An Open Letter To February

Dear February,

I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but I’m not really going to miss you. When you waltzed into my life this year, I tried to keep an open mind, to be optimistic about your intentions, but I feel glad that your 28 days are almost through. Glad, in fact, that there are only 28 days rather than 30 or 31 like your counterparts. Because I don’t think I can take another day.

Your dark, cold ways make me sad. Try as I have to keep my spirits up by painting and knitting, watching movies and snuggling down under thick blankets, I still feel as though I’ve been slogging through a cold, gray blizzard, in boots filled with rocks. It’s so hard to remember that there is color. When you’re here, routine, as much as I rely on it most of the time to keep me sane and grounded, becomes insanity. The same, day in and day out. Each year I try to avoid your wintertime funk, yet I still succumb.

It’s true, you brought some good: a few warm days, an event to benefit the local food pantry, and quite a number of knitted hats. You took care of melting most of the snow that December and January left orphaned on our doorstep, and only brought a little bit of your own. There was yellow week, and you renewed my affection for the color red. Slowly the light seeped into the world earlier when I left for work, and lingered a tiny bit longer when I returned home. You gave me a bunch of opportunities and interviews, an internship, and the ADDY awards, and those are all wonderful things. You even surprised me with DMB summer tour dates, which I normally don’t expect until March. However, I’m quite looking forward to waving goodbye to you from a couch at the coffee shop tomorrow, with knitting in my hands and the company of a dear friend by my side. I’m ready to move on to longer, warmer days.

Sincerely, and with love, but maybe let’s try again next year?

Tracy

Love in the hands of knitters

I have been feeling a little bit like Beki awhile back, only without all of the finished sweaters, as knitting has kind of taken over my life as of late. There’s a quilt crumpled half finished on the dining room table, though, too, and some quilt blocks that have been staring at me for awhile. I am also calling it procrastination. But it’s productive procrastination, so I guess that’s kinda good.

I made these hearts. I finished them after Valentine’s Day, but oh well. They are still making nice little extra gifts. Random hearts. And they are ridiculously simple, so I plan to make more of them. I finished drafting a complicated hat pattern with ridiculous numbers of cables that I’m pretty sure has the potential to drive me out of my mind in the very near future, and I’m headed out now to a local knitting group. That meets at a bar. I’m hoping to finish a hat tonight.

Ok, scratch that. Did you know that it’s Fat Tuesday? Well, even though I’ve been to Mardi Gras twice in my life, and would love to go back, I totally forgot. And bars get busy on Fat Tuesday. So no knit night. I’ll still be knitting though, on my couch, with a beer.

P.S. The pattern for the hearts is from Martha Stewart, if you’d like to try them!

Therapeudic Knitting

I was beginning to get used to thinking that the temperature might stay in the mid thirties after a couple of weeks of mildish February weather a couple of weeks ago, but alas, it is still winter, demostrated by the 5 inches of snow and a wind chill of 9 degrees when I went jogging yesterday. So it turns out that the mittens that I finished last week are still useful. Huzzah! And that’s about as excited as I can get about winter right now.

These are based on the Evangeline fingerless mitts pattern, but I changed the thumb to include a gusset and extended them to enclose the fingers. As much as I love fingerless mitts, there is only like a two week window each fall and spring in which they are useful and the rest of the winter is way too cold for that nonsense.

I love this cable pattern, and I love the finished mittens. There are a few minor tweaks that I should make to the pattern for my next pair, as the stitch increases for the thumb turned out a little bit different on each hand, and I should probaly move the thumb a little farther toward the palm because the cable is off center. But aside from that, they are still nice.

They are knit in Cascade 220 soft pink. I’d love to share the pattern, but I’m pretty sure it will read like a foreign language to anyone but me. I need to make it clearer even for myself for next time, I think.

I also belatedly knit Erin’s Rose Hill Hat. Belatedly because so many others knit that thing right up the week she published it. Better late than never, right? It was a knitting binge, I think, because I cast on one Saturday and finished it up the following Sunday. I think I’m getting faster at this. It’s super cute, super fast, and there was enough yarn leftover in the skein of pretty orange Malabrigo to knit a little something for someone special as well this weekend.

In an effort to try to make myself feel a little bit better about the fact that it is not, yet, spring, I cast on yet another hat this weekend, and I think I will share the pattern for that when I am finished.

Looking Forward

After a week full of yellow, these are some of my favorites. There’s alot of yellow out there! The notion of posting a mosaic of favorites was blatently stolen from Emily, not to mention many of her favorites are my favorites too! Click on the image to go to Flickr for attribution.

I’ve got knitting on the brain, and am having a hard time deciding which project to embark upon next. I got a mound of red Malabrigo yesterday, a nice color for crisp-fall-Badger-football-Saturday-backyard-tailgating come next fall, and I want to make a slew of mittens and hats and scarves, for myself and Nate and maybe a friend or two who will remain nameless for the sake of surprise. I also want to start a manly hat for Nate, maybe with a twisted rib around the bottom, as well as a thick cozy hat with wide intersecting cables and a bit of an elfy point for myself. I’ve still got that hat from the Amazing Race on my mind, and I want something like that. I’ve got some soft decadent Rowan gray yarn that seems perfect for it, and then maybe with a light gray wool inside ear lining for extra coziness. This is interesting, but not quite right. I’m thinking more of a twisted braided cable that creates a couple of rows of these diamonds, maybe with a bobble in the center of each. I’ve been looking for patterns, but if anyone has any ideas, I’d be grateful for some suggestions. The thought of writing it myself is a bit daunting at the moment.

Also, does anyone have any tips for winding hanks into balls by hand to avoid alot of twisting up and swearing? Cause, yeah, I forgot to ask the LYS lady to do that for me.

Happy Friday!

You Know How I Feel.

Good lord, do I love this video? You know how I do. Totally upped my day with groove and typographic interpretation, and made me feel good when I wasn’t. Found via Swallowfield. I have to go watch it again.

Kitten Mischief

There’s a flickr group for Erin’s yellow week, it’s pretty great.

No swingy earrings today, and I am missing them.

Also, I came home yesterday to discover that I’d left the box of safety pins open, and the cats (probably one in particular) had taken leave to strew them about the house. Now I keep finding them sporadically. Not only that, but out of convenience I’ve been keeping my bobbins in the same box, since the quilting is happening in the dining room instead of the room where the majority of the sewing supplies are, and of course 3 or 4 of those have now gone missing. And they’re clear, so they are impossible to find! I would rather load up 5 bobbins at once than have to wind the same bobbin every time it runs out, so I guess I’m off to buy some new ones.

I have been trying to do a bit of quilting here and there and move forward. Soon, SOON!, I will flip the quilt and be working on the second half. I swear. All of this quilting is making me just want to do some simple piecing, but I am too lazy to want to rethread the machine with normal non quilting thread and needle, which is ridiculous, but I never claimed to not be ridiculous. Maybe I need two machines, one for quilting and one for other stuff. (JUST kidding honey!)

Thinking about wanting to grow my own sprouts.

Yellow, and updates

Yellow, for Erin’s yellow week.

I feel like a new woman. Well, sort of. For the first time, ever, I’m wearing swingy girly earrings. Nate looked at me funny this morning when I sashayed into the kitchen with them, since I’ve never been all that girly of a girl. Well, sometimes I evolve. And now I am constantly distracted by them, and can’t stop lightly swinging them around and it probably looks like I’m adamantly refusing some proposal.

Anyway, otherwise it’s still February and not yet April and the quilt is still half quilted and nothing much has changed.

I did knit a whole hat this weekend, though. I cast on Saturday morning and finished up on Sunday afternoon and wore it to the grocery store. I’m always pretty impressed when I start and finish a project in one weekend, since it doesn’t happen all that often, especially since knitting is kind of time consuming. For me, at least. And now I have a hefty addiction to Malabrigo and a desire to make more hats. Hooray for direction! After finishing the thumbs on a pair of Evangeline inspired mittens, also this weekend, I wasn’t sure where I was going to go from there. But now I know. Hats.

And did you see the gray cabled pointy number on the head of one of the blond gals on the premier of The Amazing Race last night? It was the only thing I could look at aside from all of that humongous cheese wheel rolling down a steep Swiss hill that was sending us into fits of hysterical laughter. Coveting that hat, I am. And I have some lovely gray yarn that would be perfect.

Slosh Slosh

The powers that be uploaded some video from Grillin For Peace. There’s alot of sloshing around in the ice cold water. Craziness.

Next week Erin is hosting a Yellow Week. I need a project, and we all know how I feel about yellow, so I’ll be trying to find the yellow. I hope you’ll think about participating too! Email her if you are so she knows.

Have a great weekend, full of luck and springy thoughts.

Two Buck Chuck

We had a Trader Joe’s move into Madison a couple of years ago, before I even moved to within walking distance of it, and it seemed like everyone that I knew who had been to a TJs before raved about it. “It’s the best place ever!” I heard on multiple occasions.

However, I am the kind of shopper who goes to the market with something specific in mind that I need. This is not a trait the meshes well with Trader Joe’s. I’m not bashing TJ’s (although I don’t much care for all of the plastic packaging that seems associated with a place where you can get 4 apples in a plastic container), I just don’t think it’s necessarily for me for most things. I do like the cheap wine. And the meringues.

This video made me laugh though. There really are alot of funny things about Trader Joe’s. And I had to go back and take a triple take at about the 2:12 mark. For reals.

In which I wax poetic and don’t know where this is going.

I am bored. Fantastically bored. Bored with myself, my voice, my search for existence, bored. I wanted to write yesterday, but I didn’t write yesterday because of that little voice in my head that says, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Quite right. That’s the mom voice, isn’t it? I don’t know if my mom ever actually said that to me, and I’m not a mom myself, but it floats about in the ether as something mothers say, doesn’t it?

It’s the beginning of another day and I haven’t yet plunged into the depths of despair (I’m rereading Anne of Green Gables, can you tell? I’m all “depths of despair” and “kindred spirits” and “bosom friends” up in here.) so I’m pouring some words out while I still have the strength.

I tried to write a poem yesterday. Or, at least it sort of turned itself into a poem after staring at me for awhile. This is what I got:

Wispy weeping willow branches swaying in the breeze
The constant “whoosh” sound of the ocean
Nothing comes
Moments of clarity, of hope
They are far between

Yeah, not a rhymey poem, obviously. What the heck, right? I couldn’t just post that on it’s own, but it seemed to need to be free from the drafts bucket.

In the meantime, I’m knitting little red and pink hearts to stuff with wool and Nate started training for a half marathon.

You know the only thing I want to do when I’m bored? Eat. Which is not really the best thing for me, especially when I decided to put off my Sunday run for Monday and then it was raining really hard on Monday afternoon and so I didn’t go for my run, and then the next two days I had plans after work and then suddenly it will be another week between runs.

What do you do when you’re bored?