Orthopedic Shoes

I'm so excited!  I need to get myself an eyeglass chain and some orthopedic shoes because.... I'm retiring!  Actually, I'm still going to work a few days a week but my retirement application was approved by Social Security yesterday and they sent me the approval letter today.  I'm pretty dang excited about it!  Retirement doesn't officially start until June 1st but still, I'm pretty darn excited!

To celebrate, I sat on the deck and knit after spending the morning mowing the grass. The Insanity blanket continues to grow.  I'm trying to knit on it as much as humanly possible before it gets too hot to hold it in my lap.  Currently, I'm on the seventh block of the fourth row.  57 squares down, 283 more to go.

I wish I hadn't done that math.  

Hayden took a brief pause from being Elsa and turned into a lion today.  She's got quite the roar!

The Insanity Continues

 I went MIA there for a bit.  Actually, I went S.O.A.

The TV in my area died so I've been re-watching nothing but DVDs for the past several weeks.  I pulled out the Sons of Anarchy set and have pretty much done nothing but watch bikers and knit on the Insanity blanket ever since.  (Yeah, see all those post-its scattered everywhere?  They are reminders of the things I'm supposed to be doing instead of knitting.)

It's a good thing S.O.A. is six?? seven?? maybe even eight seasons long because this blanket is going to take me a lifetime LIFETIME!  It's 17 squares wide which means it will need to be at minimum 20 squares in length.  If not at work, I really have pretty much done nothing but knit on this monster since I started it and I've only just started the eighth square of the second row.  A lifetime, I tell you!

I did take a brief few minutes off from knitting so I could pick some daffodills. We have a bumper crop this year.  I guess they really liked all the rain we have gotten over the last bunch of months.  

And of course I took an afternoon off to attend Hayden's Elsa's Frozen birthday party.  I'm ashamed to admit, I still have not watched Frozen, but I feel like I have.  Hayden quotes it and sings the songs constantly.  Like father, like daughter.

Happy knitting!

Cupcakes and Wine

I hope you had a nice Valentine's Day.  I got Mucinex and tissues.  I can't believe that less than a week after having that horrible stomach bug, I got the cold/sinus/flu bug.  Thankfully, the day before I got sick this time around, I'd accidentally bought myself cupcakes.

I didn't mean to buy so many.  I was at work and noticed the Key Lime cupcakes.  And the strawberry sounded good too but... Key Lime!  I grabbed a box and did a price check.  They were on a Buy One Get One type sale so... I went back and got the strawberry too.  But while I was grabbing the strawberry, I noticed the lemon.  I love lemon flavored deserts.  And if I was going to get key lime, strawberry and lemon, I had to get the fourth box so....  Now I have cupcakes!

What I don't have is wine bottles.

I saw this idea on Facebook.  I feel terrible that I'm not sharing the source but I guess the fever got to me and I didn't keep track of where it came from.  I just remember seeing it on Facebook.  Anyway.... I have a lot of those plants and am constantly rooting pieces of it and I absolutley love this idea!  The problem is, just a few weeks ago, I threw away over 20 empty wine bottles I'd been saving for a 'one of these days I'll make something with these'  type craft project.  Doh!  Oh well.  Guess I just need to drink more wine.  

Meanwhile, I've continued knitting on Rambling Rows.  I've made a little more progress since taking that photo.  I'm currently on block 52 out of 55.  I am so excited to get this baby finished.  It's only been four years in the making.  The problem is, once I'm 'finished,' I need to dig through the stash pile and find a skein or two to knit a border around it.  I'm torn between a garter border or an icord border.  I want the icord border but I'm having a hard time mentally facing that much icord. Not sure why - icord is pretty simple and would probably take less time than a garter border, but....

While I try to choose border styles, here's a picture of Hayden's Valentine's Day hair-do.

She had heart hair!  After the photo was taken, her mom even turned the heart red by rubbing red eyeshadow over it.  So stinking cute.

And now, I'm going to go finish my Mucinex, eat cupcakes and drink wine.

Happy knitting!

Rambling

I hope everyone had the best possible Mother's Day that they could have this crazy year.  I know it was pretty disappointing for many.  Mine was disappointing but it could have been much, much worse.  We had big plans this year because for the past eight Mother's Days, I was at work and didn't have a celebration.  No work for me this year!  But, at the last moment, my husband ended up working.  And his coworker's wife was hospitalized with covid-19 symptoms (thankfully her test came back negative and she just has 'regular' illness.)  And the MIL was taken out gallivanting around the state a few days before. Between the chance of the MIL being infected while she was out and not knowing what the status of the co-worker's wife was, and having a preemie newborn (seems like Hayden has been with us for ages but she's still considered a newborn) my son couldn't attend.  And I certainly understand that decision.  Don't mean to sound like I'm guilting him here.  I'm really not.

So our party was shrinking.

And then for reasons unknown, I had an allergic reaction to my towel when I stepped out of the shower and dried my face off Sunday morning.  In less than 30 seconds my face began to burn and itch and sting and it turned all red and got all....  well, it looked like I had 100's of zits popping up.  Not fully up, but coming.  You know the type.  The type you'd get when you were 16 or 17 and had a hot date for prom and you'd wake up with a red spot on your chin or the end of your nose.  And it burned!  And felt like 1,000's of bees were stinging me.  It was horrible.

So I called off the Mother's Day celebration completely and hid in my room.  Alone, with just my knitting and Kindle for company.  Honestly, it wasn't a bad way to spend the day.  Instead of having the BBQ my brother-in-law was going to bring, I ate a bag of chips for lunch.  A giant bag.  No fear of starvation here!  And my husband brought fried chicken home for dinner.  And my daughter made a cheesecake.

The cheesecake was delicious and frankly, I'm okay with skipping the Mother's Day thing this year.  It meant more cheesecake for me!

Rambling Rows Afghan

And what did I knit while hiding in my room?  Rambling Rows.  I can't stop knitting on this thing!  Before casting on, I'd set a self-imposed schedule of knitting five blocks a month.  It's only been 14 days and I'm already on block 15.  I am way ahead of schedule.  I don't get to say that very often!

Three on Thursday - Stash Busting

As much as I love LOVE receiving giant boxes of yarn in the mail, I have to admit, I'm enjoying this whole forced stash busting thing COVID-19 is causing. And thus, three more stash buster project ideas...

Leftovers Sweater by Julie Philip

I love this idea and I especially love how the sweater on the right has been embellished with what I assume is embroidery.

Slip Stitch Stash Hat by Renee Rico

Or how about this beauty?  It always amazes me the effect a simple slipped stitch can have.

Northeasterly by Skeinanigans

Now, this is my kind of pattern.  I can knit for as long or short as I wish with a color before changing.  I can knit it long enough to be a full sized blanket, a baby sized blanket, a scarf, or even a table runner.  The knitter calls the shots!  A friend from my knitting group is knitting one of these and ever since I saw hers, I've been thinking I need to cast one on.  She's using her Advent kit yarns but I would just used stashed yarns.  Although.... it would be a good excuse to sign up for one of those kits.  Hmmm...

Hope you'll join me for Three on Thursday.

Three on Thursday - Stash Busting

We're all stuck in our homes, the grocery stores are empty and our local yarn shops are closed. The only thing left to do is dive into that yarn stash pile.  Thank goodness for a giant yarn stash!  I don't know what those poor knitters who don't stash will do.  My heart goes out to them.

Besides stashing yarn, I'm also very, very happy about my tendency to hoard hand lotions.  My family have always made fun of me for it, or more honestly, been irritated with me over it, but they aren't complaining now!  With all this hand washing, we're going through some hand lotion!

But back to knitting and yarn....

What can we knit with all that stashed yarn?  Assuming the majority of your stash is like mine and made up of mostly fingering weight, single skeins rather than sweater quantities of gorgeous hand dyed yarns....  What can a knitter knit?  Other than the 10-stitch and mitered square blankets that instantly come to mind when planning a stash busting project, that is.  And free, since so many of us are out of work due to the nasty "C" word....

Yarn End Mittens by Kathy Lewinski

How about a pair or two of Yarn End Mittens?  They'd definitely be a great way to use up some small scraps of leftover yarn.

The Age of Brass and Steam by Orange Flower Yarn

Looking to use up a full skein?  How about knitting The Age of Brass and Steam?  As written, the pattern is for a kerchief but it could easily be made larger by knitting more pattern repeats.

Smitten by Emily Ivey

Or, perhaps you'd like to get ahead on the holidays.  This mitten garland would be adorable hanging just about anywhere in your house and you could even tuck little gifts or candies into them.  Individually, they'd make great tree ornaments and/or gift toppers.  The pattern is Smitten by Emily Ivey.

I hope you are all surviving this COVID-19 ordeal and will join me over at Carole's for today's Three on Thursday link up.  

Stay well, stay sane, and knit on!

Newborn Vertebrae Cardigan

Newborn Vertebrae Cardigan

Wow!  That photo looks so much better on my phone than it does here on the blog.

I'm still awaiting the baby-appropriate yarn shipment.  According to the tracking, it's caught up somewhere at the post office.  Damned postal service!

Meanwhile, I'm using some scrap yarn to knit a Newborn Vertebrae cardigan.  The green may not be 'pastel' exactly, but it was available and the baby is due in March.  He/she will need to celebrate his/her Irish heritage with a St. Patrick's Day sweater.  

The pattern is super simple and I can't wait to find out the baby's sex so I can knit a few more in the appropriate colorway.

On the Needles - Kroy

Phew!  I finally finished re-knitting February's cut off stitches back onto my Patons Kroy diagonally striped blanket.  What a time consuming ordeal!  But, it's done and I can move on and hopefully learn from that mistake.  

Patons Kroy Diagonally Striped Scrap Blanket

To celebrate finally getting to knit with 'new' yarn  instead of my self-made sock blank and because it was a glorious spring day, I picked up a skein of Meadow Stripes which really stands out on the blanket.  'Stands out' as in clashes with the rest of the blanket.  

Meadow Stripes is bright greens, blues, pinks and reds and looks nothing like the other mostly muted colors I've been using but I've decided not to care that it looks weird.  The idea behind the blanket is to use up some of the zillions of skeins of Patons Kroy in my stash.  And at some point, there will be a bright turquoise and magenta striped skein added in so ....  So yeah.  I'm just not going to worry about it looking weird.  It's a 'scrap' blanket - it's supposed to look weird.

Another thing I finally finished - I finished reading Disturb Not the Dream.  It wasn't anywhere near as scary as I remember it being, although there was a lot of unpleasant sex in the form of incest and rape.  Perhaps that's what I found so scary when I read it the first time.  I was pretty young and innocent back in those days.  This go round, I found the book to be much more disturbing than terrifyingly scary.

The next book in my queue is By the Unholy Hand by Kathryn Le Veque which I've just started reading.  I'm not sure I'll finish it though.  It's full of typos and grammatical errors.  The story has to be awfully good to put up with that.  I'll probably read another chapter or two before making the decision to finish or delete it from the Kindle.  It's a medieval knights' tale which is a genre I normally enjoy so we'll see how it goes.

227,008

Finally!  It's only taken me five years to knit...

mitered square blanket

My mitered square blanket is finally finished.  Well, the knitting is finished.  The squares and the i-cord border are finished.  I'm jumping for joy!

rear view

There's still the matter of the back of the blanket to deal with.  In case you can't see all the loose strings....

The whole back looks like that.  (Sorry it's so blurry.  My editing thing didn't appreciate doing such a huge cropping job.)

So, yeah.  Lots and lots and lots of loose ends to deal with.  Except I'm not going to deal with them.  Since many of the squares are not knit with superwash wool, meaning washing this beast could become a problem... I decided the easiest thing would be to simply cover up the loose strings with a nice piece of preshrunk fabric, which will hopefully help the blanket keep it's shape when I wash it.  One day soon I'll get to the fabric shop, then one day hopefully not long after that, I'll sew the fabric to the back of the blanket and then I'll be truly done.

And if you're interested in some truly horrifying numbers...

I started the blanket sometime in early April, 2014 meaning it has taken me almost exactly five years to knit it.  Not that I knit on it continuously, but it had been on the needles for five years.

The blanket ended up with 16 squares across and 24 down.  Each mitered square starts with 33 stitches and measures about 2.5 inches wide.  It was knit with random scraps of fingering weight wool.  The final blanket measures approximately 40 x 60 inches.

Assuming I'm doing my math right, the mitered squares contain a total of 221,568 stitches.

I added a four stitch i-cord border around the edge of the blanket.  There are 5440 i-icord stitches.

All total, this blanket contains 227,008 stitches.  Just shy of a quarter million stitches.

Ta Da!

It's Three on Thursday and I'm celebrating a giant...

Ta Da!

1.  Ta Da!  As promised, the diagonal striped blanket is finished!  Well, it's off the needles.  The knitting is finished.

One down, one million gazillion more to go.

2.  One yarn end has been woven in.  One million gazillion more to go.

3.  It may be a while before the one million gazillion ends get woven in because about three minutes after I knit the last stitch, I cast on a So Faded sweater using my Dark Mood set of Hawthorne yarns.  No photos yet.  I'm too busy knitting and loving the colors in this set.

Join me over at Carole's for today's Three on Thursday link up.

Makers' Monday

I'd planned to celebrate #MakersMonday by showing you a photo of my diagonal striped blanket with the caption, "Ta Da! Finished!" 

74 stitches

But if I had, I'd have been lying.  I thought for sure I'd finish knitting the blanket last week.  I also thought I had less than 100 stitches on the needle at the start of last week. 

Once again, I was wrong.  At bedtime last Sunday (not yesterday, the previous Sunday) I finally got the courage to count the remaining stitches.  177.  One hundred, seventy seven!  How could I have looked at that and thought it was less than 100?  Wishful thinking I guess.

At bedtime last night, I was down to 74 stitches on the needle.  Barring breaking both arms (knock on wood!!) I will definitely finish knitting the blanket this week.  Definitely.  That is my promise to you and to myself.  The next photo/mention of this daggone blanket will be the Ta Da! photo.  I promise.

Vicks or Vaseline?

I'm not sure why I'm bothering to post today.  I really don't have much to report.

Diagonal Striped Blanket

Knitting wise, I finally made it across the 50 inch base of the blanket and turned the corner.  And that's it!  That is all the knitting I've done.  Part of me is super frustrated with my lack of progress this week and part of me is pretty dang proud.  Despite this flu/cold from Hell (I think it's just a horrible, horrible cold and not an official flu) I've managed to knit 50 inches of fingering weight garter stitch.  I might not currently be capable of reading a pattern, and I have two unlabeled jars, one of Vaseline and one of Vicks VaporRub, and my nose is so stopped up I can't tell them apart.... but I can rock some garter stitch knitting!

As for my reading, did you catch that bit a moment ago where I said I wasn't currently able to read a pattern?  Yeah, well, I can't read books either.   Apparently the flu/cold is in my eyes as well as my nasal cavities.  I've tried and tried to read but my eyes just gush water (I hope it's water!) and my brain can't make sense of the squiggles on the page.   Currently, I'm typing this post with the zoom set so high I'm only getting five or six words to a line.  It's the only way I can tell what I've typed.  Pathetic!  (I also have no idea how out of focus that photo is so please ignore it if it's so bad it's making you nauseous.)

So, the point is, I haven't read anything this week.  But the squiggles are starting to make a little more sense and my eyes are oozing more at a slow leak pace than a full on gush so I have high hopes that in a day or two....

Happy Memorial Day!

I'm at work today but I'm wishing all my US friends a very happy Memorial Day!

I'd also like to take a moment to thank all of you for the encouragement & positive words about my newest Pi shawl knit out of scrap sock yarn.  I hope you are all right and that it will tone itself down as it gets bigger.  Time will tell.

Meanwhile,

Happy Memorial Day!

Off my rocker

I'm questioning my sanity.  I started a new Pi shawl....

Scrap Sock Yarn Pi Shawl

.... using scrap sock  yarn.  Am I completely off my rocker?  It's either going to be the most hideous thing ever knit or it's going to be a gorgeous thing to behold.  At the moment, it's at the Really, Really Hideous stage that scrap yarn projects tend to experience in their early stages.  We'll have to wait & see how it turns out.  Whatever happens, I'm determined to use up a good chunk of my scrap yarn collection.  I need to make more room for the 'real' yarn stash.

While I knit around and around and around, I'm also reading Pressure Drop by Peter Abrahams.  Although I'm a little confused about the story line, I am enjoying the book.  I think my confusion is mostly due to reading myself to sleep after 14 hour shifts but.....  The story alternates between a deep sea diving accident (was it an accident??) and woman who decides to have artificial insemination using an anonymous sperm donor.  The baby gets kidnapped immediately after being born and I get the impression that the anonymous sperm donor may have something to do with both the kidnapping and the diving accident.  Another reason I'm a little confused about the story line is that I'm having trouble putting it down.  I tend to read until  I fall asleep still holding my Kindle. I keep waking up hours later, laying on the Kindle, unable to remember what happened over the last few pages.  Honestly, I'm pretty surprised I haven't rolled over on it & cracked the screen yet.

So, what are you reading? Knitting? Crafting?  Join me over at Kat's Unraveled Wedenesday post.

World's Most Boring Blog Post

This blog post may truly qualify for the world's most boring post.  Most boring ever.

I've been working a lot of hours this week and haven't been able to get much knitting in, nor photos taken.  My mitered square blanket stats are currently:

Total squares needed:  384

Total squares knit:  240

Total squares remaining:  144

The weird thing about it is, even while I'm bitching and moaning about how long it's taking me to complete this blanket and how badly I want it to be finished, all I can think about is knitting another one using Knit Pick's new Stroll Gradient.  I'm also slightly obsessed with the idea of buying all the blues and knitting another Find Your Fade, but that's an idea for another day.

And for a bit of color...

Paris in the spring, courtesy of rareinterloart.co.uk

Okay, so that's not my actual view walking into work each day, but it's close.



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Photo Friday

Photo Friday... sort of like Wordless Wednesday.

Mitered Squares Blanket

Between struggling with the decision of what to knit next and my over-flowing containers of scrap yarn, I decided to pull out the mitered square blanket.  I hadn't touched it in ages yet I was so close to finishing it.  Or so I thought.

Can you identify any of the yarns?

I should never have picked it back up because I immediately decided it needed to be at least four squares wider and three longer.  I'm no longer 'so close' to finishing it.

And for the record, it's physically impossible for me to be wordless.

More Stripes

I seem to be into stripes these days.  I also seem to have reached my limit on Christmas gift knitting in October.  I suddenly lost any shred of interest I had in knitting Christmas gifts.  I mean really, why should I be concerned about knitting them in October when I have, you know, Christmas Eve?  I mean really!  I should be able to crank out four or five scarves, a few hats and a couple of pair of mittens on Christmas Eve.  Right?  Sure I can.

So, yeah, I'm procrastinating.

And I decided to use up some of the odds and ends of left over worsted weight wool I had laying around.

I started out with the idea of just knitting a plain striped scarf.  I was going to knit simply knit with one color until it ran out then add on the next.  Sort of Dr. Who scarf style.  But after taking a closer look at the odds and ends of yarns I have on hand, I decided that wasn't going to look so great.  The majority of yarn in my odds & ends pile are either too similar in color or they clash with each other way to much to simply knit wide stripes with them.  So, I decided, in an effort to confuse the eye and tame the clashing colors a bit, I'd knit three color stripes on the diagonal.

More Stripes

So far, I think it's working.