Knitting on Impulse

Teaser

A wee something to whet your appetite while I format the update.  The regular yarn will go up in a few minutes; I haven't managed to photograph the samplers yet, and the kids are due home in half an hour, so that bit might have to wait for tomorrow.  FYI, if you want to grab something from today before it gets away, but still have an eye on the samplers, it is a very simple process to reverse the shipping charges on one of the orders and combine them (though a wee note in the order comments to jog my memory wouldn't hurt) - they won't go out until Monday, in any case, as the kids are off school tomorrow.

No update this week

There's loads of great yarn... not quite dry.  There's a ton of sampler kits.... half skeined up.  Time to admit defeat and regroup.  On the plus side, next week's update will be awesome!

I do want to acknowledge and thank you for all the words of support and concern over the last week - they are hugely appreciated, and as soon as I feel my feet on solid ground again, I'll do a better job of replying. I'm getting there.

Aren't mini-skeins just the cutest thing ever?

Silence

I'm pretty much running on empty these days.  Beyond fighting it, past striving, fretting, trying harder... more like a pebble at the bottom of a turbulent stream.  Given up on floating, swimming, overcoming, just looking for some equilibrium, something solid to set my feet on, and carry on with what must be done.  It may well be the right place to be - it just doesn't come with many words right now.

 
Still knitting, still dyeing.... there will be pictures.

October Leaves

I definitely don't need a weather report to identify the freezing level these days:

 
It's a couple degrees above zero and raining hard down here in the valley, which means it is impossible to dress the kids appropriately. Snow gear comes home soaked to the skin, whereas the combo of thick woolly sweater and raingear isn't quite warm enough. Any day now, it will be properly, magnificently winter.

October's leaves all blew off this week, but the colourway keeps a bit of the fire alive:

In Summit Sock:

 

Blissful Sock:

and Mere Sock:

Stay warm!

Work in Progress

This is what happens when you spill your guts (no traumatic allusions, I just thought it looked cool):

And this is what happens when someone's big sister gets gloves:

Except, instead of mindless stockinette, he wanted the motif to be "just like my sweater" (yes, the Little Knight pattern I've been promising for over a year and am working on a little bit every day.) Which meant I had to use my brain and doodle up a chart.  I think I can improve it a bit on the other hand - I'm thinking of these as swatches with fingers.
 

Knitting On Through... Stuff

Thanks to the 2010 Olympics, and beyond that, the now-local world of sliding sports, it looks like I'll be pretty much on my own with the business/household/parenting thing for large chunks of the foreseeable future. Rob does have the odd hour off here and there (oh, how I wish he were being paid for this) and I am proud to report that packages have been streaming out the door Right On Time. Today, however, he reported that the brakes on the car are now minimally functional (and I know it makes me a bad bad wife to say this out loud, but I noticed they were a little mushy three days ago, and it was All In My Head until today when he was driving down the very steep hill from the bobsled track and found the whole stopping thing to be rather fraught. Sigh. Even the most enlightened male....) So there will maybe be a day's delay while we impose on a friend to drive down the highway to the nearest gas station for brake fluid. (I know. A smart, modern woman would have known how to Take Charge and check that herself.) I might just walk to the post office tomorrow, but it will depend on whether the packages will fit in my backpack and how hard it's raining if they won't. It's not quite 500 miles, but the warm, fuzzy thought is there....

It'll be a good opportunity to see if puppykins can behave herself in the post office line-up. She could use a little novelty and it's pretty quiet early in the morning.

How about a wee sneak peek for the week?

 

Coneflower Gloves

Knit to my daughter's exacting specifications and pronounced (by her) to be "way better than I ever imagined," these are basic knit-to-fit stockinette gloves garnished with a smidge of inexpert embroidery and two all-important pom poms.

 
"Knit-to-fit" in this case, incurred a certain degree of whinging about the four zillion fittings required to get the fingers of the first glove exactly right.

I don't think I'll win any prizes for embroidery, but you can make out a general petal-ish impression, right?

Not entirely unlike a Coneflower?

The recipient is thrilled, which in the end, is what really matters.

 
The yarn was a tragically knot-containing skein of Blissful Sock in Echinacea.  (There were actually two more, each with a single knot, that I kept back - I suppose if anyone is so inclined, I could knock off a buck or so for the knot and let them go....) I have to say, I really loved working with this sock yarn - the superwash treatment has done nothing at all to diminish the sheen and wooly softness characteristic of BFL.  Sheer pleasure to knit up.