Ribbit.

Oi.

Here are the pics for the lovely finished Diakeito Fetching for Robin. I think they turned out quite nice. I didn't screw up very much (you might notice the slight difference in length here - difference in tension? an extra row somewhere? I have no idea), and they look very sweet. The yarn is nice, not itchy, feminine and pretty without being obnoxiously so. They are quite tiny, though - here they are shown on Katie, a five-foot-tall Asian, and they fit nicely. Since Robin is a five-foot-tall Texan, I'm still assuming all will be well. Then the question remains, will she actually wear them?

FO Details:
Name: Christmas Gloves, pair #2 for Robin in LA
Pattern: Fetching, by Cheryl Niamath
Finished Measurements: Whoops, forgot to measure - will go back and edit this later...
Yarn: Diakeito Dia Tasmanian Merino Lame in color #604, a slightly lavendar pink with sparkly bits in it. A bit splitty and much finer than the label claims, but lovely. I still have a bunch left in the first skein, maybe even another glove's worth.
Needles: Clover Bamboo DPNs in size 5 in US size 5.
Pattern mods: The now-standard extra cable twist at the end, two extra stitches on each side of thumb which get decreased in the next row, and I didn't bother with the funky extra-stitch cast-off. I just did a regular bind off.
Number of Times Frogged: It's been a while now, but I think just the one thumb, once. It's a dang miracle.
Knitting in Public: None, weird. These gloves were clearly flukes.


Last night was all about the frogging. First I ripped out the "swatch" for the Diamond and Smocked, because once I got into the pattern stitches I had clearly cast on a completely random number of stitches, and I immediately got completely confused. So I ripped all of that right back out, and then sat down and figured out how many stitches to cast on for a proper swatch, which will then give me an idea of how many stitches I will want to cast on for the blanket. It will also be good to do an actual swatch so I can figure out how the heck to do that funky wrap around thing in the tenth row.

I really do like this Vittoria yarn so far. It's surprisingly soft and a nice color. Regardless of whether it's just so nice in comparison to the Nebraska Hat yarn that is ripping up my cuticles or whether I've talked myself into liking it because I couldn't find anything else, it's fun to work with. But now we'll have to see all about the how much and how's it look with the full pattern and can I even do this pattern. I've already gotten screwed up on which row I'm on and how many stitches are even on the needles and will I be decreasing at any point? There's no key for the w.r. n and w.o.p. listed on the pattern, but I read in someone's blog that it's just a fancy way of saying yarn over, which makes sense but when will I decrease? It might help if I'd actually read the pattern all the way through...

And then I brought the Nebraska Hat over to Jon's to work on while watching the UK Office. It was finally long enough to actually try on, and since Katie was already modeling the gloves for me, I had her try on the hat, too. And while it fit, it just looked too stretched. I didn't like it. Bleah.

Thus, the Nebraska Hat got frogged, and I cast on 100 stitches, like a real knitter. The slight difference in needle size is obviously not enough to make up for a 10% reduction in width. Dolt. This time I will also make an effort to carry up the different colors properly rather than letting them hang out with their wangs out.

Oh, Christmas knitting, how will I ever complete thee?

A Bit of My Old Life, Preparing for the New

I had a very busy weekend, and so did very little knitting.  This is a preview of next year, I'm sort of hoping, because what I was busy with was mostly Graduate School Applications.  I'm only sort of hoping this is a preview because, while I obviously hope to get into the grad school of my choice, I also hope, futilely I'm sure, to still have time to knit once I start.

There was also a Halloween party on Saturday, 

where I was able to re-indulge in another geek craft - special effects make-up.  And oh my God have I lost it.  I mean, yes, I have only the smallest fraction of my old make-up kit with which to work, and not all the proper materials or tools, but still.  It's been a year and a half since I've done any professional make-up, and it shows.  But I gave myself 

a bullet hole and stab wounds that didn't look bad, despite the extremely obvious lack of liquid blood (whoops), and made some bruises on one friend's face that weren't terrible.  The zombie make-up I did for another friend was only "eh", though.  Fine for a Halloween party in backwoods Japan where it's going to be pretty dark the whole time anyway, but not great.  Other make-up artists would not have been impressed.  But, well, I'm done with all of that, and while I shouldn't let all the old skills I paid so dearly to acquire fade away, who really cares?  Sorry for the terrible pictures, btw, but I didn't get around to taking any until it was dark.  And then I was kind of, um, drunk.

Then the rest of the weekend was Graduate School Applications with a few rows here and there while I waited for something to upload or download or print out or whatever.  Last week I managed to do most of the first glove for Robin in the Daikeito yarn.  It's practically a lace weight, even though Ravelry says it's a sport, so I went down to the 5 DPSs, and it was very small.  I worried it wouldn't fit, so held off doing the thumb until I could have my tiny neighbor Katie (about Robin's size) try it on.  She tried it on on Tuesday night, praising the yarn (maybe I'll change her intended gift now) the whole time, and it fit just fine.  She's a non-knitter, and once again a non-knitter expressed confusion at the lack of fingers on the glove.  But she did live in Canada, so I guess she's entitled to want fingers on her gloves.  Robin, however, lives in Los Angeles, so I think it will be fine.  And it does look nice.  I tried to do the thumb that night, but I let myself experiment with picking up more stitches and decreasing in funny places and it looked terrible, so I frogged the thumb and put the glove aside.

                          

While I was waiting for Katie to get back from Kyoto to try on the glove, I cast on the head band thing for Sheila.  This is my first time knitting from a chart like this, and I'm not gonna lie, it was a pain in the butt at first.  It's still a pain in the butt, actually, because I prefer to take my glasses off when I knit, and that means I have to keep stopping, picking up the chart, and holding it up to my nose to see what the hell I'm supposed to be doing.  Breaks the rhythm somewhat.  But if I put on my glasses to knit I will eventually get a headache.  So bummer.  And I first cast on the variegated Patons Decor for the headband, because I want to use it, and it's pretty, and I only have one skein of the stupid stuff.  About twenty rows in, however, I realized that it was completely wrong for this pattern.  I mean, there's all this complicated (to me) pretty stitching, and this nice cabling, and it got completely lost in this dark variegated Thing.  So I frogged it, and started last night in the Patons Decor leftover from a scarf I did ages ago (that I hate - it's stockinette and rolls like anything and is dull and sits in a drawer upstairs, likely to be donated to the second-hand shop when I leave).  I have two partial skeins, the Lilac and the Sage Green.  I started this second attempt in the Lilac, which looks nice, but I have no idea if I'll have enough yarn.  Naturally, I couldn't be bothered with a gauge swatch and how would you do that for this pattern, anyway?  So here's hoping, and I'll do the second head band, for Emily, in the green.  Also, I think the yarn is just a wee bit thick for this needle size - it looks fine, but knitting with it is kind of awkward, and also since I only have size 6s in DPNs, the needles are very short.  Maybe for the next one I'll switch up to the 7s I have somewhere.

Huh, just occured to me - if I run out yarn, I could always unwind the scarf upstairs, right?  Hmm, Idea!

Yeah, I was watching Hot Fuzz the other day while recovering from Graduate School Applications.

Oh, and I just can't help saying how very extremely freakin' happy I am about the results of the Presidential election.  So very, very happy.  Things can change, people, they really can!  Yippee!  Okay, I'm done.

[Insert Expletive of Choice] Christmas Gloves

So.  Yesterday I was talking about thumbs, and I finished those last night and was feeling quite happy about having finished the first pair of Christmas Gloves, another present to check off the list.  Yea!

Then I tried them on.  Both, at the same time, which I had not yet done.  And I thought to myself, Huh, the right one feels different.  I look more closely.  This is when I discover that on the first glove I knit, I did an extra cable repeat at the beginning that I FORGOT TO DO ON THE SECOND GLOVE!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAARRRRRGGGHH!!!!

I really hate frogging.  Avoid it like the plague unless I'm within the first inch or two or a project.  I had FINISHED this one.  DONE THE THUMB.  AAARRGGHH!!!

This is what I get for knitting while watching movies.  Actually, I'm not entirely sure when this major brain fart happened.  I realized last night that I had neglected one knitting in public spot for these gloves, because I actually cast on and did the first bit at work on Friday.  Yeah, work.  I don't usually do much at work, so there's loads of discreet goofing off, but this was the first time I'd actually started knitting, so I was nervous.  All the teachers left junior high to go to some meeting (naturally, they forgot to tell me until that morning. they forget to tell me stuff about 50% of the time, though that's just a guess because, um, obviously I don't always know when they forget to tell me things), and since that was when my computer was totally full and I couldn't do anything with it, I left and went to the Board of Education, which is where we always go when there's no school and we still have to sit somewhere and look like there's a reason we're getting paid.  Sorry, run-on sentence.  Anyway, I decided to cast on the second glove since it's small and I was only going to be there for an hour and a half, anyway.  There was hardly anybody there either, not even the big boss, so I was safe.  But maybe not, since I effed up so badly.  It also could have been that night, during scary movie night, when I finished most of the rest of it watching Alien.  

In any case, big boo-boo.  So, I discover this last night while watching Aliens, and start thinking about how to fix it.  In retrospect, the obvious choice would be to unravel the bottom of the longer glove, but instead I ultimately decided to cast on and knit the first cable on one set of needles, then unravel the beginning of the shorter glove and graft the two together.  Sounds simple, right?  Well, relative to redoing the whole thing, anyway.  But it turns out that unraveling ribs from the bottom is way trickier then unraveling from the top.  I don't know what the hell I do to my purl stitches, but it was a total bitch to undo them, and I ended up unraveling a whole extra row I hadn't intended, because I couldn't get the right number of stitches from what I was unraveling.  Then I was going to attempt to knit them together last night, but it was getting late and I knew I'd be a zombie if I stayed up too late, plus I was still watching Aliens on the laptop and I wanted to watch that video of kitchener stitch again before I started, but there was no point stopping the movie when I was ten minutes from the end.  So I put it aside and said "Get away from her, you BITCH!" right along with Ripley (I love that movie), then went to bed.

And tonight... heartbreak.

I had to frog the whole [see title of blog] glove.  It is now in several wound bits of yarn on the arm of my couch.  I could cry.  I'm going to bed.