Inexperienced criminals...

...do things like this.

Ah, Christmas.

If you would like to read about our a-little-more-exciting-than-we-wanted-it-to-be Christmas morning, it's here on my husband's blog.

I love my garbage collector.

I'm sure there's a more PC name for a garbage man (waste management technician?), but I don't care. Our trash is normally picked up twice a week, but due to the ice there haven't been any dumpster-emptyings for just over two weeks. It really did not help at all that Christmas Day fell during that two-week time period. There was a pile of bags at least as big as the 4-cubic yard dumpster right in front of it. Not to mention the five bags or so we had in the house, waiting to go out as soon as we could get within 20 feet of the actual dumpster.

The garbage truck came today. The dumpster was emptied, refilled, and emptied again. Lots of full trash bags are now out of my house and awaiting the next pick up on Friday. Hallelujah!

Now I'm just waiting for the recycle truck so I can be rid of my small mountain of empty boxes and milk jugs.

Eris, sans zipper

All done except for the zipper! And since I haven't yet bought a zipper, and since we are snowed in, I am considering it to be done. Once I buy a zipper it will go back to an "undone" status.

Just a thought.

I cannot wait for the days to start getting longer. 3:30 is just way too early to have to turn on the lights.

Eris: Not Quite

So here is a photo of Eris on the night of November 30. As you can see, I finished the body on November but not the sleeves. Even though my goal was to finish before December, I am still really happy with how much I accomplished.

Eris, divided.

Just divided the body and sleeve sections. It looks a touch small but I tried it on and it seems okay; I think that if it does turn out a tiny bit small I can probably block it bigger.

Eris, take two.

So after several days, a lot of chocolate, and a little bit of alcohol, I finally felt (mostly) not upset about my mistake and was able to re-start Eris. Here is the collar, half done and with the stitches picked up to start the second half.

Irritated as I am, I really am glad that I re-knit this. The first try had several small mistakes that bugged me but not enough to make me rip it and start again. Once I discovered I'd used the wrong gauge, though, I obviously had to re-do the thing. This time around I was more familiar with both the chart symbols and how it looked on the needles, so I caught mistakes right away and could fix them.


I'm much happier with this collar.

What goes up must come down.

So apparently November is National Just About Everything Month (Write a Novel, Blog Every Day, Knit a Sweater, etcetera). I have had the yarn for a few sweaters for several months now and so I decided to take the plunge and make a sweater this month. Right from the start there were problems. I didn't have enough of such-and-such yarn to do that project, that sweater wouldn't look good in that color, and so forth. After doing some gauge swatches, I settled on making Rogue. I got perfect gauge and even though I didn't have quite enough yarn, I was able to order more - in the same dyelot, even! - until disaster struck. It wouldn't print. Now, we don't have a printer so any printing jobs include copying files, traveling to the library, checking out a computer, printing files, and returning home. Since I was at the library, there was nothing I could do except retry to print the same thing that I had. Not happening. I must have done something to mess the pattern up when copying it. Plan B. (Well, C, actually, because I was planning on making a Hand-to-Hand Aran [Ravelry link, you have to sign up] until I decided I didn't like that yarn worked up at that gauge.) I was able to print the pattern for Eris, and I had good yarn for it that worked up to gauge. The collar went beautifully. I adore the complex cables. So other than several mistakes, doesn't it look great?


I picked up all the stitches around the edge (one of my least favorite knitting jobs) to start the body of the sweater. I read ahead in the pattern to make sure I knew what I was doing. Everything was clear except there were no specific instructions for the raglan increases, so I checked to see if they were supposed to be done a certain way. Lo and behold, I discovered that I had been working the perfect gauge for the BODY portion of the sweater all the way through my lovely collar.

My knitting will be in time-out until I have eaten enough chocolate to get over this.

Free barrette holder pattern

I had one of these barrette holders when I was young and I may someday make one for my daughters. I thought I'd post it in case anyone else was interested - barrettes are not the easiest things to store neatly.