Whichever Day you happen to feel like celebrating.  Here in Canada, it’s Canada Day.  To celebrate, we’ll be building a playset in the yard in the morning (half of it will be built, at least according to the directions), and then we’ll be heading to Steveston for the Salmon Festival and Parade.  Hopefully the weather holds.

If you’re on the other side of the border, you’ll have to use your patience and wait for Friday to celebrate Independence Day.  We’ll probably watch A Capital Fourth on PBS (we get PBS stations from Detroit and Seattle, go figure), as we did last year and the year before.  I will hit “mute” and leave the room before *someone* decides to speak, but it should be a great show nonetheless.

With a little luck, I will be knitting while the TV is on, and will hopefully finish the Blue Newborn Shorties/Soaker that has been on the needles for what feels like forever.  Won’t that be exciting?  Then take pictures and get it listed…

So are you wondering why it’s taking so long to get knitting done around here?  Mostly because I have a job.  Here.  It’s not knitting-related, it’s not editing-related, but it is Customer Service-related, and since I cashiered throughout my college career, it’s a good fit.  It’s evenings and weekends, too, which is a good fit with family life.  I hope to go back to a career in my field when the kids are both in school (barring the addition of more kids, that should be when the younger is in Grade 1, or 2012), but for the moment this is a good fit and I do like the job.  Once I am used to the schedule, I’ll get more knitting in and less falling asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow…

Confidential to Keitha – your socks are still up next, I have a plan for them that involves a circular needle that is shipping to me as we speak, and I’ll magic loop the both of them at the same time, to avoid the issues I had with knitting round 1.

Happy Day to you all!!!

I haven’t had time to knit in the past couple of days, but I did want to put up a new post.  Luckily, I’ve already uploaded tons of pictures of my yarn stash at flickr.  So as I get time to do them, if I have nothing else of import to discuss, I’ll be posting about what I could pick up and knit at any given moment.

Today I’ve got a couple of yarns from Amber Beck Fiber Arts, formerly known as MaiMaiBB.  First up is Majestic, one of Amber’s signature colorways (it’s the one used in her logo, I believe).  I’m not sure off the top of my head what the variety of wool is, but it’s lanolin rich and smooshy as the day is long.  I’m not going to touch it until I have a plan, but I am looking forward to having a plan.

Majestic is a favorite colorway of mine, and I have enough to make a large pair of longies.

Amber is a spinner as well as a dyer, and one of the first luxury yarns I ever dared to buy was a custom job she did for me when my little guy was just a few months old.  I wanted a specific colorway, something brown, but with the elements of a rainbow.  I posted in the forums at Hyenacart for guidance, and Amber replied, proposing a custom dyed and spun project.  I picked merino wool, and let Amber have at it.  The first round wasn’t quite what I was hoping for (no, I don’t remember why), but the next round was perfect.   Isn’t it gorgeous?

As you can see, Amber is truly awesome at what she does.  So much so, in fact, that I had her do a custom order for me, my Mother’s Day 2008 present.   I wanted something special to knit up for myself, to match a gorgeous faux shearling coat I was given for Christmas, 2007.  My vision included all the colors of a rose bush in bloom ~ pink, brown, green, natural, a bit of blue for sky.  I asked for something soft, gave her my budget, and waited.  Once again, the first round wasn’t quite what I was hoping for (it’s now listed for sale at Etsy), so there was a round two.  Round two is more than I could’ve ever imagined.  This is absolutely never going on sale, but it’s a testament to Amber’s incredible work. 

So that’s some of my yarn stash, and like I said, as I get to it and if I don’t have anything else to blather on about, I’ll talk about it more.

This is a quickie post, with what I have to get done in short order.

Firstly, my 4.5yo requested that I knit something for his preschool teachers last Friday. Since preschool is over as of Thursday this week, I had to get cracking. So I knit up two Foliage hats, in Malabrigo Merino Worsted colorway Pink Frost.  I had 3.7 oz to work with, but turns out I need 2oz for each, so I finished the second with a tiny bit of Velvet grapes I had left from my Feather and Fan Skirty.  Pics are taken but not posted yet.  I’ll get them in when I can.

Now that this project is done, I have to finish a newborn sized soaker (or maybe shorties) that has been on the needles forever.  I need to free up my needles!  This soaker will be going on sale as soon as I get it cranked out.

Up next is a pair of socks.  Anyone remember my Totally F-R-E-E sock lottery?  It was from September 2007, and only lasted for three minutes.  There’s no excuse for these having taken so long, but they’re up next.  I Will Not Start Another Project Until These Socks are DONE.  And that’s final.

So there you go -that’s what’s on deck in the land of knitting.  Wish me luck!

I cannot even begin to express how much I love how this skirt knit up.  Just look at it.  *sigh*

Isn’t it stunning?  I’ve had these skeins of Malabrigo Wosted Merino, colorway Velvet Grapes, kicking around for more than a year.  I decided I wanted to knit some x-large shorties with it, and to make them girly.  So away I go.  I got the shorties done ages and ages ago, but I didn’t want to do a boring old ruffle, I wanted to do something unique.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know what. 

Enter Tracey Ullman and Mel Clark, their book Knit 2 Together, and their Luxe Neckwarmer.  I knit it up, I ripped it out.  Not because I didn’t love it, because I tried to do it with not quite enough yarn.  But it was my first experience with a feather and fan-ish stitch.  I grabbed a stitchionary, received some help from my loverly knitting group friends, and this is the final product.  I’m just so pleased with the finished effect.

It’s now on sale: Feathered Skirty Shorties

If it’s the wrong size, let me know, because this skirty effect is too good to only do once.

Pictures aren’t up yet, but I’ll be stocking a second in a few days.  It’s a medium sized bum-ruffled skirty, in Malabrigo Merino Worsted, colorway Amoroso.  The original plan was to have tons of room for a fluffy bum, and incorporated a new technique to that effect just under the ribbing.  Also, to make sure it would get a lot of use, I included cables at the hips.  The plan was to have the skirt extend from cable to cable rather than all the way around, and to incorporate the last cross of the cables into the ruffle, which would give it a cute little flare.  That was the plan. 

Everything was going well, right up until I was ready to add the ruffle.  Which happened about twenty-four hours before I had laproscopic surgery to remove my gallbladder.  You’re thinking “No problem, easy surgery, fast recovery,” right?  You’re not entirely wrong . . . part of the surgery is inflating your abdominal cavity with carbon dioxide, so that the camera and surgeon have room to move, and some of that carbon dioxide is still in there even after they deflate you and sew you up.  In my case, it settled in my shoulders (this is common, btw), and holy cow does it hurt!  What does this have to do with my skirt?  Ah . . . the drugs. 

Percoset, to be exact.  I’d take ibuprofen during the days, and percoset at night, so I could sleep instead of writhe in pain.  On the third or fourth night, I took the percoset, but wasn’t all that tired. (This is the first clue that you no longer need the good drugs, when you stay awake after they kick in, rather than zonk out.) In any case, I decided to knit.  And that cute little flaring transition from cable to skirt?  Well, I thought it had worked out just fine while hopped up on percoset.  In fact, I packed up and put away my project, thinking it was done, and stinking cute.  And I didn’t think about it again until I went to take pictures for my store.  Then I thought “what the heck did I do here?”  It’s still really cute, and will work just as well as if it had turned out how I planned it, but those stinking transitions are awkward, and therefore it’s of second quality, not first.  I’d frog and do it over, except that I really don’t know what I did. 

So there you have it, my Second with a Story.  The listing will be going live over the weekend, it’s an auction with a minimum bid of $25.00.  Or maybe it’ll be a Lottery to Purchase for that price.  I haven’t decided.  Someone is going to get a fantastic deal, I promise you that!

It feels like it’s taken forever, but in reality it’s only been a few weeks since I first asked Michelle at Elemental Muse to help me set up a blog and revamp my store.  I’m still playing with it, perfecting it, but isn’t everything in life meant to be a work in progress?

In any case, the past year or so have been very hard.  What started out slow, soon ramped up, and then my older son started pre-school, a place he managed to catch and bring home any number of germs.  I won’t bore you with details, but let’s just say that we had every kind of ick option available.  Ick.  Things were really bad by Christmas 2007, and since then I’ve been on the slow climb back to being on top of things.  Thank you to everyone who helped boost my spirits along the way, by the way, I can’t even express how much I appreciate it.

But back to business…the big thing I’ve learned:

1. Do not stock customs unless I can start knitting that day.

This is a big one, since all the rest of my newfound knowledge relates to how happily I was stocking customs.  I *love* customs, and I *love* surprises, so I was stocking custom surprises.  It worked great all summer long, and then pre-school decimated us.  And the big customs I had planned suffered for it. 

Then I had email issues, and no one got updated about anything.  This is, obviously, totally my fault, I should’ve clued in that I wasn’t hearing back from people and tried harder, but it never occurred to me that was going on.  I kept on putting my work off and off and off, thinking how grateful I was that no one was complaining about how long their customs were taking, and once you get to that point, it’s really hard to recover.  When I finally did clue in, and realized that I wasn’t getting emails and my emails weren’t going out, it was a shock, to say the least.  But I got my second lesson: keep harassing my customers with emails until I get a response.

And the third big thing that I learned about myself is that I don’t like knitting customs.  It makes me nervous, and keeps me from getting creative.  I’d rather knit interesting in-stock items, just doing what I feel like doing, hoping that someone likes it and buys it.  That said, if someone wants something specific, and lets me know, I may stock something that I think meets those expectations. 

So there you have it, what I learned in 2007.  Now on to bigger and better things.

This pattern for a skirty is really more of a technique to smoothly add a skirt to an article of clothing knit in the round, using yarnovers and extra needles.  The process can be awkward, but the finished skirt is attached seamlessly, has just as much give as the soaker underneath, and once the yarnover row is complete, you can really do anything you want to finish the skirt.

Supplies:
two circular needles, one smaller than the other (I use 4.5mm and 3.5mm)
4oz minimum worsted weight yarn (for a large)
Stitch markers