What Halloween Looked Like to Me

After work I foolishly decided to go down to the Village to see the costumes. Too many people, and too many cops. I barely made it back to the 14th street Path station. Some amazing costumes here on Halloween. Too bad I didn't catch any of them. Damn job...

OMG DONE!!!

I finished the baby sweater for my friend Amy's baby shower, which is Saturday coming. FINALLY. It feels like I've been working on this forever. It's beautiful. I really need to start making something for myself so that I stop coveting the stuff I make for babies.



The yarn: Berocco Touche. At $4 a skein at my LYS, the sweater was about $20! I have one cream skein left. Size 5 needles for the green, and 6 for the body. Buttons from Grandma's button box. There are two on the inside as well.



I learned how to do a picot cast-on and bind-off for this. I must say, this is never going to be my favorite thing to do, but it sure is pretty!



Do you think it is ok for a boy? Amy quaintly but annoyingly refused to find out the sex of the baby, leaving lots up to chance. I think I'm going to try to churn out a striped hat to match the sweater to cut down on the girly.

I love how shiny and soft this sweater is. I'm kind of nervous about giving it to her at the baby shower though. I don't know if she will actually appreciate how hard it was for me to do. The seams alone stressed me out for a whole week!

a great day

My knitting group was going to road trip it up to Rhinebeck last weekend for the festival. There were three of us, and one of the three was meeting someone else up there. Then Beth's grandma died and she had to bail to go to the funeral. Because we are such a loosely knit (ha ha) group, the lines of communication just disintegrated, and the ball was totally and utterly dropped.

That's when my baby stepped forward and selflessly decided to save the day. She's working on a film right now, and they have a production car that someone has to take care of on the weekends, for parking reasons. She arranged to get the car, and I was able to make it to the festival on Sunday.



It was just she and i driving, and with Mapquest directions and the directions from the festival website, we were able to make it with a minimum of arguing. The leaves were amazing. My blurry pics don't do them justice at all. The air was crisp and cool, and it was perfect sweater weather.



I was happy just to be spending the day with her. We got up there around noon or so, and just had fun looking at everything. The sheep were amazing! I didn't realize they would have them all right there with the wool and everything. I really enjoyed the explanatory displays about the different types and their wool properties, but as Spanky isn't a wool person, I didn't want to try her patience by reading every one. I figure this first experience was like a test run, to see if it was really all it was cracked up to be.



I can't say whether it was or not. I was so overwhelmed by the number of booths and the types of yarn, and the people SPINNING in the booths that it was really all just a blur, and I started getting that panicky feeling that I should buy something! anything! and I'm not realy good with that, especially when i don't have a specific project in mind.



I ended up buying a bunch of plain black baby alpaca yarn. It was so soft, and Spanky wants a plain black hat. I also got some creamy white and plain pine green wool of some sort. I don't know what I'm going to do with that yet, but I might use it to practice a fair isle design or something. I didn't buy anything fun or colorful, which I kind of regret.



Next year, I'm going to do more planning, and really map out what I want to see. Perhaps we can even stay overnight, or I can actually go with other knitters, so as to not subject my honey to hours and hours of yarn talk. As it was, we only stayed for a couple of hours. Enough time to do one pass through all the booths, and then she wanted to buy a bottle of wine for her boss, and I wanted an apple-y dessert. All in all it was a wonderful day, and we got home in time for dinner and laundry.

Gotta love it. It was one of the most romantic, thoughtful things that anyone's ever done for me. I'm such a lucky girl.

so...

There has been knitting! I had to go on a business trip the last part of last week, so there wasn't any blogging. I hate those trips, because they take a lot of concentration in planning and executing. I was in St. Louis, but didn't get to any of the fine, fine yarn stores I know are there. There were a few things I had to blog about, though, including:

1. When work and knitting inform one another: I work in publishing. Last week, in a meeting with our production manager, he was explaining (to an assistant) how they figure out how long a book is going to be--by figuring out how many characters will fit on a page--the number of characters on a line, multiplied by the number of lines on a page. Sound familiar? I think the process of getting gauge has helped me understand the 'cast off' of a book in a completely different way. Ding Ding!

2. There was some distraction knitting, as I suddenly had a hankering to dress up:



Took me about a week, using some vintage blue acrylic that I had laying around from a very unfortunate ebay experience when I was first knitting. I think I'm going to wear it to work.

3. Anyway, I'm on to the next baby sweater--one of those Louisa Harding wrap sweaters. I've done the back and most of one front side, but no pics yet.

4. Also brought sock yarn for the plane. I'm trying to follow the Yarn Harlot's sock formula in Knitting Rules, but the heel looks funny to me so far. We'll see. I have to take pictures later. I just wanted to post something short right now, so I don't feel like such a slacker.

Back to work.

Behold, my masterpiece!

This is seriously the best put together thing I've ever knit, except maybe the baby cargo pants. I am absolutely in love with this pinafore, and if it fit me, i'd totally wear it to work.

HOT.

Pattern: duh... Anouk!

Yarn: I used the Cascade Pima Tencel yarn called for in the pattern, mostly because I found it for a decent price here at One Fine Yarns, and I didn't have any better ideas. I'm so glad I did use it! It is INCREDIBLY soft and bright, and I really enjoyed working with it. The shop was out of the ruby red color for the flowers so I subbed yellow, and I think it turned out a lot brighter than it would have with the red. I'm happy with it because it just looks happy. The other thing I want to note about One Fine Yarns is that I ordered three balls of the orange, but the proprietor could only find two and what looked to be almost a full skein, but didn't have a ball band, so she emailed me and asked me if I'd rather wait for a full skein or else she would send me the third, unwrapped one for free. I took the free ball, of course, cause I figured that if I ran out of orange, I could just sub another color, but I have almost a full skein left! I only used two skeins (and a bit) of orange. I just thought that was really nice of her to even offer. I'll certainly use her again. She sent candy too.

Notes on the pattern: I wish it said somewhere on there that this pattern was NOT a dress, but instead a pinafore. I know I could just seam up the sides. In fact, until tonight, when I just got tired of seaming little bits together, I thought that was exactly what I was going to do. I worried though about making the opening too small, and seaming it up wrong, and otherwise screwing it up, so I decided to leave well enough alone. But I probably wouldn't have made it if I'd known it wasn't a skirt. I was half way through before it dawned on me to check the internet for other peoples' finished Anouks. And in most of the pics, they are flat, just like mine. There are only a couple of shots of the damn thing actually on a kid, so it's really hard to tell, just like in the picture on Knitty. I did enjoy the intarsia though.



Hot damn, that looks good! I'm sure it isn't perfect and if an experienced knitter who'd been doing color work for a long time took a look at it, I'm sure I would get very critical feedback (constructive, of course), but it looks way better than I ever hoped.

Anyway, I gave it a spritzing, and it's blocking now, mainly to even out the neckline and side bands. All that is left is to find five matching buttons, sew them on and wrap that sucker up.

Next up, I'm knitting a sweater from my new Louisa Harding book. I just bought yarn for it today, in about five minutes at my LYS (near work) right before they closed. I'm not using the organic cottons that are called for in the book, mainly because the store doesn't carry them and I only had about five min to make a decision. Tomorrow or so, I'll show you what I picked instead, once I get a chance to take a picture of it. I was so busy tonight that it is 11pm, Spanky is home, and I want to get some time with her before she has to get up a 4am again for work. Yes, kids, this is the glamorous life of film production. I wouldn't wish it on anyone (unless it was the actor's job... that's a CAKE WALK 75% of the time).

I'll leave you with a shot from our weekend car trip. It was a beautiful day on Sunday, and we drove up past Hoboken just to see it mainly. You're looking at Manhattan and the Empire State Building (almost directly in the center) from Hamilton Park (I think that was the name of it) in Weehawken, NJ.