little feet, big sky

It’s the middle of October and I’m in a bit of a knitting panic. I had wanted to gift hand knitted items for the holidays to many, many friends and family and I just don’t think I’m going to be able to do as many as I’d like. :-(

The weather turned here suddenly over the weekend. I was up in the middle of the night and the winds were howling around and I realized it was fall already. It was chilly and I shivered a bit that night, being too lazy to go downstairs to get another comforter. The next day, some conversation with the spouse yielded the discovery that the heating isn’t turning on. Joy.

I’ve been bundling up myself and Spice and am feeling the need for warmer clothing for her. Yes, we live in sunny, warm Hollywood, CA. But our house is in the hills and shaded by lots of trees and is older and badly insulated. The downstairs living room, kitchen and guest room are all quite cold and when it’s windy outside, you can actually feel the draft like a whisper of a breeze indoors! All of this is just to point out why thick woolen soakers on Spice is not such a crazy idea…

Since I crochet faster than I knit, against rationality, I bought Victoria Schiffen’s Dragonfly Longie pattern to whip up some longies. I did because I had started a pair of knitted longies off the top of my head in super bulky Burly Spun, learned how to do short rows on fly only to realize that I didn’t understand the general butt shape I needed. For some reason, crochet just makes so much more structural sense to my brain, so anything I crochet first makes more sense when knitted later. So I bought the pattern and felt instantly foolish because if I’d just sat down with a cup of tea and a sketch book, I could have figured it out myself and saved myself $12. *sigh*

(Hmm.. Harley is leaning against my cold feet. Warm cat. Maybe I could make cat bed slippers somehow, to always keep a warm cat on my feet…)

Anyhow, the longies turned out pretty nice. She suggests a #7 hook, which I do not have. I have three G/6’s and four H/8’s, but not a single #7? Odd. I used the #8 and it’s a little ‘holey’ for my liking, but that could be because I used Lion Brand Fisherman, which always runs a little thin for worsted weight. I’ll be trying the next one with Cascade 220 and a G/6. I also strayed from the pattern in a very impatient-me type of way. The bulk of the pattern is worked in the round by joining each round with a slip stitch, chaining one and starting the next round. For some reason, I hate doing this and prefer to work in one long spiral, so I did that for the legs and the hips/waist. You can only really tell from the back, where the spiral starts near the center butt piece, and at the “end” where the fpdc/bpdc ribbing starts. I can’t tell at all on the legs. I haven’t decided yet if the convenience is worth the look; from other people’s pictures, the joined rounds result in what looks like a seam running up from the middle of the butt, which I think I find equally unappealing. I haven’t quite decided yet. :-)

These longies are super fast, but it’s still pushing my other on-the-needles projects out..

• Tan cable scarf in Cascade 220. about 70% done and holding.
• Kitty Pi in orange varigated Bernat Felting. For Irix, and also about 70%. Needs felting.
• Wristwarmers in Brown Sheep’s Handpaint Originals. %80. Not sure why I’m just not finishing these yet!
• Grey dog sweater in Lion Brand’s Jiffy. Just needs to be seamed and a neckline added… note my use of the word “just”. Again.

What’s awful is that this pushed out the other projects I wanted to do by Christmas.

• Kitty Pi in grey for Harley. Using Brown Sheep Burly Spun.
• A shawl for my mother’s friend Dorathy.
• Socks for me in Colinette’s Jitterbug.
• Red hat for the spouse. I’ve been promising this for, like 3 years.
• Scarf for the spouse. I picked up the yarn for it, Garnstudio’s DROPS Alapaca in Goteborg maybe 2 years ago. *sigh* See a pattern here?
• A cute hat/scarf/mitten set for my nephew.
• A red and black scarf for my cousin.

This on top of Spice and household-y things and trying to get sorted for traveling over Christmas. Eek!

Okay, so of all the things you can do with your iPhone, you can’t actually knit directly with it.. but almost.

Store knitting patterns on your iPhone using Evernote. After trying for ages to find a practical way to use this slightly clunky desktop app/website/iPhone app, I’ve found it’s great for storing patterns I’m currently knitting. Sign up online and create a new note. (You can download the desktop app for either Mac or Windows, too.) Copy and paste the pattern text into your new note. You can even drag a picture into the note, too, which is great for cables/braids or even charts. Install the Evernote iPhone app, login in from your iPhone and you’ll see your pattern there. :-)

Track stitches on your iPhone with Stitchminder. It’s a free app, and despite the slightly garish background of a blue ball of yarn, it works pretty well. Ironically, the preset column counts don’t have a heading for tracking stitches. Instead you can choose from column names like row count, increase/decrease row and pattern row. Make sure to set your Auto-Lock setting (Settings > General > Auto-Lock) to something like 5 minutes, so that you don’t have to unlock everytime you finish a row.

Now all we need is an iPhone app for Ravelry. :-) Any other ways you use your iPhone to help with crafting?

I feel so useless lately. I know the whole “taking care of a whole person” bit, but I can’t help but feel that I’m just not accomplishing enough. And frustrated because I don’t have the time or energy to get more done. Work is pretty much shot. I might spend an hour with my hand in actual code, but that included hours spent in my head working out the problems first – and my head is nowhere near clear enough to do that. I have an attention span “the length of a flea’s nose”, as an old friend used to say. I consider the spouse lucky if I follow him talking for more than five minutes. All my mind can think of is baby, and other than that, my demeanor is pretty vapid most of the time. How on earth is this a biological survival skill??

At this point I’m capable of the following: eating, sleeping, showering, feeding baby, changing diapers, bathing baby, playing “wiggle out the farts” with baby, doing laundry and limited driving. Okay, so some days I only eat about 600 calories and I’m often so spaced while driving that I make myself say the color of the stoplight out loud before the intersection. Still, right now, that’s about all I can manage.

I’ve recently added knitting back to this list. Knitting usually takes more brain cells for me than crochet, but lately I’ve been on auto-pilot with it. The whole “sleep when the baby sleeps” thing doesn’t work for me because I don’t easily sleep with daylight and she rarely sleeps long enough for me to get in a nap, too. So I’ve found that twitter and knitting are both things I can do in 20 – 30 minutes chunks, between her and some laundry and maybe a cup of tea. I’ve finished a baby vest, and am almost done with some gorgeous wristwarmers that I’ll probably sell on Etsy. Next up are some scarves, a wool diaper wrap and perhaps a pair of socks. The other morning, I photographed many (but not all) pieces of my copious yarn stash to list on Ravelry. This made me realize just how much good yarn I have that needs to be knitted into something useful… hence, the knitting spell.

If you knit or crochet and you’re on Ravelry, check out my notebook and send me a hello! I’m also on twitter and always looking for new friends to follow.