my waterloo

Happy 4th of July everyone! Ours has been pretty slow and relaxed, which is just the way I like it, especially since it fell in the middle of the week this year, you know? We slept in, went to brunch, and then took a nap. I'm reading His Dark Materials, and I'm in the middle of the third book, so I read while Spanky slept. Then we got up, had ice cream, and watched the fireworks on TV. Somewhere in there, I also blocked the sweater.

It has been so long since I've been able to post anything! At first I just put it off because Spanky came back from Florida (YAY!!!) and lots of other things happened, which I'll go into below, but mostly, it's been because I've been blocked. I haven't been able to knit anything, or write anything, or plan anything, all because of one project--the lace leaf pullover.

A while ago I mentioned that I'd sewn it together twisted and had to pull it apart and do the grafting again. Well, I did that. 107 stitches, unraveled, put back on needles, and grafted together again. Except that I dropped a stitch, and didn't figure out what I was doing wrong with the grafting until half way through. So it looked worse than it did the first time and I had to pull it all out and do it AGAIN. Oh. My. God. THREE TIMES I did the grafting. three times. And it still isn't perfect. There are parts that of the grafting are too tight, and parts that are too loose, but at least I can wear it now.

You can kind of see it on the right in the sweater. That's the tight bit. I don't care though--I can wear it this way, and as far as I'm concerned it's done! (plus if I had to do it again, I think I would probably just burn the whole thing and pretend it never happened!) It is happily blocking on my kitchen counter, and I'm ready to move on. My only other project has been a log cabin that I started with some of the vintage acrylic in my stash. One of the main perks of going through my stash and cataloging it for Ravelry is that I was able to sort through all the colors that I had and organize them into batches. I have two batches that are going to become log cabin blankets that I'm going to donate to our local animal shelter. One is in browns, the other in purples...



I've been taking the first one to my knitting group and working on it at home, in lieu of a more challenging project, since I couldn't start anything until I finished that $)%*)#& sweater. Here's how it looks so far:

It isn't beautiful, but it will be nice and squishy on the bottom of a dog's lonely cage, and that's what I'm after. My cat seems to like it so far...

That's all I've been working on. I did make an unfortunate trip to Patricia's Yarns in Hoboken, which resulted in a small haul:


I was so eager to get that Knitscene that I asked Spanky to go with me on the light rail last Friday up to Hoboken just so I could get it.

The Fixation and the Cat Bordhi book were just extras. They gave me a deal on the sock yarn--the blue one was free, since they were all leftovers. I'm going to make my mom some socks at some point. She lives in FL, so I don't think wool socks will be very practical. I've never used Cascade Fixation, but I understand it is kind of stretchy. Should be fun...

Anyway, I guess I should start at the beginning:


1. Spanky came back about two weeks ago, and the day after she got back, we went to the True Colors show. This is the only pic, because she told me not to bring my camera. WHY did I listen??? ARGH.
Anyway, this had to be one of the BEST concerts I have EVER SEEN. Erasure was amazing. The Gossip was AMAZING. They just keep getting better and better. Everyone else was really great too, but I was there to see Erasure (and Cyndi Lauper, who played the Goonies song, to my delight). Perhaps I will also buy tickets to see them in Brooklyn later this summer...

2. Pride was the weekend after Spanky got home. I didn't take any pictures of that either, because we only stayed about 20 min. The parade gets harder and harder to watch, and this year, they didn't even have the street fair because of what basically amounts to a turf war. Lame. But after the dyke march, we did this:


Spanky's idea, not mine. She's much cooler than I am. But Team Dresch--they were great! The crowd loved them, as you can see. There were a bunch of other bands too. I haven't been to a show like that in a while, but it was fun.

3. Finally, we are also getting a new bed soon, which means we're sleeping on the floor right now.


This pic is actually of our old mattress. We have the new mattress now (queen rather than full size) and we're sleeping on that, and the old one is in our living room, waiting to go out with the trash.

So, all in all, it's been a very full two weeks. Now that the sweater is done, my list going forward looks like this:

1. finish/fix sock
2. continue log cabins
3. spanky's sweater
4. swatches for master knitter program
5. start another pair of socks
6. baby present for Debbie

I'm back, baby!