Yarn Brand Idea

Jennifer has decided to collect photos of Unfortunate House Colors, and has even dedicated an imaginary line of yarn to this theme. Yesterday, she designed this lovely ad:
I'm so proud!

Sock Karma

I probably should not have congratulated myself on how well those socks fit Jennifer yesterday. Why? After four hours of intensive knitting last night, I accomplished THIS:

Not only is it very blurry, but it is not very much knitting. I started this sock toe over - and I am not lying, exaggerating or pathologically embellishing - SEVENTEEN times. Why, you ask? Corners.

Okay, see how, with this toe-up sock, there are little corners sticking up where it was first cast on?
With the yarn I used for these socks, the yarn is kind of thin and light and pliable, so those little corners are only visually annoying and hopefully do not cause discomfort to Jennifer's little toes. However, the sock yarn I'm using now is thicker and those corners - which were HUGE in my first few casting on attempts - would feel like hard knots under the toes. Just thinking about those corners poking around in my shoes gives me the shudders. Oh, and also, the WHOLE FREAKING POINT of hand knit socks is that they are super comfy in the toes because they don't have seams, as opposed to manufactured socks.

I thought that maybe the corners were showing up because I was an inexperienced toe-up knitter, so I just tried redoing it until the corners went away. No dice. Then I remembered there is this thing called the Internet, so I used it to look up other people's toe-up socks. Unless the yarn was super fuzzy and forgiving, those socks had corners, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any solutions or even other people freaking out about sock corners on the internet, so I tried idea after idea after idea to make the corners go away, hence the seventeen tries.

Trying seventeen times didn't bother me, really. What DOES make me a little twitchy is that it took me four hours and seventeen grueling trial-and-error attempts to arrive at this solution: Pick up a couple of stitches on the edges of the cast on.

Well, duh.

I'd like to make a special apology to my mom, who called me when I was on about the 14th try. Mom, those were very naughty, impolite words and I should not have said them. You are NOT allowed to repeat them, especially in public or at the restaurant we are going to tonight.

One good turn deserves another.

Shocking news here, but I have ACTUALLY FINISHED SOMETHING. Here we have the completed Tofutsies socks, at home on Jennifer's feet.
It is a testament to Jennifer's enduring devotion to me that she (1) took off her shoes, (2) changed her socks and (3) threw her feet up on her desk and TOOK A PICTURE for me, in the middle of our crowded office without a care in the world that executive passersby might think she was crazy. Don't mind me, I'm just taking pictures of my feet here.

Jennifer asked me what pattern I used, and the short answer is, I didn't. The long answer is that I borrowed bits and pieces of various sock instructions that I, after many failed sock attempts, have tested and found to my liking. I used a toe-up sock cast-on from Knitty.com and the hourglass heel from The Twisted Sisters Sock workbook (which is a short row heel, using yarn overs instead of wraps), and increased gradually up the leg to match the normal human anatomy of the leg, because the yarn wasn't super stretchy and I didn't want the socks to roll down annoyingly. (Hopefully they are still not rolling down. I think Jennifer is starting to think I'm a little weird because I keep asking her every 15 minutes how the socks are doing.)

Apparently most people are supposed to have legs that are exactly the same circumference from ankle to thigh. I have not seen such a person yet, but I'm certain from knitting patterns and the manufactured socks that I am wearing now that this is what is expected of us. Yet, my socks are bunched around my ankles because they cannot be stretched out enough to be pulled up any higher on my legs. I realize that I have a lot of leg there, but for heaven's sake, I can't be the only one.

VALIDATION: This just in from Jennifer: "By increasing up the leg you allowed space for my fat rings around my ankles (in other words, after wearing them I'm not showing sock indention)."

Excellent!

Awwwwwww yeeeeah!

I didn't finish anything this weekend as I'd promised myself, but I'm really really close to finishing my Tofutsies socks. It's a good thing, too. Know why? Jennifer went out of town this week, and she got me a present.

That's right. Jennifer got me Koigu.
Awwwwwwww yeeeeeeeah.

In other news, my mom got a new computer, so we spent Friday night and Saturday turning my old bedroom into a nice computer/knitting/sitting den for her. We're not totally done, but we're close - ready to scrub the room down and decorate it all pretty for her. It's been a struggle for her because when she got the house from my grandfather, she had to move our stuff in on top of two previous generations of stuff and keeping all of it tidy is pretty overwhelming (read: impossible). But, we're going to make some progress on it this spring. We should have taken before-and-after pictures of the room!

The Thing Is...

...when you're working on an Epic project, there aren't many new and exciting things to report. For example, I completed two new skeins of Blugy this weekend.

But, see, this Blugly looks the same as the last Blugly, so not very exciting. So I tried spinning some ME2, to see if THAT was more exciting:

But that looks the same as the last ME2, so, again, not exciting. I'm going to have to finish something soon, so I can begin a fascinating new project. That will be my goal for this week: Finish Something. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, last week Jennifer left an Easter basket on my desk and told me I HAD to take it home and share the goodies with Dug, and in an uncharacteristic act of selfless sharing, I obeyed. After devouring the goodies, I was going to ask her if she wanted her cute little basket back, but then I discovered that it is EXACTLY the right size to hold KoolAid packets:

See? How perfect is that? So I'm going to use it to hold my fiber dyeing stuff. Yay! (Thanks, Jennifer! Sorry if you wanted your basket back because I am totally keeping it now!)

Now, to distract everyone from noticing that I have very little to say, here is an exhibit of Mickie and Angus trying to smoosh as much of their surface area together as possible:

Cheer up, Jennifer.

My friend Jennifer has informed me that she now understands why her parents kept chickens while she was growing up. With a flash of wisdom, insight and empathy, she has concluded that when a house full of three pms-ing, teenaged girls got too much for her father, he could just go outside and snap the head off a chicken. Sounds like my dear friend is about to go off the deep end. I guess matters have only been made worse by my taking a couple of vacation days from work, because I haven't been there to talk her off the ledge. I hope I'm not the straw that broke the camel's back...or in this case, the absence that wrung the chicken's neck. I'd be devastated if she went on a chicken-wringing rampage just because I wasn't there to soothe her nerves, so people: keep your poultry inside tonight.

In other sad news, my friend Maxim has departed Kansas City after trying to single-handedly rebuild my house from the ground up in less than two weeks. He's a madman. I'm not sure if I'm appreciative or frightened.

I didn't get much done while he was here because he kept making me fix things. (We did YARD WORK yesterday. Who does that? It's crazy. Crazy, I tell you.) HOWEVER, I maybe got a wee bit of knitting started on my Blugly sweater:

This is all of the shoulders, down to where the arms are set aside and the body of the piece begins. Not bad, eh? (I hope it fits.)

I also did just a teensy bit of spinning. Those among you who are Jennifer will notice that the above photo shows Blugly spinning, not Muppet Entrails 2 spinning, but I swear, I will get to it. I have absolutely NO PLANS to fix anything this coming weekend.

BAD Carey. BAD.

Okay, so I've been a bad blog poster for...um...a week. More than a week. But this is NOT my fault. A friend of mine is visiting from out of state and happens to be very good at Fixing Things. Good at isn't really the way to describe it. Obsessed with Fixing Things and Cannot Stop Even if There are Video Games is a better way to describe it. And, as my house is a "run-down dump", it turns out that every single thing that could possibly be wrong or broken in a house is, indeed, wrong or broken. So, for the past week, we've been fixing things, non-stop. There is no stopping.

I swear to god, I got up at 3:00 this morning to go pee and before I made it back to bed, there was Maxim with pad and paper, showing me a sketched out idea about Fixing Things. NO STOPPING. (Yes, Maxim, that qualifies as Crazy. I still love you, though.)

It turns out my spinning wheel and my knitting are not wrong or broken, so they've had very little attention from me during this time.

However, I have observed the poll results. As soon as time allows, I shall commence my blugly sweater (okay, so MAYBE the shoulder part is pretty much done - pictures later) and address Jennifer's Muppet Entrails 2 fiber with the same hellbent focus that Maxim is currently directing at my house while I am safe at work.

THINGS MAXIM HAS FIXED/IS FIXING BECAUSE HE IS SO COOL
(AND CANNOT STOP FIXING THINGS):
1. Replaced an outdoor faucet and valve. (It was leaking.)
2. Installed a pet door so I can move the kitty litter to the garage.
3. Cleaned out most of the garage already. (Way above and beyond the call of duty.)
4. He's addressing the issue of The Magenta Door.
5. He's installing an exhaust fan in my bathroom.
6. The water shut off valve for the house is in a hard-to-get-to place in the crawl space, so he's redirecting it upstairs.
7. He installed smoke detectors so we won't die in our sleep if the house goes up in flames.

What else? I know that's not all. He never stops.