2008 Ravelympics--Recap

First, Sam: The foot looks lovely. His staples are still in place and he hasn't licked at it much. He tried licking, and I sprayed with Bitter Yuck. The next time I looked at him, he was carefully licking around the staples, getting the Bitter Yuck off his foot. I don't think the taste is going to deter him. ;) But he's the boy who likes grapefruit juice, so why should I be surprised? I'll call the vet's office Monday morning to schedule an appointment with a tech to get the staples pulled on Thursday.

Meanwhile, it's Antibiotics 3, Sam 0. Now that he's off the Cephalexin, he's really having digestive tract issues. I'm glad I'm home with him tomorrow. I have a hunch he may be getting bland rice for breakfast.

* * *

The 2008 Summer Olympics has come to an end, and so has the 2008 Ravelympics. You can see my "medals" in a row down the side of my blog; some of those are "multiple" medals because I completed more than one item for that event. Here's what I told y'all I had queued up, and info on my progress:

The camera? It came back from Sony on Friday (it was gone for three weeks). I took pictures of the baby jacket and the "repaired" pictures look exactly like the unacceptable photos from before. The camera and I--and the baby jacket--are going back to Best Buy tomorrow, I think, for a little chat.

Entered in "WIPs Wrestling" (i.e., wrestling your WIPs--works in progress--into completion), I have two items:
A Baby Surprise Jacket for baby number 7 for my cousin Shari (due in January).

It's done:
(Photo is color-adjusted in Corel.)

The other WIP is a vintage doily:

I finished the doily, disliked the border, ripped it out and redid it:

Entered in "Baby Dressage" and "Gift Knits Pentathlon" are two pairs of crocheted booties: one for Shari's baby and one for coworker Trina's baby boy (due in November). These will be made using yarn left from the BSJs.

They're done (lots of color adjusting on the photo of the purple booties):

I've queued up three doilies (also Gift Knits Pentathlon as well as Homestuff Hammerthrow). One uses DMC Cebelia in ecru. The other two, both using the same pattern, will be multicolored doilies. The ecru doily will take several days--or even a week. The multicolored doilies are from a book entitled "Easy One-Day Doilies," but I've made two other designs from this book and they took longer than a day, so I'm not expecting too much.

The ecru doily went very well. I'm not posting pictures here, though, because it's going to someone on my LJ friends list; if you want to look you can find it on my Flickr account. (There's a 2008 Ravelympics set there.) The two multicolored doilies from a single pattern were horrendous: an unnecessarily complicated design early on; about the time I beat that part of the pattern into submission, I tripped over an instruction on Round 8 that I didn't realize I'd gotten wrong until I started Round 11. Since I was working both doilies at the same time, I was going to have to frog lots of work on two versions of a pattern I really was starting to hate. I was rescued by a friend saying she'd happily give the two partial doilies a home at her house. I was glad to abandon those two:

I've also queued up two thread bookmarks (Gift Knits Pentathlon), one in light blue and one in mauve.

Success:

I've queued up the Mermaid scarf pattern (Gift Knits Pentathlon and Scarf Stroke), set to use up some mango-colored Microspun yarn.

I started this one and seriously disliked the pattern (Good heavens! 40 stitch markers?) So I hunted around for a more workable pattern and found a feather-and-fan knitted pattern. One skein and size 8 needles netted me a 6" x 42" scarf, shown here with the 2008 Ravelympics commemorative pin:



(The creators of the Ravelry site have a Boston Terrier named Bob. Bob has become the official site mascot. His image is on the Ravelry medals and on the pin. Bob's quite a celebrity on the site.)

And, by way of a triple-whammy entry (Amigurumi 'n Toy Toss, Pets Pommel Horse, and Gift Knits Pentathlon), I've queued up four versions of a pattern called Kitty Squid. It's a cat toy that will use up odd bits of leftover yarn.

Done. Meet the Kitty Squid Squad:


Other projects didn't get done: Sheldon the turtle is still queued up. The Paw Cozy probably will not be made at all. The tank top for me has been started and I'm about 6 inches into the front (or the back--at this point they're interchangeable). The two BSJs are still waiting for me, too.




At last count, the 2008 Ravelympics involved 16260 projects from 5712 Ravelers. 6431 projects are showing up on the "finish line" pages (201 pages, to be exact)--and that's just completed projects with photographs. Many more people have posted that their projects are finished, but they don't have access to cameras at present. There'll be more precise numbers later on, but it's been fun knitting to a deadline and knowing that thousands of other knitters around the world were working to the same deadline. People are already making plans for the 2010 Winter Olympics.