In Which I barely write about knitting

Woah, I haven't updated this since September.

Let's blame it on schoolwork shall we?

Let's see, what have I been doing since September? Hmm...

Well for the headlines: Due to my Government class I hate politics more than ever; Due to the people in my History class I worry for Humanity; I'm passing Spanish; I barely work anymore so I don't have any money to spend on yarn, books, or other things; My youth director moved to Longview, TX and at her goodbye ceremony I cried in front of most of the people I know at church; When I do read a book nowadays I devour it and am done in a day or less; And I finally found some bright orange cotton so I've begun making washcloths and I plan to knit a black linen hand towel or too go to along with them.

So that's the basic Idea of the past two months.

Latley, life has been fairly routine. I knit as much as I can and for some reason two girls in my history class whose names I don't even know seem to think that because I knit before my history class I want to talk to them for some reason. Mostly I make polite responses and hurry into class as soon as Professor Rye shows up. This is the first semester that perfect strangers in school talk to me because of my knitting, it's kind of weird. People talk to me about it in government and spanish too, but I actually don't find them annoying so it's pretty cool.

In other news, I'm still really enjoying reading poetry and I have begun writing a poetry journal in which I copy out some of my favorite poems and then write a couple of lines about what they mean to me or why I like them. I've also written a couple of poems, but they're a long way away from being able to be seen by anybody. I also have read a few new good books lately. As I mentioned earlier I devour books when I get a chance to read them. For instance, earlier today I read not one but two new books I got from the library at 1pm. While I admit that neither of these books were very long, I still am surprised that I finished the second one.

In talking about books I would like to make an observation about book trends of the last few months. We all know that the final Harry Potter has been out for awhile and those people who don't really read outside of that series were looking for new books to create a fandom for. For many of those people they picked the Twilight Series which are vampire romance stories. Now I am very happy that people my age are reading, in comparing my life and education experiences to those who don't read much I think my love of books has really been an advantage, but I don't get all the hype with vampire romances. To me it seems like trying to mix two very different genres. I like both science fiction and chick-lit books, just not squished together. I think that's just weird.

My mom recently read a different vampire romance and did enjoy it, and I am by no means shunning all those who love twilight, but I occasionally begin to feel how I'm pretty sure Mom feels whenever someone tells her that if she would just give Jane Austen a try she would really like it. People in my youth group have read Twilight, people in the tap class I barely belong to have read Twilight, my neighbor was one of the first people to read and recommend Twilight to me. But I still haven't read it and I have no intention of reading it or even of seeing the movie unless someone else pays me to go see it, and even then I'm bringing my knitting. So just to let anyone who reads my blog and wants to know, I will probably never read a vampire romance because I just really don't like vampires.

So that is my rant about books for the time being, I'm going to go start another book and try to figure out the measurments that I want my new felted gray beret to be. (More on that in another post.)

I'll write again soon!

"Tell the folks at home what you're doing, Roger"

In Which I Have a Great Achievement

So I've barley been on my computer in the past month, much less had time to write a blog.

I went to Fredricksburg TX with a couple of friends, after looking at Texas State University first. I'm not going to Texas State, I've offically decided and started telling people that next year I'm going to Oklahoma State University. Whoo Hoo, now I'm looking for orange yarn to knit things with.

Fredricksburg was very fun relaxing couple of days and I began to develop a new hobby there. One Friday at the library I decided to take up poetry reading. I found this fantastic book called the Poetry Reader's Toolkit and a couple good poetry anthologies and spent almost all my time in Fredricksburg reading poetry. It turns out that I like a lot of depressing poetry. At least that's what everyone else said when I made them read poems I thought were cool. I found I really like Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson and will be asking for poetry books for Christmas since I can't afford anything right now.

Knitting-wise, I finished Marianne - my emerald green shawl, it will look great this winter. I also sold a pair of gloves like the ones I made for Simone's birthday and continue to make more gifts. I've now made a start on Christmas knitting to go along with finishing up birthday knitting. I am knitting an OSU orange shawl/wrap for mom for Christmas that she will look great in and I've recieved the yarn for Kevin's Christmas gift, but as I know he reads this blog and I want to be a surprise, I'm not saying what it is - just that he'll love it.

The biggest news in the world of my knitting is that I finished a sweater. And it fits. The sleeves are the same length, the neck hole is not too small, the waist shaping even turned out the way I wanted it to, which I was worried about. Now I want to knit another sweater, but I can't possibly afford the yarn till probably December.

I find every day that I am longing for it to get cold enough for me to wear some of the handknits I have especially all of my gloves. I have cast on a new pair of gloves Dragon Wings which are in a lovely deep green yarn. I'm finishing more and getting so I have less stuff on my needles which is the way I like it. If I have too many projects going at once, I feel like it's chaos and I have enough chaos in my life as it is.

I'm taking 9 hours of college credit this semester and three of those hours are spanish 3 with a hard teacher. I'm making it, but I have to work at it. A lot. I've also found that getting a good nights sleep does wonders, so I'm signing off now. I promise to post sooner next time!

"Here, hold my monkey."

In Which I knit around an incredibly busy schedule

So I said that I was going to post some pictures about my knitting and my trip to D.C.

Obviously that hasn't happened.

I've not posted since I was in Tulsa a couple of weeks ago because I keep saying I'm going to put my pictures on my computer, edit them, and then make a picture post. So far I've gotten my pictures on the computer. I have over 700 from D.C., it's crazy. I was excited when on the last day I used up my 2 gig card with pictures from prom to D.C., but I don't think I realized exactly how many pictures will fit on a 2 gig sd card. I'm going to try to finish editing the good ones and deleting the bad ones this weekend and then I really will put up pictures.

Until then I'll talk about my knitting and whatnot.

There's been a lot of knitting. Possibly miles of it.

So in Tulsa I cast on mom's birthday present The Spy. A lovely black bag the same pattern as D.C. my bag. I got a lot of work done in Tulsa and on the way home, but the day after I got home my life got crazy busy again. Almost too busy for knitting.

On Sunday I had to set up the church for day camp and then go to a birthday party, but I did manage to knit a rose for my friends gift. That day I also got the crazy notion to knit a birthday gift for all of my friends, most of whom hadn't had a birthday party yet this year. I was already halfway done with Simone's gift and just needed her to try it on for size and other than that I hadn't even thought of anything. I asked everyone there what they would like for their presents giving them a set of choices that I could knit quickly. Throughout the next week in my meager free time I started scouting out patterns for everyone and looking through my yarn to see what I had that I could use and what I needed to buy. In looking through my yarn I've decided that I'm never buying yarn without a specific and near project in mind for it or else my stash will one day smother me.

Of course, while I was making all these grand plans I barley had any time to do anything because that week I was working at day camp. Day camp was fun but crazy and exhausting. By the time Thursday rolled around I was amazed at how much energy the middle school girls I was working with had for their lock-in after the normal day of camp. I just sat quietly on a couch in the youth room, read a book, and knitted a bit. It was a great weekend and my knitting absolutely amazed the girls. Especially when I was knitting the next morning when they were all finally wiped out.

This last week, other than 5 hours of work, I've been totally free. I've been knitting almost non-stop. I finished and felted the base of The Spy and worked most of the panel in a day before realizing I was going to run out of yarn. I finished Simone's rockin' gloves, I started Dark Lady, a scarf for Addy, and bought yarn for Sophie and Jen's presents.

I am now almost in debt because of yarn purchases and have way too many projects on the needles.

Till next time, when I promise pictures!

"You have some nacho shmutz on your face there."

In Which I find how dependent on knitting I really am.

It has been just under a month since I last blogged.... My life is crazy.

So last update I was about to leave for D.C. I have been there and come back and it was great. I met a lot of really fun people, bought books and knitting magazines, got rained on, learned how to make oragami, and walked about 50 miles.

While I was in D.C. I learned something about myself. When I don't knit for a couple of days I get very angry and a little violent. Really. I nearly punched out a guy I'd barley met because I thought he was talking too much. Instead I went and asked a guy I did know if I could punch him because it would make me feel better. I did and I did feel better.

I also got to lead my group a few times and I remembered how much I like being in charge of a bunch of people. We had a simulation in which we were solving the kidnapping of a 9 week old baby, and we had to interview all the people involved in the case. We could only have 3 people do each interview, and in order to give everyone who wanted to a chance to interview I had do draw out a fun little scheudle and make sure we got where we were supposed to when we were supposed to and had our interview questions ready. It was crazy and hectic and I loved every minute of it.

We presented our case at the end of the confrence and my group got 2nd place which I think is pretty good considering we didn't even have the right guy and a group that did didn't even place.

We spent a lot of time out over that weekend and I got oodles of fantastic and funny pictures. I also got quite a few rather strange ones. It was all great and I had just over a 50 pound suitcase when I was done.

I've also been getting ready for the day camp I'm helping put on next week so I've been busy with that for the past few days. I've decorated a jumpsuit to be a racing uniform (it's awesome) and I've gone over all our Bible studys and made more age appropriate ones for the middle schoolers that I'm teaching (they were all for little kids), and I've also learned how to work the sound board in our church so I can run sound for our assemblies. (like I said, my life is getting crazier by the week)

I've done quite a lot of knitting latley considering how busy I've been with other stuff. I have just finished the sweater front of Nebulous, I'm well on my way with Marianne, and I have bought the yarn for my mom's birthday present which I will start tomorrow on her birthday. I am making her a bag with the same pattern as D.C. but it will be black with a tweedy black and gray front panel. When mom told me that this was what she wanted for her birthday I made her spend an hour on the computer picking out her colors. She just wanted to say a color and be done with it, but there are far too many variations in colors in yarns to not look and pick out exactly what you want.

I also had to go to the dentist twice this last week. The thought of getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist actually makes me want to throw up. In order to combat this feeling while I was actually getting the work done I brought a swatch of knitting with me. I had practiced knitting with my eyes closed and I knit through my entire cleaning. I did pretty good too. Having found out that I had a cavity I went back once again armed with knitting and knit through the entire sandblasting experience. I didn't drop a single stitch the second time. Now I can go to the dentist without fear. But not for another 6 months, thank goodness!

My last bit of big news is that after I got back from D.C. I decided to clean out my closet. Having already done the entire rest of my room and bathroom I assumed that it would be easy. Then I started actually taking stuff out of my closet.

It didn't all fit in my room.

I do not know how I had so much stuff stuffed in there but after two weeks of battle in which I did not always have a sure place to sleep, I have conquered my closet and gotten rid of a room full of stuff. (pictures on the next post) I am very proud of myself for this accomplishment.

In Which I Learn Something About Our Postal SystemMail

So about a week and a half ago I ordered more yarn (like I need more yarn, I know). Then I put off writing a new blog post until the yarn had got here so I could talk about how pretty it was and what I was doing with it.

So I waited. And waited. And waited.

Every day I would wait anxiously for the mail to get here and then be very sad when it didn't contain any yarn. A week after the yarn had been shipped I went on the website I had ordered from and finally figured out how to track my yarn. I then found out that my yarn had been in Dallas. Then a couple of days later it somehow ended up in North Carolina. Our postal system at work.

So my yarn finally came in yesterday over a week after it had shipped from Ohio. I had ordered a gorgeous emerald colored bulky yarn for a shawl. Why did I need this yarn? I'm doing a Knit-a-long Read-a-long with a group of knitters who like Jane Austen novels. Right now we are reading Sense and Sensibility and the shawl fits into the category of something romantic and beautiful that Marianne would knit. I am also continuing on my sweater for something that Elinor would knit.

My sweater, Nebulous, is going rather well. I have all of the back done and am about a quarter done with the front. It will be beautiful. I am taking both Nebulous and Marianne(my shawl) with me to D.C. whether or not I will actually find any good knitting time. I finished D.C. last Sunday and have been giving it a trial run all week. It is a very good bag, possibly one of my favorites of the ones I have knit. It will not hold a huge knitting project, but it will hold enough. The frogging and starting over paid off in the end.

In other news, my cousins from Birmingham were here this past week and I taught Alex, the one closest to my age, how to knit. I don't know if she'll keep it up or not but she did seem to enjoy it. And I love to spread knitting wherever I can so I was very happy.

Now I'm off to have lunch with my friends and pack for tomorrow.

In Which I Get More Yarn and Find a Place For It

I had a very productive last couple of days.

It all started on Tuesday when I was looking in my room(which was rather messy) for my copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. I hadn't found it on my bookshelf so I went to look in my nightstand. Among other things in my nightstand that hadn't seen the light of day for years I found a book that my mother had bought me many years ago called Organizing From the Inside Out. Since I still didn't have TKAM I picked it up and started reading.

All of the first part seemed rather familliar and I even found some notes I had made tucked into the pages. Tuesday night I finally got through the first part and was ready to get to the part of actually orginizing my bedroom, which at that point I was determined to do.

At that same time I got an email from my mom that the Halfknits (A charity knitting group made up mostly of homeschoolers that I used to be involved in) were having a yarn sale. Apparently someone had contacted them and wanted to donate all of her yarn.

Why would anyone do this? Well it turns out that for some reason this particular lady was going to marry someone who wouldn't let her keep her yarn. Weird, right?

Anyway, the halfknits had all this yarn and they couldn't use it because they only use machine washable yarn for their projects. Thus they were having a yarn sale on Wednesday night. I was of course planning to go.

So, now we're to Wednesday. Despite my plans for Wednesday, first I had to go to work for the last time for a month. I had left work early the previous day so I was really hoping I'd get to stay for a little while so I could make a bit more money. Of course, when I showed up there was nothing to do. Nothing at all. I stood at my station talking to Patty about the new system we were begining to try and then Amy(my boss) came in and I was pretty sure that she was going to tell most of us to leave. We had a meeting about the new system we're implementing (which should be all set in by the time I get back) and then she did tell most of us to leave. At least I got to stay for half an hour and get paid for it.

So I came home and got started on my organizing project. I read through the chapter on one's bedroom first (I always read all the directions before I start), and began. The first step was to sort, so I took everything out of my nightstand, desk, under my bed, and where ever else I found stuff and sorted it into many piles on my bed and the floor next to it. A couple of hours later I was ready for the next step. This step was to get rid of stuff from each pile. To go through them and decide what to keep, what belonged elsewhere, what to give away, and what to toss. Awhile after that my piles looked much tidier. One of my worst piles was my stash. I had long ago planned to be a knitter without stash. So I have no idea how my stash got to be so big. I went through it and got most of my old acrylic I had bought for baby hats and a blanket I was never going to finish and set it aside to give to the Halfknits. At this point I had been working for about 4 hours straight and my mom was coming home so we could go to the yarn sale. A good time for a break.

Now I've heard about these yarn sales where people are getting rid of some or all of their stash for outrageously cheap prices, but I'd never been to one before. I had heard what might happen so I went and got 50 dollars out of the bank so I could spend no more than that. I got there and there were 2 bins and a whole dining room table loaded with yarn. It was awesome. I began to sort through it and start a "maybe I'll buy this pile." after awhile, when I had sorted through most of the yarns I looked into my maybe pile. There were a few skeins of hand dyed ribbon yarn in there that even on sale were $15 a skein so I set those aside and even after that my pile came up to $64 rather than the $50 I had planned to spend. My mom however told me to get the yarn and she would cover the difference. She's awesome.

So I went home with less yarn than I had gone with (I had a lot of acrylic) but I was very happy. After watching a couple of tv shows with my mom, I had to put most of my piles of stuff away somewhere if I wanted to sleep on my bed that night. I had decided that my desk is really the place I do most knitting that I don't do in public so my desk has turned into a Knitting and DVD zone. My chair across the room is where I'll do my homework and studying, and My current books are kept by my bed.

I'm not entirely done, but I feel so much better now that I have most of my room organized. I have to talckle my bookshelf and closet separately and I also want to do my bathroom which I can barely use for all the stuff I don't know where to put right now.

Now if only I had the money to buy the extra containiers I need....

TTFN!

P.S. It's Friday the 13th!!!

"I dare you to move."

In Which I Get Yarn

It's been a big week as far as knitting goes.

After anxiously waiting for yarn on Thursday and Friday, sitting watching the mailbox until the mail came, I settled in to do the same thing on Saturday morning. During the week the mail comes to our house around 10:30 so I wasn't planning on waiting too long. I had just started a really good book and was willing to wait.

10:30 came and went as did 11:30 and 12:30 by around 1:00pm I decided to take a break from my vigil and eat lunch. After lunch the mail still wasn't here.

I had a birthday party to go to that night, and deciding that I should leave the house before I went stir crazy I went to Target to buy a gift and my mom came with me. On our way home we ended up behind a mail truck and I thought it would be rather funny if that particular mail truck was headed to our home and had my yarn on it. We continued following it and sure enough it did stop in front of our mailbox. We sat in the car behind it and I watched to see if there was a large padded envelope with our mail.

There wasn't.

Rather sad, because I knew I would have to wait until Monday at that point I went home and finished up some flowers I was knitting for the party that night. Later, about an hour before I was going to leave, the doorbell rang. I went downstairs wondering who it might be and to my surprise it was the mailman back again with an envelope full of yarn for me! I probably could have hugged him at that point, but he was already going back to his mail truck.

I was even more surprised when I opened the package and saw that it was my sweater yarn which had shipped a day later than my purse yarn, but I was ecstatic. I quickly cast on for a swatch (yes, I was very good and actually swatched for my sweater) and was happy to quickly get gauge. I had decided that I had good gauge at just a couple of inches in, but I wanted to finish the whole swatch and wash and block it so that i could see how it would do.

Of course by this time it was time to go to my party, where I didn't get a single chance to knit. After the party a couple of people and I went to IHOP because we know one of the waiters working the graveyard shift there and I got about another inch done while we were there. I got home around 1am and finished up the swatch, washed, and blocked it so it would be ready by the time I went to church the next morning.

At church I cast on and began the whole sweater. It was so exciting. In the past week I've gotten almost the whole sweater back done which I noticed is much faster than I used to knit.

Of course after a week of being very single minded about my knitting I've become a bit distracted. I am trying to finish up my bag D.C., which I also finally got more yarn for, I want to knit a change purse because I got this handy card holder which is replacing my wallet, and I was commissioned to make another bookweight that I want to have done by Friday when I see the lady who wants to buy it again.

Oh well, all is going great in the world of my knitting and I'm even finding time to clean my room (mostly knitting induced mess, I didn't know I had this much yarn!)

Check later to see how the sweater(Nebulous) and D.C. are going - I promise pictures next time!

"Tell the folks at home what you're doing, Roger."

Almost Out

Despite the large bins I have full of yarn I have found this past weekend that I am almost out of yarn.

Hard to believe isn't it?

I have decided to make a sweater this summer and I ordered the yarn for it toward the end of last week. I had finished up all of my major projects so I decided to work on my bag for D.C. that I had set aside. The reason it had been set aside was that I knew it was too small and didn't want to work on it any more, but I also didn't want to do a guage swatch and rip it out and start over again.

Last friday I took the plunge. I knit up a proper swatch and discovered that to get gauge I needed to hold the yarn double. At this point I was volunteering with my mom at the library but, it being memorial day weekend and all, it was really slow. So I pulled the bag out of my bag and I started to frog it. This was the biggest thing I had ever frogged, and it was really fun. My mom was shocked at how much work I was simply pulling out stitch by stitch and row by row. It kinda looks like my hair doesn't it?

Anyway, the next problem I had was that the base of this bag the yarn is worked double so I had one section of yarn that I needed to separate from the other part. I got started that night but had to go to a graduation party before I could really make any headway. The party was great, but I didn't get home till almost 2am that night. I stayed up till 3am trying to separate this yarn which was going to be a painstakingly slow process.

Finally I admitted defeat for the time being when I couldn't keep my eyes focoused on the flowing yarn in front of me. The next day was our memorial day party and I had to spend the morning cleaning, but I had just enough time to get my yarn untangled wound into a hank and washed so that it could dry for the rest of the afternoon. By the time the party was offically over a little past 10pm I went to check on my yarn and found it was still rather wet at the bottom. I really wanted to cast this back on the next day so I got a small portable fan and laid the yarn on it so it would dry faster. An hour later I deemed it close enough and got down to the business of winding it up.

Now because I had decided to use the yarn double and the pattern called for using the yarn double for the base I was going to knit it with the yarn held quadruple. I had 2 skeins of yarn that were already in use and I tried to get close enough to halving of each of those skeins so I could just use those to begin with and I hoped that it would be enough for the base. Finally after another late night it was all wound up and ready to go.

I cast on the next morning at church and in that one day knit up more than the yarn I had previously used and was down to one skein left.

I needed to buy more yarn. My sweater yarn hadn't come in yet and if I ran out of yarn for this project before it got here I didn't know what I was going to do because I don't want to have too many projects going on at once (crazy, huh?)

Finally today all of my yarn was shipped and should arrive in a couple of days. Hopefully I won't run out of yarn after all.

Stay tuned to find out about my very first sweater!!

"Have fun storming the castle!"

Weekend Notes

What a weekend.

Friday after my Spanish test I went shoe shopping with my mom before she and my dad left for Tulsa. Once they were gone I put in Stardust and got to some good knitting.

Earlier I had started Mom's triangle bag named Origami and was really excited to get back to it. I am making it out of cascade wool in a beautiful, bright red and black which are perfect colors for her.

Saturday I was gone all day at explorer competition and left the house so fast I actually forgot my knitting :( there would have been a couple of good knitting opportunities too. We did well anyway and despite my intentions to get at least a couple of rows done when I got home, my cat demanded all of my attention and I was quickly asleep.

Today was much better in having time for knitting, and I am now halfway done with the first flap of Origami. This obviously means I am a quarter of the way done with the whole thing not counting blocking, sewing, and felting (not necessarily in that order)

Today I knit before church, in Sunday school, waiting for a couple of friends to get here, while watching Sweeny Todd for the first time since it came out (woot), during lunch at Olive Garden, and on a large tree that had fallen over the creek in our botanical gardens.

I felt much better about missing so much on Saturday.

On another note, I've stopped carrying my Doctor's Bag because I just can't seem to live with the minor things wrong with it. (I need to get cobweb out of it...) I will let it sit for awhile and one day I might pick it up again. It took me long enough to make it.

Because of my lack of a handknitted bag for myself that I can use as a purse, I have bought the yarn for the Boot Bag from Bag Style and will knit it as soon as I am done with Origami. I plan on having it done before I go to Washington D.C. this summer because it seems to me to be a rather professional looking bag and good for carrying into places like the FBI whilst I am there.

My final piece of news is that I finally bought a skein of Raven yarn from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. After much consideration I bought the Grawk colorway because I love the colors in it and it's description as a mischief maker who likes to be the center of attention. I plan on using it for a pair of lace up opera gloves for the Northanger Abbey KAL/RAL so I hope I get the yarn soon. I can't wait to see it in person, and I hope it is as gorgeous as I think it is.

I'm signing off now,
Rose

"Act One Finale" Urinetown the Musical

Beginnings and Mistakes

Alright....

I obviously haven't actually used this blog since i started it, but i think now is a good time to start.

2008 seems to be a year for new beginnings for me. I have and am using a treadmill in my house, i have recently started playing the piano a bit, i have started a dvd collection so i have plenty to watch while i knit, i'm doing my Bible study every day, and i have started actually writing in this blog.

So... yay for beginnings.

Speaking of beginings, yesterday i picked up a knitting project that i have not worked on in months. it is the Doctor Bag from Knit2Together. i fell in love with this bag when i saw it, started it as soon as i could, and then about a foot into the back panel i put it down and it landed in my hibernation pond.

a couple of days ago however i found myself with absolutely nothing to knit until i get a set of size 2 dpns in the mail. so i went over to my hibernation pond picked the Doctor Bag back up and fell back in love with it.

Today i was out with my friends and we stopped in a starbucks. luckily i already had a jamba juice smoothie with me, so i didn't have to actually buy starbucks coffee. Anywho - i brought out my knitting while my friends were talking about horses (some big horse thing is coming up tomorrow) and began the decreases at the end of the back panel. i quickly realized i did not have the right number of stitches. ARRG!!!!

knowing that if i had to rip this whole piece out i would just give up on it entirely, i tried to figure out how i could fix it and still make it look decent. there are now a bunch of math figures on my pattern as i was trying to figure out if it was something wrong in the pattern or something i did wrong. at first i thought there was something wrong with the pattern, but later this evening i realized that it was knitter error. My first big knitting mistake of the year. yay.

A new beginning for me, however, would be that i managed to fix the mistake with a little bit of figuring and the bag will still look fine. WOOT.

Tomorrow I begin some of my regular activities and i can begin more frequent knitting in public, my favorite kind of knitting because then people look at me funny. At the moment i am trying to figure out if i will be able to knit in the dentists chair tomorrow so that i can keep my mind off the sharp things in my mouth while my teeth are cleaned.

Till Next Time,
Kathryn

P.S. other exciting news that absolutely does not relate to knitting - I'M GOING TO SEE SWEENY TODD ON STAGE THIS MONTH!!!!! me and my brother and a friend of his are going at the end of this month and i have been "squee"'ing all night.