Vanilla, Please!

Has a week gone by already? Yeowser. Here's a plain ol' update. Nothing fancy, no humorous story, no puns. Just vanilla blogging. Things have been busy here at Annie's House of Yarn and Diapers. Between house guests, litter box chores and strollercize, there has been some crafty magic, but I tell you my friends. I am tired. Babette has kept me sane. (Sometimes it's nice to have a project that you really have to look at to work on and keeps you from having to keep up conversation.) It's moving along and I have to start working on the bigger squares.


I finished one Sidewinder, and am tinking more than knitting on the second one. But I will finish. The "one yarn discipline at a time" thing is killing me. I really really want to start Blouson. By next weekend, garsh darn it!


One dishtowel down, and working on the second one. I only know one finishing technique for the edges of my dishtowels. I'm not sure how I feel about fringe for this project. I guess I'll find out!

I have also, of course, been Ravelrying. I do a lazy knitters version. I click on 'friends'. Click on 'friends activity' and look at all the projects everyone else has added to their queue's and add them to mine. Y'all have great taste in knitting projects!

More clever analogies of life and yarn to come, and I promise some updated pictures of Cashew! In the meantime, feel free to read how "knitting and purling" found its way into my birth plan.

Procrasti-ravelry-ing

My MIL is coming to visit tomorrow. I should be cleaning. But my procrastination goes something like this:

Hum dee dum dee dum...I'll just check my email real quick. Oh look, I left Ravelry up. Just for fun, let me type in "sweaters" and see what everyone is making... OH *bleep*! Add that to the queue, add that to my Amazon shopping cart....I wonder if I already have yarn to make the Central Park Hoodie? Let's visit my favorite yarn store (aka My Stash) oh look, I have 7 skeins of Cascade 220, that's enough for a CPH...

An HOUR goes by. I have been warned that Ravelry is a time suck. It is a yarnaholic's paradise, but for all the time I spend deepening my love for patterns and yarns and project ideas....I could be knitting!

I mean, I could be cleaning!

Hmmm.

I could be knitting!

What's the point of having a queue if you don't get to the knitting? The "What if....Someday...." game only works for so long. What I love about knitting is the actually sliding of the needles through really pretty yarn. My Ravelry is getting ahead of my knitting. I feel a panic coming on. I'm so cool, I'm on Ravelry...smoke and mirrors! Hot jeans but no ass! Fancy bra but no boobs!

Next up, a sweater to wear to Rhinebeck. I will not have a lame Flickr mosaic thingy in January to recap the 2 scarves and a baby blanket I made in 2007. I will push on to be the cool, hip, super knitter that I dream to be. *sniff* I believe in actual knitting, and lots of it.

You know, I can keep going. Anything to keep from vacuuming cat hair.

Fun with Fibonacci

One of the things I love about weaving is design. You can take something as simple as dishtowels, use a plain warp and play with the weft like crazy. So I had me some fun with Fibonacci. Fibonacci was a mathematician. (Go read about him here.) So to play with Fibonacci, you gotta make like a bunny and bust out your linear recurrence equation. A linear recurrence equation is a recurrence equation on a sequence of numbers expressing Xn as a first-degree polynomial... Fine, so I looked that up on Mathworld. Stop laughing. Here's how I understand it...start with 1 and 1. Add them together, you get 2. Now take the last number (1) and add it to 2. You get 3. Now add that to the last number and you get 5. Are you following me? 1,1,2,3,5. Those numbers will act as your number of rows for a given color. That's the basics. Now play.


I actually started with the number 2, and I took it to the number 10, and then came back the other way. I assigned that sequence to green. I then reversed it and assigned it cream.

Green - 2, 2, 4, 6, 10, 10, 6, 4, 2, 2

Cream - 10, 6, 4, 2, 2, 2, 4, 6, 10

Hmmmm. Technically I think there was supposed to be another "2" in the cream, but whatever. That's my Wabi Sabi.

Neato, right? And not just cool for weaving. Knitting, crochet... (Flickr pool, anyone?)


Now a weaving question. Is it normal to see your threading sequence? That will tighten up in the wash, right?

Together at Last

Is Cashew in awe? Is she in shock? Does she merely have to poop? Who knows for sure. One thing that is for sure is that Curlicue is done! Off the needles! No longer in a pile by the knitting chair! Grab that flask and take a celebratory swig!


There it is in all it's glory. It's a bit rumpled in the photo, but it did block very nicely. A tad tricky to photograph, so it may not be as creative as yesterday's salad but at least it's a full view.

So the technical knitter stuff: The pattern is Curlicue Coverlet by Oat Couture. I used Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece in Dusty Sage. I started this blanket mid-winter with hopes of finishing in early March before Cashew was born. Swollen fingers kept that from happening, and any remaining knitting was done during naps, bedtime and walks to the park. It was finally completed in late June. My modification was to do a provisional cast on. Instead of seaming the blanket, I kept the stitches live on the last section, picked up the stitches from the cast on, picked up stitches past the cast on (makes sense when you are working on this blanket), picked up a couple stitches in the center to close the hole and did a 3 needle bind off. Over all it is a fairly easy blanket to knit. The sections go by fast because they are all short rows. The pattern is easy to memorize. I was able to do it with Placenta Brain AND New Mommy Brain. That, in my opinion, is quite something.

So now I can finally move on to something else. I have so many beautiful yarns in my stash, I have decided to have fun with stash busting. Must make room for Rhinebeck!

The Menu

I really loved my June Plan. Yes, I was tired from trying to fit so much in, but the upside is all the options I now have. It's like going to your favorite cafe and picking something from the menu. Shall I blog about my Babette short stack?

Or perhaps my fiber rich dish towels...

Or shall I go straight for a Curlicue salad? Decisions, decisions!