of Rowan Calmer, knit from the top down. It fits reasonably well, although I really should have started doing decreases in the back sooner than I did. I’ll throw it in the dryer when I’m done and hope it shrinks a little. In the beginning, I was doing a great job at keeping notes so I could ultimately write up the pattern for what I was doing… but I’ve gotten lazy and bored, so I stopped. It’s not perfect and there are definitely some things I’d change knowing how my choices in decreases affected the direction of the fabric, but it’s really good practice for when I actually start writing patterns (I SWEAR I will actually do the dress that was going to be in the new Sensual Knits before they canceled it).

Now that I have all that boring knitting talk done with: YARN SALE! I got to the Fiber Gallery Saturday morning, right after they opened, so I could get some good sale merchandise before it was all gone. And I spent WAY more than I’d like to admit, but I made sure to only buy yarn that I had projects in mind for. In fact, I have a cheat sheet I bring with me when I go yarn shopping:

The last time I brought this sheet with me, I bought some Cherry Tree Hill Cotton to make the Yoke Pullover. This time, I bought some Cascade Fixation to make the Basic Slip (I’ll be using the Trellis hanging off the bottom of the sheet for the dropped stitch details), and a ton of Manos Cotton Stria to make Road to Golden. I’m really excited about the color combo. Here’s a general idea:

I do buy yarn for projects not on the cheat sheet. For instance, I bought some SWTC Amaizing, which is 100% corn fiber and some SWTC Bamboo:

But I made sure to buy enough of the Amazing to make a shrug (3 skeins) and enough of the Bamboo to make a sweater (4 skeins). I’m really excited to use my new yarns, even if that means finishing my WIPs.

The real reason I’m making this post isn’t because I felt the need to keep it updated with what I’ve been making. Oh, no. Really, it’s because holy carp. I’m going to the Fall Knitting Retreat in the Rockies. I’ve been dealing with massive amounts of stress in the personal life, and nothing erases all of my worries better than travel. The urge to just buy a plane ticket somewhere and be anywhere but here has been phenomenal lately, but the things causing all of my stress are things that make it necessary for me to stay where I am. Just like I spend hours looking at knitting patterns instead of actually knitting, I’ve been looking up places to go and reasons to go to them. I’ve been especially interested in knitting retreats. I don’t remember how I heard about this one. Maybe it was just through a google search. Who knows. But when I first saw it, I thought, “OH! I want to go! I shouldn’t.” My contract at work ends the week after the retreat, and I really shouldn’t take days off then. Also, I maintain my status as a part time college student to keep my massive student loan debt deferred, and I really shouldn’t miss class, whenever that would be in early November. Also, I would be going by myself, and I’ve never flown by myself before (I’ve actually only gone on two round trips in my life). And I won’t know anybody at the retreat. SCARY. But you know what, all those are just excuses. I want to go to this SO bad. Classes by Stefanie Japel, Cookie A, Amy Singer… The first thing I ever knit from a pattern was the One Skein Wonder. And 7 of the 11 garments I’ve knit have been from Stefanie’s patterns. After seeing Stefanie’s post with the map saying it was 1.5 hours from me to Calgary…

The e-ticket is already in my inbox.

Yeah, it’s not until November. BUT I’M GOING!

I’ve been having a stressful week. So today, I said, “I’m going to the thrift store!”

Of course, first I had to stop by Pacific Fabrics and grab a size 7 circular needle because apparently I don’t have any. While I was there, I finally fould the perfect contrasting yarn for the Lotus Sweater I have in my mind. The main body of the sweater is a nice, deep ruby, and the stranded lotus design is going to be in this:

Tahki Tweedy Cotton Classic

Then, off to the thrift store. The truth is, I was looking for pants. I’m always cold, and I need pants that will keep me warm until the summer. I only have two pairs and I’m feeling the need for variety, at least until I can do a load of laundry.

But alas, the sweaters were across the aisle from the pants, and I couldn’t help myself, especially not when I found a size large, 100% Cashmere cardigan

or a wool-viscose-angora-cashmere turtleneck, also size large, in one of my favorite colors

After securing these sweaters, I wandered off to the back corner where the Red Heart is dumped. Sometimes there’s good yarn, and although it’s rare, I couldn’t leave without checking.

Good thing I didn’t. I bought 5 huge cones of yarn, two of which are laceweight mohair in a color I don’t mind. This is a big deal. Even better: each cone was only $2.99. There’s a sweater I really want to make that calls for laceweight mohair, but my current mohair stash is all variegated DK of various colorways. Worry no more, I have enough mohair to last me a couple years now.

The other three cones are some as yet undetermined fiber, two are a seafoam-blue-green, one a powdery-blue-lavendar, and they appear to be a light fingering weight. No idea what I’ll do with them yet, but I’m sure I can think of something.

Now, if only I had time to knit…

I’d mentioned my plans to get a dressform from Joann’s to aid myself in designing. I’ve used them before, and I don’t think I’d be able to start seriously designing unless I have one of my own. Joann’s handed me a flyer when I went there to buy some emergency #17 circular needles, and on this flyer it mentioned the next week, dressforms would be about half off, starting at $90. That’s a good deal. So I went there with Kate and Charles, since my back is still in need of physical therapy and I wouldn’t be able to carry the box myself. When I asked about one, I found out that not only did the flyer contain a misprint (dressforms were not on sale), but they didn’t have any left, since they were on sale before Christmas.

This left me dressform-less with a deadline. I wasn’t too upset, since I really don’t like the ones Joann’s has: the hard plastic ones that are “adjustable.” That’s great if I’m making things for a bunch of people of different sizes, but I’m really only going to be making things in my size, which is also the size I need to make things for publication. Plus, I prefer dressforms I can stick pins into.

I went onto ebay to see what dressforms were available and what they were going for, and I came across this beauty: One of the squishy ones with adjustable boobs. One of the costume designers at the shop I worked at in college had one of these, and occasionally brought it in to work on. I remember the shop manager saying it was one of the nice expensive ones. I just bought it for cheaper than the plastic ones Joann’s has, with free shipping.

I’m very excited.

I got paid yesterday. What does this mean? All those urges to go out and buy sweaters to unravel became a reality over the course of two days. Not only did I get some nice yarn to recycle, dye, felt, etc., I also picked up some SWEET fabric. Observe.

YESTERDAY

I stopped by the Goodwill by my house. It’s nice living in the yuppy neighborhood sometimes. The store was small so I only picked up two sweaters, an XL mostly wool in somewhere around sockweight yarn for $3, and a small hooded bulky linen one for $4.

I’d never been to this thrift store before so I had a look around, and found THESE babies:

6.66 yards of fuzzy pink upholstery fabric for $7(I’m serious about the measurement too)

4.5 yards of that pretty color-changey purple fabric for $4

I also caught a glimpse of some nice looking nylon yarn ($1.50) that ended up being way way way less soft that I’d thought. I can still make something out of it though.

TODAY

Chris and I both had dentist appointments today, but they were five hours apart so we used that as an excuse to run a bunch of errands. We stopped by a lumber store so Chris could take a gander at wood to start making his drums out of, and I got a dowel to make a niddy noddy to unwind my yarn onto. Then we stopped by the thrift store I used to work at and knew all the tricks and where all the good stuff was. Chris helped me look through sweaters too. I came home with:

37 ties ($6)

Giant pink cone of mystery yarn, laceweight ($2)

The exact same bulky linen hoody I found yesterday (can’t hurt to have more of the same yarn!; $3.50)

A splurge. Pink and green linen sweater ($10)

A red and orangish wool hoody ($2.50)

An 80% Alpaca, 20% nylon sweater in my favorite color ever ($5)

The hard part now is going to be NOT unraveling them until I’ve finished the second baby blanket and have the niddy noddy all made up. But oh man I want to do it NOW. I’m excited.

Went shopping for my secret pal, and I admired a set of DPNs that comes with FOUR sizes, 000, 00, 0 and 1. It was $10 and more that I felt I could reasonably spend on something I had no immediate use for, but I was out with Chris and he bought them for me. :X :3 Unfortunately, the store I went to didn’t have what I needed, so I went somewhere else and ended up spending WAY more than I should have, but ended up with the back issue of Interweave Knits I’ve wanted but my other yarn store was out of, and I picked up the new Knit1 which I might end up subscribing to.

Anyway.

I’m accumulating a lot of crap. The craft room is almost done so at least I have a place to put everything now.

After work, class, and my chiropractor appointment this morning, I stopped by my favorite yarn store, which I haven’t been to in years. I finally got paid last night, so I had money to start my shopping for my splj4 partner.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been there, and now that I’m familiar with a lot more yarns and fibers than before, I could really appreciate what they had. They have the soysilk laceweight yarn (dude, it looks like THREAD), along with other crazy fibers, like the corn yarn (SO SOFT), as well as the bamboo, which I already knew was soft. They had $5 skeins of cascade fixation, but only one in variegated hot pink, which was why I didn’t call Chris and ask him how many I’d need for the Zaftig bra (note to self, 2), so I didn’t get any. There was some yarn that I forgot what exactly it was, only $3 a skein on sale, but I didn’t know what I’d use it for and $3 a skein adds up.

I grabbed three magazines out of the $1 bin and everything else was for my partner. It was funny how even though I wasn’t buying for myself, this yarn trip was the only thing that kept me awake through class this morning.

Kate’s sister is full of babies. Two of them. I hate babies, but I like Kate and her sister and the yarn is soft so what the hell. Plus I saw this pattern posted on Craftster and it looked like a good challenge. I’m going to be good this time and actually take pictures of my progress. So I did.

Yarn of choice. I needed two boy-ish colors. Blue and green seemed to work.
Yes. Twin boys. She’s going to have LOTS of fun with that.

The yarn is actually SOFTER than it looks in that picture. It’s NICE.

Not bad for full price. I’m estimating I’ll need three skeins per blanket (the pattern calls for 14 oz, each skein is 5)

I’ve been working on it for four days.

The pattern is old and weird, but I think I’m figuring it out pretty well.

ONLY 30 INCHES TO GO!

When these kids turn one I’m making them cupcake hats.

So I’ve been needing SOME kind of motivation to get knitting again.
I bought lots of yummy yarn for an even yummier shirt, but it’s still not enough to get me going.

Before Chris embarked on a long journey to California leaving me all to my lonesome, I wanted to go yarn shopping so I’d have something to keep me occupied in his absence. I knew what I wanted to make (see yummy shirt link above) but I didn’t have the materials to make it. There’s a yarn store within walking distance of the house, and I’d never been there before, so there we went. It being close and a nice day, we went for a walk, and Chris took Athena. For those of you who don’t know, this is Athena with me as a size comparison:

So we’re walking walking walking. And I’m wearing my flip flops because pfft like I wear real shoes anymore, and we’re walking walking walking. Athena likes to walk RIGHT in front of Chris, which is inconvenient since the leash is about the length of her body. I was walking behind Chris at one point in a cross walk because other people were crossing the other direction, and I was walking too close behind Chris and OW! my toe!! The back of his shoe hit my left big toenail as he was lifting up his foot. I didn’t pay too much mind right away since he’s done stuff like that before, and at this point my feet are getting used to being tortured. I mean, the nasty black part of my right toenail just fell off, so why should I try having normal looking toenails?
After we’ve crossed, my feet are REALLY hurting, and I look down. And see this:

Not one, but THREE toenails were damaged in the incident. Normally my big toenail just gets bent a little. No, Chris tore it RIGHT OFF. Luckily I had a napkin in my bag, so I had something to wrap around my GUSHING toe when I wandered around the yarn store and bought

I spent $127 on knitting paraphenalia. But I bought four sets of circular needles, so the yarn wasn’t actually THAT expensive, and I joined their $10 annual fee club deal, where after I spend $250, I get $25 of store credit. $250 isn’t a whole lot of stuff, and I’m halfway there already after one purchase.