But not like I love my guitar…

I’ve been terribly ill for the past week and it has really put a damper on all of my plans. Like getting to relax before classes begin, etc… Sigh!

Classes start on Monday, and things are looking up. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get even one linguistics class in, but after a chat with a man who just happened to be the linguistics department head, I got into three! I’ll be taking the main Syntax upper division course…and its pre-requisite at the same time. Oh sweet goddess is that going to be hard. But it does shave almost an entire year off of my graduation date! Yay for chance encounters with department heads!

I got a brand new laptop for the start of school – I can no longer take notes by hand. It is SAD. But I type so fast that I can practically transcribe all of my classes, and it’s wonderful. This laptop is adorable – not even a foot wide,  and maybe 8 inches across the other way? She weighs about 2 pounds and fits neatly into any purse or bag that I may be carrying. I am in love. The tiny keyboard is a bit of an issue. I keep accidentally pressing PgUp and moving my cursor all over the place. Oops.  Having this laptop being so small and so portable has enabled me to finally begin working on Iris again. That, and having taken a hefty break from that damned cardigan.

I picked up the right front (I have the left front and the back done) for the fourth time, and COd. I’ve got almost 7 inches done and it looks okay. I taught myself to Norweigian purl, and that’s been helping my gauge immensely, but it’s still off. I can’t ever seem to keep tension the same and it always ends up looking sloppy (in my eyes. Not in most non-knitters’). I am going to knit the sleeves in the round, I think so that I can at least keep those looking sharp. I still haven’t decided.

I need to get back to work on Iris, but she’s a difficult creature. The yarn and stitches are so fickle that I can’t watch anything while I work on the front pieces, so it’s very tedious and I need to take lots of ravelry breaks. I can’t wait to get to the sleeves which are plain stockinette and will knit up fast while I plow through my school reading (yes, I read and knit at the same time!)

If you say run…

Wow! It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I’ve been trying to keep my knittage down recently, due to a lack of money.  I was able to pay off a huge chunk of our debt a few weeks ago, and it felt so good that it got me on a debt-reduction spree.

Compared to other young couples in the United States, Matt and I have a very small amount of credit card debt, and we have lovely credit ratings. We are both quite good with money, but over the course of last year, in which we moved five times, we managed to rack up quite a bit. If I could keep working the amount that I’m working right now, I could easily pay stuff off in the next six months. However, school will soon start and I my hours will go down considerably. It’ll probably be a year at least. Sigh. So I’m trying to keep my yarn-buying way down. I won’t have much time for knitting once school starts anyway.

I have still been busy! I’ve worked a bit on my Maligata handbag (I think last time I mentioned it, it was a wallhanging). I’ve got the front piece and the back piece done. I am working on some side pieces and a bottom piece to make it a bit more bulky – not just the two pieces sewn together, ya know?

this is Mali unfelted and unblocked. She looks cuter with a tiny bit of felt. I need to embroider her an eye and a nose, I think.

I also sat down and knitted Big Bear a sweater, using the leftover yellow Cascade 220 from my boxes. I’ll post some pictures once I’m done knitting a similar sweater for my brother’s teddy bear.

I am planning on spending today finishing sewing the pair of pants that I started awhile back. I have not had a chance to do so since Matt usually sleeps during the day, but he is out at a CPR training all day. I am planning on having some breakfast soon, and then buckling down and finishing those pants and/or finishing some Maligata.   I’ve got Becoming Jane to watch, so some knitting will have to be in order!

I am also planning on doing an ebay search for some Cascade 220 to make some socks for family members. I had said that I didn’t want to make any gifts other than Maligata gifts, but unfortunately Maligata is expensive if I’m not going to be selling. Chris, Dad and Matt will all get socks, I think. I am trying to make things that will help me improve my actual knitting skill – my tension is not always right and sometimes things look a bit lumpy. So I want to be doing things that are simple and will help me be excellent by the time I get back to knitting lovely things.

And as soon as I finish this Maligata bag, I will frog my Trendsetter scarf and do it over in a ribbing or something that doesn’t need blocking. I think it will be better received as anything but stockinette. I will probably also use slightly smaller needles. And then once Trendsetter scarf is done, I will hop back on the horse and finish Mom’s cardigan.  I guess I’d better get moving, eh?

C’mon sea legs, pull yourself together…

Wow! I’ve finished projects.   “What?!” You exclaim?  I tell you the truth! Projects have been completed.  If you feel a bit faint, that’s natural. I’m still reeling from it and it’s been a few days.

First, I finished my Celtic Cable Neckwarmer. And she’s a beauty!

Croissant is always the manly helper. Always.

And then I went ahead and finished my couple of boxes:

which became

And then I decided against the waste of yarn for felting since it didn’t seem to help much with sturdiness, and went for a nice thick garter stitch. The result was much nicer:

.

Neither box is perfect, but they hold my underthings, which is all I really needed them to do anyway. And now I think I have a pretty good grip on box-making. When I get around to making more, I shall know how to make a pretty nice one, I should think. I’m going to invest in a bit of wire for stiffness. I could go down a couple of needle sizes or two, but I prefer to be able to knit one up in under an hour. And it’s not like adding wire is cheating…is it?

In other knit news, I also finished my Venus scarf, but have not been able to block it. I will post a progress picture or two a little later on. I also finished a sweater that I finished knitting over a year ago. I finally went and bought some buttons and now it’s really quite cute, despite the fact that my knitting was less than excellent at that point and time.

The most exciting thing of all, however, is this:

(Yes, those are two posters of two different Mr. Darcys.)

It may not be noticeable at first glance, but I rather enjoy citrus fruits. I know, I know, I was a bit subtle about it, but I think if you pay close enough attention, you can see it.  The quilt is exceptionally poorly made. It really, really is. Fortunately that is hardly visible on the front side, unless you look really closely. This baby has taken me two years to make, and has survived and changed its looks through no less than five moves – including two international ones. By the time I got around to actually finishing piecing the top piece, I had lost and redesigned the pattern so many times, that I have no idea what it was originally supposed to look like. The only thing that remains the same is the center piece. I ran out of fabric, and being as I was living in a different country, one year after first buying it, I could not buy any more, so I got really really creative with the cuts and edging. There was supposed to be more white and a lot more fruit, rather than chunks of green and yellow. Um. Yay!  And then I discovered that my ancient sewing machine would not quilt! It couldn’t handle the batting, so I resigned myself to hand-quilting the bastard (as she has been known ever since I realized that in January). Then I moved back to Eugene where my mother, an extraordinary quilter lives. Over the course of a couple of visits, I finished the quilting on her fancy-pants sewing machine. It does not match, and is hardly even remotely straight as I couldn’t figure out how to make the quilter’s foot work properly for me, and I had no patience. So just don’t look at the quilting too closely. Just…don’t.  All in all, this thing probably took me less than 3 weeks to make, but because of the moves, injuries, school and sheer laziness, I managed to stretch it out to two years (almost exactly too).  Go me.

In other news: I started on two new projects. I began work on my first ever Maligata bag. I went out to a beautiful LYS and bought some pretty llama/wool blend (when I find the name, I’ll post it) that was the exact colour of Mali. It was my first attempt at designing an intarsia pattern, and I am pleased to say that it went swimmingly. Next time I will buy graph paper, rather than drawing on all the lines myself. Or maybe I won’t. Who knows! I then had to convert the entire pattern into longhand because I simply despise reading charts. Even ones that I’ve made myself, apparently.  The rectangle that I’ve knit is adorable. It’s clearly a cat, and the heart behind her is also quite apparent. I need to take some yarn and a tapestry needle to give her defining touches and important things like, you know, her eyes.  In lieu of it being my mother’s birthday on Sunday, and me not having even the slightest present for her, I’ve decided to simply make this rectangle into a wallhanging and give it to her. I’ll have to try the bag out later, I suppose. But Mali is her cat, and we did originally get Mali for her for her birthday, so it’ll be cute. Mom will probably just be annoyed because it doesn’t match her decor, and Mali will be annoyed because she’ll think she looks chubby and Torah will be annoyed because there’s no Torah wallhanging, and Kit will just run around in circles to annoy Torah further, and Mickey will just sit in his box and glower, and Dad will probably be the only one to enjoy the present. Which is, in the end, good because I don’t have a present for him for his birthday in two weeks.

I also started sewing my first pair of pants. This excites me, but I can’t really work on it because I don’t want to wake up Matt with the sewing machine. He should be getting up soon anyway, so I think I’m going to go subtly let him know with the gentle roar of an ancient Singer.