Two weeks of CMS/Colloquium knitting

 

Here's what I did in CMS and Colloquium two weeks ago.  I finished the second strip!  They are not quite the same length, but I talked to my mom about it and we agreed that it's okay.  Garter stitch is stretchy.  

Last week, I had intended to start on the 30" strips for the blanket for my cousin's baby, but I didn't get the yarn wound in time.  So instead I worked on this:

This is the second leaf sock.  This project is really on the back burner, but it was nice to see how fast it goes.  I got about half of the leg done last week.

A Wool CRISIS!!!

A Very, Very Bad thing has happened.  When I got home from Yarn School in October, I was too lazy to unpack all of the lovely fiber that I dyed while I was there.  I was still too lazy to put it away when I went on my next two trips, so for three months it's been sitting in a pile on the bedroom floor (not good, I know).  Today I finally got myself together to put it away, along with some yarn that ended up in the same pile.  I put half of it away, and then as I was picking up the beautiful long braids of hand-dyed wool, I noticed that bugs had taken some bites out of them. 

BUGS!!

It is BAD.  Not in terms of the actual number of bugs (Robert thinks they look like beetles), but because they are there.  And I had started to put things away, so now I am concerned that I might have spread them to my dresser, the sock yarn I store in my bedside table, and the bins I use to store yarn and fiber in the closet.  Places where things I care a lot about, things I have spent hours and hours and hours making, are stored.

We immediately put all of the things from the pile of wool into plastic bags into the freezer.  I got on the internet and found information about clothes moths and carpet beetles (neither of which really look like what I saw on the fiber).  All of the sites I looked at say that washing in hot water is the best thing to do, but since I'm talking about wool, that's really not an option for me.  We're going to get moth balls, even though all of the sites say don't use them because they're toxic to humans as well as moths, but it doesn't seem like anything else will actually kill them.

If anyone out there reading this has good advice about this, please tell me!  I don't know what to do.

Vacation knitting

This is the knitting I did while we were on vacation for Christmas and New Year's.  I decided that it would be nice to knit myself a fancy shrug to wear with my sleeveless wedding dress at our reception (which will be outdoors, so unless summer comes early, I'll probably be chilly).  I chose the Lady Grey Lace Shrug pattern and ordered this lovely cashmere-silk yarn from Webs. 

I got gauge (or close enough) on both the stockinette and the lace pattern in my swatch, so tonight I ripped out the swatch and started the shrug.  So far it's lovely!

Colloquium knitting returns!

This past week was the first week of our Spring semester, and my department is hiring this year, so even though I forgot to bring my knitting on Thursday I still knitted through two "special colloquiua" last week.  Plus one today.  This picture shows the second 30" strip as of this morning, when it was 20.5" long (there's another special colloquium tomorrow, so I didn't bring my knitting home with me this evening.)  As of now, it's about 24", and i need to start knitting tighter, because it's been getting a little bit wider as I go along. 

I used to be an incredibly tight knitter, but lately my tension has loosened a lot.  On this project, I'm using the exact yarn called for in the pattern, but I had to go down two whole needle sizes!  I think its a good thing, but it takes a bit of getting used to.

Holiday Sewing

 I sewed Christmas gifts by machine right up until the morning we left to visit family for the holidays, and then I sewed another gift by hand almost right up until Christmas Eve.  I made this little clutch for a friend using this tutorial at Noodlehead.  I did the interfacing a little bit differently than in the tutorial (I wanted to use some heavy fleece-type sew-in interfacing I happened to have in my stash to give it extra stiffness, and I ended up wonder-undering all of the layers together), but it was much easier than I thought it would be and it came out really well!  It has handy card pockets and a divider inside:

I also made (but didn't manage to get photograph) a super-cool zip-itself coin purse using this tutorial.  It was pretty easy, and seems like magic!  I filled it with two miniature bottles of nail polish and Santa put it into someone's stocking.