Too @#$% Hot

I've got FO's to show off, as well as presents. But it is just too freaking hot to go outside and take photos. How I wish my fridge had an icemaker. How I wish my house didn't have a west-facing living-room window.

But, I am grateful that I have a lovely house, with a fridge. (Just in case Someone thinks I'm not grateful.)

Short of showering with my clothes on (which I have done, BTW) how can I keep cool?

~ETA~
I found this short movie about Crown Fountain. I'm going to think cool thoughts.

My SCA Name

I will be registering the following as my official SCA name shortly:

Duchess Tola the Charitable of Wimblish upon Frognaze.

The VIP has been named: Emperor VIP the Idle of New Invention.

Find your Peculiar Aristocratic Title here.

Blasphemy

I do not like Jaywalkers. There, I said it. I love the yarn I used for them, which was Austermann Step, and it was a minor miracle that they match exactly. But I did not enjoy knitting them nor do I like how they fit. To be fair, I will probably try them one more time, but not decrease quite so much during the gusset because I cannot for the life of me figure out why she has you decrease to fewer stitches than what you started with. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate some enlightenment. So fighting with the Jaywalkers is why it took me so long to post. Mleah!
However, I do have a few projects that I finished and enjoyed and here they are. I tried a short-row stockinette heel for the very first time. It was excruciating to work through the pattern instructions, but I made it and here is the proof. The yarn is Online Supersocke and I like it very much. My LYS doesn't have very interesting colourways of it, but I know they exist. The hat is for the DD. She chose the yarn from my stash (yay!) and designed it, and I knit it to her specifications. It is Plymouth Encore in black and off-white, basic stockinette cap. At the end, instead of drawing the yarn through the remaining loops to finish it off, I did a few inches of i-cord. DD made a pompom to go on the end, and she proudly wore it all day every day for the rest of the week. It looks incredibly cute on her and I am proud to say that I made it and she actually wears it! The short socks are made from the Regia that I bought while on my trip in Chicago. I really really love this yarn. And my new KnitPicks size true 2 needles had arrived in time for me to use them and I have found my favourite needles. I did the short-row heel again and I think it looks a bit better. I know it was easier.

And now for something completely different! Look at this wonderful yarn. My friend Val dyed and spun it and was showing it off at Fibre Night last week. Of course since it has so much pink in it, I was admiring it muchly. And she gave it to me! She is not in love with pink as much as I am, and knew that I would give it a good home. I love this yarn! Here is her post about it, you'll need to scroll down a bit because it happens to be a biggish one. She doesn't think it's spun tightly enough for socks, but I think I will try it anyway. I will get some reinforcing nylon for the heels and toes and just see what happens.

And see my ticker? It is slowly but surely counting down the days until the VIP arrives. We are both extremely excited about this event. He went looking for a LYS the other day, and found Woolbearers. He says he is bringing me a bag of squishy goodness so that's another reason to be excited!












And in case you were thinking that I was going to completely ignore the Huge Event of the week, rest assured that I am not. I pre-ordered my copy and showed up at my local Borders store about 1:15pm yesterday to get my purchase wristband. I was #123 in the silver (second) group so I only had to actually wait about 45 minutes after midnight to get my copy. I came home and read the last 2 chapters and went to bed. Now I can rest, and actually enjoy reading the whole thing. And I won't watch a movie unless I am with someone who has seen it and will tell me how it ends. Yes I am very well aware of my extreme weirdness.

More Tomorrow, Let This Tide You Over

Go read this.

So sweet, it made me cry!

Inspirational

Knitting Iris's most recent post has inspired this.

When DD was born, I was newly-divorced and living with my parents in a house that they rented. We were happy there for almost two years, and then an old college friend invited me to move to Tulsa and tend her daughter for the summer and possibly think about staying. We went, but we didn't stay. When we came back, the people who owned the house my parents were in, sold it. And the house that they found wasn't big enough for us to re-join them. So we found a basement apartment in the same neighbourhood and moved in. I loved that house. It had the Most Hideous carpeting and paneling, but it was warm in the winter and not too hot in the summer. The basement portion was actually older than the upstairs portion as it had originally been a basement house. The upstairs had been added about 20 years later. Of course, when the Teton Dam burst in 1976, it was filled to the top with water and mud. Some of the original beautiful oak paneling was damaged and unsalvageable, and it was replaced with far inferior stuff. It was fairly dark, what with the chocolate-brown carpet and all, but I still loved that house. We were there for six years and would probably still be there, except . . . . .

We were asked to vacate because the landlords had a grandson who had just gotten married and he wanted to live in my house. So we moved. I was (and still am) so sad about that. I have to pass that house every time I go to my folks' place and I still cry, even though it was five years ago that we left. Eventually the landlords bought a house a couple of blocks away, and have turned the whole property over to the grandson. It has gone very far downhill and it is so sad.

But about the photo: I worked at the fabric counter at WalMart and I got that lace there. I had enough to make curtains for both sets of windows in my bedroom. Being a basement house, the windows were quite short so I was able to make the most of the small amount of fabric I had. I liked the fact that it was quite a thick pattern, and although it let light in, you really couldn't see into the house. I would lay on my bed and read, with the curtains wafting in the breeze and watching the light play across the fabric. And one day, I just grabbed the camera and popped off two shots. This is the better of the two, although they are both nice. I took it on real film, not digital, and when I first got my scanner, this is one of the first images I scanned.

Happy 4th!

To celebrate the day, I present to you my first completed pairs of socks for Summer of Socks.









I am not officially enrolled in Summer of Socks, I am just playing along from the sidelines. At first I thought I wanted to see how many socks I could knit in the time period, but now I've decided to use the time to explore new sock techniques and patterns. Obviously I had to get my Stars and Stripes socks done first, so that I could wear them tonight at the barbecue and fireworks our SCA group is doing. But the second pair I learned how to do short-row heels (Cat Bordhi's version) and while I'm not sure if I'm in love with the technique, at least now I know how to do it. It's quite amazing how that pair happens to match nearly exactly, which was totally accidental. For my third pair, I am doing the ubiquitous Jaywalkers. I have never done a patterned sock yet, and this one is fairly easy. If you click on Cara's banner enough times, eventually you'll get to her photo of her pile of Jaywalkers. And I need to post two other pairs that I finished before my trip to Chicago. The short ones are for my doctor, they knit up super fast. The long ones are mine and I got the yarn from my LYS and it is totally bizarre how one pooled like crazy and the other striped up like it's supposed to. Weird.

~~ETA~~
Confidential to VIP:
Pooling happens of its own accord, you cannot really do much to encourage or discourage it. The next pair of socks I have on deck for you are plain green, with yarn I bought in Chicago. And why would I want to knit a sweatband? Are you going for the Mark Knopfler look?