ultimate friday giveaway bonanza = awesome.

Who’s the luckiest girl in Nashville?  That would be me.

Just look at all of the goodies that the wonderful people behind loumms (emmms and lou) sent all the way from what I feel certain Professor Welch would insist on calling “Merrie England.”  The project bag the perfect size for small projects — not to mention über-cheerful with its red flowers and blue birds (though come the zombie apocalypse …) — and even came with a matching lavendar sachet (genius!); the moth banishment hanging sachet is going in my closet this very minute (p.s. I <3 owls); the buttons are waiting for a special garment to adorn; the chocolate might not last the weekend; the book will provide an interesting study in the possible structural similarities of surviving the zombie invastion and making it through finals in Nashville.

Also, the yarn = so so pretty.  Which is kind of weird, as it’s named “zombie” and is featured in the final LYoS sock: “Dawn of the Dead.”  I think there’s a theory about that somewhere …

Right now, I’m just mulling over the possibilities.  And am thinking stripes.

Again, a big big thank you to Emmms and Lou for packing so much delightfulness into such a small package!

Photo 24

Photo 24, originally uploaded by katie:m.

Fall has arrived in Nashville. And I celebrated by wrapping myself up in wooly goodness: the Ishbel of much largeness. It’s perfect!

It’s also my last day of class for a week: hooray for strangely scheduled Thanksgiving holidays! I’ve got a paper to finish and another to start … but no classes, a visit from my sister, and some delicious gravy to look forward to.

owls under review

I’ve been putting this off, but I just can’t ignore the obvious any longer.  My o-w-l-s is too big.  Way too big.

See how Alice doesn’t want to look?

It’s such a disappointment: I love this pattern, love the yarn, love how it all came together.  Except that it all came together a couple sizes large.

Part of the problem is something I’ve been kind of shy to mention, and since I’ve been knitting a lot non-fitted accessory garments hasn’t really been an issue; basically, I’ve lost a good bit of weight.  Like clothes-don’t-fit-anymore amount of weight.  It’s a good thing, it needed to happen, I’m a healthier person for it.  It just didn’t happen in the healthiest of ways: stress and paper-writing and despair, to keep it short.

And now I walk a lot to campus.  That’s the good part.

All of that to say that I’m not quite used to my new body.  And my 34″ bust measurement.

I never intended to knit the pattern as fitted as written, but, honestly, 4″ of ease looks mighty silly, not to mention baggy.  Especially with the waist shaping.

So, what to do?  I’ve been considering the options and I think frogging the body is the only answer.  Sigh.

My list of post-finals knitting keeps growing …

it’s that time of year …

you’re not helping, originally uploaded by katie:m.

… and I don’t think I’m the only one who could benefit from a little Lucky Jim (1954) therapy.

“It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.” (Penguin edition, 2002; pp. 14-15)

Thanks for reminding me, Jodi!

boring sock progress.

I’ve got nothing.  Just some boring sock progress.  After a full day of indexing — (1/3 of the way done!!  We’ve hit quadruple-digit page numbers!  Only … 1500 more pages to go.  On a related note: have I mentioned how much I hate 1) royal houses, 2) their issue, 3) their complicated marriage alliances, 4) unintelligble shades of rank, and 5) unswerving loyalty to discovering all combinations of about five Christian names?  No?  Well, consider it mentioned.  Markgraf?  Fürst?  Prinz?  Kronprinz?  Großherzog?  König?  Friedrich?  Yeah.  All not that same thing.) — seminar, and research paper researching … this is all I can muster.

It’s kind of lame.  I’ll freely admit that.  But it’s not going to get better any time soon.  Though I can promise some pretty sweet reward yarn — as of yet undetermined — when the semester is over.

Speaking of reward yarn, the earth stripe has a few more stripes.  Considering the pattern repeat is, um, 180+ some rows long, I guess I should really get busy.  Or just resign myself to wearing this next winter.

In other news, dork that I am, how did I ever get through the last 23 years without the King of America?  I get bored with indexing and buy stuff from itunes to distract myself from the royal houses.  Which is really a pretty hit-or-miss strategy when it comes to long-term buying decisions.  This time, it was the perfect album.

11.11

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day.  When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute.  They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God.  So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day.  Armistice Day was sacred.  Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder.  Armistice Day I will keep.  I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred?  Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.

– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (11.11.1922 – 04.11.2007), Breakfast of Champions (1973)

der blaue mond

So … this might give you an idea of just how quickly the earth stripe wrap is going.  Definitely a more complicated project than I had anticipated.  Especially when one comes home very tired.

Socks to the rescue!

This is another attempt at a Hundertwasser sock (I will not be defeated!): der blaue mond (650) in my go-to straight-up sock pattern, Gentleman’s Plain Winter Sock (minus the dutch heel methinks).  So far, so good.  So time to get to campus.

I had a good meeting yesterday with the future-advisor, which left me feeling like I was on the right track (finally) and that my goals were attainable, my ideas sound places to start, my achievements valid.

And I didn’t want to compromise that by tangling some mohair.

 

this might be more complicated than i thought.

There are, after all, ten colors of wool to keep separate and properly organized A through J.  And as the names (hurricane, jacob, elegance, drab, candygirl, meadow, majestic, trance, jelly, blushes) bear little, um, shall we say, transparent connection to the actual color they represent, some system had to be implemented to keep things in order.

Needless to say, this isn’t a traveling kind of project.

Also, have I mentioned the ends to weave in?

As a PSA, I’d recommend a gauge swatch.  I didn’t and ended up frogging twice, with a pretty high yarn mortality rate.

Good thing it’s so pretty.

happiness is …

… whole blue table full of kidsilk haze.  Can you guess my super reward project now?

Even Alice agrees: it will be dreamy.

Needless to say, I’m going to get started on the Earth Stripe wrap right now.  Damn the torpedoes (of academia!), I have some knitting to do.

wish fulfillment.

If we go with Freud and agree that every dream is indeed a wish fulfillment, then I just might be dreaming.  Because the first installment of a dream project arrived yesterday.

The  addictive, entirely too expensive, non-sensically named, yet utterly divine kidsilk haze in two neutral shades: Jacob (631) and Elegance (577).  Government names: brown and green, respectively.

This is my reward for making it this far at NewGraduateInstitution: for turning in writing assignments pretty much on time, for getting up each morning and trying again, for starting to learn that finished is sometimes good enough, for recognizing that it’s hard and I won’t get it right every time, for making mistakes, for digging my heels in and sticking with it.

It’s also a project I can knit while reading.

p.s. Verra Yarns, where I ordered this from (and fellow Washingtonians no less), were super fast.  The package arrived pretty much the day after I placed my order.  Instant mohair gratification.