French Girl Update

Here are the two projects I had trouble with:

On Louisa (lace tunic, page 129), my gauge was too loose. And apparenty I forgot how to count to 9. I scratched trying to do a gauge swatch and just started the sleeve as per the directions. Guess what? The sleeve fits great on the proper needles, so I'm going with the directions as written and adjust as needed. That's the beauty of knitting in the round from the bottom up - you can adjust as you go. At least I hope so!

On Niobe (lace bell-sleeve pullover, page 85), my gauge was too tight. Haven't figured out a solution to that, but now that Louisa seems to be working, I'll figure this one out later.

Yarn for Louisa - Araucania Nature Wool Chunky in color #127 (dark blue-green).

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I Must Not Be French Enough

I recently bought French Girl Knits, which has beautiful beautiful garments, mostly knit in the round, and not terribly complicated looking. Only one problem:

I can't get gauge!

There are two projects I have the yarn for, and I can't get gauge on either of them! One my gauge is too loose and the other it's too tight. Both by a LOT, like two or three needle sizes.

(Will update with which projects when I have the book in front of me.)

Anyone else having this problem? Suggestions?

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A Whole Wack of FOs! (And it's not even Friday!)

We finally got our innertubes working again at the house, and - wow - do I have a lot to show you!

Some sewing:


This is the quilt I received from blogger Crafty Turtle in the BTRS Swap. She did a great job and I love it!


This is the quilt I made for blogger Mommy's Treasures in the BTRS Swap. Great colors - I had fun playing with all the patterns.


Another variation on Irene's Tote. Love this fabric!

Some knitting:


Bubbly Hand Towel based on "Bubbly Curtain" from Mason-Dixon Knitting: The Curious Knitters' Guide.(The first MDK book.)

And some recent knitting I don't have photos of yet! A February Baby Sweater, four Baby Bibs O'Love, and one of those k1p1 stripey scarves everybody's talking about. Looks like I have more photos to take!

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Conversation With A 7-Year-Old Boy

Me: Honey, put away your clean clothes and then start cleaning your room. I need you to look for white socks. There were only two pairs in your laundry and there should have been about six.

7yob: I did find some.

Me: Great. Did you put them in the dirty clothes?

7yob: Well, I only found two.

Me: Ok. Did you put them in the dirty clothes?

7yob: No, I put them on.

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Another Lap Quilt

I signed up for the current Bend-the-Rules Sewing Swap against my better judgement and consumed with guilt. I knew completing the Lap Quilt would be a stretch, plus my son needs a quilt done for his bed. But I had to sign up - they quoted my suggestion!

So I signed up and am ever-so-close, but alas I will be late. I didn't check the specs and thought flannel was an acceptable batting material. Stop laughing. I know it isn't. (Now I do.)

The reason I didn't figure this out sooner is that after I cut the strips for the binding, I saw how much fabric was left and got obsessed with making an auxiliary and completely optional item for my partner. (Beer may have been involved in reaching this conclusion.) Because - of course - she would rather have a semi-random additional object that she didn't ask for and isn't from the Bend-The Rules book than have her quilt back on time when she's been done with hers for weeks.

So tonight, instead of making the top-batting-backing sandwich and the binding as planned, I'm making the binding only. I'll probably be a couple of days late - not too bad considering the wreckage that is my life.

Oh, and my suggestion to use a bit of your own stash in the quilt you're making for your partner? My suggestion that they quoted which was why I signed up after all? I didn't use it.

Tornado Policy

My MIL sent me this very important notice:

NEW TORNADO POLICY for Detroit and nearby areas:
In case of possible tornadoes sweeping through Detroit and nearby areas, we ask that all residents take shelter at Lion's Ford Field.

We are certain that a touchdown will not occur there.

Thank you for your cooperation,
National Weather Bureau

Why I Love the Geekdad Blog

The Geekdad blog is part of Wired.com. Several geeky dads (and a couple geeky moms) contribute several daily posts to the blog. I currently have 120 of them bookmarked on Bloglines. You read that right - One Hundred And Twenty individual posts bookmarked!

The following little gem gets off to a slow start. They could have cut the first 40 seconds, in my opinion. But I was laughing out loud at a minute & thirty:



Dad or mom, if you tend toward geekiness at all (and if you're a knitter, that's likely), you should check out Geekdad.

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.

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