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

F.O. Update Extravaganza! December 26, 2008

Well, I’ve been working on a lot of little projects lately, but I’ve been so lazy about posting that I’ve never given them their proper webpages or anything. So since today has been a very lazy day for me, I decided to take this time to update on a few projects I’ve finished recently.

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The Impossibly Orange Beanie Recreation: Attempt One

I was working on re-creating my friend’s favorite beanie. As you can see, it’s seen its fair share of wear with the paint drizzles and fabric holes. Anyway, I’m not happy with how this one turned out, the needles made such a big fabric that I know he doesn’t like it as much as his old one. Also, I made the made the mistake of glancing at the pattern, assuming I knew what it said, and working the beanie without paying any attention to the written pattern. I worked the stripes in the 2×2 rib pattern, and they look crappy. Apparently the pattern had recommended that you K all stitches in the first row of a color change to make a clean line. I saw that note when I was working the decreases for the crown. Whoops.

• Link to Project Details page for The Impossibly Orange Beanie Recreation: Attempt One
• Link to Ravelry project page for The Impossibly Orange Beanie Recreation: Attempt One

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Baby Love Diagonal Baby Blanket

My best friend is pregnant with a baby boy, so naturally I’ve started picking out cute baby projects and working on some of them. The first of the many things I’ll be making is this baby blanket. The yarn made this blanket completely GORGEOUS! It’s so snuggly!! I plan on making a giant verison of this for myself The eyelets on the side where the increases are are so cute! And the yarn looks so pretty! I’ve never worked a pattern in garter stitch because I normally HATE the look of it, but the bumpy yarn I used disguised the garter and just made it look pretty! Yay!

• Link to Project Details page for Baby Love Diagonal Baby Blanket
  
• Link to Ravelry project page for Baby Love Diagonal Baby Blanket

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Clapotis

After MANY heart-wrenching mistakes with this project, I am extremely in love with how the scarf turned out. Its SO warm and cozy!!! And the color is lovely too! It’s called Marine Heather and when the light hits it, you can see both blue and green blending together.

• Link to Project Details page for Clapotis
  
• Link to Ravelry project page for Clapotis

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Well I think that’s PLENTY enough for any single blog post to contain. I’ll have more updates coming soon. I’m making progress on the 2nd attempt at the Impossibly Orange Beanie. I’ve donned it the Diablo Anaranjado (or, the Orange Devil, for anyone unmotivated enough to look it up in a translator lol) I also have yarn to make a few more quick beanies for friends, so that should be interesting.

Thanks for reading!

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.

Past the point of no return… March 5, 2008

Wow, so I had planned on waiting until Chanel tried on the shrug before I did any more work on it. But I knew it was gonna be a while until she was feeling better. And I knew that I would be stuck at work on Saturday for 6 hours in a corner waiting for people to come buy jewelry, only to have a couple sales all day. So, with that in mind, I lost all sense of patience and decided to bring the shrug with me to work so I could have something productive to entertain me.

Anyway, I JUST finished this shrug about 10 minutes ago. Here it is!

Yeah, yeah, not too exciting, I know. It looks exactly like the last one. But it’s definitely bigger. Checkie:

I’m actually capable of squeezing into it! Which means I think it will fit Chanel perfectly!

Keep your fingers crossed everybody!

And Chanel: if/when you read this, I HOPE YOU’RE FEELING BETTER!!!! *poor thing!*

So I plan on starting a big project soon! A sweater! My first real sweater!! How exciting!!! I think I’ll end up doing the Thermal pattern from knitty.com though I have a friend thats been working on hers for over a year now. Kind of intimidating….lol. But its super cute, so why not?! Haha, plus, I’ve got plenty of boring Saturdays at the store for me to spend on knitting.

Later everyone!

LINKS (added 03-26-08)

• Link to Project Detail page for Bubblegum shrug
• Link to Ravelry project page for Bubblegum shrug 

Scrunchable Scarf Finished February 11, 2008

Well, I finished my scarf a few days ago and love how it turned out. It knit up REALLY fast, too. And in even better news, I’ve finally used up all of the green yarn I bought on sale, yay!

I know I’m not as cute as Benny, but I thought I’d post a picture anyway.

So now I’ve come to a decision-making point. Here’s the situation:

I bought blue and red sport weight yarn for a project for my Dad. He just bought a motor scooter and bought a helmet to use that was blue with a red dragon. So as soon as he ordered that on Ebay, I ordered the yarn and decided I would make him a fingerless pair of gloves that he could use while he’s driving. I wanted to stitch “Yo ho Yo ho A biker’s life for me” on them (just as a joke since we’ve been telling him how hard-core he is on his 50cc moped). But anyway, he’s gonna end up selling the helmet already. I’ve already opened the yarn to knit a swatch.

So now I have to decide if I want to put the time and effort into knitting a pair of gloves that my Dad probably won’t wear that match a helmet that he’s selling. Hmm.. He’s always complaining that I don’t make him anything, but he’s so picky that he’ll never wear the stuff I want to knit, anyway. So yeah, now I’ve got a bunch of extra yarn that I don’ think I’ll end up using : ( Lame. After I just spent $15 on yarn he goes and sells the dumb helmet. *men!*

LINKS (added 03-26-08)

• Link to Project Detail page for Scrunchable scarf
  
• Link to Ravelry project page for Scrunchable scarf 

The shrug has been started!…AND finished!!! February 4, 2008

WOW I am amazed at how fast this shrug knit up! I started it on 1/26 and finished it on 1/31!! It was such an easy pattern to follow! I love it! I had planned on posting a few entries about it as I was going, but at the rate I was knitting it, I figured I’d be done fast enough that I could squeeze the whole project into a single post. *I’m so lazy!*

So, without further ado, I give you:

Yeah, so I love how it looks overall. I just wish it would come together more at the front. I kind of feel like it looks like I stole it from a little kid, since it doesn’t fit over the *girls* haha. I think this pattern is cuter on girls who aren’t curvy. But yeah, since I put the time into it, I’m not about to frog it, even if I do feel a little ridiculous in it, lol.

But yeah, I’m gonna make a few of these shrugs for my friends since they’re so easy. And the best part about it is that my friends are non-knitters, so they’re gonna be way impressed! Haha! Plus, it’s gonna be even easier than mine was to knit, since my one friend Chanel is SUPER tiny and I only have to make the smallest size for her! Yay!

Oh, and P.S., I noticed a total STRANGE coincidence about my knitting and my pajamas and this totally wasn’t planned:

Apparently I like the way bright green looks with blue. It was a little scary when I noticed I was knitting something in the same colors I was wearing, lol.

Yeah, so I’ve ordered some yarn from Knit Picks and will blog about that when it gets here and I start my next project. I’m guessing the next one will take much longer than a week to complete, it’s a pair of gloves! Stay tuned…!

LINKS (added 03-26-08)

• Link to Project Detail page for Two Toned Shrug
  
• Link to Ravelry project page for Two Toned Shrug 

The shrug plan & amigurumi! January 8, 2008

Hello again!

I was so happy (and surprised) to see that I actually had a couple people read this blog and leave SUPER helpful comments for me! I am happy to report that I will not be wasting my yarn on yet another scarf (I must have hundreds of scarves already! ahh!) but on a shrug! I spent the last few days searching cardigan patterns online (btw, there are a lot of really ugly cardigans out there, ew) and found a few that I kind of liked. Nothing that seemed perfect.

And I just realized that when I posted the picture of my yarn, I didn’t say how much of it I bought (sorry for being a dork):

Green: 605 yards

Blue: 242 yards

The original plan was to use this pattern and change it a bit.

I wanted 3/4 sleeves and big stripes.

But luckily for me, there was a comment about a book called Fitted Knits and the two tone shrug in it

IT’S PERFECT!!!

I just ordered the book on Amazon last night, so now I’m just waiting to get the pattern until I start. THANK YOU THANK YOU Pepper for letting me know about that book!

In the meantime though, I just gave amigurumi my first try. I absolutely love how cute some people can make these little stuffies! I’m still working on it. Haha. Plus I’m a much more competent knitter than I am a crocheter, so my little horse turned out having a slightly deformed head and legs. I haven’t quite got the circular crocheting down and I couldn’t find any tutorials about crocheting to make tubes, so it was kind of guess work for me. Yikes. So I can’t wait to give a knitted amigurumi a try so it will turn out looking normal. Anywhoozles, here are a few pictures of the horses I made. The yellow one was the 1st one I did and the purple one I made for my sister (she hasn’t seen it yet and I’m giving it to her today).

I think they’re pretty cute, but nowhere near as cute as the one from the Cotton Candy Horse pattern:

Well, I think I’ve said enough. I’m trying to keep these entries short and sweet, but I find myself typing too much because this whole blogging thing is just too much fun! Okay. The end.