Puffs

I've just reached a milestone in my knitting career:

My first sweater! It's all done, and I'm really excited to be able to say that. Just one problem: I don't really like it! It fits fine (which is a miracle because I never really measured for gauge), but I'm not a fan of the sleeves. Looking at the picture, they're flat and normal and everything, but on mine, they puff like nobody's business. And unlike Anne, I don't like puffed sleeves! I'm not sure if that's something I can fix, but I will be looking into it.

Oh, and did I mention I learned how to do set-in sleeves? I'm very proud of myself. :) I used this video, which was really helpful. (Although she did say that set-in sleeves are the most flattering and fit the human body the best. So maybe I just screwed that up really badly?)

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about upcoming projects. Specifically, gifts. A couple days ago, I borrowed my mom's address book and made a list of every occasion I want to make a gift for for the rest of the year. My first project is finishing off the Pooh latch hook. Yeah. I know I posted that over a year ago, and that was at least a year after I finished it, but it's still not done. It's still going to my aunt, but I'm not sure if it's going to be in a frame (my original plan) or a pillow, or something else.

Enjoy your Easter if you celebrate, and have a nice weekend!

I Forgot

I thought of a really clever title for this post earlier, but now I have no idea what it was. 

First, check out my sleevies:

At first I thought they were different sizes, but I think they're okay. I also just wanted to show you my notepad:

See? Very full with numbers and scribbles and such. (I blurred out my to-do lists on the computer so you guys won't see how insane I am. As if you can't already tell!)

I would just like to say that picking up the 172 stitches for the neckline was a beast. (Well, less than that. Some of it was on stitch holders.) I'm almost done with the first round, which was also kind of a pain, but after that it should be smooth sailing! I was going to wait until I finished that round to post, but I'm running late and my aunt and uncle will be here any minute. Gotta run!

999

My Blogger dashboard is my home screen, so every time I open Safari, I see the basic stats for my blog, the Google Reader thing, stuff like that. And all day, I've been watching the page views count. And all day, it's been 999. Even though I know most of the page views are spam, I'm still sort of excited that it's about to be 1,000. Okay? So, if you're reading this right now, thank you.

Anyway....

More sleevie! I know it doesn't look like much, but it does go pretty quickly. Hopefully, I'll have the finished sleeve to show you tomorrow!

Speaking of tomorrow, I just found out my aunt and uncle are visiting. Apparently they're just passing through, so they'll just be spending the night, but it does throw something of a wrench in my plans. I figured out in December that people don't like it when you work on a paper while they visit. So I'm going to go bust my butt and do extra so I don't fall behind! (Don't worry I'll knit too! :) )

Joke Time!

Here we go. Where did George Washington keep his armies? In his sleevies!!!! (It's funny. Laugh. Moving on.)

As always, the nonsense is somehow tied in to today's post:

I finished a sleevie! (And yes, I am going to say it like that for the rest of the post. Deal with it.) It really didn't take that long, which I definitely appreciate, seeing as there's two. I'm not sure if I'm going to start the second one tonight or tomorrow, but it'll be soon. Once I do that, all that's left is assembly and figuring out how the heck you're suppose to pick up stitches for the neckline. Wish me luck!

Spring Cleaning

Before I get into the real subject of this post, here's a quick progress check on the TTT:

I finished the front (yay!) and started the first sleeve. I have to admit, I had a bit of trouble making this work. Some time after I split for the neck, I realized I had way too many stitches on one side. I had to carefully rip back, while counting the rows. Then, since my scratch paper was getting kind of messy, I had to do a bunch of math to figure out where I was in each set of shaping. (And this was while trying to watch X2. I finally just put the knitting down. And yes, I am very upset about Jean.)

So now on to spring! I think I've mentioned before that I'm the kind of neat freak that gives us all a bad name, right? My room has to be spotless, or I start getting really annoyed and end of cleaning at 6 in the morning just to stop the insanity. Ahem. Anyway, although I am not the kind of person that needs a push to clean, I did start to feel it this weekend. On Saturday I put away my heavy sweaters and pulled out my summer clothes, and yesterday my dad helped my manhandle my mattress so all the bedding could get washed. (Thanks Dad!) I also helped my brother clean out his closet for the first time in years (he did not inherit the clean gene), which is where these come in:

Nice new/old bins! I used to have these in that spot:

but my brother and I got rid of so much junk I got to have four sliding bins. Much easier than having to move all of the stacking bins to get to the bottom one! Here's a quick peek at what I'm storing in them:

The top drawer is mostly knitting, but I do have my crochet hooks and a bit of thread in there, too. As you can see, I am due to make another needle roll for my DPNs. The next two drawers are both sewing:

First, I have some patterns and notions. The blue tray goes in a sewing box, but I have so much fabric I had to take it out! :) The next drawer has felt and some floss. I had no idea before today, but I actually have a lot of DMC floss. What you see there doesn't have numbers (and a few aren't DMC), and everything else was sorted into my system. You may remember that I hit a roadblock with the HP cross stitch when I realized how much floss I needed to buy. Well, this may have solved part of the problem! I need to create an inventory of some kind so I can figure this out, but hopefully at least a few of the colors I need are in those bags.

The final bin is my repurposing bin, which is currently kind of hard to open. This is mostly because of the large number of old jeans that are in there, waiting to be made into something awesome. Once I start using some of those, it'll be a lot neater.

I'm looking forward to looking more closely at the floss, but right now I have to go read forty-odd pages on Tesla. You jealous?

I Have a Neck!

When you guys were kids, did you ever draw people without important body parts? My thing was hands. For some reason, I just left them out of all of my *ahem* beautiful pictures. (For the record, I still can't draw to save my life.) Some of my friends had a different problem, though. They left out necks. (Hm... There was a point to this.... oh yeah!) As you can see, I do not have that problem right now:

I pushed hard this morning, and I got to the neck shaping! Awesomeness! Now that I've hit this checkpoint, I've realized that I'm actually getting close to the end. My spring break is next week, so I'm going to try to have the TTT done by Easter. With the way our weather's going, I'll probably be able to wear it, too! (Grr. I hate cold wet stuff!)

Have an amazing day!

Just A Little More!

As you may be able to tell form the title, I am drawing very close to the shaping for the TTT:

This is just a smidgen over 17 inches, which leaves less than half an inch to go! Hopefully I'll be able to pull that off before I post tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Watches and Frogs

Hi guys! I hope you had an awesome week and as even better weekend! Sorry for not posting last week; my real life was sort of insane! But I did get some things done this weekend, so let's do this!

First, I need to tell you that I'm sort of obsessive about knowing what time it is. If I don't have an easy way to find out (a watch) I kind of freak out. It's not normal! So when this happened, I was predictably upset:

I honestly have no idea how this happened, but a chunk of it just fell off. I didn't do anything that was rougher than normal, so it's sort of a mystery to me, but I did know I had to do something. Enter weird crafty stuff! First, I cut off most of the strap with all the holes on it, which left me with this:

 Then, I marked and cut a little hole to put a slip ring through:

which was way harder than it should have been. For some reason, the slip ring requires a hole that's much bigger than it is to go through. Then, I took another slip ring, and did a basic friendship bracelet to create a little strap. I used a lobster closure and one of the original holes to have a way to take it on and off.

This definitely isn't a perfect solution, but at least I know what time it is!

I also made knitting happen:

You are looking at almost 16 inches of TTT front. For those of you keeping track, this means I have less than two inches to go until my next round of shaping. I would probably already be there, but I had a little issue yesterday. I think I've mentioned that I split each skein into smaller balls before I started using it, and yesterday I got to the point where I needed to join another ball. I tried it sort of in the middle of the row by knitting a few stitches with both strands of yarn, except somehow I ended up with three, so I had some awkward bunching and loops. By the next row, I had an unidentifiable loops, two hanging strands, and a major headache. I tried just dropping the offending stitches, but I sort of screwed it up, so I ended up frogging to about 1.5 inches back. I was smart about it, though, and I put a sort of lifeline through it before trying to rip. It wasn't perfect, and I went through the wrong stitches a few times, but it was definitely easier than trying to do a whole bunch at once! The whole thing wasted about an hour, but the second time I tried to join the new ball, I just started on with the new yarn and loosely knotted the ends. I'll make it pretty later!

More Hats!

First, I would like to ask you to please excuse the horrendous pictures in this post. My camera and I are currently not speaking.

And it's just one hat:

That's Hat #2, for anyone keeping track. Now, if I was on schedule, there would be two other hats (or at least 1.5), but I had to alter my schedule a bit lot. I barely had any white, blue or black felt when I started these, and after using most of the blue and white to make the baseball cap, I really have almost none. I also haven't had any yellow felt for ages. (This is mostly due to the fact that I haven't done much with felt lately.) This is sort of problematic, because the second top hat is black, the construction hat is yellow with white columns (still working on that one), and the captain's hat is blue. So instead of making hats, I've been doing every other part of the project. This included making a brochure about the State Department, making a "Bag-It" about United States v. Nixon, and making "price tags" to attach to the hats.  I've even already cut out the elephant and donkey that will go on the second top hat:

I should be able to go to Michaels tomorrow, so I'll be able to make the last three hats this weekend! (Which is good, because all that stuff is due on Tuesday.)

I got to stay home yesterday because of "inclement weather." (Snow day!!!!) I was super happy because I got to watch Captain America: The First Avenger and Thor! Don't worry, I put my down time to good use:

I'm now up to over 12 inches! Plus, do you see that little tiny ball? That's right, I'm about to start skein #2:

I gave my wrists a break this morning to start winding.

So basically, I'm super thrilled with my progress on everything, and I can't wait to get back to work. So I'm going to stop here. Goodbye!

RDJ Marathon

First, check it out:

That's about 3-ish inches of the front of the TTT. (That was completed during the viewing of Sherlock Holmes (with Robert Downey Jr.), an excellent movie. Creepy, but excellent.) Plus I worked on it a little this morning. I feel like the front might go a little faster than the back, and not just because it's less knitting (I think, don't hold me to that). I am seriously in the rhythm of the 3x2 rib, and when I get in the zone, I can really zoom through it.

I'm going to have to move my focus of the TTT for the next week, because I need to make five little hats representing five of the jobs of the president. That's fun stuff, right there. I've drawn out little pictures and planned everything out, so this week is going to have a lot of itty-bitty sewing. I've got a baseball cap, two top hats, a construction hat, and a captain's hat. And no, I have no idea how I'm going to pull this off!

If you don't want to read about anything but crafty stuff, have a great day, and I'll see you tomorrow!

OK, we're good. I think I mentioned last week that I was going to watch Iron Man with my brother, right? We did. And then we watched Iron Man 2. Right after. Let me tell you, that is unprecedented in our house. And it was awesome!!!!!! I completely loved both movies, and I just found out that Iron Man 3 is coming out on May 3. Even more awesome!!!!!! Then on Saturday night, we watched Sherlock Holmes (again, unprecedented) and it was also spectacular. So basically my weekend was like a Robert Downey Jr. marathon with a ton of homework in between. Not bad!

I also redid my desk yesterday afternoon, which basically just means that I took everything off, dusted the whole desk, then put everything on in a different way. This is what I do for fun. Sad, no? Anyway, I want to do the same with all my craft stuff. The way I have it now is working, but I want it to be even better. This will take more planning, but I'm looking forward to it! (After the hats. Gotta stay focused on the hats.)

Stretchy

A random thing before I start: I just watched the Avengers movie straight through for the first time, and I loved it! Plus, all of the male Avengers are extremely attractive. Moving on.....

Who's the man?

No, not me. I'm definitely not a man! But, I still feel awesome! I am now the proud owner of one completed back piece of a TTT. All I'm saying is, it better be really stretchy. Because I may be skinny, but I am not Queen of the Toothpicks! Actually, it kind of looks like a christening gown. Yeah, I have a twisted mind. Anyway, I'm super happy, and I'm going to start work on the front very soon.

New word: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. And yes, I spelled that from memory. What now!



I'm sorry. I get weird weirder than normal when I'm happy.

Don't be Deceived

Now, your first instinct when looking at this photo is probably to think, "It looks exactly the same as yesterday!" 

You, good sir, are most definitely incorrect. (Ladies, feel free to substitute a ma'am in there.) While the TTT does indeed look a lot like it did yestermorrow, be assured that it is, in fact, longer. I am now a mere 1.5 inches away from the neckline shaping. Beat that! Today I also got to join another ball of yarn. No, I haven't already used up a whole skein. I divided the first skein into two smaller balls so I could shove them into small places. Don't ask. All I did was leave a long tail of the first ball, then knit with the tail and the new yarn (except the first time I screwed up and accidentally used both tails so I had to rip it out and do it again).

The moral of the story? Check which piece of yarn you're using before you make judgements about how long my sweater is! (Or maybe it was something else.....)





Oh, and by the way? 200th post!!!! Yay!

Hot Glue and Sore Fingers

*The first time I typed the title, it came out "Sore Gingers." Not exactly what I was going for, but maybe there are some redheads out there that have been doing a lot of exercise?*

Anyway..... I've had a couple of things lying around that needed an appointment with a doctor:

Or a hot glue gun, that works too. If you can't tell, that's a TNG communicator pin (Halloween costume), a ring (that completely covers my entire finger), and an elephant that's missing part of it's trunk. The ring looks good:

You can't even tell the difference. Not sure I can say the same for this elephant, though:

It looks alright from this angle, but let's zoom in:

Yeah, you can see the glob of glue that's holding it together. Oh well, I doubt anyone's going to be scrutinizing it too closely! Lastly, I got a ton done on the TTT!

This is not the best picture (shocker) but I finished the first 19 inches, and I've done the armhole shaping, too! I'm just a few inches away from starting the neckline shaping!

Still Wish I Was There

Check it out!

That's right, I did another side! I realize that doesn't sound that impressive, but I literally just did that in the last 20 minutes. Which includes the thread breaking twice. Apparently, it doesn't like being yanked on. Who knew? (Yes, I am kidding. I did know that.)

Despite the hour I spent on Monday meticulously lining up the edges, they're still a little off, so I've decided to just make it a pillow. The little tiny bubbles will help with the shape of it, and no one will ever know any different! (Except you. So no snitching, you hear?)

I did a few rows on the TTT yesterday, but nothing to get that excited about. I don't think I've even hit 14 inches yet.

So yeah, it basically looks the same....

I have found a new way to waste hours at a time: Harry Potter Pinterest boards. They're so addicting, and I can't help but say, "Just one more!" over and over and over and potato and over and over and over again. (How many of you noticed I stuck a potato in there? Ad how many of you just went back and checked?)

I'm going to end this here, and I'm definitely not going back to Pinterest. I swear. (Seriously, I need to go shower.)

Greetings from France!

Yeah. I wish. But I do have this:

How cool is this? (Yes, this is the part where you pretend it's the best thing since sliced bread.) I got my inspiration from things like this, but I didn't actually look at one while I did this. I'm totally in love with this right now, though. Although it is taking a lot of work (everything is hand stitched), I can't wait until I have the end product. I haven't decided if I'm going to put stuffing in to make a little pillow, or leave it flat. I've done similar things before, but that was two years ago, so I don't have pictures. I might do this again, maybe with Germany, so I might make a little tutorial. Don't worry. It's simple enough that even if I write it you'll be able to figure it out! (Actually, I bet some people could just by looking at the picture.)

This was supposed to be a nice close up of my little stitches, but (shocker) it turned out blurry and I couldn't get a focused shot. I still thought it looked cool.

Guess what takes two rulers to measure?

That's right! I now have just over thirteen inches, which means less than six to go until it gets really crazy. I've never done armhole shaping before, and I'm starting to think 3x2 ribbing wasn't the best way to learn.

Do you know how to spell tchotchke? Well, you do know. See ya!

Oh, right, that too.

I'm not going to lie. I am totally and completely discombobulated. (OK, I thought there was going to be a red line, but there isn't. How awesome is that?) I took a trip to my state capitol on Monday (this one), which, while I had nothing to do on Monday afternoon, means I had a ton of stuff to catch up on today. so now I have a lab, an essay, and a whole bunch of questions to answer and not a lot of time to do it. But it was so totally worth it.

That point of that paragraph was to say that I am not going to be doing a whole bunch of work on fun things today. :( I did do a little bit of TTT last night:

I know using the same picture twice is sort of cheating, but it looks almost exactly the same, except I'm now creeping up on 11 inches. (And by the way, the thing in the top left corner is a candle in a votive holder, not a toe or something. I just realized how weird that looked.)

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day!!! Not my favorite holiday, I'm not going to lie. I did get my best friend a pencil and a fake flower. Like I always say, we're classy folk around here. :) See ya!

Sidetracked

I have made decent progress on the TTT, as seen in this picture:

But I do have a problem. Despite my love of this sweater, I think I'm about to become sidetracked. (Again.) One of my closest friends is about to celebrate her birthday, and she happens to be totally and completely obsessed a huge fan of the Divergent series. If you've read the books, you probably know that each faction has a symbol associated with it. (Tobias has them tattooed on his back, remember?) Anyway, I thought it would be really cool to make her something with these symbols on it, so I did some googling. No dice. So, on to Plan B: Blowing up pictures of each symbol so I can make my own cross stitch charts. That should take up most of my crafting time this weekend, so wish me luck!

Wrapping Up Knitting

I just have two more knitting projects to post, so I'm trying to wrap it up by putting them into one post. I'm almost to the end of past tense posting-Hurray!! OK, here goes:

It's a sweater. A real one. With normal sleeves and everything. So it probably took me about two days. In reality, it probably took longer to dry after I washed it then it did to knit the whole thing! One drawback: I don't know any 6-12 month babies. It's so cute, and no one can wear it for a long time! Or however long it takes for me to find a 6-12 month old baby to give it to. Either one. I think I'm going to make another one with reverse colors.

This is a thing. It is made of a bunch of squares made from scrap yarn which were crocheted together then sewn to a piece of fleece. I used all of my talents to make this! I have no idea what to do with it. I really should stop using scrap yarn to make more unnecessary stuff....

And now, a documentation of my insanity. These are all the scarves I have made between the beginning of June and the beginning of September. Yes, I know two of them are cowls, but they're the right colors for the ones I've already given away. The rest are Christmas presents except three, I think. I'll do a roll call under the picture.

First row: Patons Bohemian yarns-"Indigo Indulgence" (not for Christmas) and "Casual Cream" for my aunt. Bernat Boa- in a color that isn't pictured for another aunt, and directly below one for a birthday that has already passed so it's a cowl in the picture. Now look to the right of that one, and you have two in "Chick" for my mom and her best friend for Christmas. Back to the first row, you have a Bernat Handicrafter Cotton Stripes in "Pinky Stripes" for my mom's birthday in a few weeks that is eight feet long. Last one on the top, Bernat Boa again in "Raven" for my grandma for Christmas. 

Second row: Red Heart Super Saver in "Bonbon Print" (I think) with Bernat Boa in "Chick" for the fringe. Next is a cowl in an unknown yarn (where'd that ball band go?) representing another "Casual Cream" that is already gone. The other three are in the paragraph above, so that's all!

I really like knitting. It's faster than crocheting for me, and I can use novelty yarns sometimes to keep it interesting. However, I can crochet in the round very well, but I'm still working on the DPN action. So, it's a toss up for me. They're each good for different things.