A New Addition

I seem to have acquired a new pet today!

I was taking a stroll through my apartment complex when I noticed something rustling in a nearby bush. I approached cautiously and saw a curious but sweet little face peeking out at me:

He seemed friendly enough so after a moment of indecision with those big, opalescent eyes staring unblinkingly out at me, I carefully scooped him out of the brush.

I dusted him off a little bit he didn't seem too worse for wear... maybe a little bit stranger-looking than I might have originally thought...

In so much as I am knowledgeable about feline-cephalopod anatomy would allow, I determine that he was in good health... at least all of his little paws--tentacles were intact? He didn't have a nose as such so it was difficult to test whether or not it were cold and/or wet.

Best of all, though, he seems pretty friendly:

So I brought him inside and introduced him to Herr Kittie... thus far, Kittie is pretty ambivalent about our newest addition. I'm not too worried about either of them, though; Kittie is too lazy to fight and our new house guest appears to have the ability to stick to any surface, making a quick escape simply of matter of slithering up the nearest wall.

I hope he'll be happy here, but I'm worried he might be getting a little home sick:

Plausible Map of Night Vale by Melissa Dalton

Things are good here and I am most pleased with my newest project, Octopuss by Jill Watt. I couldn't resist using the pattern to make myself one of my favorite characters from my favorite podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, Khoshekh! 

If you are into any and all things H.P. Lovecraft, or Twin Peaks, or just general weirdness, check out Welcome to Night Vale.

I hope everyone had a lovely Valentine's Day and an equally nice weekend. I myself just wanted to do a quick, silly post because I was just too excited about my newest FO.

Also, I just wanted to give you all a heartfelt thank you for bringing my modest blog to over 200 pageviews. I am thrilled-beyond-thrilled to offer words and pictures and much silliness to all of you. Thank you!

Murphy's Law and Other Constants

So the good news is that I finally finished the gloves I've been working on. Huzzah. I'm ashamed to admit that these took me the second-longest of all the projects I have ever knitted.

To give you some sort of perspective on how ridiculous I think this is, here is the only project that exceeds these gloves in time taken:

Matyev's Bedjacket

Yeah. That's all-over stranded colorwork worked in the round then steeked... not to mention hours and hours worth of duplicate stitch in several colors. I'm actually a little bit bitter about the time this (admittedly beautiful) project took... mostly because my shoulders are sloped enough that this falls right off of me when I attempt to wear it. 

At any rate, I don't do well with projects taking so long. I'm much more accustomed to knocking out two or three projects per month-- that's a rate I can definitely get behind. 

Things as they are, however, I'm lucky if I'm able to knit during my lunch break at work and perhaps for a few minutes in the evening. Seems I've finally made the horrid transition into Normal Adult Life and, thus, have much less time for all the things I'd rather be doing. 

I don't believe I've outright mentioned it in a post, but I have several other past times very much apart from knitting. Shocking, I know. The things that take the most time are, inexplicably, not craft related: I belly dance and I lift weights. Stating that so plainly makes it seem a little paradoxical but it's true. I have a couple dance classes a week (and the occasional performance), as well as lifting heavy at the gym a few times a week. Throw that in the mix with cooking and trying to make sure the house isn't a complete disaster, suddenly I have a lot less time to devote to knitting.

I shall have to work on that.

So here are the long belated gloves:

And they're lovely and so incredibly warm. I knit them at a much tighter gauge than suggested to make up for my very short fingers... it made the actual knitting less than pleasant (lace-tipped needles + cables knit through the back loop + tighter than usual gauge = ouch) but the result is quite nice.

Of course, though, the day I finished them, it was too warm to wear them-- but I've come to accept this about my life and accomplishments. Nevertheless, it has cooled back down again and now there is ample opportunity to wear weird split-fingered glove/mitten hybrids.

Just after I finished these, I quickly cast on for a hat for Tim. He asked so nicely for a hat that wasn't too long and that he could wear casually around the house and office. I was happy to oblige him and pawed through a veritable mountain of leftover mostals and came up with a coordinating pair of Cascade 220 balls in some shade of brown and Pumpkin Spice Heather (courtesy of the Doctor Who scarf I finished for him recently). I blithely started knitting Stephen West's Botanic hat. It's a lovely, simple pattern that I have made previously. 

And then I became very aware of the fact that the darker brown yarn was running out awfully quickly... I started to get that familiar sinking feeling that accompanies poor planning.

But disaster was averted in the end: I ended up having a whole 5 inches of yarn left over. That's practically a mile. Made it with yarn to spare! Take that, Murphy's Law! Haha!

Feeling perhaps overly confident and maybe just a little swollen with pride, I cast on yet another project! 

This time it was Alchemy Yarn's Scribble Me Timbers cowl. I'd picked up some (non-Alchermy) yarn of a novelty sort recently on credit... I was feeling untouchable and not even weirdly scratchy-textured yarn could defeat me.

And this is the result: 

I promptly gave this away upon completion and, of course, didn't get a FO picture

You will notice that this looks rather nothing like the sample.

I find myself recalling earlier during the weekend when I noticed I'd made a mistake while casting on Tim's Botanic hat. I sat back with a huge sigh, flicking my work away in disgust. Tim looked over and asked me what was wrong. I moaned: "Why don't I ever read instructions?" Without skipping a beat, he supplied: "Hubris?"

Touché, Tim.

Touché, Murphy's Law.

Let's Talk About Color

For those of you who have seen my Ravelry projects page, you may have come to the conclusion that I am, in fact, completely enthralled by color. In the vein of 'pics or it didn't happen', I present to you the inside of my cedar chest:

Both highly colorful and highly disorganized!

As a little girl, I wore a wide variety of colors (I'm told, though some of that may have been under maternal duress) but as I got a little older, my wardrobe became more and more monochromatic. If I'm completely honest, by the time I hit high school, one could rightly classify the contents of my closet as 'melancholy' and 'drab'. Now, this isn't to say that my clothes weren't nice-- they were! It's just that every piece I owned was, invariably, black or grey. Not even white. Black or grey. I wasn't even inherently adverse to color-- I mean, I quite liked it, I just didn't know what to do with it.

This is no longer the case, fortunately. My stocking/legwarmer/tights collection alone would have sent my high school self into melodramatic conniptions. To give you some idea of the extent of my depravity: last night I went to Target and -wonder of wonders!- the entire stock of opaque-ish tights that are normally $5 each were on clearance for $3.something each. I may have a minor weakness for both clearance items and colorful tights.

Anyway, I picked up three pairs of tights: turquoise, teal, and damask blue. I got home, pleased with my purchase and realized that I already had that exact pair of turquoise tights. Not even a different pair of turquoise tights-- the same. pair. Fortunately, I was able to pawn the still-sealed pair off onto a friend so it was not a complete waste.

The inclusion of color into my wardrobe is something I credit largely to my knitting. Before knitting, it was easy enough to always wear black and grey because, dammit, it always matched. When I started knitting, however, I had absolutely zero interest in black yarn: it was simply too hard to see the stitches, first off, and second-- have you seen a yarn store recently? It's a riot of color! It's so loud and wonderful and even though I was doing a lot of my purchasing in Michaels, there was still so much to look at! The first time I visited my first local yarn shop, I thought I might actually die of chromatic happiness.

One of my first finished objects was a pair of somewhat hideous legwarmers (I still wear and get a disproportionately huge number of compliments on them) made from Lion Brand Homespun in some muted rainbow-ish colorway. At the time, this was the first shock of color my wardrobe had seen for years.

Um, yeah, that's a toe ring.

During the successive years, I've had quite the opposite problem as before: there is, perhaps, too much color in my wardrobe. I've actually had to rein things back a little and try to put a little bit of neutrality back into my knit goods. I've actually had to knit a few grey shawls recently, just to offset the Crayola-bright look my clothes have attained of late.

Mostly, I'm okay with it. Knitting the occasional neutral-colored thing (which reminds me-- I need to make something in navy blue and/or black forthwith) is tolerable in the grand scheme of things as long as it keeps me, generally, in technicolor.