Ravelympics

I’ve seen the hubbub several times on Ravelry in previous years, but I’ve never really caught the bug, I probably didn’t quite see the appeal. I think there are two goals to the Ravelympics: challenge yourself, and make new friends. And not to boast, but I think I do a pretty good job of challenging myself on a regular basis, knitting-wise at least. Something I don’t do so well is socialize, I’ve never really taken advantage of the community side of Ravelry.

Now that I’ve been making it a near-weekly habit of sitting at Looped and just having a chat with the people who stop by, I’ve found it addicting. Some nights we’ll only talk about knitting, some nights about politics (it is DC), or our personal lives, and sometimes we’ll all just quietly sit there and knit, enjoying the atmosphere (and the yarn fumes). I’ve met so many amazing people. Just last night I discovered that a woman I’ve seen several times at Looped used to be the president of the EPA. She’s worked with the Obama administration, and now works at a company she created with Madeleine Albright. And she’s been on Colbert! It’s rather bizarre to have been interacting with someone so prominent without knowing it, but I don’t worry about making a fool of myself, because we’re both lovers of yarn, she just happens to know a lot more about the environment than I do.

The whole point of that was to say that you never know who you’ll meet through knitting. Knitting being what it is, it tends to draw in passionate and creative people. The type of people that created the Ravelympics. I’m planning to join Team Wandering Wool and hopefully start and finish a lace shawl during the time of the Olympics. As I’ll be moving cities during that time, I might just keep it at that. But if my pair-of-socks-a-month is anything to go by, I’m always up for a challenge!

Have you thought about doing the Ravelympics this year?

Happy Knitting!

Super Fast

I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should knit only baby stuff from now on, because finishing an entire sweater in a single weekend is kind of addicting. Or maybe I should just trade in all of my fingering weight yarn for worsted. Boy does worsted knit up quickly. I was originally going to do a rather plain sweater with my Dream in Color Classy, but I switched at the last minute to this adorable cabled vest.

It was really fun to knit up, and would have been even faster with nicer needles. I’m starting to realize that I don’t have any nice needles above size 4, either circular or double pointed. I suppose that that’s telling of the type of knitting I like to do. The other sweater I started is just a simple garter stitch kimono sweater, which I decided to spice up with a bit of blue on all of the edges.

On Saturday I dragged Ty to the Wandering Wool trunk show at Looped where every single skein of yarn that Joelle brought was simply gorgeous and I might have bought one of every color if I hadn’t been supervised. The April socks, in her Rock Creek Sock are about as far along as they were a few weeks ago. Ty politely reminded me, while we were perusing more Rock Creek Sock, that they might be late April socks if I continued at my current pace. With the first of the baby sweaters done I’m now devoting all of my knitting time to the socks. I don’t want to fall behind only a third of the way through the year. So I’ve taken the drastic measure of only carrying the April socks in my bag. Normally I have two or three projects, rarely only one. We’ll see if I can get the first one done before Ty leaves tomorrow.

Have I distracted you sufficiently with shiny new projects to not ask about my cardigan? Good.

Happy Knitting!

Verdict: Guilty as Charged

As soon as I walked into Looped on Saturday, Susan, Janie and Ann all looked at the back of my cardigan and saw the problem immediately. Huge blocks of color that don’t match. They agreed that I would have to frog the entire piece and start over, alternating skeins from the very beginning. Now you might think that I was upset that they told me this, but honestly, I was relieved. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to wear something so horribly mismatched, and having other people agree with me made me feel a little less crazy. As I told Ty when I got home, he said that he would never be able to give me an answer that would cause me pain, even if it was the answer I wanted. This is to be expected from someone who loves me more than life itself (or so I assume). Good thing I have fellow knitters to support my masochistic insanity.

I finished one of the cardigan fronts last night, and soon found yet another way to procrastinate frogging all of my hard work – Ashley’s hat. It was her birthday yesterday, and we’re going out to celebrate on Saturday, so that’s my deadline. After the monstrosity that was created when I wet blocked the hat the first time, I actually made and wet blocked a little swatch.

And I even measured four full inches. I’m pretty sure that the ratios for the hat were fine, so I shouldn’t need a row gauge as well. But I’m sure I’ll be kicking myself soon when something else goes horribly wrong. Because this yarn has already been wet blocked, I’m certain that it won’t grow as much this time, but I didn’t measure my swatch before I got it wet, just after. Hopefully this hat wont fail me again and I’ll be rid of it for good on Saturday. It’s been haunting me for long enough.

Happy knitting!

Stash enhancement

A week or so ago I had decided that this Tuesday would be the day to use my 15% off at Looped. It had (impatiently) been waiting for me since perhaps December. I’m still not sure how I managed to wait that long before using it, except for my excuses of needing to buy enough yarn to be worth it, and the inability to combine it with sales. So Tuesday was the day and I had a short list of projects in mind: baby sweaters, socks, and a sweater for me. Socks were by far the easiest, because I had been eyeing a beautiful orange in the Wandering Wool for weeks. The ‘local yarn section’ of Looped is conveniently kept directly across from where I normally sit, meaning that I cann’t help but stare at the gorgeous colors. The baby sweaters, for a coworker who’s due in June, were also not too bad. I knew I wanted a green and a brown in fingering weight. So I picked two out and that was that. Except then I realized that one of the patterns I had printed out called for aran weight, not fingering. So a quick look at the Dream in Color Classy and I had it down to a brown and a gorgeous red. Kate agreed with me that the red was better. Through my search for baby yarn Ann repeatedly tried to convince me to get all sorts of pretty blues. It’s something I’ve been stubborn about lately, that strange gender color segregation: blue for boys and pick for girls. It seems entirely unnecessary to label children by color, and really, there are so many other colors that deserve just as much attention. And I never liked pink all that much anyway, or pastels for that matter.

Sweater yarn. Oh sweater yarn. It seems that you have decided that I am unworthy, or perhaps just that I need to come back again and buy more yarn from Looped. I spent about twenty minutes wandering around grabbing skeins of worsted in ‘warm’ colors (I’ve decided that I have too much teal) and at one point Susan (one of the lovely owners) asked me if I needed help, or if I was just going to stand there holding mismatched skeins for a while, which is apparently just fine by her. Eventually I decided that, based on color and wanting a plied yarn, Cascade 220 was in fact what I wanted, in the beautiful orange heather. Now, I let my pile of yarn sit there for a while and continued to wander around the store. I happened to wander a little too close to the Tosh Sport, and fell in love with the Candlewick. Now I was worried. Did the 15% off do enough to cover two sweater quantities of yarn, plus my odds and ends? I decided that it wouldn’t, at least not to my satisfaction. I then realized that there possibly was not enough of my Cascade 220 on the shelf. Well, off to Susan I went to see if they had more. Nope. No more in the back and not enough on the shelf to make a cabled sweater. Thank goodness for Candlewick. The intense yellows that had called to me mere moments before were now my saving grace. I grabbed up five hanks of the Candlewick, and my various other yarn, leaving the Cascade for another day, and made my purchase minutes before closing time.

And what happened then? Susan handed me the brand new 15% off that I had just earned with my purchase.

Happy Knitting!

Oh, Hello there

I’ve been rather absent over the last week I suppose. And unfortunately the next few weeks will be more of the same. I’ve hardly had much time to even knit! Graduate school interviews are an amazing and exhausting experience.

So I’ll just leave you with this until next time.

Looped Yarn Works and The Phillips Collection yarn bomb Dupont for Valentine’s Day

Happy Valentine’s Day!