long time, no post! :0 August 5, 2008

Well, I was sitting here on the computer listening to music and reading other blogs thinking about how lame it is that I haven’t posted on my blog for well over a month. So I decided it would be even lamer if I just sat around thinking about it, but didn’t do anything. So here is a blog post update!!

Thanks everyone for the positive comments on my last entry! Yeah, I might try to make it 3/4 sleeves if it looks like I’m running low on yarn at the end of things. Haha, and Pepper, keep watching that yarn of yours! Desperate times call for desperate measures!!…

Well, time for confession: I practically haven’t knit at all this summer!! I haven’t touched Thermal since before my last post. It’s just sitting there in a heap on the floor taunting me. Evil little sweater.

I’ve wanted to do some small projects, like amigurumi, but haven’t gotten around to it…

I’m so lazy!

But I’ve just been so busy with other things!! Haha, here’s a hurried list of everything notable I can think of that has been either fun or not so fun:

• My dad bought me a replacement car on auction, which eerily enough turned out to be the exact same model, year, AND color of the car that had been wrecked!!
• I’ve been to a million concerts and decided to start posting all my concert footage to Youtube.
• I bought a laptop (which I might’ve said in my last post…but I can’t remember and I can’t be bothered to go read my last post haha)
• Plans for my 21st birthday are already in swing! Haha, it’s in December, and I think I’ve decided to spend it with my Sacramento friends first. Then I have plans for Reno, Los Angeles, and Chico! Wowza.
• I play guitar and started jamming with a friend of mine and writing a song, but we haven’t had a chance to for the last couple of weeks, so that’s sad Haha, but I can’t wait for the song to be finished! I like how it’s sounding.
• I have plans to go surfing for the first time ever! It’s next week and my cousin is taking me Woohoo!
• Warped tour is coming up!!!! ZOMG!!!
• Haha, my friends Joey and Shimoda from the Joey Shimoda Show Fo’ Sho! (on KXLU) invited me to go on the radio with them when I make my trip down to LA! Plus, there are plans for amazing cupcakes from a bakery called “Sprinkles” woohoo! I <3 cupcakes
• I spent a week in Reno with my family that lives there. It was a blast, I spent far too much money shopping. And we went to Tahoe, which was a blast haha and I got a wicked sunburn! Which has since turned into an okay tan (it was better before it peeled!)
• In a few weeks time I’m working the state fair in Oregon and going to see Weird Al while I’m there XD haha. I have GOT to find a little knitting project I can take with me!! Or I might go insane. And that would be bad.

So I think that’s the majority of new things.

I would like to take a second to say that if anyone reads this blog, you should check out a couple of my bffs! They’re so good! I’ve known both bands since December and think everyone should hear them!! Haha, they are Push Push Pull and Hazel and Vine . If you like them, add them on Myspace and tell them Mickey sent you! ;)  I recommend “Shazam” on Push Push Pull’s page and “Fly By Kite” on Hazel and Vine’s page.

Well, I think that will conclude this blog post. Sorry that it had VERY little to do with knitting. When things slow down, I’ll knit more and then my posts will have more about knitting, yay! In the meantime I’ll publish the project page about the scarves I knit for Joey FOREVER ago. I hadn’t realized it was still unpublished! So here it is! And also, I actually edited my “About Me” page so that it’s actually cool now! Enjoy.

Happy knitting everyone! Hopefully your projects are all going swimmingly!! Much love!

<3 mickey

Lazy week June 10, 2008

Well, this post doesn’t have much to do with knitting since I’ve hardly been knitting this week.

I’ve STILL been to lazy to sit down and do the blocking for my lace scarf. So for now it sits wadded up in a cardboard box, taunting me.

Also taunting me is the Thermal sweater. I haven’t knit one single stitch in it since the last time I posted, which was over a week ago. I just know it’s gonna be HUGE!! Thanks for the reassuring comments on my last post, by the way. Haha, Pepper, I was laughing so hard. If your yarn goes missing, don’t check my stash for it…

Yeah, so this week was pretty lame for one reason.

That is/was my car.

My dad used it to go to work the other night and he totally got t-boned. Though fortunately everybody’s ok. And we’re all REALLY glad that it was the back door that got hit and not his!!!!

So yeah, the last week has been filled with me trying to hitch rides everywhere. I feel like such a little kid. Can you drive me to work? Can you drive me to the store? Lame. And also it has kind of put a damper on my concert life. A bunch of the ones I have planned probably won’t work because our family is having to share one minivan and my dad needs it at night to get to work

A tragedy, indeed.

So yeah, if anyone has a car they want to give me, I won’t stop you!! haha.

Woe is me. May 31, 2008

So I thought I’d talk a bit about my WIP sweater before anything else today, since it seems to be a bit of a dire situation.

The last time I blogged about it I was talking about how worried I was that it was going to end up being too small for me. Now I wish that were my problem. I’ve done a couple of stupid things so far and I need to admit to/complain about them:

• I didn’t see in the pattern that the designed suggested rounding down sizes when you make it to ensure that it would be fitted and look best. So I cast on for the 34″ pattern (I measure 33″ around) but apparently I should’ve cast on for the 32″.
• I thought that I was getting nothing done in the middle of the body, so I never bothered measuring the progress to see when I would need to start in with the shaping. So I ended up knitting an extra 2ish inches in the middle of the body! Which normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but I didn’t order enough yarn to have room for error. And I didn’t really want to try unraveling those extra inches because it would be such a pain to make sure that all of my stitches stayed on the needle. So instead I left it how it was.
• SO IN SUMMATION…. I am totally paranoid that I’m going to run out of yarn halfway through the second sleeve. And then I’ll try it on to see how it looks and I’ll realize that it looks like I’m wearing a big baggy potato sack. Depressing.

So now I’m really hesitant to knit with much enthusiasm because I don’t think it’s gonna turn out looking right and I hate wasting time on a project that I’m going to hate. Gosh! I just don’t know what I’m gonna do!!! My friend Cyrstal was kind enough to say that if it didn’t fit me I could give it to her. Haha. But there’s no way I could give away a Thermal sweater!!! SO MUCH time and yarn money has gone into this project!! She could never love it as much as I could!!! I honestly think if worse comes to worst, I’ll just unravel the dumb thing and then leave the giant yarn ball in a closet for a few months until the sight of it doesn’t make me sick. And then I guess I could start the sweater over in a smaller pattern.

Anyway, here are some pictures. I just set aside the stitches for the armholes and have worked a few inches in the upper back.

Anyway, in less depressing news I bought a laptop!! It just got here the other day, which is perfect because I didn’t think I was gonna get it until mid-June, and the wait was killing me!!! Yeah, it’s not very cute, but it works beautifully. Haha I’m just jealous because my cousin got a cute green one and my boss got a white one with this cute blue flower print. And mine is just plain black and not as compact. But oh well. I need to be cool about this before the poor computer gets a complex. That’s possible, right?

And also my friends and I filmed a very strange and brief adaptation of Taming of the Shrew today. My friend needs it for extra credit in her English class and I LOVE editing videos so we spent the day being absolutely ridiculous and filming it and I think it’s gonna turn out HILARIOUS!!! Haha, we did a comical version of Hamlet a few months ago, but I think this one is gonna be SO MUCH BETTER!!! Editing should be insanely rushing, though, as it’s due Tuesday, I work ALL Monday and can’t edit then: leaving us only parts of Sunday to edit this thing between jobs. Crazy! But at least there aren’t as many thingies I have to do to get it edited. When we did Hamlet we only had 4 actresses for all of the parts (so we had to double up on characters and then splice scenes together so those characters could still talk to each other). But this time we had 6 (which doesn’t sound like much more) so only a couple people had to double up on characters and those doesn’t even have scenes together so that’s perfect for me.

So, yeah, I know that the last paragraph was just kind of a pointless spiel on my part, but I’m excited about how this is gonna turn out so I couldn’t stop writing about it, and typing on this new laptop is just too much fun!!! Oh, and by the way, I updated the “About Me” section a little bit and will add to it in the future. But you should check it out and “add friend” me where there are sites you can do that on! There are links on that page to my profiles.

But I think I’ll call this a blog post and finish up. It’s already a quarter after midnight and I have to get up in the morning, so I need to bed!!

Happy knitting, one and all. I hope your projects are all going better than mine seem to be :S

SO close to finishing, but in the meantime… May 12, 2008

So I finally finished all the knitting for the mead scarf. The only thing I have left to do is weave in the ends and block it, but I’ve been putting it off since I don’t have anything set up to do the blocking on.

Anyway, I thought I’d share an almost finished picture of my scarf, so here it is.

I absolutely love this color! I definitely would’ve had enough to have made the Thermal sweater out of this blue yarn (I still have 22 unopened skeins left over!). But oh well.

And as this was my first lace project, it did not go perfectly. Haha, there were some interesting eyelet formations and some accidental ribbed knitting in the parts that should’ve been seed stitch.

But, I think once it’s all blocked and finished, all my little mishaps will be camouflaged by the pattern. So yay. Hopefully I’ll have that done within the next week or so. I haven’t been in a terrible rush to finish it since we’ve had 100 degree weather already, leaving me without a need for a wool scarf.

And, in the meantime, I started in on the Thermal sweater with the yarn I had ordered from knitpicks a while ago. It came in about a week ago, but I was desperately trying to finish my scarf before casting on a new project. If I try to work multiple things at once, I pretty much just focus on the newest thing and ignore all the old things I’ve started, which explains a box full of UFOs. And I didn’t want the lace scarf to be banished to that box.

Yikes. Rambling. So here is the start of my sweater.

I was so panicked because my gauge ended up being smaller than the pattern called for. So I’m working the 34″ pattern, but it’s actually coming out to the size of the 32″ pattern. OOPS! I thought I was going to have to frog it and start over, but I decided to try it on first and get peoples’ opinion of the fit. And to my delight, it stretched enough to fit, but without stretching so much that it ruins the look of the pattern.

So for now it looks like it’s all going ok. I just really hope I don’t have problems when I come to the shaping along the neck and for the sleeves.

I am a woman obsessed. April 29, 2008

Well, I started on a new project. I have some really pretty blue fingering weight yarn but I’ve never known what to do with it until the other day when I was browsing lace scarves on Ravelry. And then I found the Mead Scarf. And then I soon became addicted to this whole lace knitting thing. It’s like a book you can’t put down, but only in a more negative, deranged, obsessed way than the expression connotes. If I don’t have it in my hands to work on, all I think about it is how much work I could be getting done on it if it WERE in my hands.

Friday night I was at a concert and I had my scarf in my backpack just in case I had to wait in line for forever (which I didn’t). And I really hated the 2^nd band that started playing and I couldn’t even stand to look at the guys. I was standing right in front of the stage (front row, woot woot). All I could think about was how BADLY I wanted to pull out my knitting and focus on that, instead. I kept trying to think of a way I could discreetly knit in the front row of a dimly lit concert. So for the 30-45 minutes of their set, my fingers were twitching and I was haunted with ~*~seed st 5 sts, *k3, k2tog, m1* seed st 5 sts~*~

So yes, hopefully once I get this baby finished I’ll be able to move on with life. We’ll see…

So here is the LOVELY blue yarn that I have. I got it at a thrift store ages ago for $.50/skein and I think I bought 25 skeins (I have some of it involved with a UFO that will never be finished)

The bad thing about it (other than that it smells like it was sitting in a little old lady’s house for 50 years) is that I can’t find the yardage ANYWHERE on the skein! Which is why I was hesitant to start any project with this yarn. I had actually thought about using it for the Thermal sweater pattern, but I would be devastated if I got halfway finished with a sweater and then found out I had no more yarn to finish it with. So if anyone has any ideas on figuring out yardage, please see if you can figure it out from my label. The picture should enlarge when you click it.

So all in all, at least my obsession is paying off. The first day I started this I thought it would take me years to finish. But after this weekend I think I’m about a third of the way done! I’ve also done about another 4 inches since I took these pictures.

I <3 Joey at KXLU! *listen to his show!* April 23, 2008

SOOO….

Today was amazing because a couple of shout outs on the L.A. radio station KXLU (88.9 FM)

And because I’m a huge giant dork, I recorded the 2 that I was awake for! I guess Joey mentioned me a few times, starting a t 7-ish, but I was still SOUND asleep that early, lol.

CHECK IT OUT!!!!

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The First:

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The Second:

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So that ABSOLUTELY made my day!!!

Anyway, he had left a comment on my post of the scrunchable scarf that I had made for myself asking if I sell these. Long story short, we e-mailed back and forth a bunch, he picked out some awesome yarns at knitpicks.com and I spent the last couple of weeks making them for him. And, of course, I was totally paranoid that he wasn’t going to like them and think they looked amateur or something (which is what I always fear when I make stuff for my friends. I guess it’s just because I always know the little flaws that bug me about a project as I’m working on it, but they’re not things that anyone else notice or even care about). But he LOVES them! So yay!!!

Anyway, I’ll post links to my Project Info page when I get a pic of him and his scarves.

Until then, YAY!!!

And listen to Joey on Tuesday mornings 6-10am Pacific Time (88.9FM for L.A. or stream online at http://www.kxlu.com) because he’s super awesome and they play some AWESOME indie music.

And one last thing. If anyone happens to know where I can buy some sweet rainbow yarn online, can you leave me a comment about it? I’ve only seen tacky acrylic Red Heart rainbow color changing yarn, but nothing nice. So yeah, I was hoping for worsted weight, but if the yarn is super awesome I can probably make it work. Here’s a picture of the stuff Joey likes, but I couldn’t find anything comparable to it online

The ugliest thing I’ve made in years. April 13, 2008

Story time!….

So, once upon a time I bought a cheapy thing of yarn from Walmart because I thought the color changes in it might make an interesting scarf. Then I knitted a swatch, hated it, and let it sit in a box.

Meet Shandi:

See what happened when Shandi met my yarn:

Goodbye yarn.

The most tangled yarn covered in the most white cat fur and other random bits of garbage you will ever see. Gross.

So since I could clearly never salvage this for any other project, I decided to make Shandi a toy out of it. She was apparently very fond of it for some reason. So I found a pattern online for a knitted ball and made it up in a couple hours. Then a couple hours after that, when I had finally finished putting in all the stupid little fringe thingies, this thing was born:

It SO ugly that it’s almost, almost, ALMOST cute. Haha, yeah. But so far, I think she likes it! Some action shots:

Lol, plus she uses it as a pillow sometimes. *awww!*

The end.

• Link to Project Details page for Amazingly Ugly Cat Toy!
• Link to Ravelry project page for Amazingly Ugly Cat Toy!

FO: My First Sweater!!! March 25, 2008

Well, my friends, I’ve done it!!! My very first sweater is FINISHED!!! And here I thought making a sweater would be scary because it would take forever… (lol I’ll ignore the fact that I chose a beginner’s pattern….)

So since this is one of the bigger projects I’ve worked on (I actually did start a blanket once, but that’s a UFO for another story) it soon became the target of many kitty attacks. Here is one such instance. (She thinks she’s so cute! Look at that smug face! Grr!!)

Anyways, so the only real change I made to the pattern was the sleeves. I didn’t really want cap sleeves as I prefer the way ¾ sleeves look on my arms. So the first time I knit the sleeve, I didn’t make any decreases and just made a straight tube with my size 8 dpns and guessed on the length I should make it. But then when I tried it on it looked so strange.

As you can see, it was baggy in all the wrong places and the bottom rows of ribbing did the weirdest thing! I didn’t knit them long enough, so where they sat was exactly on my elbow. So any time I moved my arms, it would fold in this permanent crease halfway down the ribbing so it would just constantly pucker funny. Yeah, that got frogged fast.

So my next go with the sleeves went perfect. I decreased 4 stitches per stripe (13 rows each stripe) and managed to keep them lined up underneath the arm so they stay hidden. Yay!

Yeah, so here’s the picture! What do you think?

• And since I’ve started doing Finished Project pages, here is the link to the details of this sweater.
  
• And while I’m at it, I’ll even link to the Ravelry page for it! Wow! Fancy!
  

Oh yeah, on a different note, I just got Microsoft Word 2007 on my computer, so my blog posts might start looking a bit different since I’m using it’s “New Post” feature to see if it’s much easier than editing from straight inside of WordPress. I dunno, I might not use it again if I don’t like how the posts start looking. Plus I don’t like that I can’t use external photo hosting sites when I want to post pictures. They all have to get uploaded into my WordPress account, which might fill up kind of fast. Hopefully not. I haven’t looked into how much storage they allow you to have with your free blog.

If there’s anything you like or dislike about the way pages start looking, let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can fix. Sorry if the pictures take a long time to load.

$0 in Paris: MY FIRST SWEATER! March 16, 2008

So a few posts ago I said that I was planning on making the Thermal sweater and that it was going to be my first ever full size sweater! But I’ve made a liar out of myself.

The yarn I want to use for that project is out of stock and won’t be available until April (teaches me to fall in love with the same yarn type AND color that the pattern was written in!) and I’m too impatient to wait until April to start in on a sweater.

So I’ve started the $5 in Paris sweater. And so far it hasn’t cost me a penny in yarn because I’ve knit the whole thing in scrap yarn and partially used skeins that I had lying around after I made a few baby blankets last year.

So here are a few pictures. Sorry the 2 in the mirror are so dark, but I couldn’t turn on the flash without getting a picture of a blinding white mirror that needs to be cleaned.

(ooh. free yarn! the before picture

and off the shoulders:

So yeah, now I just have to get the sleeves made and I’ll be done! woot woot. Thanks Pepper for recommending this project with that other yarn of mine! I love how fast it’s knitting and it’s super comfy and cute!

Oh, and in other news I’ve started making Finished Project Detail Pages for the projects I’ve blogged about. So far I’ve only completed one page (the Bubblegum shrug) but I’m working on them when I get a chance. You’ll be able to see all the project details by clicking the “FO’S: Project Details” button on either the top right corner of the page or on the right in the sidebar. Anyway, it’ll be really nice when I’ve got them up and running. Then I won’t have to make my blog posts as long, either.

My New Toy! March 13, 2008

So I’ve been wanting a new digital camera for a while now, but I’ve been to cheap to invest in one. But then my old digital camera did something I will never forgive it for:

{Enter Micaiah, front row of awesome concert, digital camera in hand and pointed}

{Enter Colby, guitarist from awesome band Bidwell, who also happens to knit (sexy, right?)}

{Colby: runs in front of Micaiah and makes an awesome face/pose for her camera}

{Micaiah: frantically clicks camera button, flash goes off, gleefully pulls up saved pictures to pridefully stare at the awesomest picture taken at a concert ever, when:}

Micaiah: “NO!!!!!! HOW IN THE WORLD DID IT NOT TAKE THE STUPID PICTURE??!! THE FLASH WENT OFF!!! CAMERA, I’M GOING TO PUNCH YOU IN YOUR STUPID FACE! I HATE YOU!!!”

Um yes. So now that you have relived this painful memory with me, look at what I got when I “stretched” (I hate to say blew, since that would make it sound like I wasn’t in control of my spending…) my camera budget (and ignore how horribly I take care of my nails):

And look at how beautiful the pictures are that it takes! :

YAY!!!

So I would like to say:

1- Look forward to MUCH better pictures of my projects, as I will now be able to actually focus on them up close without washing them out with flash. YAY!

2- Sorry if the pictures take longer to load now as the megapixels per picture have almost doubled what the old ones were.

XD YAY!!! So I still absolutely love my 35mm Canon way more than this one (I’m a dark room girl all the way) but for the speed, convenience, and VERY pleasantly surprising picture quality I am SO HAPPY about this digital camera.

Wish me luck on my next Bidwell concert this Friday. This thing had better take fast pictures of Colby, because I would hate to have to punch it in the face after I just spent what I did to buy it…