yarn

There, dammit, I'm a knitter again.

['Project closeup: "wisp" variant']

Blame our visit to Catherine and Jeff in Illinois recently; I knew I had gorgeous yarn stashed away, and I knew I needed to just dive back in and get started, but it took seeing her lace knitting left casually out on the table that made me say "*@($*(&! I know how to do that."

Bit the bullet, set up a ravelry.com account.  (I'm amyqmc there.)

Came home, dug out the stuff, picked a project I knew I was capable of doing — and just did it. Felt much better, too.

Stick by your words, domesticat.

Despite what Matthew will tell you, I’m generally a nice and polite person, especially in public. I let my hair down on this site more than I often do in face-to-face conversations, and every now and then I have to learn to live with the little lump in my throat that comes with speaking my mind.

You never know when you're going to fall in love. Well, I wouldn't so much call it 'love' as I would 'deep and abiding lust.'

Adrienne Vittadini. Cristina. Color #4.

Any knitter who tells you that there is no such thing as 'crack' yarn is a lying sumbitch who is desperately trying to cover up his/her addiction. In this world, there are workaday yarns, yarns you use to construct beautiful but unfussy garments; garments that don't attract a moment's notice. Then there are yarns that, once spotted in a store, never leave your mind, quickly ascending ranks to the level of obsession.

This is a shawl salvaged from a pattern gone desperately, desperately wrong. We’re talking "throw the unfinished project across the room and screech out loud" wrong. I’d started working this yarn in an Irish net stitch, which looks like a large series of interconnected X’s with open areas in between.

Except I was working with yarn that was completely and utterly wrong for that stitch pattern, and I kept losing stitches without realizing it. By the time I’d worked up about nine inches’ worth of shawl, I folded my work over and realized in horror that my knitting was getting smaller with every row.

I knew that I needed a shawl by birthdaybash weekend, and that I was running out of time. I resorted to one of the quickest and easiest openwork patterns known to knitters: k2tog, yarn over, repeat. Luckily, desperation made me knit fast.

“Good morning, this is Yarn Expressions.”“Hi. I think I’ve got the weirdest question you’re going to hear all day. My name’s Amy…”

“Ah, yes. That ball of green yarn you bought yesterday afternoon is sitting here on the counter. You can pick it up at any time.”

“I tore my car apart yesterday after I got home, looking for that yarn.”

“Yeah, you probably wouldn’t have found it in your car… If you hadn’t called by noon we were going to call you.”

“It’s been sort of a long week.”

“We all have those.”

If you missed the explanation of what "Blue Ambition" is, and why I’m knitting it, go back to the entry "Blue Ambition #1: grid up!" and catch up. I have a bit more detail to pass on now.

I took the week of Jeff’s first week in San Francisco off, so that I could concentrate on the dragon*con tech staff work that was piling up, and thus I’m not as far along as I’d like to be. The good news is that I’m halfway through the knitting of the blanket.