I AM THE MASTER OF ALL I ATTEMPT! BOW BEFORE ME!

I AM THE MASTER OF ALL I ATTEMPT! BOW BEFORE ME!
Yeah, yeah, it's been a while. My 3 readers should be used to that by now. In the interim, I took the girls back to visit family, Adam has continued to heal nicely, the renovations are progressing, and the garden is ready to be rototilled this evening. It's been busy. What can I say?

Oh, I know what I can say: BEHOLD MY MIGHT AND POWER!!!

Muahahahahahaaaa!!!

Sorry.

I'm feeling a little self-inflated at the moment in all things yarnish. For you see, last night, I mastered (I use the term to mean "learned" not "able to teach a course") continental knitting, fair-isle, and knitting with one color in each hand. All at the same time.

Adam was sitting across from me and looked over ad saw me knitting fair-isle with one color in each hand and had the gaul to not leap from his seat and kneel before me in awe. In fact, I think what he did was glance over, think, "Is she still knitting?" and look back at the Yankees-Boston game. (WAY TO POP FLY THE GAME AWAY, BIG PAPI!) And so, I decided he needed to be schooled. It went something like this:

"Adam, look what I'm doing! I finally figured out continental knitting."
*blank stare*
"And now I can knit fair-isle, because I can hold a different colored yarn in either hand."
*slightly impressed "hmm" sort of look*
"Isn't it amazing?"
*uhhhhhh-how-should-I-react-so-I-can-look-back-at-the-game face*
"I AM THE MASTER OF ALL I ATTEMPT!! BEHOLD MY GREATNESS!!"
*wondering where the nearest psych ward is*

I tell you, it is a good thing I derive an income, however meagre, from doing this or Adam would have made the call last night and I'd be waking up in a pretty, pink, padded cell right now.

But seriously, I'm totally thrilled by this. The world of fair isle is finally open to me! Yay!

And what was I working on, you ask? Well, I'm part of a mitten exchange and my partner is a math geek. So, I designed a Norwegian-esque pattern that has a butterfly on one mitten and a hurricane symbol on the other. It's witty. It was the suggestion of one of the readers of my personal blog and he's a math geek, too, so I'm trusting his judgement. And where is my progress? After all, I managed to get half a mitten done last night, so where's a photo?

Well, you'll have to wait, because I frogged the whole thing. See, I was knitting it with a 100% wool dk that I'd kool-aid dyed red and a white 80/20 alpaca wool blend. And though the labels claimed the same gauge, they were not the same in practice, so it was all nubbly. Also, I discovered that either due to myself or fair-isle in general, the gauge got much tighter when I started the fair-isle section, so I'm going to start over, using a green 80/20 instead of the red wool so the yarn wpi is the same AND will be going up a needle size when I start the chart to try to combat the tightness.

I knew it was going to be a problem by half way through the first chart row, but I was so drunk on power that I couldn't stop myself.

So, that's awesomeness #1.

Awesomeness #2 is that I just scored this in a swap:



$20 worth of yarn I'm never going to use, plus a $25 gift certificate to Knitpicks is getting me that sweet knitting bag. While I love my "Will knit for tattoos" bag more than life itself, sometimes it's not big enough and sometimes I need to be more covert with my knitting, and this should do the trick quite nicely.

And finally, awesomeness #3:

Saturday, I was in, in all places, KMart and saw something that prompted the urge to design again. It will be a tote bag. And it will be the most awesome bag ever toted. I just have to finish the 97,000 other things that must be done before I can start working on it.