Month: July 2005

Knitting Roundup

I found the prettiest color of discontinued kitchen cotton on sale at Fred Meyer last week, and snatched it up for an Eyelet Skirt. (I’m not convinced that this will be the best weight/texture, but the gauge is right, it’s washable, and I love the color. Worse comes to worse, it was a $14 experiment and I can rip it out and make placemats or fishtank towels of it all. And it’s certainly better than that horrible florescent red Cotton-Ease that I ordered online – lesson learned – for the skirt and which quickly found its way to a new home.)

I cast on and made it through a few rows before deciding that it was way too loose, and that I’d have to switch from #7’s to #6’s. Malheureusement, my 6’s are currently engaged with the Bomber jacket (hate that name). So, I have a new wind on that project. I made it through the rest of the right front on Sunday at the beach, and am now working on the last half of the left front. The sleeves are almost all stockinette (yay!), so I think I’m going to try to finish them before starting the skirt… No promises on doing the ribbing for the collar, however – I get all burnt out on K3, P2 after a day or so.

My kind of workday

After a great weekend replete with movie, beach and deck time, I settled down to “work” on Monday with the washed and ironed quilt fabrics and the mat and cutter. The circular cutter took a while to get used to. I finally figured out that I had much better control when I stopped holding it like an x-acto (hand over the top, cutter at a 45 degree angle), and starting holding it vertically with my hand on the side (rather the way you would if you were stabbing with a knife – sorry for the graphic analogy :-P). I also didn’t realize until I was 8 colors in that cutting one way is much stretchier than the other way. I get confused if it’s with the selvage or against (I don’t have my lingo down yet), but things went much quicker when I started cutting parallel to the woven edge. My fabric was pretty neatly divided between fat quarters and 1/8 of a yard cuts, and so some of the cuts won’t be long enough for the 10″ strips that I’ll need for the outer edges of the squares, but I should be able to fake something together for those.

I finished all of the blues and purples, which felt like major progress. I only have greens left to cut at this point, though I think I’m going to need more fabric – more greens, some yellow for the sky where it meets the mountains, and a different color purple – one of the colors is too yellow, and needs to be redder or else it won’t progress properly (see the half line in the picture below). I was worried about it when I bought it, but after cutting it became too clear that it was a completely different color family.

Dilemma

I finished ball 1 of Branching Out — here’s the progress:

Obviously, it’s hurting to be blocked, but you can imagine. I *way* overestimated how much yarn was needed, since I had five balls and this definitely only will need 1¾ max. Any idea what could be done with the extra 500+ yards of lime green All Seasons? Possibly I could be twins with (aka, a vile copycat of) Amanda and try to eke out a honeymoon cami? Or more scarves? If I was a knit swimsuit person, that would be a possibility, but I’m not. Also nix on the boob-holders/one-skein-wonders — not so much my style. Any other ideas? It’s a beautiful yarn and I’d love to make something pretty. If all else fails, I think I’ll get more colors and do some sort of multicolor top?

The newest addition(s)

This has been a rocky week on the fish front. We’ve nearly given up on ever finding our small yellow tang (even though the fish store has 8 larger ones, it seems better to wait — they little ones are so neat and are supposed to adapt better), and Kevin’s been lusting after the firefish that they’ve had recently. Only problem was that there wasn’t much information out there, and the little that was there was pretty conflicting. We knew that they needed about 20 gallons per fish, that they’re jumpers, and that they are supposed to be extremely shy (odd because they weren’t at all at the store), but other than that, reports conflicted. After reading up on Fenner, it seemed that the best option was to get a group of three. On the way home and in the settling-in period in the quarantine tank, everything seemed just fine. However, while we were both at work the next day, all hell broke lose and the dominant fish bullied the other two to death. We leapt in and isolated him in a colander floated in the top of the tank when it became clear what was happening, but by that point it was too late and the damage had been done. So, now we have one firefish. We both feel terrible, because we do want to be conscientious and we felt like we’d done our research beforehand. Lesson learned (be skeptical of what you read), and hopefully others will at least be forewarned by our sad tale. Meanwhile, the “bully” fish seems to be doing well, and we’ve forgiven him for his transgressions.