Bandwagon, here I come!

Tons of people on my blogroll did a random Tuesday today, so since I got to work an half hour earlier than I meant to (damnable pens writing down the wrong schedule!), I will also randomize my Tuesday.

1.  I forgot to put the back wheel on my bike after April gave me a ride home the other day, and it was an unpleasant surprise at 6AM this morning. Fortunately, aforementioned schedule fiasco happened and I was  not late, but early instead.

2. I am going to make vegan sloppy joes in the slow-cooker tonight and I am probably waaay more excited than I have cause to be.

3. The term started yesterday and I am already sick of one of my lectures. Phonology? Really? Maybe I’ll like it, but right now the combination of miserable seating, unpleasant topic, and massive amounts of homework is not promising. My seminar on language and gesture looks to be absolutely mesmerizing though.

4. I am wearing a pair of pants that I made. With my own hands. They are ugly as sin, but no one will notice under my Green Apron ‘o’ Doom.

5. I plan to finish my karaoke cable scarf tonight, as soon as I rock my way through 70 pages of reading.

6. My garden is growing! Things that I planted! Are coming up out of the ground! AND IT IS SO EXCITING THAT SOMETIMES I JUST HAVE TO SQUEAL AND RUN AROUND AND JUMP. Sorry.

5. Matt locked himself out of the house yesterday – with the blender running inside, and couldn’t get in until I got home thirty minutes later. Never have I had such a smooth smoothie.

4. I had to put this on hold and finish it during my lunch break. I am now very hungry and surrounded by food that I cannot eat. I want something warm and filling and all I have is a really crappy nearly wilted salad (I forgot to bring dressing) and a mushed banana. Life is unfair!

3. I have had three compliments on my pants so far. Apparently ugly as sin is in. That was hard to type, let alone say…

2. Homework is dumb.

1. I have reverted  back to the third grade in my state of cranky hunger.

Frogs, WIPs, and FOs oh my!

I have been a busy bee! I finished the term (can I get a hallelujah!) with a basic feeling of not-failingness and a GPA that reflects how close I was to doing so. Ouch. But that term is over and this coming term includes online 100 -level astronomy classes and only two upper-division linguistics classes, rather than the four 400-level classes that I opted for last term (can I get a WTF!). I am looking forward to actually learning stuff rather than cramming it into my head so that I could vomit it back out on exams the next day.

You remember how I said I was going to dig out all of my ancient WIPs and deal with them on the first day of Spring Break? I actually did it! The really great thing is that I didn’t intend to. My mom and I were planning on painting my garage and turning it into a yoga studio this week, so I went in there to start cleaning it out. Turns out that the reason we shoved stuff out there is because we don’t have room for it in the house. I was baffled as to how we couldn’t fit everything from our monstrously small apartment into our much more spacious house, until I started poking around. The house is full of fiber. Everywhere. Crammed in corners and various cubbies and drawers. Seven different places, to be exact, were playing nanny to procreating WIPs. In order to finally unpack the boxes in the garage, I had to deal with my FiberBeast. After placing the various balls of acrylic and other random yarns found for me by my non-knitting grandmother into a special container, I got to work on the projects that either needed to be frogged or finished.

First, was this sweater that I did not knit. In fact, it was quite a surprise found in a bag among other yarns from a yard sale (courtesy of Grandma…) It’s kinda cute, but not spectacular, and after finishing it off I found myself to be utterly horrified by the original knitter’s techniques. Oh well.

It is small, but fits. I think I am going to use it as en experiment with steeking to make it into a cardigan! I think it would look better as a cardigan; I have always wanted to try it; and it is a wee bit small, so cardiganing would make it so I don’t overstretch it when putting it on.I just finished with a couple of rounds at the neck and bound off the armpit holes, and wove in a billion ends that were unneccessary to begin with!

Next up was my beautiful purple Ziggy!

My first lace pattern and I really liked it! It’s super cute on, too…

And on to Shads’ birthday presents (her birthday was in January). I cannot photograph these well at all as there is NO natural light. We had beautiful days during the end of finals and then it just turned back into a swampy, sludgy and sometimes hail-y mess. Yeck. Anyway, the first thing I made for Shads is a lovely Evangeline in Cascade 220. Shads loves green, and she’s pretty hot and quirky and awesome, so these just kind of scream SHADS!

They really do look much nicer than in this picture. And super comfy. I kinda want my own now.

Now, Shads also loves Batman. So I made a Batman slouch for her. It’s not exactly obvious that it’s a Batman slouch, and that’s what I love about it. I just sort of cast-on for this, and made it up as I went along – slouches aren’t that hard really anyway. I just turned it inside out for the purlishiciousness.

But where’s Batman? Look closely, young grasshoppers.

As soon as I can get these mailed to her, I will force her to send me pictures of her wearing them. They look fine on me, but they will look awesome on her because she’s just That Way.

Next up: Maligata!  Mali is my first cat. She’s an adorable little girl who looks somewhat like a llama. Her nicknames are thus The Mali Llama, and Maligata because she’s a Mali and a gata. Inoright? Anyway, ever since I got her I always wanted to name whatever company I owned Maligata with a picture of her face from the profle blended with a heart. And of course I decided to knit that. As my first intarsia pattern ever. Oh, right and I also wrote the first intarsia pattern I ever knit? Why do I do these things? Really? Anyway, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with her, so I took all the scraps I had and turned her into a beautiful purse.

I’ve been told that it’s not that easy to tell what it is unless you’ve seen my doodling it everywhere. Whatevs.

My pet sheep in my cat bag made of alpaca. Could I be any cooler? No.

Are you getting tired? Cause I’ve got miles to go, baby… I found this thing and don’t know what it was supposed to be – it’s made out of Lily Sugar’N'Cream and totally pointless.

So I fiddled with it for awhile…I thought maybe it could be a small pillow, but I didn’t want to deal with stuffing, etc… and it’s too big and to0 loosely knit to be a washcloth, and not really worth frogging for the yarn. It puzzled me until Lily tried to eat a button, and as I pried the slimy thing from her jaws an idea hit!

It’s summery – maybe springy – and fun!

And then I finally finished up an old Maner that I’d made ages ago and just didn’t feel like weaving in the ends. I still need to find a fun button for it, but I’ve been contentedly wearing it all day with just a safety pin, so until then…meh…is fine.

These are great and similar to the Calorimetry which I have been saying I’ll make since they day it first appeared in Knitty. But somehow I made this first? Super easy and will probably be where most of my leftover yarn ends up. Mmm, toasty ears.

After a whole lot of end-weaving and a TON of frogging – a tunic, an afghan,  several wristwarmers and my beloved/despised Iris sweater design for my mom – I am left with one and ONLY one WIP.  Not only that, but my yarn is now only taking up one under-the-bed tub (which is mostly needles and other paraphenalia), one cube for acrylics and stuff I think I’m going to donate, and one basket for my WIP and queue. Ahhhhh….

I happily leave you with my Karaoke Cable Scarf, so that I can go to Ravelry and update for hours. And then maybe I’ll finish cleaning the house so that I can clean the garage so that I can paint the garage so that I can turn it into a yoga studio. Spring break my ass.

(can I get a hallelujah!)

It’s dead week again…

…and this is primarily why I can’t get any work done:

They won’t stop being furry and cute. Lily (in black) keeps saying “Hey mama! Hey! I am sooo much better than syntax! You can’t pet syntax, can you? And I bet it doesn’t purr like this…see? Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”.  Look at how demure she looks.  Croissant on the other hand has been keeping me distracted by turning into a twenty-pound hurricane and wreaking absolute havoc in every room of the house. We are currently down one collectable Lord of the Rings goblet. How will we ever be classy without Frodo? And how will Gandalf survive without his little hobbit friend? We’ll see.

When the cats aren’t distracting me, I’ve been distracting myself by pretending that I really need to bake more bread:

…yum. I can never manage to take a picture before it mysteriously loses chunks of itself. It is somewhat perplexing. I may have to go do another loaf just to investigate.

Now, it’s one thing to tell myself that I need to bake bread, because in this house bread is always a necessity. However, it went a bit too far when I convinced myself that more important than a final paper were these bad boys:

…who were delicious, incidentally. The glasses are filled with oat-milk which I decided to try since it was on sale at Sundance for cheaper than soy. I can’t stand rice milk, and I don’t really like soy milk all that much, but it’s usually the most economical option. The oatmilk was…acceptable. Not any better than soy though, especially not for the  loss of protein per cup of it. It served its purpose quite well for these cookies. I think I used the Classic Chocolate Chip recipe from How it All Vegan. I usually am set in my ways and always make the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, so I don’t know why I switched it up. They were utterly delicious though. The second batch was better because I refrigerated the dough and they were firm and plump. I just didn’t want to take the time for these ones so they were a bit spreadier.

Also on my distractions list: ZIGGY!

So far I think it’s coming along pretty well. I’ve never really worked with a lace pattern before. It’s kind of ridiculous how long I’ve been knitting and all of the things I’ve never tried. Anyway, it’s knitting up just fine, but really awkward to photgraph at this stage. I still don’t fully understand how it’s put together in the end, but that’s okay. I’m also worried about the quantity of yarn I have left. I’m only halfway through and it seems to me that my skein is running a little small…but the skein was a good deal longer than called for by the pattern so I hope that I am just being paranoid. It’s a lot of fun to knit, but it does put a crimp in my knitting-while-doing-things style. Which is probably why I’ve never done lace before. It’s not really movie-material. But it’s kind of nice to wake up in the morning, make my tea and knit a repeat. And then scream because I still have a week and a half left of pure torture.

Final distraction, and last desperate attempt to keep myself from starting my socioling paper? Blog. So I think I’ve run out things by now. I will leave you with a good dose of cute and a favorite haiku of mine:

I sleep with one paw

protecting my nose from harm;

one can’t be too safe

rainy days and mondays…

Mondays are going to be personal update days, and then I will try to stick to a mostly knit-sew-other craft basis. This rule is now in place to keep my from babbling like a moron whenever I feel like it. It’s not good for anyone’s health!

Yesterday was my 21st birthday, and unlike every other American girl, I do not have any pictures to post. In fact, I didn’t even drink anything. Which is ridiculous, indeed. However, I did spend my 18th birthday in France where I was taken out on the town to celebrate my legal drinking, and I spent my 19th birthday in BC where I did the same. So it shouldn’t be too sad that I didn’t get to do anything for my 21st, but I’m still a little bummed about it. We had just planned to walk down to McMenamins, grab a plate of fries and a beer.

Instead I spent my birthday weekend baking bread. A ridiculous amount of bread, actually. I took a photo or two of my loaves, but I can’t find my camera charger cord thingy, so meh. I now have a monstrous amount of bread in my freezer which is good because I am poor and good, healthy bread is expensive.

I also wrote a paper which isn’t even due until Wednesday. This is neither normal nor healthy for me.

On Saturday my parents wanted to take me out to Sweet Life (an incredible vegan bakery in town. The only reason to come to Eugene ever), but I didn’t really want to go out. On top of my brother losing his job, my father also got a notice that he’ll be laid off from CASA in June. My parents are fine for money (they saved quite a bit by taking all of my college funds for themselves /bitterness) so I wasn’t worried about that, but it hardly seemed like the time for great big stuff-yourself celebration y’know?  So the family came over for a tea party, which was awkward and weird being as half the family is depressed, my aunt is a paranoid schizophrenic and only chats with herself (I love her dearly, but, well..she’s not a party person) and my grandma was trying desperately to cheer us all up and failing terribly. Yay family.

I did get a TON of gardening supplies – as soon as finals are over, gardening will be started and I am very excited about that. We also got a little bit of money, which was nice.

We went out for dinner at Lotus Garden (vegan chinese food…so frakkin’ delicious) and then went to a couple of thrift stores that are known for having a delicious book selection. I know, we’re classy people. I found a goldmine of Discworld books which I have actually given up looking for in secondhand stores because no one gets rid of them. I also found the second in Game of Thrones series – the first of which I also found at the same store (an autographed copy no less). I also picked up the first of the Diana Giabaldon books, which I don’t know if I would like but the library never has the first book, so I figured $1 is a good price and I can sell it for more on Amazon if I don’t want it! I also bought an adorable kids t-shirt that just says “SAMURAI!” on it. ‘Cause I’m a Samurai donchaknow.

Then Matt’s bike broke. And then my bike broke. Goodbye birthday money. That one day you spent sitting in savings was nice. I’ll miss you.

I really want this term to be over.  Hello 2.0; I remember when you were a 4.0, and I miss you like that. Please come back?

Also, a quick sidenote to the weather: WTF?! SRSLY PLS STOP SNOWING IT IS SO NOT OK! YOU ARE CONFUSED ABOUT WHERE YOU ARE. PLS TURN AROUND & HEAD NORTH KTHX?

FO: Mama Sock

I did it! I made an FO! I really did! I gave them to my mommy this afternoon and she seemed to not at all care about them. But I expect that when giving gifts to her, so it was a success.

I have been having such a hard time with lighting these days – I can’t get good pictures! Sigh. These pictures do no justice to the colourways, but oh well.

So I know I said that I would be finishing up projects before I started on my Spring list, but…ew. And I would like to do that over Spring Break when I’ll have at least three days off to get all organized. As it is, I don’t even know where Shads’ stuff ended up, so how can I be expected to finish it, right? Okay. So now that’s decided, but y’all have to hold me to my word: When Spring Break hits I will put down my current WIP and finish off my old FOs. I will. I type truth right now.

I think I shall begin my Ziggy!

Just one bad day.

I’ve been picture-taking and organizing my Ravelry queue, to get ready
for Springtime Awesome Knitting, as all the cool kids are calling it
now. And guess who got her big box of yarn in? Guess! Guess! While
you’re thinking about that one, let me show you some yarn pictures:

This Karaoke will become Karaoke Cable Scarf!

This beautiful alpaca silk has no real destination, other than prettiness. It’s so soft. So…so soft.

This Karaoke will become Ondine: Sleeves for a Mermaid

This Kidsilk Haze will become a Rose Red. Or a Rose YellowOrangeish. Whatevs. I look forward to the FO, but not to the WIP. I will snap this yarn like a…thing that snaps easily.

This Cashmere Canapa will become a River Tam.

This Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light will form River’s brother, Simon Tam. I could not photograph this yarn well under any circumstances. Meh.

This Berroco Ultra will become a Ziggy, methinks.

As for the Rowan Damask, all I know is that I want to have its little yarn babies.

I have completed one of my noro socks for my mama, and I have the other almost to the heel. I’ve actually got homework this week, followed by Dead Week and Finals Week so I don’t know if I’ll get them finished, but I’ll certainly try.

After I finish my socks, I will go through and find all of my unfinished WIPs and either finish them or frog them (Maligata and Mom’s sweater excluded as they are special circumstances), and then I will get going on this awesomeness. It is so hard to have all of this pretty new stuff and not be able to start in on anything!

In other, non-yarny news:

My mother came over to bring us a few of our things that didn’t quite make it here in the moving process. She also brought some really unsettling news: my brother just got laid off. He works for web-design, and the company just moved into a nice new building and signed a bunch of nice new contracts. And then they laid him off due to money constraints. None of that really adds up, but it just hit me hard that no one is safe and I feel like I shouldn’t use any electricity, or eat anything other than rice and just hoard, hoard, hoard my money away. I had an unpleasant if somewhat sillily so morning, and a headache that just wouldn’t go away. But anxiety is starting to set in and I wonder just how long it will be before I’m the girl outside Starbucks, living out of a bike-cart instead of the girl inside, making frothy drinks.

So my SpringKnittingDelight is kind of bogged down by my feeling awful and fretful right now, but it’ll all be okay, right?

Also: It was me. I got the big box of yarn.

All shook up

I came on here to post the pictures of my new box of yarn that arrived, but instead, I find myself totally distraught. I keep telling myself that I won’t get mixed up in any threads on Ravelry that involve my personal views and emotions on things. But this time, I really wanted to make a good point in  my Veg*n group. So I wrote it out, and re-wrote it. And I had Matt look at it, who deemed it acceptable. It was ignored by the OP, and then when I tried to communicate with her on a friendly level…well…
From: vidyate
Sent at 9:30 AM Today

So now I see that you didn’t respond to my post because you construed my boldface font as shouting.

You are looking at this all in the wrong way. My second post, as you will find is filled with frustration at your lack of ingenuity, but seriously, you totally misread the first post. It was optimistic, fun, and lighthearted. Bold is emphasis. Bold draws the eye. It was like that piece of of the spoken speech that has pauses and is spoken even more quietly and rythmically than the rest.

Why are you looking for a fight?

From: Searsknitter
replied
Today
9:37 AM
re:
Sent at 9:32 AM Today

Sorry, I don’t care to correspond with you.

What the hell? It’s amazing how a day can be totally destroyed by someone without the human capacity to listen to someone, regardless of their views. I am a veg*n pagan, and I hang out with an evangelical Christian girl on a regular basis. We are good friends and we can even argue friendly-like about our views. If we can do it, why can’t everyone else? What’s wrong with the world? Seriously. Yarn pictures will follow once I’ve gone for my run, done my yoga and hopefully calmed myself down. I need to be clear and focused when it comes to my phonetics class today.