More Knitting!

[liralen]

Hee.

I finished the purple and pink poncho for I_. It was an experiment in mitered squares, square shaping, and... dun du dah! I-cord. Yeah. Although I've been knitting for decades I have never used an I-cord finish before. Now I realize that, on the most part, most of my knitted items had finished edges already, either sideways lace edging or were something that was supposed to be seamed, or a ribbing (cuffs, bottoms of sweaters, and collars) and I'd actually done very few cardigans (which is where I can see this being the most useful).

But the mitered squares were every which way until I figured out a better way of planning the squares, so they all had uneven or even different selvages, so I finally just bit the bullet and used a small circular needle and whipped on an I-cord edging. Wow. It was really nice.

If course, the four-year-old girl was having a bad day and wasn't cooperating with anything, much less having a new piece of clothing thrown over her head. :-) So no try-on pictures, yet, but Jet was nice and tried it on and one of his friends tried it on just because she thought it was pretty. So I have some pictures at home. I'll post when I can.



It snowed for nearly all of Friday and both Jet and I had colds, so we stayed home and watched Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and then Toy Story again. Hee. It made shopping for his disposable overnight pull-ups quite amusing, as they have Woody and Buzz picture pants. Though we didn't go out for the day. We just stayed home, decompressed, and I knit away at the poncho. We did take a break to go outside and have a snowball fight. Jet started calling my snowballs "power crystals to fuel our rocket ship" and they had to be *smashed* to power the "rock-et ship" which was a BIG ROCK in the garden. :-) We also settled down afterward with cups of hot cocoa and a bunch of paper and made a slew of paper airplanes which rain from the skies, or at least the second floor balcony, on a regular basis, now.

I finished in on Saturday. We had a little adventure and went to Boulder's new Super Safeway, which used to be an old K-Mart and now has all kinds of Whole Foods-like booths, prepared foods, and organics. It's pretty bemusing. We spent waaaay too much money there.

We spent the afternoon at home, Jet had a long hot chocolate bath, using my Philosophy Hot Cocoa bubble bath, shampoo, and shower gel. It's decadent stuff, and makes me feel like I ate a chocolate bar without adding to my hips. Yum.

I should have transplanted a slew of Green Zebra tomato plants, but I didn't when I found two or three of my seedlings infested with aphids. I followed kathrynt's advise and squished 'em. There were only about a dozen on those plants, the plants I had upstairs, and the baby lettuce, which had been doing SO badly, and I couldn't figure out why until I saw those pests sucking away all the life-juices... ahem.

So I squished 'em. I can't imagine being Jain, and not squishing bugs, at all. Hm. Though I guess a Jain wouldn't raise lettuces to eat 'em, either.

Which ties into Sunday in that there's a lady that's going teach a world religion class, and one of our members was like "What's a Jainite?" and I blinked and said, "That's not right, they're Jains, not Jainites..." and they all peered at me, "How do you know what a Jain is?" asked the teach of the class. "Uhm..." I thought, "Oh... through comic books..." Which left everyone blinking, "There was a story about a female Jain who wouldn't move for fear of crushing an ant, and she got eaten by a tiger, and because of that she became a bodhisattva (I couldn't pronounce it for the life of me)... uhm..."

They all just stared at me, "That was a comicbook?"

"Uhm... yeah." *sigh*

It was a nice service, with the snow falling softly outside. I was happy because I'd finished the poncho and given it away.

Then I went home, and we had lunch, and I started work on my Dubbelmössa kit from Schoolhouse Press. The unspun Icelandic is a joy to work with, though it's far stiffer than most wools I usually choose. It's scratchy, too, but the unspun yarn, itself, is very cool. It's a soft roving that's just put into a wheel (okay a bunch of wheels) and you just knit it right off the wheel. It still has the lanolin in it, so it'll probably shed water beautifully, and it's so warm it amazes me. As suspected, since it's been years since I've done two color knitting, my gauge is EVERYWHERE, loose when I'm uncertain of the pattern (some REALLY long carries I normally would not make, but the hat is "hermetically sealed) or tired, tight when I get going with one color around a whole round or when I realize I'm going loosely. So I'm very glad I'm practicing on this rather than doing the "Crying Sun/Moon" sweater as my first try at multi-color knitting.

The really cool thing is that the hat nearly exactly matches a black and white cotton sweater I got from L. L. Bean, though the color patterns are different, it's enough alike that I could wear it with and have people swear it was matching. Well... at least until they touched it... or smelled it... :-) The lanolin is good, smelly stuff, and leaves my hands very soft but a little barn-yardy. I got a good four inches through it. I'm pretty happy. I just have to even out the gauge. The instructions say that the two wheels are enough for two hats, but I don't think so given my current methods.

John made tacos for dinner. I'd made cedar plank salmon the day before, with roasted asparagus. I also went a little crazy and used a Bon Appetite recipe that layered Yukon gold potato slices with portabella mushrooms, artichoke hearts, goat cheese, garlic, a sprinkle of parm, plenty of olive oil, and a bit of white wine. It baked for a good hour, and was really good. I think it might even have been good for a vegetarian main dish, but it was excellent as a side for the salmon.

So it was a pretty nice weekend, all in all. I even got to ride the exercise bike, and surprised the heck out of John and Jet by declaring that I'd had a very nice day on Sunday. Given my last two weeks of stress, irritability, and sheer unhappiness, it was a good break for me.

I think that going to sleep well before midnight since Lent started has certainly helped, plus I pulled a pint of buckwheat hulls from my buckwheat pillow when I realized that part of my night was spent making the hulls go to the Other Side. So my sore neck may well have been from too high a pillow. Luckily, with a Bucky, it's easy to fix. I am now doing research into millet hulls along with buckwheat hulls and peering at lots of different things with respect to pillows. I do wonder if a bolster would be more useful for side sleeping than a flat pillow, and am thinking of trying something out, but there's a LOT out there... yeah... wandering thoughts.