Geez, *another* FO!

Wow, I am totally on a roll... or in a role.. or something. Or maybe on drugs. Nah, caffeine is about all I can handle. Anyway....

I started a pair of worsted weight socks on Wednesday last week, after my beloved brown scarf was done, and I finished those socks last night. Another finished object!!! I am loving this finishing thing. Unfortunately the next project, the laceweight rippley shawl, will take longer to finish, but since it appears to be relatively mindless knitting, maybe it will get done in a timely manner. And now that I have my new One Project at a Time program, I must say... things tend to get done, when you spend time actually knitting on them instead of starting a new project every other day. :)
Here is a picture of the socks:
*woohoo! new socks!*

One thing that always amazes me is how hand-dyed yarn has a mind of its own. Take, for example, my socks. I knit them from one skein of yarn, which you would assume to be pretty much the same from beginning to end. I used the same needles and the same number of stitches to make the second sock identical to the first. I even knit them within a few days of each other, so you would think my tension should have been the same for both socks. But look at how the right sock has tighter stripeyness and the left sock is more relaxed, stripe-wise. (Don't you love my highly technical knitting terms? I just made them up.) Why does that happen? I knew the stripes wouldn't line up exactly the same, and I really am not interested in having two socks be exactly the same, but it just makes me say "Huh", because the two socks came out kinda different and I figured they would be kinda more alike. OH well. Just another knitting mystery. In the next couple of days I will be winding up some handspun laceweight yarn to start my ripple stitch shawl and I will let you know how that goes!

Today at Unique One I have to knit a special order sweater for a customer, one of our lupine sweaters. Maybe you don't know this... I have a great yarn shop here in Camden, but Unique One is also a great sweater shop. I and a few of my home knitters use standard gauge knitting looms to create sweaters that we sell here at the store and online. The lupine sweater is a popular item here, even in the winter, and I am actually completely out of stock of them right now. Thus the need to knit one for the dear customer :) I'll try to take pictures while I knit it so you can see how we make the sweaters here.... maybe someone is interested in that. I know that people wandering through like to watch while I knit the sweaters. Lots of people have never seen a knitting machine in operation. So wish me luck & have a good day knitting whatever you're working on!

:)

[UPDATE] I ended up having somebody else knit the aforementioned lupine sweater.... so the knitting photo journal will have to wait for another time! Sorry!

OMG I finished something!

Well, it had to happen sometime... I actually finished a project. Yup, a UFO became a FO.

Ever since I cleaned up, put away and organized all the knitting crap I had been kicking around downstairs for about a year, I have been on this new stringent knitting regime, whereby I remove NO MORE THAN 2 knitting projects at a time from its prison bin, and do not allow myself to start another new project until one of the existing projects is done. It is actually working pretty well!! I kinda scared myself when I cleaned up and realized that the load of crap I had sitting around in bags "around" my chair filled 5 (yes, F-I-V-E) large Rubbermaid plastic bins. [Not the bathtub sized ones; those are upstairs ... these are the half-bathtub sized ones). So I numbered my bins and wrote down what is in each bin, and I am working my way through them, one (or two) project(s) at a time. I am allowing myself one project of any difficulty level and one project of Knitting-in-Line-at-the-Post-Office difficulty level. Gotta have that walkaround project, ya know? It's like having a security blanket. But with needles.

So anyway, back to my victory dance.... mid-November, I suddenly had a strange and urgent desire to knit a fine-gauge dark brown scarf, long enough to wrap a couple times around my neck or possibly strangle an unknowing terrorist, if the need arose. This was strange because I actually really do NOT like brown, I tend to avoid it, despite it being the color of chocolate. So that was weird, but I grabbed 4 skeins of Dale of Norway's Baby Ull in a luscious dark brown and cast on 70 sts on size 4 needles and proceeded to k2, p2 forever. I loved it. I knit and knit and knit, night after night... loving every minute of it... not straying from my one project, until lo and behold, suddenly it was done! Geez, it really does work... if you keep knitting on something, it becomes "finished". Wow. So I wove in the ends and wore it out in this freaking nasty storm that manifested itself... personally, I am blaming Canada for it. I closed the store at 3 today. It was nasty out there. Here's a picture of my finished scarf, modeled on a truly lovely Unique One sweater; also there is a picture of my scarf in action, on me... after I fought my way through the blizzard to get into the store this morning. BTW it is very difficult to take a picture of yourself in a mirror without getting the camera in on the act. So oh well:

Meanwhile, back at the rocking chair, I already started my next One Project, a pair of worsted weight socks in a hand-dyed lovely yarn from some farm in Maine... I will have to get back to you on the name of the place. It is lovely wool yarn, which has nylon in it. It looks handspun, but isnt; but it is hand-dyed. I got it at this year's Fiber Frolic. I have one sock done and the second one is already half done:

Since I appear to be zooming through this second project, I have already been shopping in Blue Plastic Bin Yarn Mart #5 for my next project, and I chose to use some handspun laceweight yarn that I have been hanging onto for I swear, about 8 years. This was amazing yarn and we used to sell it when I could get it. A wonderful man from Rhode Island, whose name I unfortunately do not recall, had some amazing supernatural powers of spinning, and he used to spin this *2-PLY* lace weight yarn from Shetland sheep that were raised right here, in Lincolnville or Northport, I believe. It is amazing... it still makes me shiver to think that anyone could spin like that. I am finally going to use the 3 skeins of white and 1 skein of brown to make a ripple-stitch shawl. This yarn is one of those yarns (we all have them) that we hold onto and never use because it is "too nice" to use. You know you have that yarn in your stash, admit it. Maybe it is cashmere or handspun or yarn made from a pet dog you used to have... or maybe it is just the most luscious, amazing yarn you have ever seen in your life, and you are in such utter AWE of it, that you can't possibly use it because, after all, NO project could ever do it justice. Right? Right? Yeah... well I got over it. I have this impossibly amazing yarn that has been (sometimes literally) kicking around in my yarn stash for okay, maybe it's been 10 years. And dammit, it is time to knit something with it!!! Wooo hooo! I feel such a sense of freedom, of adventure, of fear that is is going to take 20 years to wind this stuff into a ball....
Pictures below.... please note that I am showing the close-up shot as well as the not close-up shot of the yarn on a background of my recently finished Baby Ull scarf. Yes... Baby Ull... and just look how fat and chunky the Baby Ull looks compared to this *2-PLY* handspun laceweight. Sigh.. I bow before this spinner's abilities... :

If anyone knows/remembers this amazing spinner's name, please leave it in the Comments... I would love to recover that bit of info so I can give him appropriate credit!

Happy knitting, & try not to hurt yourself :)

I'm in :)

Wooohooo! I got into Ravelry! Yay! My username there is "unique1". I wanted to have "yarndemon" but somebody already had it. I wonder if she ever gets mistaken for me? heh heh. Poor thing.

Unfortunately I might not have time to actually *put* anything there until this weekend :( But it will be another fabulous time-waster of the internet kind, for a while, anyway!! I filled out my profile, or at least I thought I did, but for some reason it didn't take. I guess that is why it is still beta, eh? Oh well. I will re-do it later. I also put in my first project listing, but somehow managed to make it an "Ugh!" project, when in fact it is actually a fabulous, beautiful (to me) project, so I deleted it and I will start over. See? Already wasting time. [face-slapping mode ON]

Have a great day .... ;)