Red and Green

I'm still working on my knitted Christmas decorations, and I've had a very busy week. Tonight I decided to sit down with the new Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince RiffTrax and make this.

This was also the first time I tried out an argyle pattern. It went quite well.

-Kat

In Which I Start Something

Today I drove from my home in Texas to my second home in Stillwater. A four hour drive on your own allows a lot of time for introspection. While I was driving I listened to a few podcasts. I started out with Bad Philosophy (check it out - it's going to be a thing), and then I moved on to catching up with a knitting podcast I follow. Sometimes I'm amazed at how much inspiration I can get from hearing someone else talk about knitting. I started thinking about how I don't have a class I can knit in this year - which was the most knitting I ever did in the last few semesters - and how I would have more difficulties finding time for my hobbies this semester. That got me thinking about my hobbies and the hobbies I plan on taking up.

Last week I was talking with a friend, and I mentioned how home ec-y I am in my hobbies. I knit, cross-stitch, write, and cook, and I want to learn how to sew and garden. Thinking about them all together I realized that I really enjoy creating things.

When I was young I dreamt of being an artist when I grew up. Then I realized that I can't draw a thing and I gave up that idea. Since then I have come to understand that I still have a strong creative impulse, it just goes through different avenues. Around mile 200 of my drive my thoughts wandered back to my lack of knitting time this semester. I made a resolution - this year I am going to create something every day. Whether that be a few rows of my sweater, a paragraph, a few stitches, or just dinner, I'm going to create a bit each day, keep track of it, and see what happens.

I find joy in creating things - otherwise I wouldn't keep doing it - and one thing I know is that it's important to make time for the things you love, so starting today that's what I'm going to do. And if you're even a smidge interested, you can keep up with me here on this blog.

-Kathryn

In Which I Have a Lot of Knitting

Wow....

How did October get here already?

First off the college catch up:
Classes are fun (bet you don't here that from many people), they're pretty much the same as they've been.

I've had time to read a lot more than I thought I would so I've been reading a bit of Shakespeare. I don't think I'd read any of his comedies before and I really like them! Always learning something new.

With it being fall and a little colder up here than it is in Texas, I've had oppurtunities to wear stuff I've made, and I love it. Unfortunately it's also given me a bad case of startitis.

I'm currently working on five projects and I've ordered three more which are being shipped to me now. That's more projects on the needles than I've ever had before.

I'm still working on Joe my blanket, but it's gotten so big that it just lives on my bed now and can't travel anywhere.

I'm also working on an unnamed scarf that I started before college. It's a beautiful gray lace scarf and I love the feel of working with it.

I recently started a shawl in a pretty blue-green for a knit-a-long. I have to purposely drop stitches in it and I love it. It's named Anne.

I also ripped out a fingerless mitten I had made a year ago and am changing it into a lace neck scarf.

Then I wanted to learn how to do circular knitting with the magic-loop method so I ripped out Juliet, my pretty cotton yellow gloves with cables up the arm, and restarted them with magic-loop and it's working out much better.

See? I told you I've got startits! I started all those new projects within days of eachother.

Now I've ordered three kits. One is a kit of knitted ornaments that I'm going to decorate my room with for dead week and finals week. The second is a knitting bag that will teach me how to make linings and and use interfacing. And the thrid is a kit for a hat and gloves to teach me fair isle (knitting with two colors of yarn in one row), which was one of my goals at the begining of the year!

All this knitting will keep my hands busy and warm all winter.

Alright, tired of hearing about knitting?

In other news my classes at the Colvin Rec Center are going really well and I'm imporving greatly in both boxing and yoga. My boxing class has dropped from 20 people to about 8. It means we get to learn a lot more in each class because Jeremy, the teacher, only has a few of us to correct.

The other big part of my life here at OSU remains the Canterbury center with the Episcopalians. I love going to a church that has such a small congregation, because everyone knows each other; and I still love the two-three nights a week I spend at Canterbury, the people and conversation are great.

I also went on another tour of the library this week and found a fantastic study spot! It's on the fourth floor facing big arched windows so during the day it's really sunny and really beautiful. I also checked out a couple of books on e. e. cummings and I don't have to give them back till the end of January if I don't want to! How cool is that?

All of these things are keeping me very busy, and I'm really looking forward to tomorrow when I don't have any pressing responsibilities until the play in the evening.

"When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way."

In Which I Do a Little Bit of Everything

School is finally winding down and I'm already getting ready for my next semester in the fall.

I've been looking into what classes I want to take at school and I've been looking for dorm stuff. Apparently I picked very unpopular colors for my dorm as my mom and I can't seem to find them. I choose orange and black for my bathroom because of the orange washcloths I've been knitting in my philosophy class and purple for my bedroom because of the purple, black and yellow blanket I've finally started and plan on having finished by the time I get to school.

In classes now everything is getting close to the finish. We're reading Hamlet in English, doing a unit of the philosophy of logic, truth, and science in Philosophy, and reading Billy Budd by Herman Melville in Lit. I still really don't like Melville - Billy Budd is at leas short, but the story isn't even really good. I thought I might like it because it's something of an exploration of opposite personalities, but instead it just makes me angry like Moby-Dick did (and yes the hyphen is supposed to be there).

On a happier note, I got accepted to the Freshman Research Scholars program at OSU and I'm very excited! The class I take for this program is taught by the dean of the arts and sciences college and there's only 16 people in it! I think I'll really enjoy doing a research project next year and hopefully I'll have the opportunity to do another one my sophomore year.

While I'm making plans for the fall semester I'm also making summer plans. The only big event I have is the National Lutheran Youth Gathering in New Orleans. It should be great fun. The rest of the summer I plan to spend buying stuff for my dorm, knitting my blanket, and reading classic novels.

When I got accepted to the FRS program I realized the only classic novels I've really read are Jane Austen novels and I think I should expand my horizons a bit. I've been making a list and every time I go to borders now I spend time lingering in both the knitting section and the required reading for schools aisles.

Despite being so busy I have gotten quite a bit of knitting done lately because I temper my homework schedule with knitting breaks. I knit an entire wrap - Emma - in two weeks because I wanted to wear it on Easter. I was up at one in the morning before Easter watching The Ten Commandments on TV sewing on the buttons and weaving in the ends!

I've also started my black hand towels for college and I've finally collected all the yarn and started my dorm blanket!! It's really soft yarn that's knitting up really well, I'm very happy with it and I haven't even finished the first block of color yet. There will be pictures when there's something more to show!

That's the highlights for this semester (I really might blog more than once every few months after this)

Until next time!

"Why did I listen to that cad?"

In Which I Knit Socks

So here I am again.

My last post to this blog was in November and a lot has happened then. So much has happened that I actually did not pay attention to any of my emails, ravelry, or any blogs that I follow for almost the whole month of December. Now that I've caught up with everything and gotten through the crazy that has been these past two months I felt it was time for an update.

Apart from my grandmother getting the stomach flu on Thanksgiving day and passing it on to my dad who then passed it on to me (this was the begining of the crazy), then finally starting to work three days a week, and all the other stuff that goes along with Christmas including spending 7 hours at church on Christmas eve. I have actually gotten a lot of knitting done. I have had my first ever Christmas knitting, been knitting to get rid of my stash, and am now working on my knitting new years resolutions.

Chirstmas knitting always has a good story with it. I've heard of many from other knitters which include such fun things as sleep depravation and finishing hats to go in stocings in the wee hours of Christmas morning. My story is this - I was only making Christmas gifts for two people, my Mom and my Brother. For my brother I choose to make a Jayne hat and a set of juggling balls. For mom I was making a wrap she picked out. I started both of these projects very early on so I was sure that I would have plenty of time. Due to this feeling of not needing to rush I worked on my Christmas projects sporadically and worked on other projects in between.

The week before Christmas I suddenly realized how little time I had left and how little yarn I had left for mom's wrap. I ordered more online, hoped it would show up soon, and set to work on finishing Kevin's gifts. A long doctors visit that was mostly waiting gave me time to finish the Jayne hat and start sewing up one of the juggling balls. A few nights later I was up at midnight watching Legaly Blond and finally filling the juggling balls, they went under the tree the next day.

During that time my yarn that I had ordered showed up I opened it on the Tuesday a week before Christmas and suddenly realized it was the wrong yarn. I had accidentally ordered the yarn I had used for the Jayne hat. I frantically ordered more and it didn't show up until the Saturday before Christmas. I frantically worked to finish the last sleeve and was up until 1 a.m. on the 23rd sewing it up it was wrapped on Christmas Eve.

For Christmas I was given among other nifty tools a yarn meter, so I immediately went to work measuring all my yarn and planning projects for it. I now have great plans for using up almost all of my yarn before I go to college in order to make it easier to travel and store (it's much easier to store nothing than a whole lot of something).

Then the new year came and I made some resolutions. I read the Knitting Daily and one might notice the banner on the side of my blog saying that I was a Fearless Knitter for 2008. I believe I lived up to that name too, I made my first sweater and it fits, and I tackled my first Christmas knitting as well as other things. Now I also have a banner proclaiming myself to be a Fearless Knitter in 2009 and I began to wonder how I would live up to that name. I came up with three ideas. I decided that in the course of this year I would conquer my fears of socks, lace, and colorwork.

I began eagerly last week with socks. I can now proudly say I have knitted a sock and am knitting it's mate and have plans for more!! The rest of the resolutions will hopefully come to fruition in the course of this year.

That's all I have for now, I'm off to finish my second sock!

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 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!"