Woo! Hiatus Week! I am posting this post… from the pa-a-a-a-a-a-a-ast! The PAAAA-A-A-A-A-A-AST!

I actually left for Sudbury on Friday, but I couldn’t leave you guys without a Saturday Pattern Day. To cover Monday’s post, I thought I’d let you know that I’ve not died, and by the time I don’t post for the fourth time on Friday, I will not have died by that point either. For all I know at the moment.

Saturday was the garden party, and I’m sure it was wonderful. I’m sure I got compliments on my beautiful shawl, attacked my cousin with a croquet mallet, and ate at least 12 devilled eggs. I’m also assuming I met Conan O’Brien, because that would be AWESOME. He let me touch his hair. And then we made out for like 2 hours.

Anyhoo, I’ll be in an undisclosed location until the end of the week, which means there will sadly be no Saturday, Pattern Day on the 4th. I’ll be back soon, though. See you next week!

If you are knitting or have already knit a pattern that I’m talking about, leave me a comment and I’ll update my post with a link to your version. If you’ve written up a pattern and you want me to link to it, send me an email or leave me a comment and I’ll post it! It makes the list longer and my job easier.

• You can now crochet an amigurumi Cheese-kun, who is apparently the mascot for Japanese Pizza Hut. Get the PDF here!
• I’m not sure what to think about this linen top pattern. It looks a bit short, but it could be quite nice. Good use of Habu maybe? I’ve been going crazy for the look of Habu lately. Not enough to buy it, but I’m cheap, we all know that. Anyhoo, this top is cute and based on the fact that it’s just a box, you can pretty much alter it any way you want to fit it to your own shape.
• Here’s a bumble bee cat toy that I can totally vouch for, because cats love jumping at things that move. The same website has a knitted elephant, too.
• I didn’t even realize this was free, so in case you guys didn’t, you can get the Flower Basket Shawl pattern for free from Interweave. Thanks to these guys!
• Also from Interweave, it’s a pretty Icelandic Lace Shawl.
• I like these Mad Color Weave socks.
• This Dappled Lace Café Curtain looks dandy. I would certainly put this in my kitchen if I had a kitchen that I could foresee occupying for longer than a year. Speaking of which, I signed my lease this week! A year-long lease.

Here’s the swatch for my non-navy navy sweater.

(I apologize for the bad photos; my camera has a lousy flash and I was taking pictures in the basement with no light!)

The bottom section is double-stranded with size 7 needles. The middle stripe is single-stranded on size 7 needles; I abandoned it pretty quickly when I realized that it wouldn’t look as Habu-y as I thought. The top section is double-stranded again, with size 9 needles.

I think I like the bottom better. The top is about 11.5 stitches over 4 inches, and the bottom is 14 stitches. The Phildar pattern calls for 25 stitches, so I ripped back and continued the swatch with a single strand and size 5 needles. I’m not sure if I want to knit as tight a gauge as the pattern calls for, but I think I should consider single-stranded a little bit more. It’s alpaca, so I don’t want it to be too thick lest it kill me with warmth.

Here’s the update to the swatch:

My blocking pins are still in my apartment so I had to do with some sewing pins (I don’t know what they’re called) and I ran out of those. I had to find some substitutes; I am going to call this the most unnecessary “un-vention” ever.

Heehee, it looks like an alligator hand puppet is eating my towel. Man, I miss my blocking pins.

Bonus blocking photo: Here’s my shawl being blocked!

I planned to finish this shawl by Monday so I’d have a few days for it to block and dry. What did I actually do? I finished it by Monday and then forgot to block it until last night.

Memory: 1
Eve: 0

I love this shirt!

(Photo by Ashley Shannon)

The t-shirts can be bought at this land-based store or over the phone, but I can’t find the distributor/producer of the tees for possible purchase online.

In knitting news, I’ve thrown together a swatch for my non-navy navy sweater, and I’m blocking it right now! Excitement!

I’ve whittled down the stripes to the following three, thanks to Carly (who should get a blog), Liz and April:

Now that my shawl is finished (tune in for an FO post), I’m “designing” a sweater. I’ve got a bunch of alpaca left over from my dad’s Rule 30 scarf, so I’m knitting a sweater with it. It’ll be entirely stockinette, very loose, very casual, and I’ll be knitting it at camp. Because I don’t know anything about sweaters, I’m taking the basic measurements from the Phildar 443 Tendances sweater from the navy section (cleverly titled 9 and 15) and making modifications if necessary. I have three grey shades of alpaca and a red splash for interest. Here’s how I’m figuring out how I’ll break up the stripes:

Charcoal grey: 87.5 g or 37% of the total mass
Dark grey: 87.5 g or 37% of the total mass
Light grey: 37.5 g or 16% of the total mass
Red: 25 g or 11% of the total mass
Total: 237.5 g

While I love integral calculus, I’d rather not have to do it at the moment so I’m removing the waist shaping for my area approximations:

9 stripes for 57 cm; 6 cm per stripe, starting from the bottom. Topmost stripe: 9 cm tall.

Because I can’t go a day without writing a script while I could have been knitting, I wrote a little thing that takes the proportions of colours I have in the stash and my shirt measurements and picks out some possible stripe combinations. I’ve got 8 possibilities here; which do you think I should choose? I’m leaning towards number 8 or number 2, 4, or 7. Or one of the others.

The red stripe goes right above the boob. I’m also considering just putting some red on the cuffs and bottom as accents instead of a boob stripe. What do you think?

They’re like tiny portly fairies. I’m glad that the guys are willing to de-manly themselves by holding embroidery needles in the photo, even though it appears they’re holding them the wrong way. That’s one small step for womankind!

They’ve also reprinted these!

Yay Magritte reference! I missed this one when it was first printed, so I’m so glad it’s going for another round.

Don’t buy too many! I can’t justify buying these just yet so I’m waiting for a bit. But I must have them!

I’m just kidding. I haven’t read all the leaks or spoilerz or anything on the Internet, so DON’T TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS! I’m not a huge Harry Potter fan or anything, but I do want to read the final book and I want to find out what happens while I’m reading. Call me old-fashioned, I’m used to it, I’m a knitter! I’ve borrowed Harry Potter 5 and I’m on Chapter 23, so I should be able to finish it in a day or two. I’m going to try to get a copy of the sixth and seventh books tomorrow (so as to avoid the risk of drive-by spoilings at the midnight bookstore parties) and I will LITERALLY TAKE THEM INTO THE WILDERNESS to avoid being spoiled in the meantime. I will be without the Internet from the 28th to the 5th of August, as I’ll be with the beau and his family at their camp (otherwise known as “snuggly buggly,” which cracks me up). I don’t think anyone else in his family is a Harry Potter fan, so I don’t have to worry about having them spoil me.

BTW, I want to send a totally excited and thrilled and flattered thank you to Kimberly who surprised me with a donation for the blog. Thank you, Kimberly! I got all teary-eyed that someone would like my blog enough to do that. I will have to blog extra hard in order to return the favour. Enabler!

I’d also like to mention Meg who emailed me a little while ago about her campaign to Knit and Fight The Black Dog, the Black Dog being depression and mental illness. She writes, “I will be using my knitting blog to highlight my struggle with the illness and encourage people to talk about their experiences and try to dismantle the stigma attached to the disease.” I read through a bunch of it out of interest (it’s hard to turn off my inner psychologist!) and the information there is really good and quite interesting, even if you don’t have the illness and you’re just reading it to get a feel for how it feels. Go check her out! It’s exciting to see the sorts of supportive communities that arise out of the knitting blogosphere. IMHO, knitters are some of the nicest and most supportive folks on the Internet.

Look what I caught! It’s a big’un!

I was going to stop at a metre or so, but I’ve decided to keep going. I’m also surprised at how light it is; I thought it would be a monster, but it feels like nothing! If nothing were about a kilo or so, but that’s about the weight of an apple and I don’t mind that weight distributed over my shoulders.

I was going to take some cast-off photos for a lake-side cast-off tutorial, but then we had to leave a little early and I decided to read my Potter on the way back instead of knittin’ on the shawl. It’s got a few inches and then it should be finished, I think.

BTW, I wanted to have a nice picture of me and the shawl and the lake, but unfortunately the sun was plotting against me at the time. Here is a photo of me as a pseudo-silhouette, and a slightly retro-looking attempt by me to play with the curves in the photo.

If you are knitting or have already knit a pattern that I’m talking about, leave me a comment and I’ll update my post with a link to your version. If you’ve written up a pattern and you want me to link to it, send me an email or leave me a comment and I’ll post it! It makes the list longer and my job easier.

• La Lanterne Rouge is a Tour de France-inspired hat pattern.
• Check out this short-row argyle sock generator! An example in progress is here.
• I’m not sure if I posted about these Snicket socks before, but there’s a great new example here to look at.
• I was waiting so long for these Marigold Socks to be published and then I missed it when they went up! At least, I think I did. I searched the blog and I can’t find any mention of them, so if I did talk about them, well, here they are again.
• I’ve been following Tuulia’s blog for so long and I didn’t even realize she had these beautiful Celtic Braid Socks on offer!
• Alison’s Scarf is by Annie Modesitt, and it’s really pretty. Combines cables and lace just like I wanted to in my parasol and uses the i-cord borders I’m using in my Stashmina, which is how I found it.
• I’ve come across this pattern before so it’s not exactly new, but I thought I’d post these Red Dwarf Socks because I found a beautiful example here. A knee-high version is here.
• The new pattern from the purl bee is the Leah Tunic, a very graceful stockinette number that looks great for late summer.
• You are being asked to Put Your Foot Right in Cancer’s Ass. One hopes you will rise to the challenge.
• I hadn’t even known this pattern source existed: here’s a Beaded Camisole (example here) in leaf lace, the Ink Flared sweater and Donyale. I’d love to knit that sweater but I have no idea what the collar looks like. I wish there were better photos! Send me links if you’ve knit these to provide some alternate photos.

In the last post you guys asked for pictures to go with my i-cord instructions, so here they are! The instructions I used were here; I made some clarifications and now I have photos. Liz and I had a mini knitting bee, and at one point we ran out and got these shots before it got dark. Thank you Liz! Here goes!

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