Back in 2008, I decided to be a part of Team Canada for the Summer Olympics. It was great fun, and I managed to knock off 2 WIPs that had been lurking in my stash. Well, before I knew it, Vancouver 2010 is just around the corner, and I haven't decided if I want to be part of it again. Normally, I would dive right in without any hesitation, but there are a couple things that are complicating my decision this year.
The first complicating issue is the fact that the hubby and I are actually, physically GOING to the Olympics for one week. While I can take knitting with me, we all know that it's just that much harder now to bring all the little things that you never know if you'll need when you're finishing a project. That said, I suppose I could always just be less ambitious with my project, and aim to finish it during the first week of the Olympics.
The other thing is that, and I suppose this is the big news that I haven't really talked about here yet, is the fact that we're expecting our first baby in the spring! Remember that Classy that I mentioned before? Well, that's being slated for a baby sweater for the little one on the way. I know many of you are probably saying that this may be perfect for the Ravelympics -- something to spur me on to finish some goodies for the forthcoming baby. I considered that too, and it's not without its merits. However, I have to admit that this pregnancy is taking its toll on my knitting time. It takes me just a little longer to do just about everything now, and after work I have a hard time staying awake past 9 or 10pm.
I honestly keep waffling back and forth between whether I join or not. Sometimes having a deadline, even if it's a friendly one, is nice to keep me on track. Sometimes, it stresses me out. Then again, maybe the fact that the baby is going to enter this world whether the sweater is ready or not should be deadline enough? I still can't seem to decide.
How about all of you? Any of you planning to join the Ravelympics?
And since there haven't been any photos in this post, here's a random one of some cute kitties.
With the closing ceremonies set for about 7 hours from now, I managed to get that leaf patterned scarf done. There was a real push on it the past two days, and there may come a day when I feel that I want to make a REALLY long scarf and add a 4th skein of yarn to it, but I like the way it looks right now. It's not blocked yet, so some people might argue that it's not completely finished, but it's off the needles, so I will consider it finished for the purposes of the Ravelympics.
I'll endeavor to take a better picture of it after it's all blocked.
Congrats to all the fantastic athletes, organizers, volunteers, staff, EVERYONE for making these 2008 Summer Olympics one for the ages! Watched some awesome sports, and got knitting done to boot. What could be better than that? (^_~)
What, you may ask, is in this compact package for me?
Thanks to the Ravelympics, I 'met' the fantastic Roxanne, proprietress of Zen Yarn Garden. We are both working hard for the Ravelry Team Canada. She was showing off some lovely blue sock yarn that she dyed for one of her events, and I couldn't help but commenting on it, what with blue being my favourite-est colour in the world. And so, she mentioned that she'd be happy to do a custom order for me if I wanted some of it. After cruising her website, I fell in love with the Curvy sweater, and told her that I loved the sweater, but not the pink. And so, she offered to make me a custom kit out of the lovely blue yarn, dubbed Azure.
And so...
MY KIT ARRIVED TODAY!! Can you believe it? Barely 3 days since we messaged back and forth about it! Thanks so much, Roxanne!!
And in other knitting news, I am desperately trying to finish my leaf-pattern scarf before the closing ceremonies finish. I'm not sure if I'm going to make it, but boy have I made loads of progress on this project that I definitely wouldn't have otherwise.
Yet again, Ravelry proves to be quite the enabler of my addiction...
[NOTE: To answer Marie's question to my previous post, BSJ stands for Baby Surprise Jacket. It is so dubbed because, as you knit it, it resembles nothing like a sweater, but at the end you do a little creative folding, and presto! You have a jacket! Surprise!!]
A couple of weeks ago, I needed something relatively mindless to take to knitgroup. I'm sort of tired of knitting socks for the time being, so I dug around and pulled this out.
That's a Sophie's Toes Magic Ball that I bought from someone who was destashing on Ravelry. I'd admired this sock yarn from afar for a while because the colourways are incredibly pretty, but I've never actually bought any because a)I usually miss the updates, b)I can't decide which colourway to get, and c)I have way too much sock yarn and am trying to be good.
The Magic Ball is several different colourways put together for a total of ~15 different "blocks" of colour (there are a couple of repeats). It came with a pattern for a simple scarf, so I cast on and started a little basketweave pattern.
The knitting is indeed very mindless, and it's incredibly fun to see all the different colours emerge. I think a Magic Ball is a marvellous idea, because I get to play with several different gorgeous colourways (yay! pretty colours!) without having to actually knit an entire pair of socks out of each one.
And, just because, here's a photo of the "real" Sophie's toes. =)
So I've REALLY fallen off the wagon this week. Since the yarn splurge last weekend, I've done a bit more shopping. I went back to the store that was having the moving sale (twice even, but once was purely just to keep someone company) and bought a bit more Noro and some Elizabeth Zimmerman books (gotta see what all the fuss is about, after all). The Yarn and Fiber Company was having a 15% off sale and I picked up some Kureyon colourways I had my eye on. I went to another yarn store to pick up a pattern. I saw some very very discontinued Silk Garden on eBay, made a modest bid, and won (to my utter surprise, I was completely expecting to be outbid).
Normally I might be feeling terribly guilty about all this, as though I were spending away my future or being totally reckless, when I had specifically told myself I wouldn't buy any more yarn until Easter. But really, it wasn't that much additional money, I am far from dipping into savings/credit to finance it, and all the yarn/books were on sale (well, the pattern wasn't). All the yarn is also earmarked for specific projects that I had in mind beforehand, not projects that I made up on the spot in the store.
I think I've gotten a lot better at not buying yarn on impulse, at not saying "oooh, here's some pretty yarn....quick, what could I make with this?", or justifying a yarn purchase by saying "I guess I could always just make a scarf out of this". I have a lot of "this is for a random scarf" yarn in my stash, and I'm tired of it (I love all the yarn of course, it's just that I and my family have a lot of scarves now). The Silk Garden is for a large-ish project-in-progress (I'll blog about it soon, I swear, but there's been a lot of other bloggable knitting these days), and the Kureyon is for a smaller version of a log cabin-y blanket that I saw on Ravelry (damn you, Ravelry!).
Anyway, I'm sick of looking at yarn now. Unless one or two very very specific opportunities come up, I'm more than done for now. =)
In other news, I've finished the front of my Nothing' But A T Shirt (I have no idea why the picture looks so weird and swirly, click to see the actual photo on Flickr).
Immediately after casting off the front, I threw both body pieces into a Eucalan bath and pinned them out. They are drying on the blocking board now, and once they're dry I'll sort of pin them together and see how they look on me. I pinned them out to the correct dimensions, but I'm terrified that the yarn will snap back and create a lot of body-hugging negative ease. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm no longer the underweight-to-the-point-where-people-were-telling-me-to-please-put-on-some-pounds girl that I was 6 months ago, and I'm not sure how flattering it would be. =)
I did the shaping for the neck using short rows, instead of doing the step-wise bindoffs (like I did for the back), and you can kind of see where the stitches look a bit wonky as a result. I hope that will disappear once I pick up the stitches for the neckband (I was kind of hoping they would even out with blocking, but it appears you can still tell).
And on a completely unrelated note, I love that Daylight Savings Time is so much earlier this year. More light, hooray! I have a feeling that it will be hard to wake up tomorrow morning, though. =)
Well, after wearing my Bird in Hand mittens for a couple of weeks, I am announcing that I am now officially a Mitten Convert. These are the warmest things ever! We've had several days of absolutely frigid weather (when even my apartment gets cold, that means it's REALLY cold outside), and while my toes felt like they were about to fall off my fingers were pretty much always toasty warm (of course they were in my pockets most of the time, but still). Stranded worsted weight alpaca knit on itty-bitty needles = knitted fabric that is impervious to cold. It's like magic!
So now I need to plan for the next pair of mittens! I think I'm pretty much done with the winter accessories for this winter, but there is always next year and beyond. These Fiddlehead Mittens look very yummy (Ravelry link). The kit itself will probably be impossible to obtain, but this version knit using Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light (sport weight version of the Ultra Alpaca used to knit the Bird in Hand mitts) and Kidsilk Haze for the lining looks particularly cozy (Ravelry). Time to put it in the queue!
So I've had a Ravelry account for just about 2 months now....and I've done virtually nothing with it. Initially it would drive me crazy when someone would refer to something on Ravelry on their blogs and I would be unable to see just what they were talking about. It seemed like a cool idea to be able to type in a pattern name and see pages and pages of photos without having to troll through the results of a Google search. And then there was that whole aura of "hey, here's this cool club that you're not a part of yet!" So I put myself on the waiting list, and obsessively checked my spot in line every few days or so. I passed the time by uploading a bunch of old FO photos to Flickr in anticipation of massive project-updating activity.
And then my invite lands in my inbox during a relatively hectic time, and it just sits there for several days. I make several halfhearted efforts to come up with a username that wasn't stupid or already taken (adrienneknits was the final decision, which is terribly unoriginal but meh, whatever). I poke around in my "notebook" and make a stab at adding some projects. I add some books (I also have trouble remembering which books I have, as they are all in boxes at present). I wait for the crazy obsessive feeling that so many other knitters have experienced to take over me. But....it seems like I just don't care that much. The thought of spending even MORE time updating this additional knitting-related database just makes me feel tired.
I know some people seem to have this inexhaustible energy for blogging, for reading and commenting on other people's blogs, for participating in this whole crazy knitting "community" that exists out in cyberspace, but it seems like I only have so much patience for it. I mean, I've gone months without knitting, and months without touching this blog. Knitting is fun, but I don't necessarily want to be doing it 24/7. Looking at and reading about everyone else's knitting is also enjoyable, but sometimes I'm just not that interested.
Anyway. I'm happy with this little blog that we've got going here (and which we've maintained more or less for a pretty long time!), and it's ok that we don't really advertise it or have a bevy of adoring readers. Sometimes I wish it were different, but most of the time I'm content with just doing what pleases us and not feeling pressure to be constantly producing beautiful knits to serve as blog fodder. And I guess it's also ok that my Ravelry account just sits there most of the time, I suppose it will come in handy someday, and maybe eventually I'll even feel like doing something with it. =)
