I've Moved!

For anyone who's still following this blog, I've moved to my own domain - http://gknerd.com. I also actually post regularly over there (with pictures!), so you really should check it out!

Testing the Mobile Blogger Interface

Okay, so I can tell you right now that there aren't going to be any pictures in this post...not just because I don't have any (and I don't, at least not on my phone right now), but because there doesn't seem to be a way to post them through the mobile interface. Grrr...

Also, um, hi! It's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry about that...

I've definitely been knitting, though. I even (yet again) took on the dreaded Boyfriend Curse.

(For those of you who don't know, the Boyfriend Curse is the thing that causes you and your sigificant other to break up when you're somewhere in the process of knitting him something, or very soon after finishing. It is strong, it is powerful, it is not to be trifled with.)

So...I was dating this guy. I've actually dated this guy a few times (it's a long story), but the short of it is that I tend to fall madly, head-over-heels in **** [word removed to protect my sanity] with this guy whenever we start dating.

I've also knitted for this guy before. The last time I did so, we broke up a week before I was going to give him his sweater, so I should have known better than to knit anything for him.

'Should' being the operative word there.

We were talking one night, and at the same time I was trying to pick out knitting for a trip. I carelessly mentioned that I would knit socks, but that I didn't like wearing them and I didn't have anyone to knit them for.

Innocently, he said, "I like socks."

I could have laughed. I should have just explained how the world worked, why it was such a bad idea for us to go down that path.

Poor, besotted fool that I was, though, I found myself saying, "How do you feel about blue?"

*headdesk*

I wasn't even done with them before we were breakng up yet again (yet again for reasons that were circumstantial more than anything else). I finished them, silently cursing them, even going so far as to dub them the Curséd Ex-Boyfriend Socks.

However, all was not lost. A month later, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (www.yarnharlot.ca) came to Seattle, and I took the socks to her to be exorsized. She took her traveling sock, still on the needles, and blessed them with the power of 50,000 knitters (which is what she estimated her sock had come in contact with).

The socks then became the Ex-Curséd Ex-Boyfriend Socks.

Not very long after thet, the guy called me up out of the blue...circumstances had changed and maybe we could try the dating thing again.

And so the socks became the Ex-Curséd Ex-Ex-Boyfriend Socks.

And you'd have thought I'd learned my lesson...but I'm now planning on knitting him something else, so that I can make sure that this time, he and I are stronger than a silly curse.

Here's hoping I make it out the other side in one piece...

It's not yarn...yet...

I've been doing pretty good with the whole Yarn Diet thing. I bought a few skeins of yarn last month as a reward for getting through a particularly heinous project at work, but other than that I've refrained from buying yarn for several months now. Frankly, I'm pretty proud of myself.

Or, at least, I was, until I went to the Weaving Works sale this weekend.

I might have had a minor falling down. In my defense, I didn't buy yarn, per se...I bought a couple pounds of fiber, which will take quite a long time to become yarn, which....

...I'm not helping my case, am I?

Okay, I'm going to give up. Someday I'll remember to take pictures and post them here, but for now at least I managed to write.

Seriously? So sorry.

Apparently, in my last post I promised that "A better, more coherent, yarn-pr0n-filled entry will be forthcoming in the next week."

As that post was from September and it is now February, I think we can all figure out that this did not happen. Nor, I fear, will it happen tonight.

However, my Dear Readers (all none of you...), I have a solution! I will add blogging to my ToDo list, which means I'll be constantly reminded of it and will actually have a chance in hell of making it happen. Double plus because my phone happens to carry my ToDo list as well as a camera, so there's a much higher chance of getting real pictures! Of Knitting! Regularly!

I did mention not very coherent, right?

Okay, ToDo item created. Which reminds me (and I'm sorry, but this next paragraph will have nothing to do with yarn or knitting at all), do you know what my favorite thing in Outlook is? It allows you to have repeating ToDo items, like water the plants or refill X prescription, at any frequency you can think of. But wait, it gets better! Because you can also set the recurrence to happen from the time you complete the task. So, for example, I have a ToDo about vacuuming my apartment (Hi, my name is Elisabeth and I'm anal retentive), and I have it set to regenerated for 2 weeks from the last time I completed vacuuming my apartment. This is utterly awesome, because frankly it usually takes me more than 2 weeks to get around to vacuuming, and this way I only have one ToDo on the list nagging me about it. Fantastico!

Okay, I'm done raving about Outlook. Frankly, that's the first thing I've found that I thought was worth raving about, so I figured I'd share.

Alright, now for some pictures of yarn/knitting:

...apparently the universe hates me right now. Blogger is hanging on uploading my pictures.

I'm sorry, I guess you'll all (ha!) just have to wait until the next time I post, when I and my electronics will hopefully have our acts together.

Good Knitter, No Yarn

*As a warning, I'm writing this while severely sleep deprived and there are no pictures. A better, more coherent, yarn-pr0n-filled entry will be forthcoming in the next week.*

So...since I left you, loyal readers [seriously, I just write that because it amuses me...I know no one is reading this], I have almost been good. The Cascade 220 that I bought was swatched for an idea I had, but it didn't work out, so the three skeins are now languishing on my coffee table. Meanwhile, I went out and bought four skeins of Lion Brand Microfiber in whatever the periwinkle color is called and am now 4 feet into a mind-numbingly dull moss-stitch scarf of my own invention.

In other words, after I vowed both not to buy any more yarn and not to start anything new, I both bought four skeins of yarn and started a new project.

In my defense, both of these actions were undertaken before I was reunited with my stash and unfinished projects.

So why, you ask [no, seriously, it just cracks me up, pretending there's a "you" to ask me], does the title of this post refer to a "Good Knitter"?

Because today, my friend Jimmy (most recently featured in the Yarn Harlot's blog sporting a binary scarf [follow the link because I don't have permission to steal the Harlot's bandwidth. Also, you should be reading her blog anyway]) told me he needed yarn for his next third project. And he wanted me to help him figure out what he needed for it, and help him get it.

Now, we're both working stiffs, so by the time we were ready to go yarn shopping, all the Yarn Shops had closed. I'm a big believer in working with good quality yarn if you can afford it, though, and being working stiffs for a really well-paying company meant going to one of the local craft mega-marts was right out. (Yes, there would have been Microspun, which some of you might have noted, I am currently using [who am I kidding - there's no one there to "note" anything!]. Microspun is just about the only yarn worth buying in the mega-mart craft stores around here, and in my opinion for most cases it's only borderline acceptable. My buying it was an act of desperation. On the other hand, I do happen to be a bit of a yarn snob....

Anyway, just about our only chance at decent yarn in the area tonight was at Ben Franklin (kind of an old-school mega-mart craft store). I hadn't been there in a while, so I was pleasantly surprised by the selection. It wouldn't rival a real Yarn Store, but for desperate situations...well, they've got a great selection of Cascade, some Berrocco, some Trekking, some Fortissima...actually quite a few brand name yarns, and a many times a few lines from each. There was plenty there that a Yarn Snob like me could love...and plenty that I did.

I refuse to divulge the number of times I picked up a skein, petted it for a while, and murmured to it what I would make out of it. Refuse.

Jimmy walked away with several skeins of a really, really, really soft alpaca for a scarf and a couple skeins of Cascade for a hat, plus needles to match. He is definitely a knitting prodigy - as soon as he'd been knitting for an hour, he started planning Christmas presents he could knit. And folks, I hate to break it to you, but that was in May - he might actually be able to make it, with time to knit himself a few things while he's at it.

To get back to the original idea behind this post, though, I walked out of Ben Franklin with a $5 bottle of Euclan wool wash (I think it was Euclan...lavendar-something, whatever it was) and nothing else. Not even a skein of Trekking, and I do love my Trekking...

I think I deserve a cookie.

Of Course

Those of you who have been following closely might have noticed that in my last post, I swore off buying any new yarn or starting any new projects until a reasonable dent had been put into my unfinished projects and my stash in general.

This week, I bought three skeins of Cascade 220. And promptly started planning a new project with them.

"Why?" I hear you asking. No, really, I do hear it - I'm hiding in that closet behind you as you read this.

Okay, that was a fib.

Anyway, the reason behind the complete disregard for my latest yarn fast vow is that, a week and a half later, I'm only halfway through moving. All of my stuff is out of my old apartment...but nothing is in my new apartment. In fact, my new apartment has the old tenants still living in it.

That turn of events was highly unexpected, by the way. It all boils down to a big snafu on the part of the leasing office, but what it means is that I packed everything I owned (and I do mean everything) with the intention of unpacking it the next day, or at the very least with the knowledge that if I wanted to unpack it, I could do so the next day.

Instead, my stuff is in storage. For two more weeks.

This includes not only all my clothes, my books, and my linens, it includes my yarn and projects. For two more weeks.

Now do you have some sympathy for my plight? Can you forgive me for breaking my yarn fast vow before even a week had passed?

Bad Blogger, No Cookie

So...hi there. I...um. Well, I haven't been around lately, you know? I got a little caught up in the graduating and the traveling and the continued traveling and the finding of a new apartment and before I knew it, months had passed.

Months.

How embarrassing.

Now, however, I'm in the middle of packing (I move tomorrow, so you'd think I'd be near the end of packing, but unfortunately I'm actually closer to the beginning of packing...it should be noted that blogging is apparently not conducive to packing).

In all the time I've been away, I've been knitting, of course. I've finished a couple things, I've started more than a couple things, I've spun some yarn...speaking of, let's have some yarn pr0n, shall we?

This is the first thing I spun on my wheel, and I'm calling it cotton candy, although to be honest I don't think I've ever seen cotton candy in either green or yellow. Still...I mixed the colors, I get to call it whatever I want, right?

Of course, being a bad blogger I completely forgot to take pictures of the roving, the plies, or the process, nor have I yet photographed the hat that I made out of this yarn. Let me simply say that I'm trying, I'll get better...someday.

Also, I've been relatively good about only spinning fiber I already had, such as this soy silk that was just sitting around minding its own business.

Oh, who am I kidding? I totally bought more fiber to play with - over a pound just a month ago, even though I still had plenty of fiber stashed away. Once again, though - bad blogger, no pictures, and now that fiber, at least, is packed, and there's no way on this Earth that I'm going to start unpacking just so I can take a picture to further procrastinate on the packing front. No siree bobby. You're just going to have to wait until I unpack it on the other end.

In other news, packing up my knitting has been a bit of a humbling experience. The yarn is once again taking up a significant percentage of the total volume of my possessions, and as for works-in-progress...well, let's just say I have more than two boxes worth of those.

So...here's my new resolution: I will finish things. I will not start new things until I've finished at least three things per new thing I want to knit. I will not buy knitting supplies unless they are necessary to finish something. I will not buy new yarn or new fiber until the hundred-something gallon tub I use to contain my stash actually has air space in it.

Any takers on whether I'll actually be able to stick to this? No? Smart readers. Still, it should help to at least think I have a plan.