Robynettely

Here are some pictures I took of Selbu to Sahara... back in October, apparently (judging by the leaves on the ground). Selbu to Sahara, pre-blocking Even the inside looks good I absolutely love the steek coverings on the sleeves. I love Norwegian steeks On the wooly board I've worn it at least half a dozen times since I blocked it. It's holding up well, and it matches my brown cords really nicely. Next time, I wouldn't make it out of cotton, though. Sometimes my yarn choices are stupid.

It's probably not the pattern. I blame the yarn (Paton's Kroy may not have been suitable). tiny cable sock It's too big. same sock again, different view I'm going to make it a glove.

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Really, Ed, I wasn't trying to game the test at all! You are The Devil Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition. Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really "Satan" at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild - or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chai

"Your depression, my friend, is the revenge of the oranges." -- Margaret Atwood I tried on my poncho while crocheting it together... Nautilus poncho And decided it wasn't worth it to finish making up. Obviously it's not working out. I have since ripped the entire thing out and started again. Oh, and I did what I should have done when I first noticed a problem--I went online looking for errata. There were some, of course. The length of the final knitted strip should be 128", not 51". I think the 51 refers to after all the short rows are done. I was pretty close this time (not shown... no point, a long thin strip of knitting looks the same as any other.) I also ordered a larger crochet hook, thinking that might help. And you can't just order a crochet hook, you know? So I ordered yarn for another poncho too.

I am currently working on the Nautilus poncho by Norah Gaughan from "Knitting Nature". Does this look like a poncho to you? Poncho Oh good, me either. To make it worse, it's more than twice as long as the schematic, even though I think I'm under gauge. Maybe the crochet stage will make it all work out. Though crochet has never solved all my problems before. And while it's supposed to use four balls of yarn, I have yet to finish my second. I guess I'll have enough yarn left over to make matching opera gloves.

The company that I work for doesn't allow workers to have sound cards in our computers, I assume for one of two possible reasons: If we had sound cards we would spend all our time on YouTube If we had sound cards we would keep our speakers on turned up high and would annoy our neighbours Notwithstanding the fact that there's a TV two cubes over from me and I have had to ask that the volume be shut off on it because they leave it tuned to Detroit PBS or some other irrelevant, asinine program (Detroit traffic comes to mind). But today I came up with an argument for it. I like to listen to my MP3 player while I work. And I surf far less when I have headphones on, because then I can't hear management come up behind me. When my battery is dead, I have to surf because there's nothing else to do until it's done charging. I made another Rachael Ray meal, by the way. I didn't get to eat the leftovers (it was Pasta with sausage and broccoli with Ricotta Surprise from the

So on Saturday I was at the bookstore, and I picked up the new VK and a Rachael Ray 30-minute meals cookbook, "Express Lane Meals" or some such thing. I'm not accustomed to the staff at the bookstore commenting on what I buy -- even though I buy knitting magazines all the time, they never say "Do you knit?" or "Did you knit that sweater you're wearing right now?" But the cashier said to me, "Do you like Rachael Ray?" To which I responded "I've never seen her show, but I keep reading these reviews that say her recipes really work, and I really need some help..." Not that my cooking is bad or anything, I think others in my family might say it's just too infrequent. Big long pause. "I've seen her show," the cashier said finally. "I hear she's sort of annoying on TV, " I said. And the cashier blurted out, "She comes across sort of as if she doesn't know what she's talking about."

So KBTH, where I have probably posted four times in four years, is having a knitalong for Jade Starmore's Beadwork, and I can never resist a knitalong where I own the instructions and the yarn already (no matter how badly KALs have gone for me in the past). So I did this... Beadwork "swatch" (sleeve) It's Frangipani in Crushed Raspberry, a popular shade I'm thinking, because I've seen it used for a couple of other swatches on the KAL page on Yahoo Groups. I figured I'm a "Tight, bitter knitter" so even though the gauge seems to be a challenge, I would be fine, so I went one needle size and started. I'm resizing it sort of my own way. I like narrow sleeves, so I'm doing the child's Large 18 cm sleeve. That will fit my little wrists (people make fun of them at karate, they're so small and breakable looking) just fine. I'll make it longer, modify the body using the picture and my unique tastes, and end up with something... finish

This took me six days. Hippie That would be #23 from VK Spring/Summer 2005. I like summer projects. As I said to Ed yesterday, this was rated level "Experienced". I found it pretty straight-forward. Perhaps I'm beyond patterns now? I had some things I wanted to rant about, but I forget what they were, so I won't bother.

Last week I finished the yellow socks. Sunday I finished the flap cap of the damned, eight days after removing it from time-out. It's adorable. The flaps stick out, but that might be because my hair sticks out. I will use the lessons I learned to make another flap cap again. I might even send it to a magazine (as part of a set, perhaps, with the matching gloves and sweater). So last night I started #23 from Vogue Knitting Spring/Summer 2005, which I renamed Hippie, because my sensei said "Robyn, you're a hippie from way back" while we were at Karate camp, and this struck me as interesting -- is that how people see me? I'm using some Lana Grossa Toccata in a dark blue color. There's a mistake in the first row of the first lace pattern. I think by the time I got to the second repeat, I had realized that the yarn-over had to go inside the SSK, though, in order to make the lace panel work right. This is probably why I make such a lame proof-reader -- my eyes fix t

No pictures today because all my knitting looks pretty much the same. I finished another band of black and another band of white, so Luna just looks longer I finished one of the Regia socks and started the second but socks are pretty boring to look at I didn't work on Serpentine I didn't work on the Jade hat that is in time-out Selbu to Sahara is ten rows longer, more about that... I decided that if S->S is ever going to be finished, I have to set myself a schedule. I counted how many rows are left in the body, and then I decided if I'm going to wear it in October, I have to finish the body in 10 weeks. I have 150 rows on the body... therefore I have to knit 15 rows per week. I doubt this schedule will survive the day, because today is the last day of the week, and I have five rows to go. However, I did finish a book! Robyn's Book Reviews for June In June, I read three books (and it's unlikely that I'll finish any more in the next five days): "The Davinc

I just got back from my weekly run, and I am melting all over my chair. I could feel for about the last ten minutes that I was dehydrated, and that's never good. It's supposed to be 32 degrees today. Luna I named it after Luna Lovegood on the boy's suggestion. My what a poor photo this is. If I knew how to make it thumbnail size perhaps it would look better. However, it does prove that the latest sweater in my obsession with Barbara Walker's Top-down Set-in-sleeve is going to fit just fine. It will also be an awesome and often worn addition to my wardrobe, I'm sure. It needs another row of white, and then will finish off with black ribbing. I have decided to get over my obsession with not posting decent photos of stuff I designed myself, since who am I kidding? I have no real plans or desire to publish this stuff in a magazine. More on my current obsession with people who complain about parents who leave work at quitting time to get their kids... I can understand th

Well, the psychotic relationship between my camera and Baffy here continues. I'm trying to upload pictures, but I may have to do that at work, then mail them to myself to upload them from home (since I'm not supposed to install software on office computers, which is probably a good rule, though inconvenient). I'm going to try once more. Perhaps I won't choose Canon's software this time. Prairie Tank, Sock and Book I Read I have no idea where I was going with this picture, but here it is. The book was good. The boy made me read it. Prairie Blocking And this is Prairie blocked. It's finished now. I've even worn it. I finished Sigyn, too. The socks are not done, however. I have many things to rant about. I'll try to choose just one. Today in Salon's Broadsheet I read an entry that was all about parents who leave work at 6 to go get their kids, and non-parent coworkers who feel put out by it. I have just one thing to say: No one is getting paid to work a

Well, I actually worked on Sigyn yesterday. I did about 10 rows of the sleeve, and made the same mistake I do every time I do the inside curve section of the pattern. Every time, there's a spot where I need to move one side of the curve's stitches over by two, and the other side's stitches over by one, and every time I do two on both sides, and notice when I need to move them back and it's not symmetrical. So I have to rip out five stitches down eight rows to fix it four times, if that makes sense. I did that. I went to bed. In the meantime, I finished the Prairie Tunic from IK Summer 06. Indeed, there was an error in the pattern, as I learned from fathomharvill.typepad.com/fathom/. The person who posted about the error there decreased on the middle every second row and on the outside every row. I made armhole decreases instead. It worked. I started the socks with the Opal yarn. I started a top-down set-in-sleeve pullover with the black/cream Morea yarn I bought from E

Yesterday I went to the Downtown Knit Collective's Knitter's Frolic. I bought: 5 balls of Briggs and Little 1 ply in color Jade 1 ball of Opal in a yellow-and-blue mix which calls itself Magic but as I'm not really a sock afficionado, I don't know what it means Brittany size 2 DPNs Addi Turbo 36" size 4 circular "Heirloom Knitting" by Sharon Miller "Inspired Cable Knits" by Fiona Ellis Parking was hellish and looked hopeless, so after driving around for maybe five minutes I gave up, went home and rode my bike down even though it was about 7 degrees Celcius and raining. Besides the parking advantage of a bicycle, it also kept me from buying more than I could carry. It was interesting. Venders I was surprised not to see there included Fiddlesticks Knitting (though her patterns were somewhat ubiquitous) and She Ewe Knits. I saw Robin Melanson at the Needle Arts Bookshop booth.

I didn't finish Sigyn. I didn't finish the pirate socks. The Jade hat is still in time-out. I didn't even work on Sahara to Selbu (or the other way around), though I did think about whether I should try to do something about the length error I made on the sleeve. There's no way I'm going to reknit the whole sleeve for a half-inch error just above the cuff. Maybe I could snip it and remove the cuff, then rework it down, removing the affronting four rows. I think I will do the body the way it's written, then attach the sleeve, and make my decision at that point. It's just that the sweater's dimensions are already on the large side. I'm doing the smaller of two sizes, and it's supposed to come out 24 inches long. I have often shortened sweaters designed for that length to be closer to 20 inches, because I'm only 5'3". It's hard to tell from the "artistic" (Ed referred to it as Allanah Myles-like, but I bet the Norse photog

I finished the Victoria tank by Veronik Avery from IK Summer '04. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. It fits properly even though I didn't use the suggested yarn, didn't do a swatch, and was having a panic near the end that it was going to come out too big. Mine is about an inch more around than the schematic suggests, and I think it looks fine on me. Victoria tank finished And with that done, I decided that it was time to finish the sleeve of Selbu to Sahara (or the other way around). Sleeve Sahara to Selbu And I started the body. This was mostly so I could have a project to carry around last weekend. With the Jade hat in time-out still, I needed something portable. Start of Body I'm making the small/medium, and I noticed as I started the alternating color stripes on the body that I made a mistake on the sleeves. I did medium/large length, but small/medium width. So I'm replicating the error on the body. You can't tell in the picture (because I took it

Well, I finished the Jade gloves, but the hat wasn't going so well after four starts so I've given it a time out. I won't be wearing a hat for about eight months, anyway. But I'll be able to wear this soon... Victoria Tank Yep, it's the Victoria Tank by Veronik Avery from IK Summer 2004. I'm using Jaeger Siena in Marshmallow. I just finished the first ball of five, just finished the seventh pattern repeat. I'm not sure if it's the yarn I love, or the pattern, or just the fact that it's not that frigging Jade hat. Or Sigyn. Or Selbu to Sahara. Maybe it's that I bought the perfect pale pink tank top to wear under it last week.

I'm at work so I'll be brief. In two months, I didn't post at all. However, I finished Jade and Manhattan. I like them both. I wear them a lot. They both fit pretty well. My concerns about Manhattan coming out really large did not happen. The cast-on edges stopped rolling after I blocked it. Manhattan and Jade  Jade's armholes are too large, but I know what I did wrong, so I'm itching to start another top-down set-in-sleeve sweater so I can try it out. Very wearable. I've started gloves to fraternally match it, and then I'm going to do a hat. And then I'll probably send it all to IK. Okay, I have to say what the problem was. You know how when you knit the front and back of a sweater, the armhole goes up to the top of your shoulder? Well, when I calculated the armhole, I forgot that, and I used the number that should have been the height of the armhole as the depth of the sleeve cap. So my sleeve cap is 2.5 inches taller than it should be, and the armhole

I got a ball-winder and swift for Christmas, and I just made this. My first ball That's a lot easier than the ones I made with my nostepinde. Oh, and the yarn was the Christmas present I bought myself (You know the average person buys themselves a gift, and its average cost is $87) -- eight skeins each of Rowan 4-ply in Holly and Gingerbread. The ball is Gingerbread. My total was $78 or so. I bought it at Webs because by the time I got back from a lunch the day it went on sale at Elann, there was only one shade left, and not mine. For Christmas I also got Scarf Style from my sister (because I asked for it because so many people raved about it, though I had never seen it) and I gifted myself with "Mary Thomas's book of Knitting Patterns" while we were at Borders on the 29th. While I was there, I looked at lots of knitting books, because the stores in the US seem to have so many more books than Chapters does in Toronto. (I will save my rant on that topic for some other