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April 24, 2005

Days of Yarn and Roses

We got engaged! It was a foggy night in Portland, ME, but there was sunshine and Stevie Wonder in our hearts!
Click below, you can see the gazebo where it happened, and the temporary rings I crocheted us until our real ones are ready Thursday!

Posted by Betsy at 01:59 AM | Comments (47)

April 18, 2005

un-FOing believable!

These are my dad's Christmas present. No, I haven't been planning ahead. Look at these babies. They are a pair of flapless, modified broadstreets made from Dale Baby Ull. The fingertips are my own design touch, which probably cost me getting them done any time before the end of winter. There were a dizzying amount of ends. Anyway, I was in a foul mood during knitting group due to the getaway we had to cancel because I got a stomach virus. I decided nothing could make it worse, so I wove in a million ends, and voila! Omar is modeling. He has the prettiest hands, and perfect nails and cuticles with no buffing!

I'm chugging away on Crumpets. Here is a shot of the yarn I got on sale at Fabric Place during their April sale, which is 20% off all cotton yarn.
The blue is Cascade Pima Tencel for Crumpets. The purple is Berroco Cotton Twist for the Lace-Trim Bolero from the Spring Vogue Knitting.

Posted by Betsy at 11:09 PM | Comments (2)

April 17, 2005

The Bag Report, part 3

I should have titled these The Bag of Knitting Past, The Bag of Knitting Present, and the Bag of Knitting Future, or something. Part of the reason that I was able to get away with getting enough yarn for two bags for such a dirt cheap price was that we already had three balls of Reynolds Saucy lying around from a bad mishap with web colors and online ordering during Kyoto. For knitting speculators, here's a glimpse of the bag that will be!

Posted by omar at 02:02 PM | Comments (2)

The Bag Report, part 2

The following weekend, a long yarning excursion took us by Fabric Place, where all cotton and cotton blends were on sale. Coincidentally enough, two of the other bags I liked in Folk Bags were both made with a light cotton yarn. I went home thinking, and by the weekend after that, I was convinced I had to go and get some cotton.

I made out pretty good, I think, picking up enough cotton for two projects, plus two sets of cheapy Susan Bates circulars for under forty bucks. The first bag I started was the Tea House Sling Bag. You're supposed to make both straps separately and then knit them together, seaming up the bottom with kitchener or something, so I just cast them both on at once, and took off!

Now I'm in the plain old stockinette portion of the bag, and I've been using it to practice tensioning my yarn. Aren't I so earnest and fresh faced! Anyway, I still knit incredibly tightly when I'm tensioning, but I'm getting the hang of it.

Posted by omar at 01:56 PM | Comments (2)

The Bag Report, part 1

A couple of weeks ago at the yarn swap, seaming, and potluck with our knitting group, I acquired some salvage yarn, and eagerly ran home to to figure out what to do with it. My first thought was the Monk's Satchel Bag from Folk Bags (to be featured in part three), but the yearn was of such a vastly different weight that I felt like it just wouldn't quite turn out right. So I turned my eyes to the Irish Creel, which had a very nifty stitch pattern that you can almost entirely not see here because of all the business in the yarn (click to enlarge):

However, I ended up dropping a stitch in it somewhere, and I have noidea how to salvage such a thing because of the stitch pattern. So we shall speak of it no more.

Posted by omar at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2005

At last

I feel obligated to upload this right away, although as you can tell from my picture I'm feeling less than thrilled. I am not sure I think that this sweater is very flattering, although it turned out much, much better than I would have expected. Hopefully I will take some more modeling shots soon that don't involve me glowering and feeling tired and ugly.
Kyoto, good bye.
I don't know when I'm going to wear this, but here it is.
My compliments to Grumperina for the seaming help.

Posted by Betsy at 12:57 AM | Comments (9)

April 05, 2005

Crumpets Knitalong!

I haven't been in a knitalong since I disbanded the Kyoto knitalong and finished my Kersti gloves.
Now there's a knitalong for the adorable Crumpets pattern from Chiagu.
I'm so there! I already have my yarn, Cascade Pima Tencel in a pale cornflower.
I knit about an inch of the bodice this weekend but ended up ripping it all out. I can't wait to start again.

Posted by Betsy at 08:10 AM | Comments (4)

Even the Score

With Betsy preoccupied with the finishing touches on Kyoto, I have been able to catch up in the afgan square count, bringing us up to four each. (Betsy's is the Easter-themed, pink and yellow one.)

She has started another one, though, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before she's ahead once more.

Posted by omar at 12:41 AM | Comments (0)

Be Wavy This Spring!

Who is that jaunty fellow in the scarf? Why, it's none other than our own Omar with his almost-too-late-to-be-useful wavy scarf! It's made of a soft but still manly shade of mottled brown, in a yarn called Bunny Print, which Omar was telling everyone was by Berocco. He was wrong, though, so avoid that embarrassment by sticking to just the name!

Omar tends to wear his scarf slung jauntily over one shoulder, so as to get maximum coverage over heat-radiating parts.

Omar went to sleep one night with the ends on his scarf still all unkempt and unsightly. When he woke up, he discovered that an elf named Moped had woven them in for him! Imagine his surprise and delight!

Posted by omar at 12:20 AM | Comments (4)

April 03, 2005

R. in Flapper's Hat

Also while we were all merrily a-seaming... (or rather other people were and I was enjoying corn bread and coffee cake) we pulled R. aside so that we could snap a quick snap of the end result of my Flappers hat.

It occurs to me now that you can't see most of the hat now, but getting a child to sit still, pose, and turn, is no mean feat-- especially when you're eating corn bread.

So, for better or for worse, this is the record we have of my gallant hat.

Posted by omar at 01:44 PM | Comments (2)

Hip to Be Square

Hello again, gentle readers. It's not so much that I'm not as prolific a knitter as my beloved (which, I suppose is true), but more that I am an incredibly lazy knitblogger. Usually, if blogging involves more than copying some text from an article and making a wry comment, it gets procrastinated on for days. Or weeks.

Anyway, I figured that I'd post a slightly better view of my little piece of wall hanging heaven. It was the Basket Rib Stitch with one strand of Cascade 220 and one strand of Optik. Here we see the square free of the context of its neighbors. (Click on the image for full size.)

And here we see a close-up of the effect! Stunning!

Posted by omar at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)

Galleries

We've been trying to get a gallery set up for awhile. We weren't sure how to do it, and we're kind of lazy. Omar finally suggested we do it with flickr and have seperate galleries. I just got three sets set up in my gallery.

• My FO Gallery. These are not ALL of my FOs since I started knitting, but only the best!


• My Kyoto Gallery Relive the agony and the ecstacy of this soon-to-be FO!


• My Humble Spinning Gallery

I still need to do the captions for the second two, but they are done for the FO.
I also added a flickr "badge" to our sidebar, so if you load our blog you can see three random projects.

I have more knitting news, but it will have to wait.

Posted by Betsy at 12:04 AM | Comments (1)

April 01, 2005

Bloglines stats PSA

A few people have asked me how to check your number of bloglines subscribers, and then a curious phenomenon was noted. To see your number of bloglines subscribers, subscribe to your own blog or view the feed in someone else's public subscriptions. The number of subscribers should be in the top right corner.
In my bloglines view, it says we have 15 subscribers, down from 20-ish rather recently. But Kathy emailed me to say that when looking at Erin's public subscriptions, it says we have 95! As she would say, Holy Smokes! Then I figured out that we have three feeds.
Omar says there are three different formats of site syndication. Once upon a time when I first started using a feed aggregator, he told me to always subscribe to the atom one, so I did. But for some reason, I didn't when I subscribed to our blog.
So anyway, three types of feed--

• atom.xml - the feed labeled thus is often the best choice, as it most likely contains the whole blog entry, at least in Movable Type.
  
• rss (i.e. index.xml in MT) &
  
• .rdf are more likely to just be the first few lines of an entry
  

So Hail to Thee, Our Public! You are much, much larger than we thought! *roses and blown kisses*

Lesson: if you have more than one feed, do some math.

Posted by Betsy at 01:42 AM | Comments (4)

Look Ma, No hole!

Tonight we stopped by Circles for a "drop-in knitting clinic" visit to see about the hole. In 20 minutes or so, it was fixed. Still no official diagnosis on what happened. It was where I joined a new skein where I generally overlap the yarns. But somehow there was an extra loop along with two ends that Allison used to darn up the hole.

So here she is, in all her unfinished glory, with a surprise!

What's that? A thought I had some months ago: silk ribbon embrodiery. It was super easy to make these flowers, and I like to fool myself that they look professional. :) I'm not sure how secure they are, I think I will tack down the ends with matching thread. I plan to seam the sash with thread, not yarn. The next challenge: truth be told, the sash looks to be about 2.5-3 inches narrower than the top. I'll see what can be done with blocking. No matter what, the hard part is over.

Posted by Betsy at 12:21 AM | Comments (7)