Gone Batty!

Today's music is System of a Down "Hypnotize" and "Mezmerize"

    Before I get to the knitting, let me just write for a moment about "the cough".  In my last post, I had finally gone to the clinic and was given antibiotics and cough syrup (wt/ codeine). That was 2 weeks ago. I did not take the antibiotics, but I did take the cough syrup, though only at night. Several times, I woke up in the middle night and would take another 5ml of the syrup if I was having a coughing fit. It stopped the cough so I could sleep, but I never felt particularly rested (I dreamt very little, is that related?). I didn't notice a difference in how much I was coughing (or not coughing as the case may be) until this weekend. Last night I did not take any cough syrup and I did not cough!   My voice sounds different to me, and I can't project at all-but i'm not coughing incessantly so no complaining from me!

On to the knitting and non-cough related life stuff:
   So in the two weeks since I last updated (in case you missed it in the first paragraph) there's been some fun, some not-fun, and some knitting. The fun: T, A and I went to la maison tricotee which I have decided is my favourite of the LYS (local yarn store(s)). Though to be honest, it's not super local-it's a good 25 minutes on the metro. Extra knitting time, amirite?! Anywhooo, I like that they carry a lot of  Canadian indie dyers, they have a real community vibe, and I love that they have tea and snackybits. I'd like to make going there a regular thing, tea and knitting-it's my zen.

                                 Look at all that colour! I just want to smoosh my face into it all.

Charmingly mismatched teacups! Snackybits!  (And A's Hitchhiker, knit in Sweet Georgia Cashluxe)

Tea! Snackybits! Watermelon sock #2! (Vanilla cake and jam-so delightful!)

Truth: I'll pretty much love any place that serves cake.

While there, I saw a pattern I had to have. I had to knit it!  After snackybits, I rushed home and cast on almost immediately. By almost immediately I mean after I picked up the 5yr old from school, did afterschool stuff, made dinner, got the 5yr old to bed and then cast on  Boo!
First I made one:

And then I made a second:

Are they not the cutest freaking things you've ever seen? Despite their totally wonky eyes.  I've named them Boo and Bloo (because I'm clever that way).
Their wings are made using leftover Knitpicks Swish worsted in black (obvs) and each pair of wings took about 10 grams of wool. Boo's body was made with leftover Malabrigo Rios in Plomo-roughly 10 grams as well. Bloo's body was made with about 10 grams of leftover Madeline Tosh Vintage in Betty Draper's Blues.

Also fun; the eldest came for a wee visit and she brought me a present. I love presents, and this one was pretty adorbs: An alpaca made from Alpaca!

On the way to the place where she works she passes by an Alpaca farm. alpagas ferme norli. I'm dying to go! They have 40 pregnant Alpacas. That means at some point there will be 40 BABIES. oh the squee! I love that they have info on the herd...much cuteness. so wow.

Not fun: Appointments-lots of phone talking (ick) and making appointments and going
to appointments. The upside to appointments is travel knitting, so not all bad?
 B and I waiting for the bus  (this was actually taken before the maison tricotee pic but yunno, for sake of the blog, things get fudged-also, how many public transportation pictures can one chick take?)

Anywhoo, have made lots of progress on the second watermelon sock. (the colour above is accurate)

Fairly close to the toe decreases on the Watermelon, which is why I cast on a new sock:

This is the Pixie Dust Sock from Socks a-la-carte 2 toes up (but I'm knitting them top down). I'm using stashed sock yarn of course. Cascade Heritage sock in Blood Orange.

I have an appointment and some shopping to get done this week, so I should be able to finish the second Watermelon sock by the end of the week. I'll have to cast on another pair of vanilla socks in the next couple of days, since Pixie Dust isn't portable for me. I can't keep track of the pattern, even one that is so easily memorized, on the bus/metro.

Hitchhiker numero dos is vry, vry close to being finished.

aka, i'm getting fed up of knitting it and want to start something new. I'm at the 38th point. I think that's enough. Maybe I'll do one more point. I'm undecided.
                 Deck knitting in the sun! while B bikes around in circles. Note the sassy slippers.

Next time I blog, there will be a finished pair of watermelon socks and a finished hitchhiker!
 

quickie from the sickie...

Today's post is brought to you by: Queens of the Stone Age "Lullabies to Paralyze"


Yesterday I spent the morning at the clinic. I finally decided to go see a doctor about this dry cough that I've had for over 2 months. I dropped B off at school, hopped on the metro and prepared for a long wait. I brought my watermelon sock with me.

I underestimated how much knitting I had left because in the 2 hour wait to see the doctor-I finished my sock.  And by finished, I mean that I finished the toe decreases but couldn't do the three needle bind off as I hadn't thought to bring a third needle. I was able to hop onto clinic wifi and put out the call (aka facebook post about how I was bored) and the lovely A showed up and kept me company through what would have been a very boring wait.
Anywhoo, the doc couldn't hear anything, so I was sent for a chest x-ray. Nothing showed up on the x-ray so I was sent home with a prescription for antibiotics and hycodan cough syrup.  So, i'm basically fine, minus the incessant coughing, and the back pain (from uncomfortable waiting room chairs, lack of sleep and brutal coughing). Oh, and the runny nose I now have. *sigh*

FO: Watermelon (vanilla) sock:

I've already cast on the second sock-it's my travel project, and I like to have the first couple of rows of ribbing established before I tuck it away in my travel bag.
I think at some point this week or next, I may cast on another sock. Not a vanilla sock though, something with a pattern. I'm getting terribly bored of vanilla socks, plus I have some really lovely solid sock yarns languishing in the stash basket.


FO numero dos; optimistic-mitts! I really liked this pattern, and I really love the finished object.
First mitt, almost done.

Both mitts, second ready for binding off. If I make these again, I'd bind off in pattern-would look much nicer.

Finished! My favourite part of these is the strap and button. It was fun choosing the right button out of my button box. The strap was seed stitch, which I normally cannot stand, but seeing as how it was only 30 rows of a 7 stitch pattern, it was tolerable.

Aren't they super cute?! They are just perfect for slightly chilly mornings. I lurve them.

Progress on the Hitchhiker has been slow, but I'm at 30 points now, so yay!

I only have this:

Tiny little amount of noro left-bottle cap for scale, but i'm not quite ready to stop knitting this hitchhiker, I would like it to be full sized, with all 42 points. The lovely A, again to the rescue (and because she lives closer to the LYS) graciously picked me up a ball.

And now an abrupt ending, because I'm suddenly very, very tired.

Plz let it be April showers...

and not April snow. I will lose my shit if we get any more frigging snow. The temps here are still in the negatives and that is bad enough. I feel very much like a character from Portlandia:

Tonight's playlist: Alice In Chains "Facelift"

Last weekend, my neighborhood had a sugaring off/maple syrup festival. It was kind of odd. There was a huge trough full of snow set up and for 2$ you got a popsicle stick to dip into the maple syrup. I took B and he was super stoked-loves the maple syrup. I do not like maple syrup. What I liked was the vendors selling hand crafted items, like these super cute little alpacas (my Biodome mug for scale)

They are actually made from Alpaca, which pleases me greatly. That booth was selling hats, mitts and scarves and I thought it strange that they didn't have any roving or wool. There was also a "petting zoo" set up...a couple of geese, some goats, sheep and two alpacas (d'awww) some bunnies and a forlorn little pony in a teensy pen all by himself. B spent a lot of time at the fence petting the goats and sheep. We could not get close enough to the alpacas for hugs. When B tired of the animals, there were plenty of activity stations set up for kids that he enjoyed.
There were also a lot of food vendors, though we didn't sample any of the wares, it was a lot of maple  flavoured (obviously) and pork/bacon-y things.

Let's get the FO out of the way shall we?

 Vanilla sock made with TurtlePurl self striping yarn in Twilight.

Cutest shoes ever right? I love a good Mary Jane. I'd really like to wear them.

This yarn washed up really well. Lost no colour at all, and they feel just lovely on. Is it weird that I almost always include a picture of my knitted item soaking? I don't know why, but it probably is related to my love of fresh laundry. I cannot wait until I'm able to hang up my clothes outside again. They smell so much better when they come off the line. Another benefit to line drying, it cuts down on that electricity bill a wee bit. Laundry is very meditative to me. the hanging, the folding. And to me, a picture of some nice hand knits in soapy-ish (well, eucalan-ish) water is very zen.

And that concludes the finished objects for this week. At least there are a couple of WIPs to pad out the blog. There is always a couple (several)  wips.
My Noro Silk Garden  HitchHiker is coming along and it is GORGEOUS.

I really, really love it, I'm no less enamored of this shawlette the second time around as the first-though I am at 20 points-so the shine will be wearing off somewhat in about 2-3 points. With NSGS only being 328yds though, I know I'm not going to get anywhere near 42 points. Nbd.

I've still got the Cabarat sock on the needles. As you can tell from the picture (or maybe not) I did the gusset decreases on this sock with the circs. I used stitch markers to keep track of where to decrease and I had absolutely no problems. Of course, in my last post I didn't mention that I had done that, and on the post from March 13th, I had written that I couldn't do the gusset on circs-so I thought I should clear things up a bit. I can now do the gusset on circs.  I can also cast on stitches on my circs now. I might have rendered my dpns obsolete. *sad face*

It's kind of hideous right? I don't know if I can finish this sock. I mean, I've already put so much work into it, but ugh. the pooling! the camo! How am I going to manage doing a second sock? If-and this is a big if-I ever finish these socks, I can guarantee they will be boot socks. And if I finish them it's only because I really love Alegria by Manos Del Uruguay.

Making finishing ole ugly sock up there even more difficult is the Biscotte&Cie self striping Watermelon sock yarn that I now have in my possession. It is truly scrumptious. See,  the Twilight sock, instead of dampening my self striping sock yarn love, it stoked the fires. Which led to google. Wanting to shop local as much as possible, I refined my search to Canada. Up pops Felix-Biscotte&Cie's self striping yarn. *LE GASP*
How have I not seen such beauty before? Not only are they country-local, they are in my province! Huzzah! Unfortunately, they are located in St.Bruno de Montarville. Which is about 1.5-2hrs of public transportation away from where I live. Only 30 minutes (supposedly) by car...Anywho, I looked up the distributors and found La Maison Tricotee. Last fall when I was looking for buttons for my Cypress cardy, I passed by Maison Tricotee but it looked tiny and B and M were already looking super bored from waiting for me to finish at the button store, so I didn't get a chance to go in and explore and promptly forgot it existed.
I twisted A's rubber arm, and off we went. I was very impressed by La Maison Tricotee. Cute, little shop full of yummy goodness, yarns and baked goods. Lots of Canadian dyed fibres (yay!) and quite a bit of yarns made with BlueFaced Leicester (aka bfl-used primarily for meat I think, but starting to crop up more and more in yarn shops).
They also have a discount card. Gosh, I love me a discount card...what is not to love? After 10 purchases of 25$, you get 25% off. Wonderful! They definitely have more than 10 colours of Felix self striping sock yarn that I want.

Want to see my Biscotte&Cie Felix self-striping yarn in Melon D'epice?
Of course you do!
Gaze upon the loveliness that I cast on last night:

*sigh* <3 <3
And these aren't even my colours...

Finally, I'm making a pair of wristers,using a free pattern (thank you!) called optimistic-mitts. Cute right? I've basically chosen to knit these because they have a decorative button and I want to use a couple of my sassy buttons. And because obviously, I hate when my hands are cold. I'm knitting these out of Elsebeth Lavold Baby Llama. In black (in case it wasn't super obvious), and from deep stash. I have three balls of it, and I've tried to knit it up into various items over the past couple of years-a scarf, a hat, a stuffy. All of them frogged.

Now, this is supposedly a worsted weight, but it looks and feels more like a DK weight. When I read the comments on the pattern, people had complained about the mitts coming out too big, so being that Baby Llama is not a true worsted (imo) I opted to go down a needle size. seems to be working well, though I'm worried there might be some blooming after washing. Stitch definition is not great with Llama-can't really tell that the ribbing is a broken rib pattern. But whatever, I'm using deep stash. I'm happy to finally be using this stuff. It's quite lovely. Very soft! If I had a sweaters quantity of this stuff, it would make an awesome drapey, open cardy. Alas, I do not, so wristers it is.

I cast on, finished the ribbing but I haven't started the stockinette yet. I should get to it soon though, I'm intrigued by the construction of the thumb.instead of using waste yarn to hold the thumb's stitches you knit with the waste yarn and the regular yarn held together. When ready to work on the thumb, you pull out the waste yarn and pick up the live stitches. Sounds fun!
I really should prioritize my knitting. Get the wristers done before the weather warms up, before it's too hot for full mitts, but too cool for nekkid hands. Then work on the hitchhiker, and keep the watermelon sock for public transportation until those two items are finished.

I don't know how much prioritizing I'll be able to do-Easter Break starts for B tomorrow, and the teens on Friday, I'm not likely to get much knitting done...now, sleep!

Shout out to mah Shabs!