HELP!

All of these girls know how to wear scarves. I'm a knitter. I have the scarves; I don't have a clue. I fumble, I tie knots, I drape, I loop. Nothing comes out right.

Even in summer, with jeans and a t-shirt, a scarf, perfectly styled.These four girls know what they're doing.
Uh, NO.

Honestly, even a guy knows what he's doing.
Wait---is that David Beckham? OK, so maybe it's his stylist who knows what she is doing. I don't have a stylist.

So what's a knitter to do?

While I figure this out....and stop knitting scarves...... if you see someone who isn't Bea Arthur but who looks like this, it might be me.

And if you see someone who is not wearing these shoes but who looks like this, it might be me.
Or someone who is not so thin but who looks like this, it might be me.
So many scarves. So little sense of style.

Two Finished Projects

This hat is proof that you can really screw up a pattern and still end up with a hat. The pattern was given to me verbally, and I scribbled the directions down when I got home from knitting. It calls for 112 stitches, knit on size 7 circular (and then dps) needles, five inches of 4 x 4 ribbing, then 2 1/2 to 3 inches of stockinette, and then: knit 8, knit 2 together on round one, knit round two, repeat. What is considered known (but not by me) is that on each subsequent decrease row, you knit one less stitch, then knit two together. (i.e. k8, k2tog/k7, k2tog/k6, k2tog, etc.)

Fortunately, I was at knit night, held yesterday afternoon at a knitter friend's house since the LYS was closed, and mentioned that it was taking a long time to decrease enough to need dp needles. That is when I learned my mistake. My friends told me to just jump to k4, k2tog and go from there rather than frogging the whole top of the hat. Whew. ... I finished it up and it looks like a hat!

This is the mystery knitting I did for younger daughter, whose taste is always a guessing game for me. It's a loopy scarf, made with Twinkle extra chunky yarn, on size 17 and 19 needles. The red is gorgeous but doesn't show up well in this photo. Unfortunately for me, she loved it, so I didn't get to keep it. But fortunately, she loved it, so I get to knit another one! Now I have to decide what color.

Holy Sheep!

Another finished project! I'm on a roll...a skein....a ball? Oh, never mind. But I've been knitting a lot lately and I think the key to finishing lots of projects is to have lots of different things OTN. That way, I'm never bored and I can just keep switching from one to another. I have a knit-night friend who once said she had eighteen projects OTN. That is too many, WAY too many for me. I would just get confused and end up with a sleeve on a scarf or something. But two or three I can manage.

This scarf project is FUN! It is made with two skeins each of Noro Silk Garden, colors 255 and 211. If you know Noro yarn, you know that there is an unlimited number of combinations for striping, since the yarns are multicolored. I don't think I've ever seen a solid color Noro. I don't know if there is one...

Anyhow, for an easy, fast and fun project, check out Jared Flood's pattern on his Brooklyn Tweed site. If you need a Christmas gift for someone, you can finish this one in time. I promise!

Now I have only one project going, and it's a summer weight wrap, so I'm off to shop in my stash for something more to do!

A Perfect Pie, A Finished Object, and Something Else That is Finished

This is as close to a perfect apple pie as I have ever made. I even put leaves on it! (Not entirely talent on my part-they are made with punches from William-Sonoma, but who's telling?) Anyhow, the pie is from a Silver Palate recipe, and it always tastes great made with Granny Smith apples. Usually the crust totally splits open and lets the pie juices run all over the place, but this time it stayed together. Yay!

We have Thanksgiving dinner each year with other Georgia orphans (none of us has relatives in Georgia) and we all bring food. I always make the pies, and that has not always been a success. One year I brushed the top crust with beaten egg yolks, having read that this makes the top nice and brown. What I didn't read was the part of the directions that said to mix the yolks with water, and the top of my pie was a yucky yellow. Ooops. Then there was the year that I made the pumpkin pie with brandy or whiskey or some other liquor. I don't remember which, but it was not a hit.
Now for something completely different. This is my most recently finished project - a ribbed scarf made from three skeins of de.Ve Autunno, a wonderfully soft merino yarn. It's just a k4, p4 ribbing, made across 28 stitches. It's not entirely successful, however, since the ribbing does what ribbing is supposed to do, which is to pull together. This makes for a narrow scarf. I tried blocking it, but that made the fabric too thin. So I held a steam iron a few inches above the scarf, and the ribs pulled back together. It's a good thing the scarf is long - five feet long, so it can go around and around the neck in case of really cold weather.

Now for something really completely different:

Bravo, stick a fork in me. I'm done. With the Housewives. I don't know if I changed or the show changed or it's the constant bad news about the economy. Maybe it's remembering hearing Barack Obama say something like "We're a better country than this," referring to poverty, hunger, and the lack of health insurance for so many people in this country. I watched the first episode of the new season of The Real Housewives of Orange County last Wednesday night and was appalled by it. The women just want MORE. The excess was just so....excessive.

So that's one addiction gone. Now for knitting - just kidding. That one I'll keep!

The Never-ending Scarf

finally did actually have an end!

I just finished it and I love it, although I certainly won't be making another. It was knit from nine-hundred and sixteen yards (four skeins) of Rowan Kidsilk Haze, colors 579 and 597. It took FOREVER. The yarn is mohair and as thin as sewing thread.

But the scarf is about seven feet long, soft and warm. I can't wait to wear it!

totally tubular, dude

I don't know what that means. I had thought it had something to do with surfing until I watched a Globe Trekker show last week, and the surfers in southern Mexico talked about surfing in the "pipe." So who knows...

Anyway, I digressed. When I wrote about the circular scarf I was knitting, what I really meant was that I was knitting a tubular scarf. It's knit on circular needles and will form a tube when finished. I don't know where the pattern came from, but all the other kids at my LYS are making it, so I had to as well. It's knit with 86 stitches on size 6 needles, 16" long. It's a perfect no-brain-needed project, unless you're knitting it in stripes and have to count rows. I am just knitting in this green until I run out of it and then changing to magenta and knitting until I run out of that. The finished project is somewhere in the vicinity of six feet long. Yikes! I hadn't thought about that when I started the project; this yarn is really just thread and so I hope I can finish the thing before I, uh, die. Or go crazy, whichever comes first.

Finished Objects

Yay! Two projects finished---finally! After spending two months knitting a pair of socks, I was able to get busy on two other projects-one, the dreaded beaded scarf, and the other, a scarf I had bought the yarn for about four months ago. It was nice to knit on something other than size two needles for a change.

I like the beaded scarf, and knitting it was much easier than the beading process was. Sixteen-hundred beads on yarn a bit too thick for the holes in the beads---not fun at all! I used the kitchener stitch to graft the two ends together, and it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. The seam is quite visible and since the scarf could conceivably be worn with either side out, the seam detracts from one side a bit. I know (now) that the kitchener wasn't designed to work with a combination of knitted and purled stitches.

The second project is a scarf (Horndal Scarf from Noro Revisited by Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton) and it's an easy project. The garter stitch sections are knitted in Noro Kureyon and the ribbed sections are knitted in Noro Blossom yarn. As always, Noro colors are gorgeous, but I don't like the sudden surprise of knots, especially knots that cause a sudden shift in color. When I use Noro in the future, I will re-wind it into balls so that I can look for knots and color shifts before I knit.

Next project? I am starting on a sweater for grandson, who will be two this months. I bought that yarn last fall to make him a sweater for Christmas. Ooops......

Beaded Knitting, continued

Remember the beading I whined about over a month ago? Well, I have finally gotten back to it, after knee surgery and dealing with a problem thumb. I threaded 1400 of the 1600 beads on the yarn (Aslan Trends, Natural Luxury Yarns, "Class"), and that process shredded the yarn a bit. I don't recommend it for beaded knitting. The beads are from Czechoslovakia (via this shop) and are very sparkly, but that sparkle doesn't show up well in the photo.

I met a friend for a "working" lunch on Saturday. She has made several of these scarves, and they are beautiful; there is an endless variety to make depending on the yarns and beads chosen. She was kind and offered to guide me through the getting-started stage. It turns out that I should only have put about half the beads, or even one-quarter of them, on the yarn. Every bead on there has to be pushed along as I knit, and once past the first eleven set-up rows, I only need five beads every other row---so I'm pushing way too many beads along, even though we cut off about half of the 1400. (Arggh--I'll have to re-string them when I start the second half of the scarf.) Once I got the hang of pushing the beads into place as I knit, the project became fun. I've also found out about a new bead store in the area, but I'm refraining from checking it out, going crazy over the beads and buying even MORE beads to thread onto yarn. If I still enjoy this process after finishing the first scarf, then I'll go there and fall in love with some new beads.