New York Minute February 14, 2009

One of the non-crude entries on urbandictionary.com defines a NewYork Minute as

“The smallest measurable amount of time in the universe. Approximately equal to the time between a traffic light turning green in New York City and the cab driver behind you honking his horn.“

Examples of things that can happen in a New York Minute:

• Planning a trip to New York on February 9th, when the departure date is February 18th.
• Realizing you don’t have any warm hats that you like and you need to make a solid black one to match all of the warm goodies you’ll be packing for said trip.

Viola!

I cast on today, and a few hours later, I have a black version of “A Hat Fit For a Boyfriend”. I made this one longer than my blue one, which is good, so this will actually cover my ears all the way. And my forehead! lol yay!

(haha, looks like a mugshot)

• Link to Project Details page for New York Minute Beanie
  
• Link to Ravelry project page for New York Minute Beanie

Okay, I’ve got TONS of laundry and packing to do, and only a few days to get it done! Enough typing for one day.

(Don’t forget to buy half price chocolate tomorrow morning, woot woot!!)

<3! mickey

I’d like to file a Missing Cables Report. February 2, 2009

So it’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog, and I’m sitting around tonight doing absolutely nothing feeling guilty about it. Here goes nothing!

I forgot to take a picture of the “Diablo Anaranjado”, so the only thing I have to post is this cruddy picture I took of it with my cell phone. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve worked on it with any diligence. Mostly because I’m almost out of orange yarn, and I know the second I run out, I’ll just have to rip more of that orange worsted weight yarn in half again to make it fingering weight. :/ A task I’m definitely dreading!

But overall, I’m super excited with how this beanie is coming along. It’s a thousand times better than the last beanie I made for my friend! This one is actually a good recreation woot! I think I might try to get the other beanie back from him to yank apart that orange yarn so I can split it in half to finish this one. I’m pretty sure that he’ll never wear the ever beanie anyway, so it seems kind of silly to open up the other skein of this yarn that I had purchased. I would much rather return it and get my 5 bucks back! Haha

SOOO even though I know it’s bad for me to start multiple projects… I bought new yarn today anyway. I want to knit a little baby boy’s vest for my friend who is having a baby in May. So when I’m sitting around late tonight thinking I should work on a swatch so I can cast on, I realize something very bad. I didn’t have any straight needles near me in the right size, so since I see my handy dandy Needle Master case, I open it up and decide to use my size 5’s from here. However, I noticed that ALL OF MY CABLES ARE MISSING!! :O There’s only 1 accounted for–my 12″ cable which is in the car with a beanie on it.

I feel so dumb!! I have no idea where any of them could have gone! I have to rip apart the house tomorrow and try to find them. But I have a feeling I’ll have to end up ordering replacement cables from Boye Stupid stupid stupid. And in the meantime I’ll probably end up buying the correct size 5 circular needles so I can work on the vest. Which entirely defeats the purpose of owning an interchangable set! grr.

So I had to test my guage in an interesting way..

Yep… on the tip of the interchangeable size 5’s. The guage is probably tighter than it would normally be, which stinks. Plus it didn’t feel too nice on the insides of my hands having the needle ends gouge into them as I was working, lol.

But hopefully I’ll be able to cast on for the actual vest in a few days, and then I”ll take better pictures of the yarn that I picked out for it!!

Also, the last thing I wanted to post about was my new knitting club!! Haha, it’s a few of us girls who know each other from the concerts we all go to, and we decided that we needed to have a knitting circle to keep ourselves entertained at these shows. It’s nice to NOT be the only one knitting outside the venue trying to pass the time before doors open!! Here’s a picture of us, how cool are we?? Haha, and you can see that the beanie I’m working on this time is properly a ridiculous shade of orange! Hooray!!!

Sorry that this post is a little goofy looking! I’m trying to switch up how I post the photos, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it. I’m sure my text got wrapped all stupid. Darn.

Plans for my second attempt at the orange devil. December 21, 2008

So tonight I finally finished splitting the orange yarn in half. I even had time to knit a swatch for the next pattern I’m attempting and had to try 3 sizes before I got the correct guage with size 1 needles. Crazy.

Since I consider the orange beanie I made him (but haven’t given him yet) to be an epic fail, I scoured Ravelry for beanie patterns until I stumbled across this gem. The pattern is called Pismo Hat and seems rather daunting as it is a 1×1 rib worked in fingering weight yarn. Unfortunately it is entirely perfect for the look I’m going for. What have I gotten myself into??! It’s a good thing for my friend that he’s very pretty! I  already yearn to work a project in bulky weight, and I haven’t even cast on for this beanie!!

Anyway, I thought I would record my mod plans here, for myself and posterity, since I will inevitably lose the piece of scrap paper I did all my math and planning on.

The beanie pattern looks like it will only make a hat that is 18.18″ in circumference, but I need it to be 24″. Since I got my guage to match (at least width-wise) the pattern’s guage of 33 stitches to 4 inches, to make the hat the size I need it, I will have to cast on 198 stitches. This will work perfectly because I will still have a whole amount of stitches, so when I divide the stitches into 6 sections when I work my decreases, I will have equal numbers in each section. IN DECREASES Pattern: 6 sections of 25 stitches will decrease to total of 6 stitches around. Mod: 6 sections of 33 stitches will decrease to total of 6 stitches around. I was afraid that this would elongate the crown and make it a weird beanie only suited for Cone Heads, but since I have a wider base that I’m decreasing it over, the difference in decrease length should be unnoticeable to the eye. The pattern’s slope of decrease (if you will. haha its like algebra 1 with the graph paper all over!) will be 18.48% and if my mods go as planned, the slope of decrease should be 18.54%

Sorry if anyone took the time to read that and it bored them to tears.

Here is a wonderful tutorial on tubular cast-on that does not require the annoying waste yarn. It’s an Italian method and it looks brilliant. I can’t wait to use it.

This is quite possibly the wierest post I’ve written yet. I don’t normally post the math or logic behind my mods on this blog, but I’m so paranoid of losing this paper and then having to do all this work and planning again, that I don’t mind posting a boring entry to ensure that it can’t get lost. Sorry to everyone else who finds this boring! But who knows, maybe someone else will need to make this hat for a 24″ head and will need to modify it for size 1 needles and will just so happen to come across this blog and I will have saved them from having to do the annoying work I had to do. Slim chance, but a girl can dream, can’t she?

It’s past 4 a.m. again. I had wanted to cast on for this beanie tonight, but I really want to get some sleep and know I could easily be up another 2 hours getting the first few rows done if I start now. So I will be patient and wait until tomorrow.  Wish me luck!

KIP, OCD, & Laziness. December 19, 2008

Hello, hello.

Time for an update. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted, even though I’ve started/finished/frogged/loathed quite a few projects in this time.

I’ll start with the easiest. I got caught KIP between sets at a coffee house concert and the photographer decided to get a few pictures of me. Haha, it was SO awkward! Here is a picture of me TRYING to look natural but completely terrified to have a giganto camera lens pointed at me.

You might notice my fabulous place holder, which also doubles as a paper clip The sweater I’m wearing zips together to turn me into a robot! Sweet!!!

Well, well, that was the easy part. It’s currently a little after 4 a.m. and I’ve been working on a new project (of sorts) for the last hour and a half. Here is a picture of what I’ve accomplished. Sorry that the picture is fuzzy, but I’m lazy and have recently discovered the joy of camera phones for uploading unimportant pictures to such sites as Flickr and Photobucket. I’ll bust out the good ol’ camera when I have a picture that’s important.

Basically, I knit a version of that ridiculously orange beanie that my friend wanted. I was using worsted weight and the original beanie was a machine knit fingering weight yarn. I finished the beanie a few hours ago and absolutely hate how it turned out. I showed it to my friend and he tried to be nice about it but I’m pretty sure he was disappointed with the finished item. I can’t blame him, I hate it too!!

So, my imaginary OCD kicked in, and I decided to take the orange yarn I have left over and split the 4-strand yarn into two sets of 2-strand yarn. Crazy? Yes. But I found a MUCH better pattern for a beanie in fingering weight yarn that I’ll use for another orange beanie. It actually looks EXACTLY like his beanie, whereas the one I used before was just a 2×2 ribbing pattern that I thought would be convenient and he said he liked. Anyway, I’m working on splitting the yarn for now and then will make him another insanely orange beanie.

I didn’t tell him that I was going to give the hat another go, so hopefully I’ll surprise him with a PERFECT recreation! I’ve already come close to telling him about it a million times. Mostly because his face would fall ever so slightly when I show him how the beanie was coming along. And I kept wanting to say, NO! Don’t be sad! Please love my work! I’ll make a better one!! But I was strong. So far. Haha..

I feel a little crazy, but oh well. That’s been the highlight of my day, finishing the beanie, realizing I detested the finsihed product, and making fingering weight yarn out of worsted weight. I’ll post more later when I have time to take good photos since I finsihed a few projects, one of which I’m REALLY pleased with. More coming soon!

Secret Knitting Fail & Beanie Project December 1, 2008

Ughh. Of course I mess things up with my secret knitting. I’m gonna be lazy and just paste the same update here that I had posted in Ravelry about this project so far:

11/29/08:
I feel dumb. My gauge was correct, but somehow my scarf is only 45” long instead of 60” so it looks like a child size scarf!

I’m gonna have to frog this all back and figure out whats going on with my gauge and start over AGAIN (making it 4th re-start) and use different needles.

I haven’t had the heart to rip it apart yet. It’s been sitting on my desk awaiting its frogging fate for about a week now.

:’(

I still haven’t frogged it yet. This one is gonna hurt.

In more pleasant news, one of my friends who now wants me to knit him a beanie gave me his favorite beanie in the world and wants me to recreate since its full of paint and holes. Haha, it’s going to be a bit of a challenge…

Have you ever seen a weirder orange for a project or what?? Haha, its kind of worse than Cal Trans workers. The white and the black will be cake to find, obviously, so the stripes are peachy. But I have no idea where I’m gonna find an orange this insane! Haha, and the outside of the beanie is less bright than the inside because it faded! (check out the 2nd picture)

Yeah, so if you’ve seen an orange this intense, haha, please point me in the right direction! I kept thinking I found good oranges last night because they looked REALLY bright in this one store, but then when I pulled up the same color on another website, they were all muted pumpkiny colors.

Bachelors and their clothes. *insert eye roll here*

Haha wish me luck!

A quickie gets complicated. November 2, 2008

WOW!! It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve blogged or knitted. But with the weather getting rainy and my schedule slowing down, I started itching to start a few new projects.

So I ordered a ton of yarn from knitty.com (it was my first time ever qualifying for free shipping, woohoo! that’ll tell you about the quantity haha) and was super stoked to start on a couple of new projects I found online. But of course, I was getting impatient with waiting on the mail system to get the yarn to me quick enough and I HAD to start a project, so I decided to do a little quickie project with some yarn I’ve had in my stash since December 2007!

It’s this blue/black multi yarn that I’ve been wanting to use for forever, but every time I would knit up a swatch with it I would hate how it looked, frog it, and wish that any project could look as pretty as the yarn itself. Anyway, I found this really cool ribbed beanie pattern and decided I needed to make it. I started knitting it in the blue/black yarn and hated how it looked. But I sucked it up and knew I would never use this yarn if I didn’t use it now. So I kept going, and the further I got, the more I loved the way the yarn looked in the beanie’s ribbing! Behold, beanie modeling:

• Link to Project Details page for Surpisingly Popular Beanie
  
• Link to Ravelry project page for Surprisingly Popular Beanie

Haha, I love how it turned out! I wish I had made it maybe an inch longer, but oh well.

Anyway, this beanie has turned out to be a hit! While knitting mine, my sister loved the yarn and so I offered to make her one. So I used the second half of my blue/black skein and started hers. While knitting hers at a coffehouse concert I went to, my friends Dan and Gary (Push Push Pull!!) both requested beanies. While wearing mine around, my friends Davis (Hazel and Vine!!) and Sky also both aked for beanies, and even offered to pay me for them. But I don’t have the heart to charge them Who knew knitting would make me so popular with the fellas?

So it looks like I have quite a lot of knitting ahead of me in the months to come. Luckily the beanie only took me like a day to knit. So those won’t take too long.

I did get my yarn in from knitty by now, but haven’t taken any pictures of the projects I’ve started. I’m making Clapotis for myself and I have a secret knitting project. I’ll blog more about Clapotis later, but you’ll have to check in on my secret knitting on Ravelry since I can’t put pictures or details about it on my public blog. Wouldn’t be much of a secret if I did.

Anyway, it’s super late and I need to get some sleep. I’ve been wanting to write this post for like a week, now, but haven’t had the time.

ON ANOTHER NOTE! My friends from Hazel and Vine & Push Push Pull have a side project band together now. It’s called My Long Awaited and you should give them a listen. They’re gonna be posting more music soon, and it’s definitely going to be epic Only listen to them if you absolutely love rad music!! Tell them mickey sent you!

Goodnight for now. Expect many more blog posts in the near future. I’ll have to update on *shudder* Thermal, and on my new projects as well.

<3!!! mickey