Dump and Run

Note: One kid missing from all pics....smart kid....the only one to make Honor Roll all year long. Very smart indeed.

This post is for the sole purpose of letting my love ones know that, indeed, I do have a pulse and my children haven't eaten me...quite yet. Total hair loss may be imminent in one weeks' time (next Friday is the last day of school) and I may only declare guardianship over one, maybe two, of my (lucky to be alive) beloved offspring through the summer vacation. As a devoted expression of love, at least one of "them" has missed the bus each and every day for the last two weeks. "Them" has developed a new decibel with to communicate their undying irritation with one another; a decibel that only serves to signal Super Stressed Mom with the power of the wooden spoon-shaped hand.

Best dog ever.

Did I mention we got a dog too? Who broke his leg the first week home? Err, let's see...Cost of adoption: $50. Cost to absolve oneself of guilt for playing with wet dog on wet linoleum floor and being the direct cause of rescued dog's immediate return to a stinky kennel with a pin in his leg: $600. Watching a child's face sour when you tell them they have to pick up the affected dog's poop: priceless.

When two "pins" are better than one.

Ahhh....but here comes summer. Sleeping late, plugging children into video game consoles and a swimming pool one block away. I'm only thinking the happy thoughts right now and I won't even acknowledge the extra cooking, cleaning, and ass-whoopings. Kidding...kidding....learn to laugh a little...jeesh. Anyway, therapy for all this cozy family bonding of late has been crochet, wee bits of knitting and more crochet. I'm a bender of sorts. Wanna see? Well, you'll just have to wait till next time....I hear kids.

Devil in disguise.

The Glower..er

Like drawing but without the paper...and the pencil...and the drawing part. I don't play with clay much, but when my husband emailed a picture from work, I just felt a deep need to do something with his profile. So this is my very modest effort at relief sculpture, in Fimo. It's still a work in progress, but it's fun. With the Fimo, I figure I can just bake it when I get tired of trying to finesse his likeness from the soft clay and come back with carving tools and sand paper for the finish. Or rebake new layers of Fimo on top. In any case, I'm learning a lot about how to make shadows work to your advantage. Now, if I could make it so that my husband didn't have laser beams shooting from his eyeballs, I'd be a happy camper.

Fluke

Yup...turns out the pain-in-the-butt factor of salvaging yarn was more specific to angora than to ripping and frogging in general. What a relief! See what I got in less than two hours, today, after posting about the fuzzy bunny yarn.

Silk/cashmere....easy peasy. Not a single nick, few broken strands and at one point I got my swift moving so fast, I thought I saw sparks. I kid.

Cute and Fuzzy Bunnies

This here is a pile of thrift store sweaters. One camel-tan, 85% silk/15% cashmere blend. One fuzzy periwinkle blue, 65% angora, 35% nylon blend. One just has a little angora in it really, but it's four shades of fair isle neutrals. Works for me. All of them are part of my recycled yarn experiment and all together cost less than $12.

I like the idea of recycled yarn. I figure that all three sweaters together would probably make a finer quality fabric than I would normally bother with, at an 1/8 the cost of any one skein of approximately the same blend. Besides, who doesn't like the occasional do-it-yourself project, right?

There were plenty of lessons to be learned however. To start, frogging angora is probably not the most wisest choice for instant gratification. While soft and smooshy, it's also sticky and difficult to spot the stitch definition below the gorgeous fuzzy haze. Which is needed when you are ripping side seams while trying not to the nick individual stitches so you won't have to splice or felt join them later. (Did you know angora felts? I do now.) At one point, I resorted to using children's hair de-tangler around the inner armpit areas, after pulling the matted balls from the surface. It helped a little.

Days....it took me days (ok, just three) to finish unraveling this baby. Mostly because of the number of felted joins it took to salvage the yarn into 4 skeins. It's a 3-ply yarn and I kept snapping an individual strand here and there. But worse than that, I nicked alot of stitches on the sides, particularly at the top of the shoulders where they put a safety stitch into the knitted join. I got so tired of trying to sort it all out, that I finally took a pair of scissors to it and sheared the seams off. That one little action probably lost me three or more yards. No biggie, just a pain more than anything.

The other thing, angora sheds a hairball the size of a small cat every time you pull on the yarn. I'll be washing little blue fibers from my clothes for months. I even pulled some from my son's ear. Yeah, his ear.

All in all, I ended up with four large-ish skeins of sport weight yarn, from a single XL sweater. I have no idea the actual yardage, nor do I really care, but I'd say one sleeve is probably enough for a pair of mitts or a set of baby booties and a cap. Heaven knows what I'll actually use it for in the end, but it sure is nice to know that some fuzzy blue bunny out there didn't give up it's fur for nothin'.

Dee-Diddley-Done

Aaaaannnnddd, I...

So...the wrap-up. Two and half skeins and an excellent use of some hard to place fabric I've had around for awhile. The one downside to having to put a lining in a knitted bag, besides actually having to sit still and sew, is that the maximum capacity of the knitted capsule suddenly deceases to the maximum capacity of what the sewn lining will hold. I swear, I probably could've shoved and entire comforter into this granny sack before sewing the lining into it. While I can still pack a whole lotta' project love in there, I was a little sad to see the potential for mass storage go by the wayside.

...will always loooove...

No matter the moot point, I love this bag. I will always love this bag. And I hope my children feel remorse for packing it up and sending it off to the Goodwill with all the other knitted chaff when I die. In my head, this baby is an heirloom. Plushy and soft, darn near perfect seaming, lined with love and hand-sewn hidden stitching; it's a vision of delicately tweeded acrylic perfection. Ahhh.....

youuuuuuuu...ooouu!

Gave Away...

Red Heart Soft Yarn, Honey. Sz. 9 needle.

My favorite-est knit to date went to Mom....the Hemlock Ring Blanket by Jared Flood. It was the fastest, most satisfying thing ever to do. Took less than a week and more beautiful than I'd expected it would be at the start of the knit. I'm totally making another another for myself.

Also gifted a pair of Fetching mitts, to my niece, in Cascade 220, teal with little purple fibers running through it. There were very well-received (better than I hoped for actually), but I snapped no pictures before wrapping. No doubt, you've seen them before anyway.

Making...

Counterpane Carpet Bag, Carrie Brenner (from handknit Holidays, by Melanie Falick)
Sz. 9 needles, Moda Dea Tweedle Dee yarn and I won't be using the handles in the pic. Oops.

All Wrappd Up

See the half-of-a-straightpin, there in the bottom? This is the gift we got from my son's orthopedic surgeon after two days and many mind-numbing hours spent in waiting rooms to have it extracted from kiddo's foot. It's good to know those nurses in the outpatient surgery center have a good sense of humor. Hehehe...


Merry Christmas, all!

What....Who....Huh?!

How long is fortnight exactly? If I calculated the time spent avoiding the blog, I'd say it's been at least fortnight or two, right? Aww, well, anyway. T'is life.

But I made stuff and I frogged stuff and I made plans to frog more stuff that I made. And I drew a little too. See!

2 hr. pose

Like I told my people*, I'm a little proud of this drawing. I was in the company of a two very talented people and a little terrified I'd freeze, but I didn't and well,......I like how it turned out. It's fairly large, on 18" X 24" newsprint with vine charcoal. Toot, Toot! (Yeah, that was my own horn.)

I've much knitting to talk about too; some of it (really super, fantastic) good, most of it bad. But collecting the evidence of such, takes a little time, so you'll get those updates later. Besides, a good knitting story should have all the passion of a cheap romance novel and, frankly, I'm too zapped for that right now.



* This is one of my favorite expressions picked from the kids. It was coined the year that we moved into our new house and the boys were making new friends in the neighborhood. Getting up to go play outside with this new group of boys, coming and going with his brothers, my 4yr. son informed his daddy that he "was going outside to be with his people." He's still that cute, some three years later.

I'm Sorry

The rocket pattern has been moved to the back-burner for now. It's a matter of shifting priorities....again. Evidently, my sense of time and holiday schedules is WAY out of whack. (Did you all know Thanksgiving is in like four days?....It was news to me as of this morning!) Nevermind, my frustration with the project has overwhelmed my need to please. So, I'll try to have it finished before the first of the year. Sorry again, ya'll.