Blue Again

It's been quite awhile since I could post pics of my pool. Last summer was so hot we just couldn't keep it from turning green. Since it's been cool, the pool wasn't quite green, just a bit turquoise and we had almost no flow. Were we not fresh out of our alleged winter I'm sure it would be a deep forest green by now. This year, however, I've hired a pool service. They came out for the first time Friday to work their magic and voila!

I know it looks the same as prior pictures I've posted, and that's the point: between then and now it's been more bog than pool. Now, we have perfect pressure, great flow, blue water and high hopes for a great summer filled with poolside knitting. Boo-yah.

WIP Progress: Purple Shiney Card Bag

Well I'm almost done with the card bag, and I've managed to make the "Bag End" (Tolkien reference) rectangular-ish:

As you can see, I've completed the liner as well, and it's also rectangular-ish. Here's where I've hit a major snag. I mean Major Snag. Are you ready?

I cannot do the kitchener stitch. I just don't get it. At all. I mean, I understand what the point is, but not how to get there. Since this bag is rectangular at the bottom, I can't just decrease the liner in the round, nor do the 3-needle bindoff without it being really visible inside the bag. I. Am. Stuck.

I guess I'll have to head to my LYS this weekend and get someone to show me. The real challenge is not to get distracted by all the pretty new yarns there and forget about the whole "kitchener stitch" fiasco.

Yarnblob: Highly Localized Yarnbombing

This flowering cactus is located on the window ledge behind our large kitchen sink, so I had to lean way over and use really long chopsticks (the kind used for cooking noodles) to place the yarn in that position. Yarnbombing is hazardous work!

WIP: Card Bag

This is going to be a card bag for a friend of mine; the coloration isn't great in the pic because the photo was taken with my phone at work:

The yarns are:
Outer layer (on needles): GGH Gigolo, color 2
Inner layer (in high-tech anti-yarnblob device in the back): Louisa Harding Jasmine in color 29

I'll take better pics when it's finished. Meanwhile, the challenge has been to make it rectangular rather than round as for dice. I haven't quite figured out the bottom yet but I've got a few more inches of knitting before I have to know what I'm doing.

FO: Dish Rag

I found a cone of cotton yarn that had a cool color combo, so of course I made a kitchen rag:

I have every faith it will take my darling family less than 3 months to turn it completely brown. No worries, though; that'll be my excuse to make more ;-)

Paint Blob

No Yarnblob today: this was much weirder:

No, I Haven't Fallen off the Planet

In fact I have a number of things to blog about; more to come soon :-)

D is for Revenge

Okay D is for Dog, but the dog was my revenge. My Hubby kept throwing this little dog-shaped cat toy at me and I couldn't seem to hit him with it, so while he wasn't looking I put it where he would be sure to see it:

Yes, that's part of my hubby's current project. Now it's a dog house ;-)

WIP: Socks on the Go

I have a family member in the hospital (she's doing fine), and while visiting her there I all but finished one pair of socks and started another. This is the pair I started there:

Unfortunately, I have to re-do the first sock because it's a bit too large; I spose that's what happens when you approximate gauge in a waiting room and then knit standing up with the yarn in your pocket. Fortunately, I'm a patient knitter when it comes to socks, and I'm making the second sock (shown in the photo on the needles) about 4 stitches smaller. Once I get that one done and make sure it's the right size, I'll just unwind the first one and re-do it.

For those wondering, the yarn is OnLine Supersocke Relax-Color #1106 on circular size US2 needles, with appropriate Anti-Yarnblob Devices deployed.

Two Painting WIPs I'm Never Gonna Get Right

The first is that dang ninja, after I tried adjusting the highlighting down from stark white to a softer yellow:

(He looks like he's been bombed by a squadron of pollen-laden honeybees)

The other is that dang gnome with the cool armor that just refuses to look like leopard spots:

(She looks like she's either made of stone or has a serious infestation of some sort)

Sigh.

I'm Pretty Sure the Dolphin is Mooning Me

Warhammer Wood Elf Glade Guard (lots of pics)

Well I finally got a few completed (this after destroying part of the Guard by trying to use the spray-on primer):

What the Heck is That?

Since we had a long weekend I finally got my Warhammer Glade Guard glued together, minus one tiny dagger that went MIA and has yet to turn up. I admit I thought about gluing the extra elf head to the belt of the dagger-less guard, but figured that probably wouldn't go over well with his buddies.

Meanwhile, however, I am left with another conundrum; there's a critter in the pack that isn't pictured anywhere; seen here in the lower left of my pic:

And here's a close-up of the lil guy, who looks a bit like a lizard with wings:

Seriously; what the heck is it? It's not on the website, not on the box, not in the book (that I can find, anyway); nowhere. So, what is it? Is it worth points, is it a mascot, a familiar, a minion? ("Who's my minion? Who's my minion?" sorry - D&D 4E reference there...) I just. don't. know.

De-blobbing the Yarn Stash

So, after quite a long time of thinking about it, I finally dragged all my yarn out of the closet and the lab and various other places I tend to keep it, photographed it all and organized it by color range. Here it is stacked in the library after being photographed:

Here it is repackaged by color range:

(Yes, that's Vera in the foreground, hiding in her case)

Okay, from the outside it doesn't look a lot different than it used to, but at least my photography skills have improved ;-)

Unfortunately, just when I thought I was done, I sat down at my desk only to find a box that had mysteriously been overlooked:

What's in the box, you ask?

Dang it.

I Didn't Lose My Head After All

This lil guy stuck to my slipper and bruised my foot when I stepped down, but at least he's been found:

I had to stick him in a bit of Museum Putty to make him stay upright; pencil for scale. Yes, that's my blackberry in the background; I was, uh.... too busy preparing the head's welcome home party to break out the portable studio. (You believe me, right?)

New LYS and Why I'll Never be a Famous Knitter

I visited a new (to me) yarn store yesterday in Arlington called Yarn Heaven. It's a very nice shop, lots of room, loads of sock yarns (my favorite) and a sizable classroom in the back. The ladies there were friendly and helpful, and more than willing to answer questions and demonstrate things.

As a result, here's why I'll never be a famous knitter: I was mentioning that my back-and-forth gauge was different from my circular gauge and that I figured it's because I knit rather differently than I purl, and showed one of the ladies how I purl. Apparently, I'm doing it wrong, though I couldn't quite distinguish the subtle difference between what I'm doing and what she was trying so patiently to show me. She does wrap her yarn under her index finger rather than over like I do, but I just can't grasp doing it that way (no pun intended). I'm told that's often the fate of those who learn to knit from books and the web rather than from a person. I guess I'm just doomed to purling weird. I used to knit weird but I've since fixed that.

Scurvy Yarn Project: Black Cabled Socks

My LYS had a sock yarn sale some time back which I took full advantage of. I purchased, among other things, several shades of tweed sock yarns by Lana Grossa, which I really like. I need black socks, so I decided to start there. I also decided, thanks to some apparent need for punishment, to incorporate some cabling into these socks. Oh, and to make the torment really medieval, I also decided to do them via the two-at-a-time method.

Yeah. Go ahead. Laugh it up.

I didn't take any pics of the first two attempts (both of which I ripped out) because the socks looked too much like a tiny bikini top. This, however, was taken as I was rewinding the yarn after the second or third failed attempt:

At least I found some small amusement; the spool edges stayed put while I was re-winding the cake

It's in a scale because after cutting off the parts that were so bad I couldn't untangle them, I needed to make sure I still had enough for the torture socks.

Here is the yarn after I'd finished, all packed up in Anti-Yarnblob Devices and ready for yet another attempt:

Anti-Yarnblob Devices provide no defense against Scurvy Yarn Projects

Here are the socks, knitted two at a time, with cabling on the tops and cuffs, shortly before I realized the cabling pulled them in so tightly I couldn't get them on:

After I ripped that attempt, I realized two things; (1) I don't have the attention span to do socks two-at-a-time (my mind tends to wander while I'm knitting; that's half the reason I do it); and (2) the gauge difference between regular in-the-round knitting and cabled in-the-round knitting is very, very important.

After that, I decided to just knit them one at a time and only do cabling on the cuffs. So far, I've gotten to the point of starting the cuff on the first sock (I knit mine from the toe up), but now I've got to rip out the two rows of cabling and the increase row because I added too many stitches:

Eventually I will get this right and finish these darned socks. No pun intended.

Ruby vs. the Hairdryer

Recently, my teenage daughters talked me out of my hair dryer. I was using it to dry paint on minis; they wanted to use it for *tsk* hair. Bah!

Anyway, the one I let them talk me out of was full-sized and had multiple heat and blast settings. While great for human hair, even the low settings would blow a plastic (e.g. Warhammer 40K) mini right off the counter. I couldn't tell you how many times the Termagants went flying despite a lack of wings.

Having recently started painting again I realized I really did need another dryer; flying minis aside, having the girls tote it up and down the stairs was both time-consuming and problematic. So, off I went this past Saturday to Sally's on a quest for a smaller dryer, perhaps small enough not to blow my Warhammer 40K Chaos Space Marines off the counter once I start on them. Granted, they have jet packs, but that's still no way to go.

Fortunately, Sally's had just the thing, pictured here with a Reaper mini I painted for our current campaign ("Ruby") and a pencil for scale:

Being somewhat of a nerd, I was skimming through the little information booklet that came with the hair dryer (in case there was anything useful in it; scuze me while I look for my pocket protector) and found this little page of helpful styling hints:

I will admit that occasionally, when blow-drying a mini, I am amused at the thought of drying their hair, which inevitably fails to waft in the breeze, even with a styling tool:

My youngest casts "Summon Styling Tool IV"

Ruby does not appear to be quite as amused, however:

"I'll never tell you where I hid the gems!"

Ruby, however, is metal and thus not likely to go scooting across the counter with anything less than a shop-vac set to blow. Instead, I tested the power settings of this little dryer against one of the plastic WH40k Chaos Space Marines. He bravely stood his ground on the low setting; the high setting made him do a bit of a moon walk, but at least he didn't go flying off the counter:

"Wow, can you outfit that with a laser sight?"

Sometimes Yarn Just Won't Do

My Hubby was recently working on some dungeon bits for our Pathfinder games and asked me to create some tiny bedclothes for the beds he'd made. I decided to use crochet thread and a tiny hook (1.65mm) and crochet them. Even so, it was really difficult to get them small enough. The pencil and 1"x1" background grid are for scale:

The evolution, left to right; final version far right.

I finally got it the right size, and even managed to make the sides turn down a bit so they'd hang off the edge of the tiny beds:

Final version, side view.

Vinal version, end view showing turned-down sides.

I even made some Mad Knittist notes as I went along so I could re-create the bedspread since my Hubby would need a dungeon-full of them:

Unfortunately, the very nature of yarn ensured that the tiny bedspread curled a bit, and at that scale, its own weight was not enough to pull it down. We suspected that even with gluing, it would still curl. Also, the depth of the crochet stitches made the bed nearly 1/8" wider than without the bedspread. Using the same 28mm scale as the character minis, that's roughly the width of a shoe. No yarncrafter in their right mind would make a bedspread that thick. Sorry, Aunt Lydia, but yarn just wasn't gonna do.

My Hubby, however, was undaunted. He decided to use paper, some origami-esque folding tactics and some shaved foamcore, and I think they turned out great:

The paper makes it look like they were patchwork-quilted, perhaps by the innkeeper's wife. My Hubby's full blog post on the beds and other dungeon bits can be found here.

Nessie vs the Shark

Nessie, our automatic pool cleaner, is in the habit of catching just about anything that might be floating in the pool, including our yellow duckie thermometers. We're down to one duckie thermometer now, and it's been in the spa for some time. Poor Nessie apparently got bored or desperately hungry and has now started going after larger prey:

Nessie: 1; Sharkie: 0

Yes, that's the shark chlorine table holder, and yes, it's completely embedded in Nessie's gullet. She couldn't even submerge until the shark was extracted. Exotic pets require a lot of special care.