Sweet surprises!

I got a package today from Vaxgirl. By coincidence, today is my onomastic, which  usually involves dining out and nothing more. I like to celebrate this day because my birthday falls in December, which sucks. The weather is nicer in April.

Isn't it great that I got a present today?


Thank you, Vaxgirl, for the wonderful gifts: A knitting bag made with a cheerful citrus fabric, chocolate lambs (oops, guess what happened to one of them already), two potholders, sock yarn, food dyes, peeps (of course!) and a neat bowl made out of a samba LP, which I know she made herself. All accompanied by that pretty Karner Butterfly card. And she sent me all this as a prize for guessing that her artwork represented Moses guiding the Israelites out of Egypt across the Red Sea. If you didn't click on the link please do so, it's  biblical and hilarious.

Ugly sock

Thanks again for the kind comments to previous entries.

I turned the heel of the second sock and set out to adapt Wendy's feather and fan sock pattern to 15 stitches per repeat instead of 18. The result is not pretty:



Here's a close-up:



I don't like it, and I don't believe my Swapetines victim will like them either. What to do? I don't want to continue in plain stockinette. I'm eyeing the Ridged Feather pattern from Charlene Scurch's Sensational Knitted Socks. Not that I bothered to buy the book, I just checked it out of the library. That's an 11 stitch repeat but I believe that adapting it to more stitches might be easier.

However, If anyone has any suggestions on a 15 stitch repeat that might look pretty with self-striping socks, I'd love to hear about it.

The kiri keeps growing... shall I stop at two skeins of Kid Merino or go for three? I never wear shawls (though I swear I'm going to wear this one) so I really don't know when to stop.



Pssst... did anyone notice that I'm finally using the new camera instead of the webcam?

Still not knowing what to say

Yesterday, my petty problems were put in perspective. I have never understood what could possibly motivate someone to indiscriminately kill others. It's a kind of anger I'm just not familiar with. I mean, I've been angry and frustrated before, but I 've never had the urge to go find a group of people and gun them down. Hurt myself? maybe, but not anyone else. I can't imagine what could have provoked this shooting.

I have both sad an happy memories of my time at Virginia Tech. Research was too stressful for me, but I met my husband and made many good friends there. it's a pretty campus, with an international, cosmopolitan community in the middle of the very backwards and rural New River Valley. It was a boring place, but also peaceful and quiet. It's not a place I can associate to this massacre. But then, what place could be?

I didn't knit a stitch yesterday, and I don't feel like talking about knitting right now, but I did make pictures of my weekend knitting: sock and kiri progress.

     

To answer Stacie's question about joining the second skein on the kiri, Kid Merino is impossible to splice, and a Russian join proved to be difficult. In the end, I did what the pattern recommended for Kid Silk Haze, which was to knit a few stitches with both strands together and then trim the ends.

Also, because Lolita and Andrea requested it, I made a dyeing tutorial in Spanish.  Most everything there was described in past entries to this blog, before I started my Spanish blog.

I appreciate all the warm comments I got to the post about my bicornuate uterus. For the record, I also have PCOS. I've said before that this is a knitting blog and I will not talk much about these things, because I do not want infertiliy to define me. This is the blog of a knitter that happens to be infertile, not the other way around.

Ten years ago

Ten years ago I was sitting in a classroom in Norris Hall. It's hard for me to even grasp what happened there a few hours ago. I'm out of words.

Off topic

Isn't the the heart the noblest of all organs? We say that trustworthy people have a good heart. When you really love someone, you do it with all your heart. If love fails, we are heartbroken. A positive hunch is felt in our hearts, and when we are being sincere we're speaking from the bottom of our hearts.

It is not strange,
then, that other organs of the body aspire to emulate the
heart. Most of them fail, but I am the lucky owner of a heart-shaped uterus. The doctors called it bicornuate uterus and
they gave me the most discouraging statistics regarding motherhood. I do not wish to talk about bad news, but of my
uterus. Isn't it amusing to watch his picture where, innocently, he seems to smile at me, proud of his loving shape? He is a well mannered uterus, usually causes no trouble and by all means I
forgive his confusion: the poor guy did not know that his heart
disguise would have adverse consequences.

So why do I feel so
sad? Almost any woman can give birth to a child, but I do not know of any other
woman that has two hearts.

Kiri milestone

Thanks for all the nice comments about my grandmother's needles. She was a very creative woman indeed, and she used to have a stockpile of crafty materials. We thought we had emptied all that when she died 14 years ago, but now that my grandfather died more stuff showed up.

Working on the kiri, I've reached a milestone: The end of the first skein.



I also finished the foot of the first sock and immediately started the toe of the other one. You know, to avoid the dreaded second sock syndrome, a lesson learned from  Kathy. Also, I haven't done the math required to adapt Wendy's feather and fan pattern to my gauge. I hope my Swapetines victim likes feather and fan socks...




And now I have to keep nagging Aeromexico about their stupid mistakes and the reimbursement of something I had to pay for twice. But after a week, I'm starting to lose hope. And since they must be certain by now that I'm never going to fly with them again, I think they care even less.

Pictures!

I'm still using my lousy webcam. The spouse got a new camera but, since it was me who broke the last one, I'm a little reluctant to use it. So please pardon the usual blurry images. First, my welcome home gift:



I love their scent, and I love the fact that my husband keeps bringing me live flowers hoping that someday I'll learn not to kill them. Let me show you now the cotton blend and the alpaca blend I got in Mexico City:

                  

I believe I'll do more shopping when I go home. Could you believe that I got a 4.5 mm circular needle with a 80 cm cable for about four dollars in the supermarket? That's right, a regular supermarket, I wasn't even downtown where everything's supposed to be cheaper. I'm using that needle for the kiri, but maybe a longer cable would have been better:


And here are some of my grandma's needles and tools that I brought with me:



Finally, I intended to start fixing the lace tee, but I started a sock instead:

Back from Mexico

I love coming home in Spring... I love the jacaranda trees in bloom, the mameyes, mangoes, guavas, and the fact that the rainy season has not begun. The air is, as usual, very polluted. But coming from Silicon Valley I should not complain. I had the chance to meet Andrea, who showed me her favorite yarns and where to find them downtown in Mexico City. I couldn't resist some peruvian alpaca blend and a brazilian cotton blend for the Summer.

I also took the opportunity to show my mother how to dye yarn with vinegar and food coloring. We made some self-striping yarn that she's already using to make socks.



We used wool from my grandma's stash. Apparently, there was still some yarn in her house and an obscene amount of knitting needles. I took some tools and a pair from each needle size in the small numbers, since I don't knit with thick needles.

I also worked on the kiri, but not as much as I expected.



I promise to post pictures of the needles and yarn on my next entry. I haven't had the courage to rip the lace tee yet. Wish me luck!