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.


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!