I knitted something!

Nothing I've told you about knitting as I was knitting it before, though.

Well, I've spoken about the Lil' Giraffe hat, I just haven't shown it. Adorable, isn't it, even unfinished as pictured here?

I have finished the ears and just have to tack them on, and then I have to decide about the stripes and a ridge of hair between the horns.

Although, the source material hasn't got a tuft of hair between the horns:

Say it with me: D'aawwwww!

Must be nice to be able to use your own butt as a pillow. Although that could get weird, too.

Oh, well. Onward and upward! Next week I'll be moving on to something else. Not sure what. None of the projects I have on the needles really appeals right now. Then again, it took me nearly a month to finish up a simple hat with horns and floppy ears, so.... Maybe my knitting slump continues.

The slump came on as I took on that frieght of yarn. Could it perhaps be that I have too much yarn? Could I have acquired so much yarn that I am in some sort of mental freeze from option shock? Are there too many choices facing me down for my own peace of mind?

Or I'm overthinking it and I'm just a bit tired. Gah.

Hi! *waves enthusiastically from the elbow* Hi!

It's late, I should definitely be in bed, but (in order of importance)
1. I'm hungry,
2. I've been gone for a long time and I should update while the iron is hot, so to speak, and
3. I'm not entirely sure what I just heard.

Oh, and:
4. Yarnie things.

1. It's been a long day. Hell, it's been a long month. I'm lucky I got lunch in my person today, never mind dinner -- which I did most emphatically not get. Suck.

2. I've spent more time in hospitals in the past month (never fear, as a guest, not an inmate) than I care to ever again. I'm in expectation that the inmate I visit will be released on time in three weeks (he's in a rehab center now; beaurocracy and American Medicine -- ha! -- being what it is, it's cheaper for him to go into a rehab center than take the medications he needs outside of one. Riddle me the logic of that one, Batman.) If not, I think he'll probably break out of an evening and walk home. And I don't blame him one bit.

3. For the first time in nearly two years, I went to the symphony tonight. For those as what hasn't been with me all along (ie, most of you, if there are any you out there), I used to have season tickets. Economy being what it was, I had to give up the habit. But as I now have legal employment, I splurged. Tonight's soloist was Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and I've seen him before, and he's incredible. I'm not, however, entirely sure to make of the piece he played -- a little tune written for him by one James MacMillan called Piano Concerto No. 3, The Mysteries of Light. It was a thoroughly modern, atonal and jangly bit of noise, and reinforced my firm notion that most Scottsmen are, like the lovely Lord Byron, "mad, bad and dangerous to know."

There were places I felt thoroughly lost in (and, frankly, by) the sounds, and others that were...disturbingly beautiful. I am unsure, on the whole, if I liked it or not. On the one hand, Jean-Yves Thibaudet. On the other, I'm not sure what the hell I was listening to.

That can't really be a good sign, can it?

4. Oh, yes. Yarnie things.

To beat some imagery over the head until it hurts, on hand the first, I'm almost done with a project. I have no pictures, because it's late, I'm lazy, and it's just a hat. Plus, I haven't been thinking of things bloggerific due to point number 2, so there are no "in progress" pictures, no cutesy things to write about it. It's pretty much therapeutic at this point. I'll show it to you eventually, no worries.

Plus, plus, plus, and, last weekend was the local fiber festival.

I only got two skeins of yarn (duh, do you not remember my vast yarn binge of just two months ago? I sure do; it sits around me every day, keeping me warm as toast fresh out of the toaster,) but I was really aiming for quality over quantity.

Skein the first: Camo Boy, by Knit to a T Fibers. Merino wool, fingering weight, 400 yards. I’m thinking scarf.

Skein the second (ironically, the first purchase of the day): 100% Merino fingering weight, hand dyed yarn, 550- yards (give or take) in some pretty foresty greens, dyed by the lady who did the yarn for my Loki scarf.

I love this yarn, and her colors are so incredibly saturated and beautiful…. It’s an honor to get to knit with her stuff, you know?

Anyway, I’ve reported in, eaten my bagel and now I must be off to sleep. I’m about to pass out at my keyboard, anyway.  It’s been a long-ass month – did I mention that already?

Nighty-night!

Ugh. Stuff and nonsense, nonsense and stuff.

I've been catching up on the minutae of life, and it's dragging me down. I am still not, by and large, feeling the yarn, but if I was, I'd have no time to knit at all!

Still at least I've made plans for some crafting.


I'm going to make an apron like Abby's on NCIS. I'm not usually a skulls and roses type girl, but there's something about this fabric that's insanely cheery. And it'll hide stains a treat (except on the skull bits themselves.)

You can see a bit of it here:

I've bought the fabric (and the pattern this apron is based on), and would show you but BLOGGER IS BEING A WANKER and keeping me from uploading my pictures. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow or the next day to put my own picture up.

HA! I win the intarwebz! It only took me, what, an hour and a half to find a workaround? Yeesh.


It's pretty exciting. Of course, this means I have to get my mom's machine cleaned and primed. Or find a fairly cheap one for myself, which might be a good option, too.

In other news, I'm actually making a Lil' Giraffe Hat. I'm currently in the middle of the endless rounds of yellow knit, before the decreases. It'll be a while before I have something to show you all.

I'm overtaken today by a strange lassitude, and I don't want to do anything. I'm not sure what's sucked the motive energy out of me; perhaps, as the Harry Potter movie marathon on Family today is implying, I've attracted a dementor. Although I wouldn't say I'm depressed, per se, just...don't wanna. Whatever it is, don't wanna.

Maybe I'll do a few more rounds of hat and watch some of my DVR'd shows. Maybe that will perk me up?

What the what-what?

This month has been busy-busy, and I'm exhausted. Between the weather making like a massively awful rollercoaster and the extra writing I've been taking on, I could just plotz. Right here. And I haven't been feeling the knitting.

Yes, I said it. I'm not feeling the yarn right now.

I have sixty trillion skeins of totally sexy new yarn, a million-billion patterns and projects I want to use them with, and I'm just not into it right now.

I feel so empty. So alone.

I have been working, though, on a new project.

My Wollmeise Clapotis. A word which, thank you Google Translator, means "the sound of waves lapping on the shore."


I love the way some ideas are encapsulated in one word for some languages, and other languages have to use more to express the exact same idea. I mean, yes, clapotis can be translated to just 'lapping', but in English we have to express what is lapping where in order to make sense of that word. Apparently, the French already know those two things.

Sort of like how we stole the word defenestration for English. Bob I love that word. It makes me so happy, I can't even express it.

I'm still not much in a knitting mood, but now I'm in a cheerful one, and that's almost as good. :-)

Why I don't eat a lot of pure sugar.

I realized today there's a second reason I don't eat a lot of pure sugar candy (sort of pure, because I don't think the added chemical flavors and colorings in Sweet Tarts add anything like "purity" to sugar). Another reason aside from the fact that I don't really -- except for the aforementioned Sweet Tarts and the occasional chocolate -- have a sweet tooth.

Pure sugar candy hops me up like I've just taken a big hit of crack, and then it makes me ravenously hungry. Like, creepy woman in the tv on Doctor Who hungry. I had two bagels for breakfast and a normal sized lunch. Typically, that's enough to finish me up for a day, but toss in a crap-ton of pressed sugar pellets and by the time I got home I was so hungry I ate the majority of a large pizza, a handful of chocolate and am still hungry. Every so often, I go into the kitchen and putter around, trying to find more food to stuff in my insatiable cake hole.

Now, I'm not a big eater (evidence to the contrary aside), before I had the full time gig I used to occasionally forget to eat breakfast and lunch altogether. This hunger is...disconcerting. I saved up some pizza for lunch tomorrow, and there's a chance it won't make it until then.

Maybe I'll have a cup of cocoa to fill in the gaps.

Anyway, on to knitting matters. I'm getting tired of the same-old-same-old stuff when it comes to knitting. I have all that sexy hot yarn sitting in boxes and bins and taunting me with its fiberey lushness. So I'm going to add some new projects to my rotation. No worries, little duckies, I can add them and still say under my three active project limits.

So, comes the quandry:

Make a Clapotis of my Wollmeise

Or a Ginko Biloba Shawl out of my KP Stroll. Color is called "Canopy", and I have more than enough mileage to go for the massive leaf size shawl.


So you see my confusion. What's a girl to do when faced down with so much fluffy, colorful, yarny goodness?

Oh, yeah.

Me and diets.

Food diets and yarn diets. I can't stick to either of them. In the case of food diets, I start to crave donuts (which, as anyone who knows me will know by now, I don't like -- it's disconcerting; like craving mud.) Apparently, in the case of yarn diets, I get given yarns.

It's hard to see, but there are four skeins there. For the uninitiated, that's 1,020 yards of wool and nylon goodness. Yes, the colors are that intense. Possibly even more so, because the flash has washed out the green.

One of the ladies at coven brought in 16 skeins in various flavors to give away. The other ladies each took four skeins, and, in a ritual very like a gang initiation, forced me to take the last four. I was only going to take two (because really, who can't use two skeins of sock yarn?), but they quoted the rules of Fight Club at me: No orphan skeins.

So I had to take all four.

Sigh. You know, I go for nearly four years on an inadvertent yarn diet, acquiring less than ten skeins/balls/bits and bobs per year simply because I was broke, and in the first year I have cashmoney to spend, I end up with...Good Bob, I don't even know. Let's see, the 70 I got at Yarnia, my new Wollmeise, these four....

Now I really need a yarn diet!

I can't blame this on Yarnia.

There are limits to what I can blame on the mythical, magical Yarnia. But my quest for legendary yarns continues.

And I have crossed off one more, Wollmeise.

 The color is called "Klapperstorch", which Google-Fu tells me translates to "stork". I'm not sure why a yarn that cycles from a pale, pinkish-white to black would be called "stork", but perhaps German storks are just a little different.

Anyway, I bought it second hand off someone on Ravelry who couldn't bring herself to knit it because the colors are the same as her local pro basketball team. Plus, I get the feeling she's not big into red. Which is fine and natural; we can't all like the same things.

But I do love red, and the colors are beautiful. Witness:

And this is the part I love best, I think:

Maroooon! I love maroon. I don't know why, seeing as I was abused with private education, which includes pleated knee skirts in unattractive plaids (ours were maroon and gray). Still and all, I love it all together with the other colors.


It's going to become a Clapotis eventually. I've met another Wollmeise Clapotis, and it was lovely.

I think my little stork is going to be beautiful, too.

A-HA! Wikipedia provides me with this lovely fellow's picture:

A painted stork.

Now I get it.