secret pals!

This is such a great idea! I think my bank account can handle it, so as soon as I sign the lease on my new apartment I'm signing up (I'd rather actually own my new address before I start giving it out).

double-pointed demons

I thought I'd try knitting in the round with double pointed needles again tonight. It's not going quite as badly as it did the first time I tried, so that's encouraging, but it's still very awkward. Did people really ever knit sweaters this way? Craziness.

The Harry Potter scarf is coming along very nicely, but right now I'm really, really sick of doing the same stitch over and over again so I'll be happy when it's finished. I have three and a half stripes left, and then I have to block it and add the tassels.

Haha...block it...look at me use knitting-words...I feel so inexperienced as a knitter, because I am (so why even say it? I don't know). People start writing articles about shoulder shaping and which gods you have to pray to to get your gauge right and how many alpaca it takes to make a skein and I just hide under my desk and stockinette stitch my scarves, feeling inadequate. Now, I know that all it will take for me to get over this is to actually start swatching and knit a sweater, but since I don't have the resources to do that just yet, I bite my nails about it in the mean time. Also, I'm fairly sure you don't have to spin your own yarn to get into knitting heaven (I hope, because spinning makes me think of this fairy tale book I had as a child that had, for the story of Sleeping Beauty, a particularly gruesome and scary depiction of the evil fairy and her spinning wheel...and...yeah...*shudder*).

In my last post I mentioned a very ugly blanket that I frogged. When I inherited my cat I also inherited her cat carrier and the blanket that came in it. It was a crocheted blanket of many different colours that looked like they had been the remnants of skeins that someone wanted to get rid of. Now, I can understand wanting to get rid of little bits of yarn, and I can understand being so desperate to make something that you will knit or crochet ANYTHING, but this blanket was still a crime of colour. It was ugly. I can't say it any better than that.

Anyone who's paid their own way through university, as I am doing, understands that sometimes you have a lot of extra cash and sometimes you owe people (friendlies such as phone companies and landlords) cash that you don't have. This was during a time most resembling the latter situation, so I couldn't even remotely afford to go buy yarn, but I was desperate-so very desperate-to knit SOMETHING.

And so, my eyes fell upon the ugly blanket, and I saw the potential...if the colours were arranged differently...if some colours were completely eliminated...there could be such beauty...

So I frogged that sucker. I frogged it dead. And now I have a ridiculous number of silly small bits of yarn that I'm still not sure what to do with.

In December, I inherited a cat from my great-grandmother. Sassy is five or six years old and is the first cat I have ever owned that plays with yarn. The cats I had growing up would occasionally swat at yarn, if you dangled it in front of them and gave them a treat with it, but Sassy will take small balls of yarn out of my knitting box and chase them around the apartment until they are completely unravelled. Then she comes back for another victim. Today I picked up four balls of yarn that she had completely demolished and three more that were getting there, but that Sassy had batted too far behind furniture to finish the deed. I am rather glad (and very, very amused) that she has this hobby, because it distracts her totally and keeps her away from me while I'm knitting, but I am concerned that she will grow tired of the little balls of acrylic worsted weight (frogged from a very ugly blanket-more on that later) and start attacking things like eyelash yarn, which might not survive relentless cat abuse.

The solution to this came from Value Village (I love thrift stores). Wednesday night I found two bags of random yarn at Value Village for two dollars a piece, and, excited beyond measure, I bought them. Wheee! Most of the yarn was pretty decent, although it smelled a little musty, but there were three very sketchy skeins of yarn that I will never, ever knit anything out of. BUT I will be rolling them into balls and giving them to the cat. So the cat will have her own yarn and leave mine alone! Problem solved.

Maybe. She'll probably know I'm trying to buy her off and ignore the sketchy yarn completely.

I've done it. I've started a knitting blog. There are probably hundreds of other knitting blogs out there but this one is mine! Muahahaha...

Anyhow, right now I'm working on a Harry Potter scarf (specifically, Gryffindor). Each stripe of this scarf has 2,325 stitches, so, at a projected nineteen stripes, this scarf will have 44,175 stitches. Crazy! I think I'll make a sweater next. Yes, I know it's almost April, but it snowed today. I'm sure there'll be plenty of need for a sweater well into July.

This scarf will be the first thing I've knitted to completion since I was nine, when I knitted a scarf for my doll and soon afterwards decided I hated knitting. I then crocheted exclusively until about four months ago, when I felt a random, inexplicable urge to knit, and have been knitting in all my spare time since (random stabs at projects that are currently being ignored in favor of the Harry Potter scarf, or were viciously frogged because they just weren't working out). If that sounds random, indistinct, and just plain weird, that's because it is. But hey. I have a new obsession. It gives me something to do besides playing Scrabble.