Sometimes I Buy a Pattern That

I'm pretty sure I will never get around to knitting, just because I love the design so much. Case in point:



These are the Hiroshige Mittens by Hanneke Sieben, and if you are on Ravelry they can be found here.

Happy Birthday EZ

I've learned more than I can mention from Elizabeth Zimmerman's books. One of my favorite techniques that I first learned from her is the "afterthought" thumb/heel/pocket/you-name-it. Truth be told, I usually plan ahead and do the "forethought" method - but it's basically the same thing.

So it seems appropriate that today wood house knits has a post for a little trick with this method that I hadn't seen before. A cool way to make picking up the new stitches just a little easier - with nice photo tutorial.

Knit On!

Blogging Block,

I seem to have it. Maybe it's just August. The houseflies have appeared on schedule. The mosquitoes are thick. I make lists and don't seem to follow up much on any of them. Flip through stitch dictionaries, but can't quite get around to picking up needles to swatch.

Back on Track

The window installation went amazingly smoothly. Huge improvement. We'll see if they hold up/perform over time as well as the salesman claimed, but for now they seem like a dream.

The house is 80 % back in order (and cleaner than before, because even I, the Queen of Deferred Housekeeping, am not going to rehang dirty curtains or push a shelf with 1/4 inch of cobwebs on the backside up against the wall without a wipe down.) The living room drapes did go up in awful condition. I would have rather thrown them out (and believe me, they are in such terrible shape that throwing them away is the only viable option). But we need some privacy until I can get to J.C. Penny to scope out replacements. One thing always does lead to another.




Though this looks like a bit of a jumble, it is much more orderly than before. The 20% of stuff that is not back in place needs to be either organized, put in storage or disposed of. (Come to think of it, some of the stuff that is back in place could stand weeding out.) It will take me a little time to get through that.

Out of Touch

is what I'll be, online anyway, come Wednesday, at least if it doesn't rain. That's when the crew is scheduled to come replace the upstairs (and two downstairs) windows. (Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't rain - we've already had the scheduled date pushed back once due to other factors.)

I've been busy clearing paths to the windows. In my workroom, I moved everything from this corner.....



to this corner.



Plus I hauled some items down to the dining room. (Also finally sent a couple of bags of fun fur to the thrift store, and some oddballs in colors I can't convince myself to like, along with a few, very few, books that I really, truly won't ever use or refer to again. No I won't. Get those books out of here.) I also removed some considerably large dust bunnies.

I've taken down most of the curtains (still need a little privacy for the next couple of nights), and started to pull furniture away from the walls.



The rest will have to wait until tomorrow to be re-located, including the desk in the "study", which will have to be pulled pretty much directly in front of and up against the computer table, because the study is a very small room indeed. The chair will be rolled into the attic. Access to the keyboard will involved contortions after that.

Not Going Anywhere

One of the techniques I tried out at Knitting Camp was Armenian Knitting. It's a way of working large or isolated motifs in stranded knitting, an appealing thought as I am not fond of intarsia. Basically it just boils down to stranding across large spaces and weaving in the floats every 3-4 stitches as you go. I have done weaving in before, so the physical maneuver wasn't hard for me. But I found it rather tedious. And there is show through of the woven yarn that can, with proper color choices, be treated as a design element giving a tweedy effect to the color blocks. But I don't particularly care for it myself.

I started in on a hat as a practice piece,




but already there are too many things wrong with it (too big, rolled edge rolling up over lower part of pattern, some mis-readings of the chart). So I'll be ripping it out.

The yarn I picked up for it is interesting - unspun Icelandic roving. It can be pulled apart with a touch, but didn't break as much as I feared in the actual knitting. (I think I had only one incident.) Not sure what I will do with it now - maybe some mittens in regular stranded technique.