The Golden Iris

Clapotis in progress Originally uploaded by belleange . Because of a travel schedule that saved me two hundred dollars by taking a connecting flight to Philly rather than just taking the second flight out of Philly, I got a lot of knitting time in. Yes, this is yet another damn Clapotis ; my version here is in Knit Picks Sock Garden (in Hydrangea) with an extra width repeat and who knows, probably some extra length added too to make up for the size differences created by knitting on 3's instead of 8's and worsted weight. Okay, so anybody who knows Clapotis knows that the pattern depends on dropped stitches. It seems like every time you don't want to drop stitches, they run down faster than you can see. However, in this thing, I have to pick out every darn one. (Or rather my mom did... I asked her to help and found out she enjoyed laddering down the rows.) I'm not real excited about the way the coloring turned out in the increase section, but I'm too lazy to rip ...

...or, as we shall see, time to see lots of things that were made mostly out of scraps. Since I promised a quilt retrospective, we'll try that first. Here is the very first bed-size quilt I made, right before I went off to college. This was before I realized that Log Cabins usually have red squares in the middle and that my layout could have been a bit more effective. For some reason I'm a sucker for doing things small... all those strips were 1" wide before they were sewn together. Good thing my mom convinced me to checkerboard the thing instead of making twice as many blocks. And here is the back, consisting of all of my favorite worn out t-shirts of the time. I remember spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the whole shebang rectangular. In no particular order, there are Harley shirts, gym shirts (lucky me, I went to high school in Illinois where gym is required every semester), stuff from marching band and flags, Far Side shirts, my favorite dinosaur ...

In the temporary absence of a digital camera, I'm going to list a number of things that I am going to knit -- and that I actually have yarn for already. Red Afghan a la Ab Fab (but in strips... oh, the chaos of it all) in over 25 different yarns Jaywalkers in Swizzle Nordic Mittens in Brown Sheep Naturespun Sport (my Knitting Olympics project and a birthday gift for my sister) Falling Leaves socks in KPPPM Lace Ruffle Shawl in Karabella Gossamer Felted Tote in Woolpak 14ply a lovely gift for my mom (and something for me) in Lane Borgosesia Cashmere Clapotis (yeah, me too) in Knitpicks Sock Garden Pillows in various blues Lace wrap in Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud ripping out and reknitting a worsted-weight Fair Isle sweater another pair of socks, pattern not yet chosen, in Sockotta From this, it should be obvious why I'm on a yarn diet -- indefinitely. On a $0 budget, this is more than enough to keep me busy for a while. Soon: photos of afgh...

Testing, testing.... I think the time has finally come for me to get a 'real' blog. Mostly so I can participate more easily in knitting-related web things, and collect pretty buttons. Maybe one day I will develop a blog that other people are interested in. Until then, here's some useless introspection.