Distractions, distractions

It's nice to work on more than one project at a time. The ipod cozy is a quick knit, but it's boring. Here's how far along I got:





For such a tiny piece of kniting, it's taking me a long time. My excuse is that I'm also weaving in some ends of the eggplant bag and working an occasional row of the pink raglan.



I'm also packing some items and going through my stuff, separating the things I will bring to the goodwill shop. I can't believe I have hauled some old rags with me to all the places I've moved to before. Some of them aren't even wearable.

Weekend in Boston

I just returned from Boston, where I got to spend the weekend with two good friends. They're both postdocs, one in MIT, the other one in Harvard (Yeah, pretty impressive, but humble, down to earth good friends nevertheless). Both of them were kind enough to stay away from their labs during the weekend  in order to do some touristy stuff with me. Sadly, my own postdoc husband could not come with me. Gee, I'm glad I don't have a PhD. They all seem to work seven days per week. I had a great time and I'm very happy to see that my friends are doing what they love and that they live in such a nice place.


I started the ipod thing but I did not get much done:





I'm not worried, though, this should be a fast knit as long as I don't get distracted

Lucky me!

See what I got in the mail from Schmeebot.






Sock yarn, a pretty card and a keyring. Don't be fooled by the innocent look of that cute little cow. See what it does when you squeeze it:





Schmeebot had no way of knowing this, but I had a bad incident this week at work. It involved the handling of human waste (and no, Heather, it was not baby poo, it was the adult thing). While it's perfectly understandable how it happened, it was totally unexpected and disgusting. I'm glad ths did not happen during my first week here, or I would not have lasted this long.


A lesson for me: I should not complain any further about quitting this job because, even if I like it a lot, shit still happens. And Shmeebot has provided a very funny reminder to keep this in mind!

If only....

...those nasty ends would weave themselves in, I'd be done by now with that bag.



Weaving in ends is a task I don't enjoy at all. That's why I tried so hard to dye my own self striping yarn. And though I certainly reduced the amount of loose ends, I still have plenty left. That's why I got a little fed up and picked up a different project. I just knitted a few more rows with my pink yarn:






Yes, I'm reducing for armholes already. I'm no longer aiming at a boatneck, but a raglan instead.



I was still itching to felt something, and I cannot felt my bag yet, so I also knitted a little swatch and felted it right away:






I will eventually use this yarn to knit a felted i-pod cozy (no, I do not own an ipod, this is a request from my husband).

Done!

Well, almost. The front and the back are attached but I still need to weave in all those ends before I felt. Thanks for the encouragement, those very nice comments kept me going.




I have a question: Should I also block before felting? It seems to me to be redundant, but at the same time, I don't like the way the top of the bag rolls down.






I started to pack a few things and decided to dye my last lot of Kool-Aid yarn before I leave:





I spun it myself, that's why it's all curly. It will be knitted into a hat to match my Kool-Aid collar (changing cherry). That will have to wait until I'm in California, though. Right now it's too hot to be thinking about winter hats.

Putting it all together

Should I keep going? The sides of the bag are going to look a little funny, don't you think?





My options are:

a) Keep going and finish the bag.

b) Stop. Rip. Dye some more yarn (since no two dyelots are alike this means wasting what I already have). Knit again the sides and the bottom.



I don't know what others would do, but I'm going to choose (a). Unless someone really convinces me that it is of utmost importance that the sides only have one color, but c'mon, it's just a handbag.

Some bag progress

Here it is all in one piece: The sides and the bottom of the bag along with the shoulder strap. The only seam is on the bottom. By the way, the bottom has two different colors because, once more, I ran out of yarn. But the bottom of the bag is not its most visible part, so I'm not worried about that. Instead, it still bothers me that I ran out of the color I used for the sides. I will now start attaching the front and the back with yellow yarn and hope it looks good. We're very happy about my husband's new job. It's in Silicon Valley, so Jennifer, I think I'll be close to where you are. He'll start working there the last week of August. The move itself is not going to be much trouble. We're getting rid of all our furniture and shipping the rest, except for the few fragile items we own, which we'll bring in the car with us. That's right! we're driving all the way from North Carolina. Some say we're crazy, some say we're cheap. I say, at least that way I can bring some of my potted plants too!

Pink stitches

No, I'm not straying away from my bag. Well, a little bit. I did try again and made the sides a little less slanted but I'm not 100% happy with the results. Rather than frogging again, I did a few pink rows while I think a little more about what to do to the bag:





Sooner or later I have to finish a project or two, because we will be packing all our stuff and moving to California. Am I happy? You bet! My husband totally deserves the job offer he got. Alas, I like my job and I think I will miss it... But first things first. Finish knitting. Pack. Move. Get another job. It cannot be that hard.

Decisions, decisions....

I ran out of dark yarn really fast. I'll make the sides of the bag a little more tapered than I was planning just to make the yarn last longer, but I will not be able to use only one color.






I could also attempt to dye more yarn to acheive that dark color, but I don't really think it matters. After all, the sides and the bottom are all going to be knitted in one piece. Who cares if the color change starts before reaching the bottom of the bag?

No more yellow for a while

I'm done with the yellow strap and I don't have to do anything with yellow yarn until I crochet this bag together:





I will now knit the sides in dark purple and the bottom in light purple. But before I do that, let me show you what I'm doing with my pink Katia papiro:






I love it. I'm making things up as I go, but I'm aiming at a boat neck. We shall see.

Knitting a yellow strap

Could this be any more boring? It's a garter stitch strap knitted with 2.5 mm needles (that's US #1). And it's yellow. Sigh. Have I mentioned before that I don't like yellow?






It is not by accident that my poor brain got on strike and stopped knitting. I had to use some pink yarn to jump-start it:






I had made a previous swatch with that yarn
, but it did not inspire me to knit anything. Part of it was that I was committed to other projects, but also that the stockinette-ribs swatch was uninteresting. I like this 1/2 basketweave much more. Also, I was using the recommended needle size but I believe I need a tighter fabric, I don't want
my bra showing underneath such a bright color. The yarn label says I should use 4.0 mm or 4.5 mm needles, but I'm going to use 3.5 mm.



I tried Google again with different blogs from blogdrive and got the same problem as before. Blogspot, blogcity and blogger blogs are still found easily by Google, so I'm guessing that it's a blogdrive problem and not a Google thing. Or is it?

Google and Blogdrive

I'm visiting my husband's office and using a public computer (hence no pictures). Since I don't have my list of links, I googled the Faery Crafty with the "I'm feeling lucky" thingy, and I got her blogshares information instead. Not feeling lucky anymore, I did a normal search but still, she was not on the first page of results either. Her web address is pretty easy and I should have just typed it, but my curiosity had been poked.



I tried to search for my own blog, the cheap knitter, and got an old entry from somebody else's blog (not bad, I think I'll be back and read more later on). From the blogdrive front page I got different blog titles and tried a random sample with Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, with very bad results. In most cases, the blogs did not even appear on the first page of Google results. Apparently, Google is no longer finding blogdrive blogs as easily as before. No problem with blogger or blogspot. You don't believe me? Try it out yourselves.



As you can tell, I'm terribly bored with the loooooooong yellow garter strap I'm knitting for my bag and found something else to do. I don't like yellow much, but I think it looks cool with eggplant yarn.



And yes, it's a Friday night and my husband is still working. Such is life as a post-doc.

Mission accomplished

It was not that bad. I just cut one single stitch and then pulled that strand through one row. I did drop a few stitches but those were easy to fix. The real problem was attempting to bind off with the same strand of yarn: It was not long enough. But who cares? I was planning on adding yellow crochet edging, so I re-started the bind-off with yellow yarn instead:







Here are the front and the back, how do you like them?






And now I have to knit the sides and the bottom, which are all going to be made from one piece along with the strap.