My dilemma

Or, how do I clear up some of the WIPs before starting something new?

I am in the throes of extreme startitis. Or maybe it's just excessive lack of inspiration to finish my current projects. Of which there are many. There's my woefully neglected Ravelympics project from last summer. There's a winter vest that is waiting for some serious extension/grafting work that I'm ignoring. There's the never ending SYB. I've got an Aleita Vest fail in need of remedying before the fall so I can actually use it. And Boo's Haiku - the poor kid has watched her sister get handknits all summer with no payback. Where's the justice in that?

And yet I don't want to work on any of these. I've got a Cookie A bug, and Carroll is waiting for me to get going on Glynis in our knitalong. My recent handspun is crying out to be knit into a shawl for someone who could really use a warm hug now. And I spent one long evening last week not watching "Dollhouse" and fiddling with Ironman's colored pencils, some graph paper, and a huge pile of Palette in an attempt to come up with a good color combo for this. I'm doomed!

I think the only thing I can do is require that I finish something old before I start something new. I desperately want to knit on Glynis and Aestlight while we're back in the states next week, so I guess that means to finish two items. First up Haiku, and then...I guess the Estes vest is next easiest. It's almost done, but the thought of grafting together an entire vest's worth of cables is giving me heartburn.

Do you think it will be enough if the knitting is done? They don't have to be totally finished, do they?

Damn...

What I did on my Hurrication

I was home all last week due to Hurricane Ike, and managed to fit in a bit of knitting between kid wrangling, cleaning up the yard, getting poison ivy and making toast over the gas burners on my stove when we didn’t have power.

I now have the completed pieces of the Estes vest (Rav link), ready to be assembled. This has been a really fun knit - I used some worsted weight yarn I got from Carroll in our Knit Night destash a couple of months ago and doubled it to get gauge. I did the fronts first because I wanted to do some adjusting of the pattern. The vest as pictured in the magazine was pretty short, so I wanted to add some length to it, and I had read on Ravelry that the pockets as written were very small, so I wanted to make the pocket openings a bit bigger. Both problems were solved by starting the pocket openings as directed in the pattern but knitting another half repeat before starting the waist shaping.

And again, another example of the joys of blocking. The pattern calls for steaming the pieces, but I wet blocked, and I’m very happy with how it came out. Before blocking the texture was a bit too exaggerated. Now it’s just right, and look at the difference it made in the size of the front! I was a bit concerned that the whole thing was going to be way too small, but it came out just right. Trust the swatch Porpoise, trust the swatch.

It’s been a long time (read: more then 15 years!) since I’ve done any serious cable work, and I’d forgotten how fun it is. Plus with bulky weight yarn and no sleeves, it goes really quickly! I finished one front piece in a day before the hurricane (mental health day where I stayed home in front of Buffy with my yarn - bliss), and got the other front and the back done over the course of the last week in the evenings. Now I’m itching to get to some other cabling work, and I have grand designs on a couple of child sized Aran sweaters. I only used 6 of the 10 skeins of this yarn so maybe there’s enough for a sweater for one of the kiddos.

The last week has also been a great source of stash enhancement for Ironman. I think I’ve mentioned before that he does woodworking. Well, my mother-in-law, Mermaid, arrived last Monday in time to enable him in a major way. She is a wood sculpture by profession, and the two of them have spent the last week driving around scoping out the brush piles on everybody’s curbs and swiping interesting wood. they dropped me off at work one morning last week to take care of some cells, and drove through the Museum District, a very tony part of town, and came to pick me up with several very large logs strapped to the roof of the car. Apparently folks were very entertained by the sight of two people pulling wood off of the streets and taking it away with them. In any event, the final touch on this vest will be handmade toggles from either Crepe Myrtle or “Ike wood” (an as yet unidentified hardwood that looks maybe like some kind of nut tree but we haven’t been able to figure out what it is yet). One light, one dark - any suggestions?

Old friends

My parents are embarking on a major construction project at their place in Maine, so my mother has been going to town on the piles of Extremely Important Crap that my brother and I have been storing under their roof. She came across an old trunk of mine with a lock on it. Once we had determined that I had no clue as to the whereabouts of the key to said lock, we decided she had free rein to cut off the lock and see what was inside. Of course she promptly went back to Boston and found the key, so hacksaws were not called in to salvage the situation.

Inside the trunk she found these:

I knit these two sweaters almost twenty years ago when I was in college (and the fact that parts of college were almost twenty years ago totally gives me the heebie jeebies). The one on the top is a guernsey (I'm 95% sure it's Penny Straker's Staithes Gansey - Rav link). The yarn is some gorgeous tweedy teal worsted weight that we bought at the Blue Hill Fair one summer when I was in college and I went back to school and knit it up.

The bottom sweater is my first Aran, from a Candide pattern that I bought in 1991, if I remember correctly. Anyway, a long time ago. It's huge - probable 50 inches across in the chest, and I wore it as a winter jacket through most of college. Which, given that I went to college in western MA, belies the intelligence that presumably got me in to said school, but what can you do.

I have been wondering where these two sweaters were hiding for quite a while now. I don't think I've seen them since I finished grad school in 2000, and they are in remarkably good condition for having been stuffed in a trunk and stuck in a barn for 8 years. I certainly don't have any reason to wear them right now, but I'm glad I have them back. In fact, they've inspired me to start a new cable project.

I can't justify wool sweaters for Houston "winters", but a wool vest? That I can definitely get behind.