sweetgeorgia

I suck at knitting along.

It’s September 30th and tomorrow my fellow “Knitting on the Road” knitalong-ers will be moving on to the next set of socks, “Conwy”. Me? I’m missing the boat. Here I am at the toe of the first “Friday Harbour” sock:

I even started right on the first day of the KAL, August 1st, and can’t believe it’s been two months and this is as far as I’ve gotten on this sock. Shameful.

These “time management” issues have been on my mind for some time, but I was confronted with them a couple days ago when Roxanne posted a comment asking “How do you find time for everything?” And the answer is, I really really don’t.

I try to spin a bit every evening; I knit in the car on the way to work and back, at lunch and when I get together on weekends with friends; I dye on free Saturdays and update the shop on Mondays; and I work all week at my design business. But all the to-dos from work, home, craft, etc. pile up — the unfinished knit projects, the unspun wool, the undyed wool — it gets overwhelming. The only thing I can do is work on a little at a time and whittle away at it.

So, here’s the plan. There are a couple things I need to finish off: the Electra vest, the Trellis baby cardi, the Harry Potter scarf, and these socks! I’m going to frog the pink mohair mess that was a “Hollywood Knits” sweater and re-knit it (eventually) with my own pattern. And Lucky? Well that will be on hold until springtime.

Then, I can work on my lovely fairisle cardigan (ala Meg Swansen), start Na Craga for the DH, and possibly Rogue for me. I thought about setting up some rules for myself. Something like:

>Maximum number of allowed projects at any one time: >* One sweater for me >* One sweater/big project for gifting >* One lace shawl for me >* Two pairs of socks

Hmm, I might still use that as a general guideline. But all I can say is, do a little bit everyday…

For naughty people who want to spin at work

Heh heh, here is the little spindle I made at work.

To make one, you’ll need:

• 1 free pencil from big name paper company
• 1 free cheese-shaped eraser from Babybel bag of round red cheeses
• some yarn to use as a leader (I stole some from my fairisle vest — that’s Rowan Felted Tweed! ooh, fancy!)
• 1 elastic band to hold the leader to the pencil.

I couldn’t actually get the tip of the pencil all the way through the eraser, but no matter, just as long as it doesn’t fall off! I could have probably used a paper clip as a hook and attached it to the pencil eraser, but I was in a bit of a panic (needing to spin that fibre that arrived from the postman) and didn’t think of it.

Enjoy your clandestine office spinning!

Knitting on the Road

Like many people, I’ve had Nancy Bush’s book, “Knitting on the Road” for a while and have not yet knit anything out of it. So the new KOTR knit-along is a great motivator. It will be an ongoing KAL where we knit a pair of socks every two months using a pattern from the book. Last week, we voted on which sock to knit and “Friday Harbour” came up as the final decision. Here’s my start:

I’m using some yarn that I dyed in a crockpot with washfast acid dyes. Being “Friday Harbour”, I was going for a kind of watery theme. Ah well, it’s an excuse to knit up some stashed yarn. Besides, it seems incredibly difficult to find the recommended Mountain Colors Weavers Wool in Vancouver.

Rather than use DPNs, I’m using my Addi circs (3mm) for magic loop again. I just put stitches from needles 1 and 3 on one side of the loop and the stitches from needle 2 on the other side of the loop. The chart has so far been easy to follow and it’s working itself pretty quickly — it’s only 49 stitches around now.

Oh, and here is another sock I knit on Friday: my first toe-up, short-row heel sock in my very own handspun!

I chose a skein of the craziest, most barber-poled handspun and used Wendy’s Generic Toe-Up Sock pattern for this. It’s all 30g of yarn knit up. I used a sewn Tubular 1×1 cast off for this (see Katherine Buss’ Big Book of Knitting — it’s fabulous)… but mainly because when I first cast off normally, I couldn’t get the sock on my foot!