Handmade holidays

I had a most awesome day off yesterday. First off, Sarah's in town for the weekend, so it was awesome to see her for the first time since July or so. A group of us got together yesterday morning to decorate onesies as a baby shower-ish gathering for Jolene, and we had a blast being total craft geeks. Yay for my days in college making letter shirts for APO; blanket stitch FTW!

After that, it was off to tea. Now, I have always had a picture in my head of what "going to tea" involves. Etiquette. Straw hats. Hoity-toity-ness. Tiny sandwiches. Pinky fingers sticking out. You know... proper, snooty tea.

The place we went to, Teavolve in Fells Point, was not at all what I was expecting from a tea room. It's not formal; there were people in there with laptops, everyone was wearing jeans. We each got a pot of whatever tea we chose, and a scone with clotted cream and raspberry preserves, 3 sandwiches and a deviled egg, and a little dessert plate at the end. We ended up being there for almost 3 hours, and despite the fact that this was one of those days where caffeine reacted badly with my nervous system, it was a lot of fun.

We had our handmade gift exchange, and to all those who saw the socks Sarah made for me and didn't think they would possibly fit, I say this:



Sarah, they are DEAD-ON! The yarn is Socks That Rock in Pallas Athena, one of their new Raven Clan colorways. I know she said what the pattern is, but I was busy admiring them and convincing everyone that my feet are actually that small. They came wrapped up in this bag that she made, which has skulls on the outside and is shiny purple on the inside. And there were also some yummy hand-dipped chocolate mint candies. Hot. ;)



Thanks, Sarah, for being a fantastic gift buddy!

My own worst enemy

A couple of months ago, I decided to take up sewing. I had a successful tutorial afternoon, I felt stoked about it, I came home and revved up my sewing machine, and it just wasn't working right. The top thread was leaving these HUGE loops on the underside of the fabric, so the bobbin thread wasn't being held by anything, and I ended up with a messy tangle of thread that wasn't holding the fabric together at all. It did the same thing over and over, and being as clueless about sewing as I am, I didn't know what to do to fix it. It's a 30-year-old Kenmore sewing machine, and the thought had occurred to me several times that, hey, maybe it's just plain broken.

Then Erin came up with an idea for the group of us to do a handmade holiday swap. I took it as a sign that I should take another crack at the sewing machine over this past weekend. I changed the needle, I put in new thread, I tried every tension setting, but it was still doing the same thing. The top thread had absolutely no tension.

Because genius me had it threaded through the tension wheel incorrectly.

*headdesk* (I needed something more emphatic than *facepalm*)

So, um, it works just fine now...

I made a short-row heel

Just to show that I still knit from time to time...



I turned the heel on my Northern Lights sock. It's my first short row heel; not too shabby, if I say so myself.



I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my family, and believe me, I know exactly how much I have to be thankful for right now. A whole bunch of wonderful things have happened as a result of getting myself back on the path that I was supposed to be on, and I thank my lucky stars for that every single day. I love my family and my friends and my job (even on the weirdo full moon days); I think I'm entitled to a couple of lines of sappiness about that every so often. :)

Anyway, Thanksgiving was very nice. I didn't get a ton of knitting done, just a little bit while my parents were watching a football game. All I had with me was the sock; Ljod's in a bit of a hibernation, since I need to figure out where the buttonholes go and I'm facing another long and somewhat boring section of stockinette. It's also hard to get jazzed about knitting a sweater when our temperature control at work keeps the building right around a balmy 80 degrees...

Arrrrr

I can't believe I didn't post this... I got it a bit before my birthday, so it wasn't together with the other yarnage when I was taking pictures of that.



Kathy was my birthday buddy at work, and she gave me a Lantern Moon sheep tape measure and this skull washcloth that she made!

And in my own knitting... I have about half a sock foot done in the Cherry Tree Hill yarn.



With the way it's pooling, I can definitely see why they named this colorway "Northern Lights". I think "plain ol' stockinette socks" is the way to go with this stuff. Even a basic stitch pattern like feather and fan was getting a bit lost, so the yarn's going to take center stage with these.

Three weeks later...

So, part of the reason I haven't posted in three weeks was because I was making the following, and didn't want folks at work to see it on the blog before I'd actually worn it.

I made a Hallowig...

It was going to be part of my Halloween costume, but didn't really work out. See the little flip on the bottom? That's after 10 minutes of blocking with a steam iron... and it was gone entirely within 20 minutes. Without that, it doesn't look like a wig. It looks like a hat that Went Terribly Wrong. This particular one, in the green, made me think of the melon helmet cat. Still, it only took about a week of night and weekend knitting, so at least I didn't spend a ridiculous amount of time making something that I ended up not wearing.

So, I had to change my costume plans:

I worry that so many of my FOs can double as fortune teller/pirate gear (I was going for fortune teller, but several people thought I was a pirate.)

My birthday was last weekend, and was celebrated with dinner at my favorite Indian place. Yum!

Jolene has picked up on my "I like bright pink" vibe... I can't wait to see what this Colinette Jitterbug looks like knitted up:


And Jody gave me this wool/tencel from Ellen's Half-Pint Farm, and a super-cute notions bag:




Birthday yarn rules! Thanks gals!

Saturday included a rather chilly trip up to Delaware to hang out with Jody, John, and some friends of theirs at the World Championship Punkin Chunkin competition:


I actually got a picture of a cannon firing where you can see the pumpkin (although you may need to click through and View All Sizes to actually see it)


It was an odd mix of people there. You had the engineers and folks who had made the rigs, you had a bunch of families, you had groups like ours who were just there to hang out and watch some siege engines, and then you had the drunk college students and rednecks, who made up most of the crowd. The organizers of this thing know their audience: case in point, the Skoal Zone tent. It was fun and completely bizarre, although I'd check the weather report a bit more carefully if I went again. Since I was already halfway to NJ, I left early and drove out to my parents' house in time for dinner.

Jody has decided that she and I should be sweater twins, and talked me into doing NaKniSweMo. We're each making Ariann by Bonne Marie Burns. A sweater by the end of the month is going to be a huge stretch for me, considering that I ordered yarn last week and just got the shipping confirmation a few minutes ago. Casting on halfway through the month instead of on Nov. 1 makes it a far less realistic goal for me, but I'll get done whatever I can. We'll see what happens. :)