Archives for April 2010

Here is my progress on CeCe:

It is a wee bit longer than it was yesterday, as I only manage to do a couple of rows a day. Because the body is knit in one piece up to the armholes it takes approximately forever for me to knit a row.

I have a bit of a conundrum. I’ve got a couple of time-consuming stealth projects I am working on that have rather tight deadlines, yet I want to have knitting to show on the blog. Since this, after all, purports to be, you know, a knitting blog.

When all else fails, do a giveaway.

I have this here book:

It is Color Knitting the Easy Way by Melissa Leapman. What’s the easy way? Stripes and slipped stitches, so that you are only ever working with one color at a time. There’s a lot of great info in this book — discussion of the color wheel and theory, step-by-step instructions for mastering techniques for knitting stripes and mosaic knitting, a treasury of stitch patterns, and a number of cute patterns for both stripe and mosaic knitting.

If you’d like to enter to win my copy of this book, leave a comment on this post by noon (Eastern Time) on Sunday May 2 and the Random Number Generator will choose a winner.

In Other News

I’ve updated my Travel page and removed events that have passed.

My next event is May 7 – 9 in Charlotte, NC at Charlotte Yarn. Check their website here for all the details!

I think Lucy is planning another party.

Yesterday I got a review copy of a new book: Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF, by April Winchell.

I had no recollection of requesting this book for review — either I did and forgot (very, very likely), or the nice Random House publicity person sent it along knowing I’d like it.

I sat down to flip through it yesterday and ended up reading it cover to cover. Oh my gosh — this was the funniest thing I have read in a very long time.

Apparently, April Winchell has a blog — regretsy.com — where she posts horrific items she finds for sale on etsy, along with pithy comments. How is it possible that I did not know about this website?

Apart from the items pictured in the book in glorious full color along with their descriptions from the original etsy listing (which in and of themselves make the book worth the price of admission), but you get April’s comments on each item, as well as a wonderful intro to each section of the book.

A concept book like this could have descended into a dark, bitchy, snarkiness, but there is something quite wonderful about April’s prose. It’s just plain funny. here is one of my favorite items from the book:

If you read the reviews on Amazon, you’ll see that most people agree with me. The single 1-star review said the book was obviously for “insiders” who had been reading the blog. Well, I had never heard of the blog before yesterday and I loved the book.

I do think to fully appreciate this book you need to have a sense of humor with an “edge” — so be forewarned. There is plenty of not-safe-for-children language in the book so if you are offended by that, steer clear.

But me? April Winchell, I adore you. Call me, we’ll do lunch.

Oh, and you can blame April and her book for my lack of progress on CeCe. I spent a good deal of knitting time yesterday reading!

I did take this project to the Spring Fling with me but spent the weekend working on a different, non-bloggable, time-consuming project. I continue to work on the mystery project, so progress on CeCe continues to move slowly. But I am working on it and loving it.

Lucy sez:

Meow!

The Fling is flung and I am back home with Lucy. It was a great weekend and I of course took no photos.

But I did do a videocast with my favorite KnitGirllls — LaLa and Leslie. Little did they know when they asked me to do it that I never shut up. 😉

The videocast is here. You have been warned.

ETA: Leslie and LaLa are experiencing technical difficulties with their site just now — they are working on getting it back up. In the meantime you can view the video on Youtube here — it’s in 5 parts, I think.

Lucy sez:

“I sleep better when Momma is home.”

When I was a child I knit a squirrel. The pattern came from a Patons pattern book from the UK, published in the 1960s (though that may have been a reprint from an earlier version). The pattern was very cute — you used a very loopy stitch to create the tail.

The Brooklyn General Store is holding a contest — to create a handmade squirrel. Follow this link on their blog for all the details. There are prizes to be had! You have til the middle of May to get your entries in. 🙂

I wonder if I have time to knit another squirrel?

Not right now — I’m busy getting ready to head to St. Louis tomorrow for the Loopy Ewe Spring Fling. I’ll be back Sunday night — so no blog post til Monday.

Lucy is resting up for the big party she is planning in my absence.

Have a great weekend and see you Monday!

Did you see that CeCe’s designer, the fabulous Bonne Marie Burns, just happens to be knitting herself another CeCe right now?

By the way, the other day, she posted on her blog a very helpful explanation of how to adapt CeCe to add buttonholes to the front band should you want a button-up version. The pattern is written with a one-button closure.

Bonne Marie pointed this out to me over the weekend and I thought about doing so, but decided against it. For this type of little cardi, I’d be very unlikely to ever button it up, so I’m sticking with the the original design. That reminds me — I’ll need to shop for a pretty button!

But it is early days — I’ve barely made any progress since I last showed you my CeCe.

This is what comes of spending the evening dozing off with your knitting in your hands until you finally give up and go to bed.

At some point I need to decide if I am going to make a short-sleeve or long-sleeve CeCe and I keep waffling about this. I think what I’ll do is a short-sleeve version that has slightly longer sleeves than pictured on the pattern — like have the sleeve end just a bit above the elbow.

Of course I’ll probably change my mind 47 times between now and the time I start the sleeves. I have plenty of yarn to do the longer sleeve version should I decide that’s the way to go.

Which brings me to a question from the comments. Trish asked:

I have a question about buying yarn — how much of a yarn do you buy when you just buy on a whim? I have a hard time knowing whether to purchase 2 skeins of something (a scarf?) or as much as they have left? Just wondered…so many of us have 1 off or 2 off skeins that ultimately end up not being enough for the project that we find…

That’s a very good question, and one that does not have a simple answer. For me . . . it depends. (You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?)

In the case of the yarn I am using for my CeCe (Rowan Calmer), I had a bag of 10 skeins in my stash. As I recall, I got it on sale somewhere, and bought a bag of 10 because I knew that would be enough for a sweater of some sort — Calmer has 175 yards per skein, so that’s 1750 yards of DK weight yarn.

But it depends. If it is a fabulous sale on a yarn I love, I will buy a ton of it. I haven’t done this sort of yarn shopping for quite a while since for the past few years I’ve been concentrating on socks and lace shawls. I know how much I’m going to need for a pair of socks, and know ballpark how much I need for different sizes and shapes of shawls.

What do you all do?

Lucy sez:

“Nothing.”