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Another beautiful day today! Hung more laundry outside. It’s so nice to have a real backyard with a clothesline! Henry and I went down to Mission Bay again, and we brought his bike so he could ride on the bike path, back and forth, back and forth. I sat in the shade and worked on the Slipped Cable Vest, finished up the fronts and started the back!

(Thanks to Aperture, this is a relatively accurate representation of the color, at least on my iMac’s monitor)

When we got home, we played another game of Agricola, and then in the evening I took him to his Kung Fu group class for the first time in two weeks. So happy he’s feeling good again. And after Henry went to bed, Dan and I watched episode 9 of Celebrity Rehab. Love that show! Seth and Mary and Jessica went to Sober Living, yay!

We live about ten minutes from Mission Bay now, so this evening we all three went down and took a long walk at sunset. Henry climbed a couple of trees, and Dan tok some photos, and I ripped out the DNA socks (which I’ve grown to loathe). Now I can use that yarn to make some nice simple socks for Henry that I will actually enjoy knitting and even finish someday.

A short exchange on twitter this morning inspired me to create a new project: an online knit together for Introverted Knitters. I was thinking about going to the knit together in Balboa Park, but the prospect of having to make conversation with strangers made me change my mind, even though it is fun to knit with people. So! Introverted knitters, come and join us! I am planning to schedule an online knit together every couple of weeks, perhaps, and we have a google group for chatting and setting up impromptu knit togethers.

Subscribe to Introverted Knitters

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Visit this group

Henry’s mostly better but still gets worn out easily, so I decided he should stay home from his classes today, just one more time. So he helped me with some chores this morning and then I helped him work through another sample math lesson at http://teachingtextbooks.com/. What a great math system! Perfect for Henry. I sure hope Bayshore will buy grade six for us, ’cause if they don’t we’ll have to pay for it ourselves somehow :)

Then, after math, Henry played some Guitar Hero and I got the house nice and clean and hung a couple of loads of laundry out in the sun. The air smelled sweet and springy today.

Tonight I knitted my vest some more while we watched the first episode of The West Wing which seems really good! How nice to have a new series to watch together. And then it was Survivor time. And now it is bedtime.

I recently ordered knitpicks’ Slipped Cable Vest pattern and 8 skeins of Wool of the Andes in a lovely honey-brown-gold color they call “wheat” (on sale for $1.79/skein. Dude!) Also a set of size 4 Harmony needle tips (Yeah, pattern calls for 8s, I got gauge on 4s. Go figure.) Last night, after finishing the brown and cream mittens, I cast on for the vest and worked about two inches of ribbing, and then today I finished the ribbing and worked two repeats of the cable pattern. Working 198 stitches in ribbing is funny. It starts out six miles wide and draws in gradually while you’re working, and when you finally have 3 inches of knitting it’s a reasonable width :)

It’s very restful, after all the improvisational knitting I’ve been doing, to just follow a damn pattern for a change :) The pattern is very simple, and is written pretty well, but the transition between ribbing and cable could be made a lot clearer. If you follow the directions, it seems that you need to start the cable patterns on the second row (RS), which is not really made clear in the pattern. Also, you don’t want to just randomly place your increases! Count your stitches and figure out where to place increases so that the ribbing continues unbroken up the sides of the vest. If you goof it up a little, you don’t need to rip the whole thing back — just drop the offending stitches, rearrange them a little so that the knitted ribs are unbroken, and pull them back up with a crochet hook.

Here’s my progress so far:

I’m enjoying working with the Wool of the Andes. It’s a little rougher than Telemark, and I wouldn’t want to wear it directly next to the skin, but for outerwear it’s very nice.

Man, these were difficult but the result is so satisfying. One hundred grams of Telemark didn’t seem like very much, so I split each ball exactly in half and knit the mittens top-down. I don’t like afterthought thumbs, so I un-vented a new top-down thumb! Knit a thumb tube and then attach it to the hand with 3-needle bind off over just a few stitches (5 seemed right for these), then decrease away the extra stitches as you work down the hand. I decreased one stitch every three rounds. Because I had to do quite a bit of ripping back and re-working, it took nearly a full day of knitting for each mitten. *whew*

I loved working with knitpicks’ Telemark. It’s springy and soft and wonderful. Yum!

Yay, now you can follow Pandora on twitter! http://twitter.com/pandora_radio.

(Pandora is one of the greatest things ever invented. Period.)

Spent the day working on the brown and cream mittens (Top-down with a really fabulous thumb! Photos soon!) and watching the third season of The Office with Henry. He’s feeling a lot better, no more temperature and just a slight cough, but he’s definitely still recuperating and is still droopy and tired. But his appetite is coming back!

Mom hired me to make two pairs of mittens for some friends who took her skiing. One wanted burgundy and light gray with snowflakes, the other wants brown and cream. I finished the snowflake pair yesterday:

I knit it from the wrist up, with thumb gussets. I improvised the patterns using charts from The Complete Book of Traditional Fair Isle Knitting by Sheila McGregor, a wonderful resource if you can find a copy! (Link leads to a book with a slightly different title, but I think it’s a reprint of the book I have)

Not my greatest achievement, but I think they will do.

Our three Extended Edition LotR dvd boxes didn’t get packed with the rest of the dvds because they were in a different room in the old house. This morning I finally found them (in a box with half my LPs) so we have just started a LotR marathon. Or Henry has. I will alternate watching with knitting, chores, cooking, etc., so I don’t die of Surfeit of Jackson. (edit: turns out the first disk of The Fellowship was enough Jackson for Henry, too, so we switched to Survivor Vanuatu)

This message would ordinarily have been posted on twitter, but they’re down again. Good old twitter :)

In case anyone was worried, thought I’d let you know that Henry’s still sick but doing much better. His fever was down to 100 this morning (it was 103 on Tuesday night and 101 yesterday), and he had more appetite and more pep than he’s had since Sunday. He sent me out for French bread and garlic-herb Boursin cheese (what a great kid), and we had another quiet on-the-couch day watching Survivor Vanuatu and Best in Show together. And I worked on a pair of mittens Mom hired me to make for her friend. Photos soon. Oh, and Henry felt well enough to stay up till 9 to watch tonight’s episode of Survivor with us, which was a rare treat as he’s usually with his dad on Thursdays!

And, though my jaw aches sometimes, it has not been bad enough for painkillers for two whole days, so I doubt if I’ll need to take any more, hooray!

Sorry, we’ve been having server problems and I think I lost a comment that someone (maybe Thuy?) left. She said all I needed now was knitted pants. Got ’em already :) (edit – no, I didn’t lose a comment, she commented on my flickr and I was sleepy and didn’t notice. I’ll leave this post up anyway)

Let’s see, I need to catch up a bit. On Friday, Rockola did their annual George Harrison birthday show. It went great! Henry played a few percussion parts (hand-claps and tambourine in a few songs, and a very snazzy cowbell in “Handle With Care”) and a small but important guitar part in “I Me Mine”. He practiced hard for a couple of weeks and did very well in the show. I was so proud of him! I forgot my camera, so no photos, darn it.

Saturday I picked him up from his dad’s house because his dad had come down with a very bad case of bronchitis. Henry got it too, poor boy, or some kind of nasty virus. Sunday he was a bit droopy, and yesterday he felt very bad and lay on the couch all day, but today he seems a little better, though still miserable. He’s actually asking for things to drink, instead of reluctantly taking a few sips now and then. But we’re having a nice time watching The Dick van Dyke show.

I sent several hours putting in the pockets this morning, and was wearing it when Dan got home. He took these pictures right then, so it *still* isn’t blocked!

The pockets are nice and deep. They go right down to where the border starts. I’m happy it’s a cold, rainy day, so I can wear it! By the way, this top-down, one-piece sweater was inspired by Jared Flood’s Cobblestone Pullover. Thanks, Jared!

Well, I wanted to wait until it was blocked, but I can’t :) So here it is, looking a bit wobbly, on my dress form this dark and rainy morning:

I’ll probably add afterthought pockets today, and I’ll block it tomorrow, maybe. When it’s dry, Dan will take photos of me actually wearing it!

Yesterday Fargo’s parents dropped him off to visit for a few days. Fargo has been Henry’s best friend for… four years maybe. He’s a great kid, a big reader and a real person. Henry decided to skip his classes today in favor of playing with Fargo, which says a lot because he loves his Thursday classes! The boys played and watched Naruto until Henry’s dad came to pick them up, and then I went out to buy buttons for my red sweater. I finally decided on some largish wooden ones, and came home and sewed them on so I could try the sweater on and see how much longer to make it.

This evening during Survivor I finished it! It’s wonderful. I want to wear it to the Rockola show tomorrow night, so I won’t block it yet and I don’t want to take photos until it’s blocked. But trust me. It’s a beautiful sweater, nice and long and warm, and it fits me perfectly.

Oh, this evening Chloe and I went out to pick up a few things for the show. She wanted a See and Say — you know, “The cow says.. mooooooooooooooooo” — but the modern version of that toy is extraordinarily lame so we skipped it. Also, we couldn’t find any bathrobes. I think they must be like slippers — only available at Christmas. Stupid. But we had fun :)

Yoke is done, have divided for sleeves. Pretty, huh?

A bit of poor planning on my part (forgot that my ROW gauge was also different — blame it on tooth pain) means my V is not as deep as the pattern V, but I think it’s deep enough. I don’t know if I have enough yarn to do the whole wrap-front thing, so I’m going to work the sleeves next, and then decide if I should do the wrap or just join the fronts and make a pullover.

Yarn: Knitpicks’ Gloss (merino wool/silk)
Gauge: 5.5 st/inch
Stitch pattern:
right side: k7, p1
wrong side: p

LibriVox’s full-cast reading of The Scarecrow of Oz is complete and ready for download! As usual, our recording is public domain, free and legal to download and share, of course. Every character is read by a different voice, by readers all around the world, and the narration is done by still more readers. Scott Sherris coordinated this massive project and did all the pasting-together of parts, a huge job. I did a few chapters of narration, and Henry took part as Button-Bright. Hint: Chapter 8 is Button-Bright’s first appearance ;-)

http://librivox.org/scarecrow-of-oz-by-l-frank-baum/

I woke up yesterday feeling just awful, but as the day progressed I felt better and better. Saw my dentist and she said the slight bleeding I’ve noticed is normal. They packed some more medicine-soaked gauze wads into the “extraction site” (giant hole in my jaw) and said I was healing nicely. I felt well enough to do some grocery shopping (first time in two weeks) so now we have kefir again, yay! And other things. Trader Joe’s had leeks, all trimmed and clean, so I made leek and potato soup for dinner. I love soup. Leeks, celery, onions, potatoes, chicken broth, a bit of heavy cream, and a dash of sour cream. Yum.

I took my 800mg ibuprofen in the morning and it lasted all day, with just some aching in the afternoon. I was thinking maybe I was healed enough to stop taking painkillers, but it started to hurt a LOT at bedtime, so I took another 800mg. Maybe I can stick to morning and night doses, instead of three times a day.

I’ve been feeling really worn out lately. I guess it’s probably because my mouth is still healing. I didn’t feel like doing anything over the weekend, so I mostly knitted and watched TV. We worked through all four seasons of The Office over the past two weekends, and finished up season 4 yesterday. That is some high-quality entertainment, let me tell you. It’s the only show I’ve missed during the writers’ strike. Now that the strike is over, rumor has it that a new episode will air on April 10th. Yay!! Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.

I also watched The Darjeeling Limited and enjoyed it very much, and then watched Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, so it was a Wes Anderson weekend. Darjeeling and Tenenbaums are vying for first place. I still haven’t decided which I like more, though I’ve seen Tenebaums twice now. Rushmore was good but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the other two. All three are stunningly beautiful from beginning to end.

I started a new sweater, a neck-down wrap cardigan, number 263 on http://www.knittingpureandsimple.com/cardi.html. I’m using four colors (Pumpkin, tan, cocoa, black) of Knitpicks’ Gloss (merino wool/silk blend) in 8-row stripes, and I’m doing an all-over seeded rib as well (k7, p1 on the right side, p all on the wrong side). Of course the Gloss works up to a very different gauge than the required light worsted, but it’s such a peasant and simple pattern that it’s easy to rekajigger it to suit my gauge. I’ll get a photo for you when I have the energy to get up off the couch.

I’ve also worked a lot more on the red cobblestone cardigan, and have gotten to about hip level. It fits like a dream.

Yesterday I saw my dentist, my sweet dear dentist. She said my wisdom tooth was the most difficult tooth she’d ever worked on. They took out my stitches and packed some little wads of gauze soaked with a mixture of herbs/oil of cloves into the wound, which is supposed to help it heal and not hurt so much. I think it really is helping the pain! She also said I can take 800 milligrams of ibuprofin at a time (instead of the 400-600 I’d been taking), or half a percocet plus 200mg ibuprofin. So yesterday I was in much less pain all day, which was quite a relief.

I felt well enough to work on my Cobblestone Cardigan while listening to Annie’s reading of Pride and Prejudice and got the sleeves finished and seamed! I learned how to do invisible seaming on garter stitch fabric as well as stockinette fabric and I’m so impressed with how good it looks. I’ll never fear seams again.

I remembered today that we had $25 in our Kiva account, waiting to be lent out. Henry and I browsed around and chose Mrs. Men Kim Sean of Cambodia. She needs $1000 to buy a motorcycle so that her family can improve their motorcycle taxi business.

As of right now, she is 60% funded! (When her loan is fully funded, that banner will show another loan in need of funding.) Kiva is so cool!

My mouth is still hurting like crazy. Argh.