The boys spent the afternoon carving Snolloween pumpkins and singing Christmas carols with their father.
Appropriate given the 14 inches of snow out there.
Month: October 2011
SnowtoberFest 2011
So we are having a bit of a snow event here today. It’s been snowing steadily since about noon and we have about 8 inches on the ground as of this writing. It’s a wild and crazy early season nor’easter!
They are saying we’ll get about 15 inches of snow by tomorrow morning, which is pretty fucking wild, considering it’s only October and all the leaves aren’t even off the trees yet. I heard on Twitter that 2 trees are down on my street, making the street totally impassable.
My plan today was to carve jack o’lanterns with the boys, but it seems so out of place on a day where we are holed up inside hoping the power stays on and the snow just keeps piling up outside. Instead I am knitting:
Catkin is coming along. My needle is too short to spread it out for you, so you’ll just have to trust me, it’s gorgeous!
And, I started a pair of felted clogs:
I am trying to finish these up as quickly as possible because it is freakin’ freezing in here, Mr. Bigglesworth.
Toemaggeddon 2011, briefly.
Last week, after waffling back and forth for a while, I finally decided I would to go to Rhinebeck on Sunday after all. I had already been planning on a Saturday trip to Ikea, so it would’ve worked out just fine. Saturday, I headed up to Ikea, popping into the cafe/grocery to get something to eat. While waiting on-line, the man in front of me caused one of his large and heavy boxes to fall off of his trolly and onto my toe.
It felt as if my toe had been hit with a large hammer, and couldn’t tell if it was broken or not. Somehow I managed not to curse in front of the long line of people waiting to buy their hot dogs and frozen yogurts. Luckily, I was there with my sis, who was able to help me collect E from the children’s play area and drive me to the ER (and then home when we were done).
It turns out that my toe wasn’t broken, but it did ultimately keep me from going to Rhinebeck the next day. That was last week and now my toe looks like this:
This week I have a cold, which I hear is going around. My head feels like it is packed with wool, which, I suppose is apropos for a fiber enthusiast. Still. It suuuuucks.
And to the spammer who included a joke with your spam link I say, well-played, sir. Well played. I totally lol’d.
Frogged
Remember this?
Yeah, I frogged that. I just had a hard time accepting the way the colors wanted to line up across a large number of stitches. So I frogged the crap out of that sock and cast on a baktus. Naturally, that was fine until I’d worked about an inch and then blech. So then I just wanted to see how many stitches I could get out of each color. It was something crazy tiny like 10 or 15 stitches per color. AAARGH. I am never ever going to make a long ass 15 stitch wide sock yarn scarf. And you know what I realized? This is just one of those colorways that looked gorgeous in the skein but that I hate knitted up. Once I got my head around that, I was able to just let it go. I balled it up and handed it to my friend Weaver at the park today. I’m sure that whatever she ends up making with it will be so fabulous that I’ll be pissed at myself for giving it to her, but at this point… Well, at this point it was all I could do not the throw the damn thing at her head.
So Many Plans
Yesterday I cleaned the house. Really cleaned it, for the first time in a good long while, thanks to that dreaded fatigue I’ve been struggling with. I put stuff away, I pulled out appliances and wiped the counters behind them. The only thing I didn’t do, even though it’s long overdue, was clean out the fridge and wash it. I spent most of the afternoon and early evening on it, so by the time it was bedtime, I was pretty pumped, and bubbling with plans for today. As I lay awake, trying to fall asleep, I made a list of all the stuff I would do today:
Finish Laundry
Clean Bathrooms & Bedroom
Warp Loom
Wind off a bunch of yarn
Sew pants for E
Sew some drawstring bags
Clean off my desk
Do some NaNoWriMo prep work
I’m pretty sure at this point that my list was over-ambitious. It took me a really long time to fall asleep last night, and I didn’t sleep well. It was one of those nights where I was aware of trying to sleep (or being asleep) for most of the night. I was too excited about doing moar stuff!!! To top it off, I got up early. Blargh. I did do most of the laundry, which helped a bit with the mess in the bedroom, and I managed to tidy up the bathrooms too. I spent the rest of today trying, rather unsuccessfully, to nap. Everything else was just icing, but dammit, I like icing.
Ah well. How about some knitting then?
[ravelry]
I love this colorway from the Yarn Pirate, but when I got it up to the right number of stitches for my toe, it became kind of muddied. See how pretty it is right in the first 3/4″ of the toe? I wanted my whole sock to look like that. Hence the slip stitch pattern. It helps, but not as much as I would’ve liked.
[ravelry]
Catkin is coming along too, but since it requires all of the concentration forever, I haven’t really worked on it in a couple of days. Furthermore, it looks all bunched up and lumpy there because, clearly, my needle is too short. You’ll have to wait for the finished product to see it in all of its orange and turquoise glory. Yes, I did just say orange and turquoise glory. IT WILL BE GLORIOUS I TELL YOU!
Random Monday
1. I’m such a big fat liar. I never stopped by here this weekend to post pictures of my knitting. Mostly it’s because this weekend was kind of weird and partly because I haven’t taken any pictures of knitting in a good long while.
2. I have knitted the first section of my Catkin, the section with the garter stitch stripes, and have moved on to the textured section which is a single color. It’s extremely slow going because I have to pay attention to the chart and literally cannot do anything else. I can’t watch TV or even attempt to carry on a conversation. Must. Focus. On the. Chart. Ugh.
3. I still have not blocked my sister’s shawl. 2 weekends ago, she came over and we were going to do it together, but we pretty much forgot all about it. And, as I said, this weekend was kind of weird so it still isn’t done.
4. I want to do it on the weekend so she can help me with it, because that thing is enormous.
5. I suddenly realized that I may not have enough pins for blocking it. Crap.
6. The NY S&W festival is this coming weekend. I have to be honest, my enthusiasm for going this year is waning. There isn’t really anything I want (or have to) buy there, and I can’t eat the food, so there is a whole other level of schlep involved which makes the idea of going much less appealing. Hrm.
7. I’m pretty sure that even if I do decide to go, I won’t be wearing a finished Catkin as I’d originally planned. The damn thing just requires too much concentration.
8. Here is a picture of Doozer in a box.
Drive By Link
Hey, I was going to come and do an update post, but since I don’t really have anything to update y’all about, I’m just going to leave this here instead.
Have a fantastic weekend, everyone! I might stop by with some knitting photos on Sunday.
Knitting Interrupted 