Sunday, July 27, 2008

New Project OTN

I'm not sure what I want to do for my next pair of socks, and my Tomato is in danger of becoming a UFO, but I felt like doing something quick and easy.

Usually this means a dishcloth, but I didn't feel like a dishcloth. (Some days you feel like a dishcloth, some days you don't.)

So I cast on for a kitchen towel following some of the MDK Bubbly Curtain pattern from page 47. Interesting thing about this pattern is that they say it is a 18-stitch repeat, yet the chart only shows 17. This messed me up until I decided it was a "design feature" and working for me. heh.

The cast on is 60 stitches, work 4 in garter stitch, then follow the Bubbly Curtain chart starting at the red line (Row 71), leave three st at each edge in garter stitch for stability and do three repeats each row. I'm on row 103 and so far so good.

Basic Sugar 'n' Cream on size 8 needles is giving me about 4 spi.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

A Quick Knitting Update

Just a quick update on some projects, without pics:

Rainbow Socks for Mr. L are done! They will go in the wash before they go in his drawer because that Paton's Kroy is scratchy!!

Katrina's Scarf got frogged. Kinda accidentally. But not really. See, the project slipped off of its giant needles while in my knitting bag, so I decided to just finish the job. Still looking for a good pattern for the Lion brand Incredible ribbon yarn - maybe a Mason-Dixon scribble scarf? One good thing about this yarn - with a little care, it wound back up quite nicely without tangling and creasing.

A Reader's Meme

Picked this up from another blog I read and thought it might be fun.

Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

I'm going to add one more note - * those you want to read but haven't. Feel free to grab this and mark your own.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife 2x
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels*
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything*
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers

Sunday, July 13, 2008

FOs! Sunday, July 13, 2008

Why, hello there. Have you been waiting long? I have some things to show you...

traxsox3

The Tracks socks. Also blogged about here and here. These are for me (neener neener). Finished 6/21/08.

Finally finished Baby J's Quilt. This should not take anyone else on the planet as long as it took me. Let's blame it on... certain people... bailing on their responsibilities, and leave it at that. Pattern is "Easy Lap Quilt" from Bend The Rules Sewing by Amy Karol. This is the second one I made and it was just as enjoyable as the first.

quiltbabyj

Next to the quilt is a Soft Turtle Buddy from the same book. He may be a "big sister gift." If you are making this turtle for the first time, you might want to make it larger than recommended, and pay close attention to the directions. Don't cut out all your pieces until you have read the directions thoroughly! I will make him again (but bigger); he is so cute.

turtle

He is going to be hard to part with. :(

I made some bags this weekend.

These are all variations on Irene's Classic Tote, from the Sew, Mama, Sew blog..

tote1front

First one, made according to Irene's original pattern. Get the details at Make A Bag. Easy pattern, try it! I'm dying for a skirt in this fabric!

The next day, I made two more of these bags. These are so quick and easy of heavier fabric with no lining; great for making bunches of them. This may be my go-to pattern for shopping totes.

apple bag1

This is bit smaller than the original pattern and may be a teacher gift. We'll have FIVE teachers next school year, and that's just classroom teachers. Two each for the older kids and one for Mr. L.

fish bag

Speaking of Mr. L, he needed a bookbag for his meeting books. This one has dividers in the front pocket to hold four colored pencils. (Click for big.) It's even smaller than the first two totes, and maybe just a little bit smaller than I intended. Oops!

On The Needles

Sorry, no photo. One sock pair in progress - Mr. L wants rainbow socks, so that's what he's getting. The yarn is Paton's Kroy in Paint Box - this yarn is way scratchier than Knit Picks Essential (my go-to sock yarn). Will it soften after washing? Stay tuned!

I have a sewing bug at the moment - gotta make more totes!

Be Still, My Beating Heart

Click here to see what is making my heart beat a bit faster this evening. Anyone have an extra $25,000 laying around?