Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Ten Things: rainy day knitting

My knitting brain is bouncing all over the place so I've decided to give you a mashup of crafty thoughts chez Hugs:

1. I browsed through some fall fashion pictures yesterday and I thought my head would explode from all the design ideas unfolding in there.  I lost count of all the Lookit This! notes I sent to Trish.  One fashion picture we agreed was Just Silly: a dark-coloured cardi with a smaller, brighter, but otherwise identical cardi shape sewn over top, by way of making the model appear even tinier.

2. Trish also popped by with some knitting tool news the details of which I'm not going to share but maybe she will, in the comments.  Suffice it to say my face is a bit green today and not from nausea.

3. I've been wearing the little Turkish Bed Slippers I knit for mum.  They don't make me feel better, but my feet are warm, so there's that.


4. Because there is a handknit hat (alpaca with shiny stuff) involved, I watched a video of Amanda Seyfried appearing on Ellen:


in which Amanda says she knits on her elliptical trainer.  Is this possible??? Will my gym kick me out if I try it??? Because if I go to Italy without getting my super-industrial-grade walking legs back in gear, I am going to have to pre-book chiropractors or massage therapists in every city I visit.  Yet I have no wish to give up knitting time.  You can see my dilemma.

5. I am completely, utterly, and totally besotted with the orange mohair socks I started striping the other day.  I want them to be done so I can wear them but who am I kidding? I may never graft the toes shut.

6. Why am I not grafting any of these toes shut?  Seriously, I am starting to think there must be some deep emotional meaning to my not finishing all those almost-finished objects.  Like, I'm not ready to let go of anything right now.  Or maybe I am just obsessed with working my way through the pile of mohair stuff I bought in May as quickly as possible, without taking time to run in ends, so as to conquer something. 

7. Though I am definitely obsessed with working my way through the mohair sock yarn, I have also realized I will need not too hot, quick-dry socks for springtime in Italy and that probably means bamboo.  I am pretty sure I have no bamboo sock yarn.  Maybe this means I can go shopping even though I didn't work through all my mohair stash, because hello, it takes me a month to finish finer-weight socks and I should probably have more than three pairs in rotation.

8. Bob is coming over tomorrow so I finished his socks last night.  HA.  Yeah, Trish may have a cool new knitting tool, but she's also got a whole sock left to knit in the very same very plain yarn as the Bobsocks.  Actually I shouldn't gloat because if he tries them on and they're still the wrong length I will have to rip back two sets of toes to fix them.  Won't have to unpick any grafting though, heh.  (are you surprised?)

9. I am going to a wedding this weekend for which I was partially prepared several months ago, then made another bit of progress on about three weeks ago, and for which I am now entirely stalled.  I need to decide on the other part of a partial present.  Wouldn't it be nice if I had a loom I knew how to use so I could make a very special table runner or something?  I think I have to go non-crafty this time around.  Though a trio of mittens with the middle mitten set up for hand-holding would be awfully cute.

10.  There's one more course (realistically, there is always one more course, but this is the one right now) I was supposed to have done for the new job and I've been putting it off because I just wanted so badly to sit and knit for a few more hours.  I started today and guess what?  Turns out it requires me to sit in a comfy chair near the computer, knitting and listening and reading and occasionally clicking to the next screen.  I can so be done this thing by the end of Thursday.  But I'm not going to hold up the knitting till then because YAY, it's been my orange stripey socks.

Okay: that's me, and now I will bounce off and get on to the next thing.  I hope you are all having a fabulous day even if (or do I mean because?) you, like me, are looking out at a whole mess of rain.  Love love love rainy days for knitting!

2 comments:

Trish said...

LOL! That's okay, Mary - it's not a deep dark secret. I'm LOVING the idea of my knitting machine. Still have to find a way to make room for it, though, and then learn how to use it...
And I've only got 2/3 (well, maybe 1/4) of the second sock left. ARGHH! Nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, says love like these plain brown socks.

Mary Keenan said...

I am totally telling Bob that about the plain brown socks. I had a terrible feeling that they might be as ordinary to wear as they were to knit *after all that work*!!