Thursday, April 29, 2010

A Belated Birthday Gift

All week, I kept telling myself I needed to blog. Yesterday afternoon, I started planning a blog post in my head. I was hoping to type it up last night after Knit Night. But then one of my friends called to tell me happy belated birthday and we talked for 2 hours so all my words were gone and I didn't feel like posting. So I told myself that I would do it this afternoon. Little did I know that I would have a lot more to talk about today.

UNMC (University of Nebraska Medical Center) called me this morning while I was sitting at work. They had a spot open in their PT class! I had kind of given up that they would ever call and I had accepted that I would end up moving to St. Louis in August to go to WASHU. Now I don't have to move, I don't have to quit my job, I don't have to pay $88,000!!!! Well I am still going to move, but in with one of my friends so we can be crazy knitting cat ladies! It's going to be awesome. We're going to look at places this weekend and try to move in by the 1st of June.

Last week, Timm and I went to the Omaha Zoo half for my birthday, half because we wanted to go to the zoo at some point. The zoo is pretty giant and awesome! I feel it is best explained in pictures.

Timm's Twin


Hungry Shark


Timm and Me on Safari
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We went and saw Date Night and ate some yummy food and generally had a good time.

I worked the rest of the week and did a little knitting and quilting on my down time. I managed to get my quilt all into one piece and finish my Sylvi. Then my birthday was Monday, so I went to Iowa to hang out. Timm and I and his friend, Charles, all went to Sioux Falls, SD (3 states in the same day!) and went to Joey's Seafood Restaurant. I got crab legs and they were delicious. Then I had a wonderful cheesecake dessert thing that was like a cross between cheesecake and fried ice cream, all it needed was a few baked apple slices and it would have been heaven on a plate.

On Tuesday, Timm and I wandered around town and looked at all the good fishing spots. I got pictures of Sylvi in action and Timm being a dork.
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Since I've been home I added the next border to my quilt. I'm really happy with how its turning out. This border really helped to balance it out because it was starting to have a lot of pastels.

Close-up of a corner


It will probably be a while before the it shows any progress the next border is all pieced and I'm not exactly motivated to work on it. I need to alter my bridesmaid's dress before I lose all my time.

There's not much on the knitting front, I'm in a lull between major projects and hoping to start a new one soon.

Friday, April 9, 2010

Wow

Apparently I fail at blogging when I work full-time :-(. I need to work on blogging weekly, instead of monthly.

I've been to knit night at whole foods several times since my last post and its awesome! I don't know very many people in Omaha (basically just my co-workers) so its nice to have contact with other people once a week. I've enjoyed seeing other people's projects and share mine. They even semi-forced me to sew together my Sylvi and this week they rang the cowbell so I could show it off (even though I insisted that I still had 3 more flowers to knit and sew down). Also this week at Knit Night one of the girls had gone crazy at the bead store because there was a sale and gave away some stitch markers (they are awesome and I have broke several of the rubber ones from my knit kit in the past few weeks so I needed some new ones). And I taught a woman how to do cables (I know that's not a major accomplishment) BUT the woman did not speak English! She had her son there to translate, but of course he doesn't understand anything about knitting, so mostly I spoke to the woman through our mutual language of knitting and hoped she understood how to apply what I taught her to more than just her swatch.

Other than Sylvi, everything I've been knitting lately I've had issues with and there's been a lot of frogging and reknitting going on around here. I thought I had finished my skew socks and then I saw this.

1. On the right sock, I'd missed a row in the pattern that added 20 stitches back in before the ribbing.
2. On the left sock, I either wrote done my modifications wrong or can't count because it ended up shorter than the right one.
3. The yarn is different dye lots!!!
I can't change #3 but I could change 1 & 2 and then I realized they were really tight on my feet and hard to get on and off, so I decided starting over might be a better plan.
This time they are working a lot better. (I knit one sock in 2.5 days of training for work - Thank you Vince for understanding I can knit, listen and learn all at the same time!) The second sock is to the heel and should have some progress tonight (Friday night is when I get knitting time at work).

The other project I'm working on is a Little Blue Dress based on this pattern, for Timm's soon to be niece. Timm's brother and sister-in-law are not big pink fans, but I found this yarn at Mangelsen's and thought it was perfect.
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The pattern calls for "worsted wool," which I interpreted as worsted weight but then could not get gauge so I looked again and it's actually supposed to be fingering weight yarn so I had a really stiff start to a baby dress. So rip, rip, rip and do a bunch of math and reknit. I'm much happier with it this time and am almost done and almost out of yarn, so I'm headed to Mangelsen's to buy a second skein to be able to finish it, then she can have baby booties to match too!

As I mentioned earlier, I took Sylvi to Knit Night to be forced to seam it and have started working on the flowers (easy to knit, a pain to sew down). I also need to find the perfect buttons for it, but here's a sneak peak.

The yarn for the flowers although it looks similar to the baby dress yarn, was dyed with kool-aid in my dorm room a year ago, when I first started working on Sylvi and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

On the sewing front, my block-a-month quilt has been put on the back burner. The only progress I've made on it was finding a fabric for backing it. I don't have any pictures, but maybe I'll get one before my next post. I got distracted by Easter and thinking about a dress that I started working on over a year ago that was put on the back burner when I had an 1870s dress and undergarments to focus on for class. I decided it would make an excellent Easter dress and got it out to work on. I'm delighted with how it turned out - it's polka-dotted satin and has pockets, so I don't know how I could not love it. The only picture I have isn't very good, so I'll have to wait and see if I can get a better one. Now I'm trying to get motivated to go back to my quilt but i haven't been in a sewing mood lately.

If you have read this far, thank you! My only other exciting news is that I was attacked by one of my guys at work last night. I'm fine, I had a red mark on my forearm that faded and might turn into a bruise and some of my hair was pulled out, but my hair is so thick you can't tell. I guess being the one staff that has taken more than a 6 week class of Sign Language is a double edged sword. My deaf guy finally has someone who understands him, but it also means I can tell him things that other staff can't (like we need to share the TV with your housemates). The staff from the other parts of our 4-plex, all told me they hoped this didn't make me leave the field, I assured them it wouldn't. The guy who attacked me is usually a teddy bear and this morning told me he was sorry over and over again. He gave me a hug and was just so sad when I told him that he hurt me.

Hopefully I'll actually post again soon, until then Happy Knitting!