Posted on 6 Comments

I’m still here, really.

Please tell me it hasn’t been an entire week since my last post. Oh, how neglected you all must feel. I guess it was just one of those weeks. Usually when I’m busy during the week, I at least have the weekend to spend getting caught up around here, but not this time. It was a great weekend.  I spent a lot of time with family, and very little time online.

Even those of us for whom the Internet constitutes an additional limb need to be unplugged now and then. Maybe I should say we especially need to be unplugged now and then. It’s nice to fill up the battery with some good old-fashioned face time.

Pen Set #1

So the last time we spoke, I was waxing poetic over ball point pens. Since then, I’ve decided to let some of them go. They’re up for grabs in the shop for a limited time. You might want to hurry, since I am prone to change my mind at any time and go back to hording them all for myself…

I’ve also put some crochet hooks back up for sale, both ready-to-ship and made-to-order. If you hesitated before, you might want to take a look now. I picked out a brand new set of nine patterns to choose from, and I also added another hook size, for those of you secretly lamenting the lack of #7s.

Aside from updating the shop, I’ve been slowly (oh, so very slowly, in itty bitty dribs and drabs) cleaning up the dining room, getting my work space back in order, and transforming the room from dumping ground back into potential eating area. My goal is to get it cleaned up to the point that it looks like a dining room once again, albeit one that has some clay supplies out on the table. Slowly but surely.

6790781417_3de548b1a4-flickr

I’m also working on a new sweater for me. Have I mentioned that? I wanted a cardigan hoodie, but I wanted something that would work up relatively quickly, since I’ve pretty much had my fill of long term projects at this point. Mom and Dad gave me a WEBS gift card for Christmas, and I used it to get myself some Northampton Bulky in Old Barn Red. I’m making a Common Ground with it, and I have to say, it was working up very quickly. Until I got to the diamond lace pattern.

I’ll save the knitty gritty for its own post, but suffice it to say, there was a lot of un-knitting, re-knitting, counting, un-knitting, and re-knitting again. Being my first experience with lace, it was to be expected, but it was still a little frustrating.  I finally finished the lace pattern last night, although I really should have been done with it a few days ago. With that behind me, I have hopes of getting the sweater done by the weekend. Bulky yarn and big needles mean that it really does go very quickly when I’m not making mistakes!

So, I think we’re caught up now. I’ll try not to be such a stranger this week.  And thanks in advance for taking a peek into the shop!

LET’S KEEP IN TOUCH!

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Posted on 6 Comments

6 thoughts on “I’m still here, really.

  1. Took a peek at the pattern-just might have to give it a go myself, as soon as I’m done with what I have on the needles. I have to stop having so many projects going at a time. Love those pens!

    1. I can’t manage too many simultaneous projects. One always ends up getting most of the attention.

  2. Eeek. The shop link isnt loading the shop! o_O

    1. That’s odd. It must have been a fluke – it’s working for me! Let me know if you still have a problem with it, and I’ll see if I can figure it out!

  3. Lifelines are very helpful in lace knitting. For those who haven’t heard the term, it means you thread a piece of waste yarn or thread through all the stitches in a row every so often, like every 10 or 20 rows. That way, if you mess up, you can rip back to the last lifeline before your error, and it’s easy to pick the stitches back up without dropping any. And when you’re done (or absolutely sure there are no errors), you just give a tug and pull out the lifelines.

    If you’re using interchangeable needles, lifelines are very easy to do: most of these have a little hole at the base of the needle (where you insert the little key thingie to help tighten it), so you can just thread your lifeline through that hole and pull it along as you knit. (Crochet thread works well for this in my experience.) With regular needles you just have to take a yarn needle and use that to thread the lifeline through the stitches after you’re done with a row.

    1. Thanks for the tip. That will be very helpful, if I do more lace. And I probably will. I was glad that this particular pattern was so bulky that ripping out a whole row only meant undoing 150 stitches or so. Still, it got old after a while!

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