One Crazy Fiber Lady

I don’t quite know how the kids like the Wii yet, by the time I got it set up last night it was bedtime, but I’m digging it.¬† Kat and I played with Wii Sports until well past that time and she did pretty well.¬† After the monkeys were in bed, I started to give mom a quick lesson in Wii-ness.¬† Yeah, two and a half hours later we shut it off having routed through several games of bowling (mom was in a league for years and I played on the high school team), tennis and baseball.¬† I trounced her in bowling while she got back at me with a KO in boxing ¬† The twins should really like that one!¬† I suspect they’ll all be playing a bit today as today is their last non-school Thursday for a while to come.

Just to prove I’m not all electronics and video games, I am still knitting.¬† Dacapo has been my commuting buddy recently though I am getting somewhat bored by all that freakin’ garter stitch on small needles.¬† Here she is lounging along the river this morning:

I had to buy her a longer needle as all those little stitches wouldn’t stay on the needles.¬† Every time I pulled the sucker out of my bag, I had to repair the last couple.¬† I’m using a 40″ now and it is helping a bit, though if I’m not extremely careful and shove her to the middle of the needles, I lose a few still.¬†

I know some folk were seriously surprised by Jessica’s pronouncement of the end of her sock honeymoon.¬† Regulars around here might have noticed that I lost my sock mojo around the end of the summer too.¬† Which is sad, because I really do like knitting socks and I, um, do have a bit of sock yarn around.¬†

What’s this?

Embryonic socks.¬† Koigu.¬† Yum.¬† I picked this up from Modern Yarn a few weeks back when they got their first batch of it.¬† Sorry, don’t have the color number with me, but its on the other skein at home.¬† I’m casting on a pair today.¬† It will be one of four patterns:¬† Charade, I Love Gansey (from the six socks knitalong), Hedera (again) or plain old vanila socks.¬†¬† I’m thinking Gansey.

Tonight is the much loved SnB so the gaming consoles, but not the knitting, will be ignored by me

Craft on!

..it pours. 

I blame it on the game fumes… or the guy behind me on line.

I got the shipping notice from Sears that the Wii was shipping.¬† Swell right?¬† Yes.¬† Pretty much.¬† I figured I’d pop on over to the locally convenient Gamestop and see if they had the doodads I wanted for it, if not I’d order those too ([amtap amazon:asin=B000KRXAGE] and [amtap amazon:asin=B000ME252U]).

It was as I was standing on line as the nice feller behind the counter piled up my stuff that I mentioned that my Wii was on the way.  He jokingly chastised me for not buying one from him.  Ha!  Tried that for weeks.  Guess what they had in stock?  Yeah.

They two dudes suggested I buy it NOW instead of waiting.¬† Heck, I could always return the other to the local Sears, right?¬† And I’d be saving shipping too!¬† Better yet, I can take my second one and stick it on eBay….

Look what’s under my desk:

I sure hope the monkeys like it.

Craft on!

Insert a Lurch {ugh} here please.¬† You see, every morning when I’m taking a shower, one of the cats, if not more, is in the bathroom with me.¬† This morning is was two of them:¬† Earl and Sara.¬† I got out of the shower to see this:

Nice huh?¬† Figures the wee beast hit a brand new roll of t.p.¬† If it isn’t a kid making a huge mess out of my bathroom, the cats have to do it.

I haven’t done a huge amount of knitting recently as I worked from home yesterday.¬† Alex woke up with a fever and had had stomach issues during the knit (all over grandma’s bed).¬† Kat refused to go to school without her brother for a change.¬† So I worked from home so that we could employ zone defense.¬† The kids got a bit of a distraction when the mail arrived bring this:

I bought it primarily for the boy, and yes I got the bundle with the wireless guitar controller.¬† However he doesn’t quite have the coordination necessary to play it.¬† Oh boy did I have fun with it last night though.¬† Worked up a bit of a sweat during my first gig. ¬†

Fingers crossed, my order (thanks to wiialerts.com) at Sears.com wasn’t against backordered merchandise but actually in stock, the kids will have a Wii to play with soon.¬† Nintendo has always been the children friendly platform and well, it is kinda cool even if the Xbox will kill it processor/graphicswise.¬† It will be great for things the kids can play.

To further distract you from the lack of knitting pictures around here today, I thought I’d show this.¬† Have I mentioned how very cool my office is?¬† Yes, I still very much love this job and the people.¬† It is a web based company and we are early adopters of various technologies.¬† But then again, we have one of these in the kitchen:

Neat-o huh?¬† It dispenses those cute 8oz glass bottles.¬† See that rectangle basket on top of the machine?¬† Well it has the change that came out of the machine.¬† Yes, we recycle the same coins over and over and over again.¬† Free $.50 soda.¬† Sweet.¬† Oh and next to the change bin?¬† Yes, that’s one of those 2lb Royal Dansk butter cookie tins.¬† There’s ALWAYS one of those up there.¬† Just like there’s ALWAYS buckets of pretzel logs on a file cabinet near the developer’s cage.¬†

It is getting even better, I now have the VP of HR knitting at lunch with me.¬† We had our first SnB at the office last Friday.¬† I came in to find a post-it on my desk, “let’s do lunch and knit today”.¬† Yah baby.¬†

Craft on!

I got a few comments/questions about the new lace project out of handspun. The singles haven’t been prepared in any special way. I’ve done nothing more with it than let is sit first on the bobbin and then in the center pull ball since I finished spinning it a few months back. I had a discussion with Cheryl at Mass this year about knitting lace with singles and I’ve been meaning to try it since. Blocking will take care of any biasing that will occur because the yarn isn’t balanced. I’m very happy with the results so far! This isn’t a great picture by a long shot, but you get the idea of where it is going.

I did a little spinning today. I managed to finish off two oz of a merino/tencel blend that I bought from Sheep Shed at NYSW’07. I’ve actually finished spinning the solid pumpkin colored merino but do need to ply it. The two yarns are earmarked for Eunny’s Argyle Vest.

I had a reminder of my past as a prolific sock knitter. You see, I’d run out of clean hand knit socks and well, it was time to wash. Yeah, I hate laundry. Very much. So today, in order to avoid cold foot syndrome during the chilly commute, I decided it was finally time for the ritual washing of the socks. I didn’t realize I had so many until I laid them all out to dry. That’s 6 feet of mat that they are drying on.

I think I have my issues with the editor worked out. I did a little googling yesterday and tripped on the whole shift+enter for paragraph breaks. There’s also an acknowledged problem with using the TinyMCE with Safari on a Mac. Any surprise that I’d been using Safari on my macbook? Yeah, now I’m using Firefox to write this. The proof is in the actual post though.

Last night I had a great deal of fun taking advantage of XBox Live and the ability to chat long distance for naught by my membership fee. Liz and I played games together online. It was way cool! Until I had a brain fart and shut down the xbox before saying goodbye. I was busy chatting with her, finished up a game I was playing and then we decided it was time to call it a night. It wasn’t until the thing had powered down and the headset was now silent that my brain kicked back into gear and I realized my mistake. Chalk it up to being a noob in the online gaming arena. Other than a couple of ass-kickings that I took a bunch of years back playing Quake 3 over dialup with a bunch of college guys (who’d frag me as soon as I’d respawn) most of my years of gaming have been solitary and/or local. The ex-h and I used to play NHL on the Genesis. Yes, I’m dating myself a bit now

Okay, time to get the crazy monkeys into bed. Tomorrow is a school/work day.

Craft on!

Thanks to Jessica, I was tipped off to the ability to include my progress bars from Ravelry here on my sidebar.   I did the plugin thing and much to my surprise, I find I have a pretty darn out of control WIP pile again.   The eagle-eyed out there might notice something very new in the list too.

I started a new project last night.  I know.  The shame.

At SnB the other night, ¬†I realized that this sock/lace knitter was really knitting nothing more than sweaters. ¬†I do have Tina on the needles, but I had to swipe the tips for another project, probably Kauni. ¬†I’m not quite ready to started Wedding Ring Shawl (still need to swatch one more yarn — should do that today) as I already have a few projects that require serious concentration and live as home projects. ¬†I needed a small lace project in a much underutilized yarn, hand spun.

Enter this yarn:

    

¬†It is the cashmere/silk from Foxfire that I got at MASW’07. ¬†I spun it fine on the Vermont Wheel and it has been aging for a while. ¬†I had dog-eared it for lace a while ago and saw it sitting on my desk last night. ¬†I dug out the perfect pattern for it: ¬†Leaf Lace from Evelyn Clark. ¬†I have to admit, I haven’t a clue how much yarn I have other than I started out with 2oz of raw fiber, spun it fine (threadlike in some areas) and um that’s it. ¬†I hope I have enough.¬†

¬†I think I’m done casting on for a while. ¬†I really do need to finish up some of what I’ve got going first. ¬†Another WIP Wipeout anyone?¬†On the transition front, I’m continuously fighting with the wordpress editor to format my stinkin posts. ¬†I likes to remove silly things like paragraph breaks… and honestly, isn’t very html friendly either. ¬†Any suggestions? ¬†Plugins that I should be using instead? ¬† Some tweak that I’ve missed? ¬†I did select the checkbox in the profile to use the wysiwyg editor {snicker}. ¬† ¬†I’m not opposed to doing the messy html bit but this editor is almost worthless as is and definitely has to go.

 Craft on! 

 

I hate when other days of the week try to disguise themselves as Monday. ¬†Having yesterday off means that today, Tuesday, filled that thankless role. ¬†And boy did it fill it with a pretty suckish day.Somewhere between getting on the ferry in Hoboken and getting to my office building I discovered that I lost my ticket holder. ¬†In said holder was my train monthly pass, my ferry monthly pass, 2 extra one-way ferry tickets, metro card and building id card. ¬†Sigh. ¬†I’m pretty sure it fell out of my pocket when I pulled out my iPod on the boat to turn it on. ¬†It hasn’t turned up in the L&F at either end of the ferry trip. ¬†I’m hoping that it turns up tomorrow. ¬†Damn. ¬†In the meantime, I have to buy more stinkin’ tickets. ¬†I won’t replace the monthly tickets as that is silly at this point in the month, but I have 7 days left in this month. ¬†Wouldn’t it figure that my mail today delivered my February pass?! ¬†

The monkeys are more like mutants this evening. ¬†Neither wants to listen and they are just running around like short crazy people. ¬†I can’t even begin to fathom how Alex got toothpaste on his foot and the tank of the toilet in my bathroom. ¬†I don’t even want to try. ¬†I’d stick them on eBay but I doubt they’d sell. ¬†No one in their right mind will buy a used preschooler

I did do a little knitting on the train, made it into the third color section, solid plum on Dacapo. ¬†Sadly, it is crap to try and take pictures of. ¬†I’m using a 24″ Addi lace in US2 and the cable is far too short to allow said pictures. ¬†I need to get a longer one.

I think I’m going to spend some serious time this evening unwinding at the wheel, transferring all this twistiness someplace else!

On the new blog note, just like Deb let me know that she had trouble writing a comment because of a demand by the blog for both cookies and javascript, if someone else has any problems, suggestions, etc please let me know: ¬†crazyfiberlady AT gmail DOT com. ¬†(risa AT crazyfiberlady DOT com also works.) ¬†I’d very much appreciate it. ¬†I’m trying various plugins with WordPress to find what works and what doesn’t. ¬†Spamfree sounded promising but like the capcha at Typepad that captures more humans than bots, nothing is perfect. ¬†I’m trying something else now.

 Craft on! 

Do I need to mention that I’ve been busy since the last post?¬† Nah, didn’t think so.¬† I’ve been slowly moving/editing to get photos from older posts in place.¬† I’m good up through Oct. 2006.¬† I think.¬† I also started working on the finished items gallery.¬† You’ll notice in the sidebar, a link to a single page, the gallery.¬† I took a lead from Wendy and opted for the single page containing links off to the actual FO’s.¬† I’m slowly slogging my way through the FO gallery on typepad and building those pages here.¬† You’ll see only a few as I work my way backwards.¬†¬† Time.

What else has been going on?¬† Well, Thursday I succumbed to the stomach virus that has been making its rounds through the family.¬† Alex started it.¬† It wasn’t pleasant.¬† I worked from home that day.¬† More surprising, I was able to get a great deal accomplished.¬†

Friday, the tummy was better, but I was home anyway.¬† I had a leftover vacation day from 2007 that I had arranged to pair with MLK and take an extended weekend.¬† It was no day of rest.¬† Nope.¬† I spent the day arranging and cleaning my bedroom closet, which I’d been meaning to do since I moved into this bedroom.¬† I had an amazing amount of yarn jammed in there, as well as spinning supplies and forgotten projects, and the normal closet things of clothes and shoes.¬† Lots of shoes.¬† An amazing supply of shoes when you consider the difficulty I have in buying shoes with my ridiculously sized feet.¬†¬† But I digress.¬† I spent the day organizing, rounding up needles and the like.¬† Closet is now workable and I have a better grip on what is in there.¬† I also have no business buying yarn.¬† Ever again.¬† Maybe this year will be the year of the successful yarn diet.

The rest of the weekend, today included, has been a mix of children, knitting, XBox and spinning. Oh and yes, I have a new neighbor!¬† Sunday, Kat and I helped (Alex showed up with Pop later) our new neighbor unload some of her stuff in her new abode.¬† Click on over and wish her the best in her new place!¬† I’m looking forward to the upcoming dye workshops in her super fabulous extra kitchen, not to mention a SnB buddy on the train.¬† Welcome Jessica.

Sorry, no pictures of the spinning.¬† I’ve been slowly, and regularly spinning having silently joined the SpinMoreJanuaryAlongThing.¬† I’ve been trying to get in a half hour every day at least.¬† Been pretty successful on the whole.¬† I’m making my way through the pounds of black corriedale roving that I had processed from the 2006 Rhinebeck fleece.¬† I’m working up all the singles, winding off bobbins into cakes and numbering in order¬†and then will ply them together when there is no more raw fiber.¬† I’ve lost count, but at some point, I figured out I get some 4 bobbins out of one cake of roving.¬† I’m into the second cake and have 3 more to do.¬†

Active knitting this week has been more work on the vest that I’m knitting for Alex.¬† I’m using an old Ann Norling basic pattern and some Rowan Tapestry that I got on eBay.¬† Good stuff that is!¬† I have the back done and have, after a week, finally cast on for the front.

I finally put in some more time on Kauni’s first sleeve.¬† I haven’t been schlepping her on the train (that’s Dacapo’s position right now) as trying to balance the chart holder is a pain, and well interferes with watching video on the iPod Touch (just put Live Free or Die Hard on it for this week’s commuting pleasure, along with the final disk of Black Donnelly’s).¬† That’s made Kauni home knitting for when I have most brain cells intact.¬† I’m about a 1/3 of the way through this sleeve now and honestly, I’m very glad that I got my brain in gear and decided that the pattern wasn’t too big for the sleeve.¬† I’m loving how it looks.

Well, time to go knit a bit before bed.¬† Tomorrow is a work day and I’m tired.¬† Mom and I stayed up too late playing on the Xbox last night.¬†¬† Should I mention that Alex has been playing Call of Duty 2?¬† He’s actually pretty good when he can manage both sticks.¬† Poor guy.¬† He’s a future gamer all right!¬† These apples didn’t fall very far from this tree

Craft on!

Finally a real post, eh? Yup. I figure this might hold y’all over while I get this new home unpacked and set up as we all like it. Please ignore the boxes piled up all over. I’m dealing with them slowly as I decide where to put things. I have some ideas, now I just need the time

I have definitely still been knitting though, even finished an object! This is the first FO of the year. Amazing. I finished it Tuesday of last week, I think. I need to check my ravelry info to get the real dates, but tuesday feels right. It was a super quick project.

And now that the weather has gotten cold again, I will get to wear it. Tomorrow even.

As I had a dirth of sweater projects in thin yarn on tiny needles

I started another one this weekend.  One that has been marinating in stash now for just over a year!  One that has lived just outside my bathroom door for months now and has taunted me daily from there.    Meet Dacapo!  My first Hanne Falkenberg kit.  Loves it.

This is the kit #8, black/plum/blueberry.  I took this picture this morning on the way to the office.  You probably figured that out by the presence of sunlight!

I then took this picture so as to not appear to weird, though there’s little danger of that in NYC!

How’s that for a view?!¬† And I get to see it twice a day, more if I go thataway for lunch.

Anyway, I’m tired, been hacking too late too many nights in a row now (was futzing with the iPod Touch this evening – Apple’s charging $20 for the phone apps to install on existing Touchs that will be free for new ones – really pissed me off.¬† One word.¬† Jailbreak.¬† ) so I’ll leave you with this last picture.¬† Poor Serendipity had to go to the groomer again.¬† Like the long haired females in this house, Kat and myself included, she has a knotting problem.¬† While I am able with some bribery get Kat’s knots out, sadly, Sara got too bad, too fast for me to tackle.¬† Mea culpa.

There was no alternative.¬† The sad thing is that her coat took forever to grow back after last year’s shaving (like¬† I have a clue where to find that link now?!) somewhere in December.¬† She barely had an undercoat until about October.¬† Poor thing.¬† Which reminds me, I have a bit of a knot in my hair too.¬† Time to start wearing braids like my daughter.

Craft on!

PS – I did a little hacking around with my feeds.¬† Getting auto updates from here probably will be determined by when/what feed address you used to subscribe before.¬† Check the feed setting in your reader.¬† If it has typepad, you’ll unfortunately need to update it.¬† If it is for my own domain, you should be cool.¬† Another option, not that I think I’ll be moving again {snicker – this is the third home in just over 3 years}, you could use the feedburner link as that can be changed without any pain to you dear readers.

Well, moved that is….

 I see the feeds have caught up with the new spot, sort of.  Content from Typepad, link, thanks to DNS comes here. 

I have a real post brewing in my head but I wanted to prevent all sorts of 404 errors for y’all and give you a real landing spot.

Welcome to my new blog! Make yourself comfy, I’m trying to.¬† The old stuff has been moved here, post wise at least. I need to figure out what I’m doing with all the sidebar stuff, as well as the photo albums, not to mention the whole stylesheet thing.

I’m also in the process of trying to get all the images uploaded here as well. I have a bulk of them, but lots of older ones (and we won’t even discuss the early blogger.com images that were linked to my defunct webspace at verizon that disappeared when I moved) are missing. I hope to get them here as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile you can still hit the old stuff, as I still have another year on that account

Craft on!