Old Man of Storr shawlette

I don't know about anyone else, but when I know I have a stash enhancement experience coming up--for example, the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival--I start to feel a little bit bad about my existing stash. "Why am I buying more when I haven't used what I already have?"

In order to assuage this feeling a bit, I decided to do a little bit of stash knitting. Out came a couple of hanks of "Sky Blue" Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool, as well as a free shawlette pattern that I stumbled across on Ravelry. A few nights' worth of evening TV knitting, and...


The pattern is the Old Man of Storr shawlette (pdf) by Carie Kottman at knitcrush. It's a mostly-garter stitch triangle shawl, with a 5-stitch repeat lace edging. The pattern calls for fingering weight, but since I was using DK weight, I played around with the pattern a little bit. I added one repeat of the lace pattern in the middle of the garter stitch section, and then only did 28 rows of lace edging. It blocked out to 42" wide, which is just about perfect for me for wearing it with the point in front.



Even though it's a heavier yarn, the shawl is very light. And since we're expecting temperatures in the 80s this weekend, it'll be a good handknit to wear to Sheep and Wool!

Spring is here!

After the grey, snowy, slushy, icy, snowy, blah, did-I-mention-snowy winter we had here, I couldn't resist these hyacinths at Trader Joe's.


The lavender and green put me in the mood for SPRING! I decided to finally get a start on the Kitchen Cure Spring 2010, and have spent most of the day today weeding things out of my freezer and refrigerator. There were some historic finds in there. Historic, and also fuzzy. Eww. Things are much better now.



Back to work -- the pantry is next!

Ridiculously easy stockinette cowl

I got an orphaned ball of SWTC Pure a couple of weeks ago from Jimmy Beans Wool. It's a fingering weight soy silk yarn, and given the softness and the weight and the drape it had, I decided to make a quick cowl. I tried a couple of stitch patterns, but the stockinette won out because it showed off the color the best. The yarn is actually 4 different shades of purple plied together, and the end result is a really nice depth of color effect.







I cast on 90 stitches on size 7 needles, and just worked in stockinette stitch until I was happy with the length. And now I have a purple cowl to go with my purple winter coat and my purple purse.

Farpoint 2010

Thank goodness for the epic snow removal that's been going on here in the DC/Baltimore corridor. Things were cleared out enough to allow the 2010 Farpoint Convention to go on as scheduled! It's a small sci-fi convention in Timonium, named after the Farpoint outpost in the series premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Happily, the Timonium Crowne Plaza hotel was not built on top of a giant captive space jellyfish.

The convention was able to book several recognizable guests with a lot of sci-fi credits: Lee Arenberg (Pirates of the Caribbean), Sam Witwer (BSG, Smallville), Mira Furlan (Babylon 5, Lost), and Felicia Day (The Guild, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). Laurel and I got to see 3 of the 4 Q&A sessions; we missed Lee Arenberg's because it was happening at the same time as Mira Furlan and Felicia Day's autograph session:


Yay! We talked WoW with Felicia Day for a couple of minutes, and she was just as sweet as could be... which is probably part of why the charity auction for lunch with her ended up going for $5000. Seriously.

I also met Mira Furlan and got her autograph, but didn't get a picture with her. After the autograph session, we wandered through the vendor area and then went to the game room for a little while before heading back to the main room to watch the costume competition and charity auction. This was one of the more astounding costume entries:


It's a reproduction of Kaylee's pink frilly dress from the "Shindig" episode of Firefly, and it was absolutely stunning. She did this without a pattern,and had to piece together the bodice by hand, along with custom-dyeing some of the fabric and hand-tying the tassels on the sleeves (she has the details available here). Just incredible.

And the evening was capped nicely by a screening of the new Star Trek movie (it is FARPOINT, after all, so they have to get some Trek in there).

All in all, a very enjoyable day!

Again with the snow

Snowpocalpyse 2: Snow Harder has arrived, and I'm preparing for a couple of days of being unable to go anywhere. After last Saturday, when I was driving home and ended up skidding into a full 180-degree spin that ended with me facing oncoming traffic, I'm perfectly content to stay right where I am. I prefer less excitement than that in my commute, thank you.

I went to Trader Joe's yesterday for my regular Thursday grocery run, and was greeted by empty freezer case after empty freezer case, and empty shelf after empty shelf. I wish I'd had a camera with me; the store looked like it had been looted, and the employees all looked a little bit shell-shocked. The library was CRAZY, so I imagine that places selling food and essentials were much, much worse.

Anyway, in sitting here this afternoon, I realized that I never shared this FO from a couple of weeks ago:


He's a voidwalker, one of the warlock minion creatures from World of Warcraft. I made up the pattern, and will need to tweak some things if I want to post it here. His shape isn't 100% correct. However, the recipient immediately knew what this guy was, so it was close enough. The main body is some blue acrylic I had on hand, with some black boucle for his shadow cloud and some gold embroidery floss for his bracers and eyes. He's kind of adorable for a demonic creature summoned from the Twisting Nether.