Progress?

I could never be an actual blogger.  Coming up with titles is one thing I am really terrible at, and I don't think I could handle the pressure of making a new one every day.  As it is, I'm always tempted to just name it after the date.

I am making very slow progress towards my eventual goal of 12 legitimate finished objects by the end of the year, but the actual objects are not the exact ones I started the year wanting to make.

Here's the current state of my Grandpa Cardigan.  I'm at the waist shaping, and the cables are delightful.  I've decided that Joji Locatelli is my actual favorite designer.

This one is a new addition.  I'm knitting the Carson Throw along with loads of other Eat.Sleep.Knit customers.  I really wanted to knit it in Cascade Eco, but they just don't make the range of pinks that Madelinetosh does, so mine is in Tosh Chunky.

And here's my absolute favorite knit right now, the Crazed Scandinavian Cowl.  I'm on row 316 right now, so about halfway.  I'm having a tiny crisis about what to do, though.  I'm using yarn faster than I should, so I ordered another skein of the Rose.  But my problem is that Kitten is out of stock at ESK. If I wait for it to come back in stock, I might miss my 30 March deadline.  If I order the spare yarn from somewhere else, it no longer qualifies for any ESK yarnathon badges.  Right now, I think my plan is to wait at least until the end of February before ordering from elsewhere.

New Year, New Knitting

I would be willing to bet that January 1st has the most blog posts out of any day of the year.

Because I am not hip, I am not sad that I'm getting mine in before the day is out.

The Twelve Things That Rachel Wants to Knit in 2016:
1) Crazed Scandinavian Cowl
2) Voodoo Shawl
3) Therapy Shawl
4) 3 Color Cashmere Cowl
5) Grandpa Cardigan
6) Sherlock Mittens
7) Star Wars Scarf
8) Rock Island Shawl
9) Field Notes Cardigan
10) Chamei Pullover
11) Scoreboard
12) Thyri Pullover

I realize this list is unrealistic because, with the exception of the cashmere cowl, I cannot knit any of these things in one month.  This makes twelve of them in twelve months impossible.  But I've been on vacation too long and have started to think that this amount of free time is normal.

So really, the goal is to knit actual things that I'm excited about wearing, challenge myself to develop new skills, and document the process using the really nice camera I got for my birthday two years ago and hardly ever touch.

Don't judge me when it's May, and this is still the most recent entry.

Half Marathon - Hannover

Before we start here, let me just apologise for the lame cell phone pictures and British spellings.  The former is due to me being alone on my trip.  I wasn't positive if I could get a late checkout, and I didn't want my DSLR in a plastic baggy in a giant room full of everyone else's plastic baggies.  The latter is due to my computer's current identity crisis and its strange need to write things like colour and favourite.

Hannover was pretty fun!  I didn't see many of the cities cultural offerings, but I would say I explored a pretty decent chunk.  I didn't take any maps with me on my wanderings, so I let myself get lost a few times.  On my first attempt at finding the race expo, I actually found my hotel again.

On Saturday, I woke up, went for a 2 mile loosen-up jog, came back, and took a shower.  The hotel had some interesting soap dispensers, and I couldn't resist a picture.  You will notice that each language places "hair," "hand," and "body" in a different order.  I'm not sure what this says about the different cultures, but it probably says something.  (The German, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic versions are in very small letters at the bottom, hence the giant picture.)

Hair: important to anglophones, unimportant to hispanophones, francophones are ambivalent.

Then I put on my new, magical Cornhusker shoelaces.  They barely fit through the holes, but I think this was actually a good thing.  Once I tightened them down just right, they weren't going anywhere!

With those, I went on my short walk turned long walk to pick up my race packet.  It was a nice trip.  I saw lots of side streets, ate a crepe, and got some ice cream.

When I got back to my room, I dropped everything off and then headed down the street to buy a Hannover Starbucks mug.  I just started collecting them this year (which is unfortunate, because I don't have them now from a lot of places I've been), and I really want to have them from places I've run in.  I don't have a picture of the actual mug, but I do have a picture of the statue of King Ernst August.  His statue is right outside the Hauptbahnhof at Ernst-August-Platz, which is not a great location to get a good picture of anything.  I took it just to prove that I actually went to the place to get the mug instead of trading for it.

The actual race was pretty nice.  The forecast had predicted heavy rains, but they didn't come until much later in the evening.  I'm not sure yet about my feelings on the weather.  I wore a baseball style running cap to keep the rain off of my eyes so that I could see while I was running.  I ended up wearing it despite the dry weather to keep the sun out of my eyes instead.  I could tell by the end of the race though, that it was starting to get hot under my hat.  In general, I would have preferred if it were 10 degrees cooler with less wind and humidity, but I was there to have fun, not break world records.

After I ran the race, I had a couple hours to kill before my train was ready to take me home.  My intention was to go visit a museum, but I noticed that I really just wanted to do a lot of sitting.  I did some sitting on a bench with some ice cream.  I did some other sitting on concrete blocks without any ice cream.  Then I took a very roundabout way back to the train station and saw this building.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is something very German to me about a Bäckeramtshaus.

When I was finally on the train back home, I learned a very important lesson.  Deutsche Bahn coffee is both overpriced and terrible.  The quality is comparable to American gas station coffee.  (The average German gas station coffee is actually very good.)  It costs 2,80.  So about $4.

The offending cup

You'll also see there part of a chart from my double knit Space Invaders scarf.  I got four aliens finished on my various train rides, which doubled the work I had accomplished over the two previous months.

Overall: Success!  Four German half marathons down, twelve to go!

WIP Wednesday

It's confession time.

I really like Harry Potter.  No, you don't get it.  I really like Harry Potter.  As in, I like it so much that I joined a group on Ravelry over a month ago where people get sorted into Hogwarts Houses, turn in knitting projects as homework, and compete for a House Cup.  They even have OWLs and Quidditch.  April is a break month, but everything starts back up again in May, so I've been waiting for then to cast on my knitting projects so that they will count for things.

But there's no point in not working on things I had already started.  And it seems a shame to deny myself knitting just because there's a game going on that I can also knit for.

Here's my Vasa, which is still a WIP because it has 50000 ends not woven in.  I was an absolute idiot and for some reason didn't carry the contrast color up the side of my first piece.  But it is blocked, even though that little piece of ribbing doesn't like to stay where he belongs.

I'm still deciding how I feel about the Vasa.  I think it's decently flattering, for a shirt with no shaping whatsoever.  If I do make another one, I am definitely doing it in the round.  I am all about easy finishing.

And what's this over here?  Could it be?  It's Visser's big cousin, Visser 4!  (It's only the second one I've made, but it's the fourth size.)  It's coming along reasonably quickly.  I've already separated the torso into front and back.  I'm working the back right now, because it's just mindless stockinette.

FO Friday - Visser

My favorite online LYS, Eat.Sleep.Knit, wrapped up their first quarter KAL challenge on Monday.  We were supposed to knit things that required us to learn a new skill, and we would get credit for 1000 yards in their yarnathon.

My initial plan was to submit Zantha, which you've seen here before, since I had never done lace before.  But since then, I've knit two more, and I am just Zantha'd out right now.  I didn't even want to look at it long enough to sew the buttons on and finish it up.

Instead, I grabbed a skein of Madelinetosh Pashmina and got to work.  My two skeins of Pashmina, in Cobalt and Citrus, reminded me of the bright, complementary colors I saw a lot of in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  I decided to see if there were any typical Dutch sweater designs that I could translate into a baby sweater, and there were!

These would be quite at home in a Van Gogh work.

Dutch fisherman sweaters were exactly the thing I was looking for.  They are knit in solid colors, so the visual interest comes from various knit and purl stitch patterns that decorate most of the front of the sweater.  They also generally have a drop shoulder construction, which is much easier to measure and calculate for than the raglans I am used to making.  They are often knit very tightly, but I loosened up the gauge a bit, since a baby doesn't need to be waterproofed on a boat.  (They probably also weren't knit in a yarn with any silk content, but hey.)

I've named this sweater Visser, after the Dutch word for fisherman.

And what were the new skills I learned for this?  Many, to include casting on in pattern and the right twist mock cable.  But the one I am most proud of is seaming.  I'm no longer terrified of it, which is good, since my plan is to knit myself a seamed garment someday.  This also lets me use sweater construction methods other than raglan and circular yoke.

A list of various loves and hates

I love cardigans.
I hate sewing buttons.
(There is a way around this called open front cardigans that I am currently exploring.)

I love my dog.
I hate it when she is aggressive toward smaller dogs, because it puts me in an awkward situation with that other dog's owner.  Although to be fair, it was an albino dachshund, and she could probably tell that an animal like that does not belong in nature.

I love ice cream.
I hate, wait, no, never mind.  I hate nothing about ice cream.  Except when the ice cream store is closed in January.

I hate sitting in traffic.
I love seeing how far I can maintain appropriate speeds in said traffic using nothing but my clutch and gear shifter.  No gas, no brakes.

I love ordering yarn.
I hate the two weeks that it takes to get to me.

Sunday Six

In no particular order, here are six pretty cool things that happened this weekend:

1) Spring finally came to Germany.

When I went for a run this afternoon, it was around 60 F!  It was nearly 20 degrees warmer than last week's run, so my pace may have suffered a little.  I didn't bring a watch, because I didn't want to compare myself to last week since the weather was so different.

And flowers are starting to bloom.  I even saw a potted plant we had put outside last year.  It used to be a houseplant, but it looked dead, so we just put him outside.  Not sure why.  Anyway, turns out, he was not dead!  He was just done for the year!  (His friend behind him seems to be actually dead, though)

The Lazarus plant.

2) I bought a cool pattern and the yarn to go with it.

Someone in one of my Ravelry groups posted about Vasa, and I decided I needed one, too!  I bought the pattern (my first purchase on Rav!) and then wandered over to my favorite online yarn shop, Eat.Sleep.Knit, and ordered three skeins of Tosh Merino Light.  I plan on making the Vasa over and over again, so there's a ton of TML in my wishlist now, but I'm starting with Alabaster, which is a pale yellow.  [I just counted.  There are 12 skeins of TML in the wishlist for various projects.]

I hate seaming and purling, so I may modify it to be knit in the round, but that will depend on what size needle I need to get gauge.  If I need anything smaller than a 4, I will have to knit back and forth, because that is as small as my reasonably-sized circulars go.

3) I ran the highest mileage week I've ever run.

33 miles!  There were only 30 on the schedule for this week, but we had a 3 mile company run on Friday.  It was pretty slow, so even though Fridays are rest days, a slow three felt restful enough that I didn't think I needed to move around the rest of the miles and just kept with the schedule as planned.


4) Three bananas reached their banana bread prime.

I put them to use in some banana bread from the Smitten Kitchen.  I've already eaten half the loaf.

 

So tasty.

5) I found the missing piece of my coffee maker.

Senseo: One of the top things I will miss about Germany

You see that black shelf looking part?  The place where you would obviously put your cup?  I moved offices a few months ago, and the new office didn't allow coffee makers at desks (literally the only thing I miss about that other office and job), so it had to come home with me.  That one piece ended up misplaced, and before I found it again (in a suitcase?!?), I had a tuna packet balanced there that I could very gently put a little mug on.


6) My shawl started developing an actual shape.

That shawl from the last post is starting to take on the shape I was intending for it to have.  I'm using yarn leftovers right now just to test it out, but when I get yarn specifically for it, I'll alternate colors more often.  The stripes right now are a little wide for my taste.

And here's a bonus picture of the dog in the yard:

When there's nothing to compare her to, she looks bigger than 20 pounds.