Get out your old Weezer albums!

Greetings at the start of Winter Storm "My Name Is" Jonas!  It's blustery outside, and the city has decided to shut down.  What does that mean?  Well, it means I got to leave the office at 2pm today!  YAYYYYYY!


via GIPHY

I decided to spend my newfound free time providing a quick update on the blog, since I missed this past weekend.  I had a very good reason for missing this weekend - tasty homemade dinner with some friends, and then a rousing game of PANDEMIC.  It's a game where the whole point is to work together to save the world!  HOW AWESOME IS THAT?  We unfortunately didn't succeed, but next time... we got this.

In actual knitting news, the hat has been mailed to my dad, so here's hoping he receives it soon!  I lost the receipt, so I hope it doesn't get lost in the mail!

I went to Fibre Space in Alexandria last week as well, because they said they had Sweet Georgia yarn.  Lo and behold, they did!  And I bought a lot:

Well I mostly just bought a lot per my usual standard.  This is for my mom's shawl, and since I'm not sure what exactly I am making yet, I decided to err on the side of caution.  And it's pretty, so I'll find other uses for whatever is leftover.  And yes, I did wind that one cake with the winder dad made me.  Worked just as well the second time!

I enjoyed walking through Fibre Space.  It's much roomier than Looped Yarn Works (but LYW is in Dupont and an old townhome and has the same amount of variety, so you can't really fault the size).  I looked at the samples they had there, looked at the difference between fingering and lace, and decided to stick with fingering.  I may end up selecting a lace weight pattern, but I wanted to knit something a little bit heavier.  I hope she likes the color... she wanted more of a navy, but I didn't see anything I liked, so I went with a more modern blue-grey.  But the yarn is super smooshy and I love it!

I also have decided I want to learn how to knit Continental, because I am working on a double knit dishcloth, and it is taking FOREVER.  It takes almost 10 minutes to do one row!  And it's only 60 stitches!  So I'm hoping learning Continental will help the speed factor.  Maybe it will also just help the general gracefulness of my left hand.  It's pretty clunky.

Alright, I think today is a short post.  Will write more later, as I am snowed in this weekend.  

Jyoti

Happy New Year!

Hello Friends!

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season with friends, family and tasty tasty noms!  Just wanted to send a quick update for now, but my New Year's Resolution is at least 2 posts a month!  Let's hope it happens this time!  Sigh.  There needs to be some sort of repercussion if I don't actually do it, but I'm not sure where that would actually come from.  Or maybe I only get to bake chocolate chip cookies if I actually do my two posts.  We'll see!

Speaking of baking, I baked an apple crumble for our New Year's Eve party!  I got the book How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman and used the recipes in there.  It's a great book, I am so excited about it!  We also made the quick-cook bok choy on another day - FANTASTIC.

This was our appetizer spread, with hand-tagged cheeses

Apple crumble/streusel tastiness!

Over the holiday, I went home to H-town.  I was attempting to knit a hat for my dad for Christmas.  However, as I had the sneaky suspicion his head is way bigger than mine, I had only completed the brim by the time I got home.  Which was lucky, because his head is a full 1.5" bigger in circumference than mine!  As you can imagine, in a 4-day trip with lots of time out of the house with friends and beer, I didn't quite finish the hat.  It currently looks like this:

It is Tin Can Knits Gather hat, which they had offered for free over their "12 Days of Christmas" giveaway!  This pattern is well-written and easy to follow, plus it doesn't require so much focus that I can't watch the X-files while knitting it!  Success!

Another awesome thing about going home - there's a garage, with tools.  AND an old man who likes tinkering around with said tools.  Meet my new yarn swift:

The yarn swift is made out of 1/2" PVC pipe (left over from my sister's project), 2x4 lumber (from somewhere in the garage), a fan motor that my dad had at his old deli, carriage bolts as pegs, with wingnuts for securing in place.  The arms can be taken off and stored separately from the box below.  All we spent was $7 for the new bolts and nuts.  It's pretty sweet.  Runs really smooth and gives my boyfriend a reprieve from holding the yarn while I wind.

Alright, that's all for my quick update.  Next time, I hope to have some swatches completed for another project!

J

The Christmas Aftermath

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas full of family and friends! I just got back from my vacation home, and I had a great time!  The gifts I gave were well received, those bought, those computer designed, and those knitted!  However, I need to work on my graphics for my knitting!  It wasn't clear enough that the card came with the gift, and that it indicated a hand-knit.  I've brought home some light cotton/linen cloth to try and make actual tags for my knits, I'll have to see what I can come up with!

The rest of my time at home was fabulous - I got to hang out with my good friends, try out a bunch of new bars, and eat some tasty home-cooked meals!  I also got to try my hand (again) at screen printing.  We did the easy way this time - no burning the image onto the screen, just using plastic sheet stencils.  Check out my bibs!

Butterflies!

Flowers!

My screen printing partner - not as useful as you would think!

I need to work on my screen print photography - those are terrible, eep.

ALSO - I did, in fact, FINALLY finish the Simplicity Cowl!  Drumroll please:

TA-DA!  Looks good, don't it?

Completed before I even made it home!  OH YEAH.  I think it looks pretty snazzy, here's hoping it gets good use!  

The fingerless mitts however, were not completed without a mad knitting session at the airport, on the airplane, and at 11pm on Christmas Eve.  But they were done before Christmas, and that's all that matters!  I did not take a photo, however, because I am a genius.  Oops.  I'll have to ask the sister for that as well.  She and her husband both liked them, I'll see what I can do for him.  It'll probably be next Christmas.  I'm not really what anyone would call, "Speedy".

In other hometown adventures, I took the parents to the Science Museum (since I bought them a membership last year and all).  I think this is some amazing wayfinding signage:

It's really well-balanced and instructional!  You can see the passage of time and the variety of the species on the planet, and it's a pretty graphic!  I love it!

While at the museum, we saw some re-created panels from the Lascaux Caves:

The Panel of the Great Black Cow, in the Nave of the caves

The newly renovated Hall of Egyptology:

This gave me some color ideas - should I ever start doing something colorful!

And some gems.  Lots and lots of shiny gems.  It was a little overwhelming, those gems.  I'm not as much of a fan as I feel I should be.  Oh well.  It was a good time anyway, and the parents got out of the house!

How was everyone else's Christmas?  Any awesome adventures or gifts?  Amazing food perhaps?  hmmm, food.....  :)

I'm going to coordinate my thoughts for my New Year's post and get that up as soon as possible.  Until then, I leave you with Glitter Dancer and Friends:

Meet Stompy the Parapalegic Trike, Glitter Dancer, and as-yet-unnamed Mr Fox.  They only came together this year to form my supporting crew.  :)

Have a great night!

Eek! Almost Christmas!!

I was just re-reading my last post...I had almost forgotten about the snow!  This weekend it has been 70 degrees, because, you know, Christmas.  It's been a little peculiar to say the least (plus very difficult trying to get dressed. T-shirt? Jacket? Shorts? WHAT DO I DOOOOO? Haha.)

In knitting news, I had a whole post written out last week in my notebook, talking about my progress on the fingerless mitts,

Took me 8 hours to get this far, while watching Good Eats, Carl Sagan's Cosmos (which I can no longer find), and Doctor Who's Spearhead from Space.  Imagine what would happen if I just worked without distraction???

The gifts I needed to finish,

Bike Helmet Ear Warmers for the BF

Christmas tree pin for a friend

And some other random things, but look!  They're all done now (and I totally forgot to post it. whomp whomp)!  The bike helmet ear warmers were very well received, but we discussed adding a button to each to actually keep them in the correct location.  They're a little dorky, but no dorkier than wearing a hat underneath your helmet (and way more comfy!).  The Christmas tree pin will be given tomorrow, I think she'll totally dig it, but I'll let you know how it goes!  I also made some cute tags/business cards for each gift, using the sheep photo from Iceland.  It needs a little work, but a good start!  I can't wait to make more!  :-) 

The fingerless mitts are still just "mitt", and remember that Simplicity Cowl?  Yea, still haven't seamed that up.  At least I wove in the ends where I broke the yarn and had to do some joining.  But not yet seamed.  I didn't know about the provisional cast-on when I started, so that cowl will definitely not be as cool as it should be.  Almost totally awesome, but not quite.

Alright, 2 more nights til I fly home, need to make my fingers fly through the yarn!  Happy knitting!  Have a great Christmas!

PS - haha, I was reading my posts from the beginning.  I made absolutely NOTHING on my original Christmas gift list!  They say if you post your goals, or at least announce them to others, you're more likely to stick to them.... bwahahahahaha.  Not true.  All lies.  Hahaha.  But everyone gets something anyway.  Except for my mom.  She gets a ball of yarn and a pattern.  The she can tell me, "no, I don't like that, make me this instead".  I feel that's a much more appropriate use of my knitting time (plus it's been very difficult thinking of something she'd really like.)  Ok, off i go!