Is my seam showing?

As promised, a shot of my first invisible seem:



(No, you don't need glasses. That's just one heck of a fuzzy shot.)

Can you believe it? There is no possible way you could tell where that sucker is.

Ok, well, the color change gives it away, I 'spose. Ahem.

You have to wait until the lining is in to see a photo of the whole thing. Suffice it to say that it is awesome.

Knit club was good last night. It was just Linda and I, because Debi had a conflict and Amanda's husband is a putz. He's all like, "I need to work for a living," and stuff like that. Psh. Whatever, dude.

We only stayed until about 7:45 and then took off to deal with errands. I resisted the urge to swing through Half Price Books as I usually do because, oh my gosh, I have so many books right now it's out of control. And with the coming rennovations, it's time to cull, not augment. I actually have a swap going on right now if anyone is interested. A lot of it is vintage stuff, some is more recent. I have tons more, but it's all in storage and it was some of the first stuff I packed up, so I won't be able to get at it again until the house is done.

I picked up one of the cabeled bags I'm designing and got back to work on it yesterday. Only I noticed that I'd been twisting two of the cables the wrong way throughout. And I wasn't sure if, after this long, my guage would be consistant anyway, so I just frogged the 18 rows I'd done and started over. By the time I went to bed last night, I had finished a full 24 row repeat. Only then I noticed that I hadn't mirrored the cables properly on either side of the piece and so now, today, I'm going to be dropping stitches and recrossing cables. Oh, heavens. I just had to do this a few weeks ago and now I've made the same mistake again. At least this time I know what I'm doing so hopefully I can redo all 8 crosses in less than an hour. I think I'm being very ambitious, though, considering the fact that our yard is a massive mud puddle and I can't send the kids out to play. In fact, I think trying to knit at all today will be an excercise in futility.

One step closer...

Most of my knitting time yesterday was spent assembling the cable bag. I worked my first successful invisible seams, too. w00t! I couldn't wrap my brain around those hand-drawn directions you see in all the knitting books until 3 days ago when I happened to be flipping through a book to find information on something totally different and I looked and, voila, it clicked. I don't know why, but that's pretty much how it goes with me and the black-and-white how-to diagrams. My brain doesn't process them right until a) someone has shown me how to do them in person or b) I've seen them umpteen times. Anyway, I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and I'll get a photo as soon as the batteries are done charging for the camera.

So, yeah, the cable bag is all assembled now and in the 'to line' pile with all the iPod cozies. I still have 2 bags on my UFO list to get done before I have my Days of Lining Torture.

When I finished assembly last night, I worked more on the mohair cravat. Today, we took the kids to the zoo and I worked some more on Kai's pink and purple blankie while Adam drove. Oooh, I'll show you the pre-knitathon photo of that!



This is a never-ending project. The yarn is available at JoAnns and was sent to me in a care package from my Mom. See that cake of yarn there above the project? All that yarn worked up, plus that cake, is only half of the skein of yarn. It is one massive skein. It's a 100% nylon (I think?) boucle. And, to be honest, I almost donated it on to someone else. I was not in love with the yarn, and in the shipping, a bunch of the outer layers got all yarn-barfy. But Kai LOVES purple and pink, so I thought I'd work it up into a simple, garter-stitch lapghan for her. I cast on ages ago. I'm working it on size 7s and for a while it was my go-to project for mindless knitting. But I got so, so sick of it.

It's. Just. Knit.

And it takes forever to see any progress on it. So, it just sat around for a long while. I pulled it out 2 days ago to work on while homeschooling, because our math lesson consisted of me making a design on the geoboard and then Kai spent 5 or so minutes trying to copy it. I have a tendancy toward impatience and wanting to do things for her, so I worked on it while she took her turn so I'd have something to do in lieu of being a control freak.

Just so you understand the scope of this sucker, it's a 30 minute drive to the zoo and I got 2 rows knit on the way there and 2 rows knit on the way back. Uuuuuuugh... Thank goodness for this UFO knitathon or I think it would have just languished for ages and eventually been chucked.

Another FO, and progress

I got quite a bit of progress done last night.

First, the unfinished washcloth:



I joined the Monthly Dishcloth group on yahoo groups oh... almost a year ago. And I was really on the bandwagon for a while. They feed you a pattern 5-10 lines at a time, twice a month. The first pattern of the month is usually a seasonal- or holiday-themed knit and purl pattern. The second pattern is usually a bit of lace or some other the technique. I tend to skip the first pattern of the month and take on the second one, because they are nice, bite-sized projects that are just challenging enough to be interesting without being overwhelming. The only issue with this new obsession was that no one in our house uses washcloths, and I prefer sponges to dishrags. So... what to do?

Well, at about the same time, I decided to try my hand at recycling sweaters. One of the first to get butchered was a cotton pull-over from the Gap. This left me with copious amounts of dk-weight cotton. It was very soft, but the unraveling process unplied it. I didn't think reknitting into a sweater was the way to go, but thought instead it would be perfect for the dishcloth projects, and it became my yarn of choice. I used size 4 needles instead of 7 or 8s, and they knit up to about half the size. They are perfect for face-cloths, and my daughters like to use them to wash up after eatting.

But then one day while working on the one above, I lost my place in the pattern and no matter how many times I counted rows, I was coming up in the wrong spot. So, it got set aside. For, oh, 6 months at least.

When I picked it up again yesterday, I realized I'd skipped a few rows and that's why I wasn't able to figure out where I was by row count. So, I frogged back and reknit. In the reknitting, I didn't go back far enough, so there is an elongated row of "leaves" in the finished item, but you know what? It's a face cloth. I'm not going to sweat it. It's off the needles now. Bing, bang, boom.



Obviously, that is unblocked. That's one of the things with using recycled yarn; even though you wash it and weight it to remove the kinks, there are still some left, so anything you knit from it looks really wonky until it's been blocked.

Then I moved on to another project. This one is a cabeled bag that was my Learn to Do Cabels project. I took this class at the same LYS where I learned entrelac and had a similar experience. First of all, the owner wrote up the pattern, and it was both incomplete and unclear. It was a bit like studying French all year and getting to the final exam and finding that it's in Spanish. Yeah, you can sort of figure out what you are reading and are being asked to do, but it takes a lot of extra time and thought. Also, the yarn estimates were way too low and after hitting the half-way mark, I realized I would need to knit the strap one ribbing repeat narrower so it would be long enough. And even now it's not long enough. I'd like it to be long enough to wear as a messenger bag, but I'm afraid it's going to be a longish-strapped tote instead. I couldn't even get more yarn to add to the length, because the yarn was hand-dyed by the owner and it was the last skein of that color. As it is, I got the front and back pieces knit with only about 1 yard of yarn left to sew it all together, so I had to go buy another hank of the green so I could finish it off. This was another class o'frustration for those of us in attendance.



All that said, though, I actually really, really like this bag. I went and got fabric to line it with, oh, AGES ago. And then it sat in its little UFO cubby for months and months and months because of my severe aversion to sewing. But, last night I got it out and steam blocked it and sewed the ends of the strap together.



I had every intention of assembling it in preparation for lining, but I got a little carried away with the steam and it ended up pretty wet, so I had to leave it to dry over night.

Instead, I pulled out the mohair lace scarf to work on.



This is some Skacel mohair that I got from the goodie bag at Stitch and Pitch last year. I wasn't all that thrilled with how it was working up. It had a pretty high yawn-factor. So, I frogged it 2 or 3 times trying different stitch patterns until I found one I liked. And, I can't show you an updated photo, because, well, I REALLY like it and I think I may try to pitch it somewhere. It's being reborn as a cravat instead of a scarf. Also, switching from bamboo to metal needles made the yarn much faster to knit with.

So, yeah, that's all the stuff I got done yesterday afternoon and evening. The kids were very content to play on their own last night, so I had a lot of time with my hands free and was exceptionally productive! w00t!

Todays UFO is brought to you by the letters "F" and "O"

I just finished today's UFO. So, you get to hear it's whole story in one go!

This UFO was born from a very vintage skein of yarn that I got from my Mom's uber-stash. I don't remember, to be honest, what the yarn was called or even the fiber content. What I do remember is that this particular skein of yarn had been floating around in my mom's house since I was a wee little one in the late 70's, early 80's. When my mom had me cull her stash for her about 5 years ago, I grabbed a bunch of these ye olde skeins that I could remember from my early childhood, thinking that if she hadn't used them by now she wasn't going to. And, they had a sort of vintage appeal to them at that point, too.

The yarn appears to be 100% fuzzy acrylic, but part of me wants to say that it also had some wool or mohair mixed in. It was billed as a tweed yarn, and was 2 contrasting colored yarns that were worked together to create the tweed effect. In this particular skein, the strands were a peachy-apricot and a peachy-brown.

Since I only had one skein of this to work with, and the colors weren't suitable for me to wear, my options were fairly limited. In the end, I decided on a purse. It was knit in two pieces: a large rectangle for the body, back, and bottom; and a long, thin piece for the strap. All the knitting was done in stockinet, and I really liked how the "tweed" worked up. I got the bag all assembled and the top kept curling because it was stockinet, so I worked 2 rows of single crochet around the top and that fixed that. In the process, I also added a loop to hold the bag closed. I still had a bit of yarn left, so I seperated the strands and made 6 crochet roses for the lower front corner of the bag.

With the bag all assembled, I moved on to lining. I got all the pieces sewed together fine and then when I put the lining in place to check for size, I noticed that when I sewed the strap of the bag in place, I'd twisted it several times. Oh, dookie. I didn't have enough yarn left so I could remove the strap and reattach it properly, so it just stayed that way. I used the little bit I did have left to sew the edges of the strap together to make it a tube so the gaff was less noticable. But the strap still neaded to be lined for stability. In the end, I just hemmed the edges of a narrow strip of fabric and ran it through the tube and connected it to the bag lining.



And then, it sat.

And sat. And any time I straightened up my craft area, I'd come across it and wonder why I hadn't sewn the lining in yet and it'd get cast aside again to be overlooked for a few more months.

So, today, the first day of the UFO knit-a-thon, I pulled it out and threaded a needle. It took all of 15 minutes to sew the lining in place and another 10 minutes to pick a button for the front and sew that in place, too. And, voila, I give you my first FO of the knit-a-thon:



Cue the trumpets!