I'm in love with the new camera

I played around with it some the first day (pictures of yarn), more today.









(P.S. The yarn is Plymouth's Happy Feet.)

Two years ago today...

Miss you, sweet girl.

My camera stinks!

At least, for anything like a detail shot.

This is the "detail shot" of a doily I just finished:



The color is much more accurate on this photo:





I've been working on a baby sweater. The pattern was fine until it got to the sleeve. The first problem with the pattern's sleeve had to do with the instructions for the cuff. Babies are not noted for keeping those fingers tucked in when you're trying to get a sleeve over their hands, so you really don't want the sleeve cuff to be super-tiny and tight. I fixed that, then worked the sleeve to the row specified for the 0-6 months size. I kept staring at that sleeve, thinking, "No way." But what do I know about baby clothes?

So I went to Target and bought a baby's one-piece sleep outfit in 6-months size. Granted, this might be the high range of the 6-months' size, and sleep outfits are looser and longer-limbed than sweaters need to be, but I think there's a problem with my knitted sweater:



I think I'm gonna need at least one more pattern repeat in there... (And I'm knitting right on target for gauge, so that's not my problem.)


And I've started a sweater for my mother for Mother's Day. Actually, I've started the swatch, which is not quite the same as having started the sweater. ;)

Maybe not dumb...

Sam may have hidden talents.

Yes, he's notorious for stealing goodies from the kitchen while muzzled, then revealing his stash of goodies when I get home...while he is still muzzled. But it may not be a thief's stupidity that is "blowing the gaff." He may just have a persistent case of bad timing.

Today I went grocery shopping. (It was either that, or force the dogs to share. Lamb and rice kibble, anyone?) When I got home, a still-muzzled Sam stood there in the kitchen and watched me put groceries away. I put the new loaf of bread on top of the refrigerator, the one place where Sam can't (quite) reach it. About 30 seconds later, the loaf fell off the refrigerator and landed in the floor at my feet. Did I not have it firmly in place? Did I have it too close to the edge of the refrigerator?

Or has Sam perhaps--just perhaps--learned telekinesis? Telekinesis and the power of positive thinking?

Heaven help me if the boy ever perfects his timing and learns to do this when his muzzle is off.

Tiger Eye

I finally got my Tiger Eye scarf blocked. Once it was blocked, I unpinned it, then measured it (when it wasn't tightly stretched out): 5.5" x 69" (14 cm x 175 cm).



But I'm tired of a camera that takes blurry pictures and gets the colors wrong. Surely a camera ought to get at least something right. (Color on the lower portion of the picture is pretty close.)

They're home.

The vet had a couple of difficult cases earlier today, so he was running behind schedule. Then there was Sam, who was no trouble and whose teeth cleaned up very nicely. But the vet wanted to give the boy time to wake up slowly on his own, since hurrying dogs sometimes leads to the hound flailing around and perhaps getting hurt. So while Sam slept off the drugs, the vet got going on Jacey.

Jacey's back teeth were far worse than the vet realized. The girl won't chew--anything. Sam at least gnaws on a durable Nylabone every now and then. Jacey won't touch the thing. She got off with no extractions this time, but the vet said if she continues at this rate she's going to need more than one dental a year.

Yeah, I know. And I do brush her teeth. But she's got a mouthful of plaque magnets. So she had a rough time, and she probably has no idea why her mouth aches so much. Her gums bled quite a bit, and while she was waking up I think she probably licked at her front legs. The fur on her legs is pink from bleeding gums, and her face looks pretty nasty, and the rest of her doesn't look so lovely, either. (The perils of owning a dog with lots of white on her.) Much of her fur looks like it got wet , got mushed out of place, and then dried that way (which is probably exactly what happened).

So I picked up the dogs about 6:30. They aren't happy that the vet is still limiting their food and water tonight. They're quite sure they aren't going to get sick from the anesthesia (and they're probably right). So far, Sam's had his small bowl of water--and Jacey's, too--and both dogs have had less than half a cup of their kibble. If all goes well, I'll give them another half cup before bedtime.

I've got a couple of furry zombies for my bed tonight. Hurray! (And if someone breathes in my face, I won't gag.)

My vet's bills are quite reasonable. $135/dog for the cleaning, and he didn't send them home with pain pills since he didn't have to pull anything. (The pain meds would have run $40/dog.) But I also needed Interceptor (heartworm meds) for them, which runs $106+ for a six-month supply for two dogs. This is on top of their annual check-up, heartworm tests, and vaccinations two weeks ago. I think they need to get a job.

Tomorrow: The Vet

Sam and Jacey go to the vet's tomorrow for their dental cleanings. I'm not thrilled about having them under anesthesia, so I'm a bit stressed.

The vet's office called. They wanted me to drop the duo off tonight by 7:30 so the vet could start them really early tomorrow. (He comes in early to beat the traffic.) But I told them that I'd had Sam sleeping in my bed for 5 and a half years, and I wouldn't be able to sleep without him around. I also wasn't happy about the idea of having the dogs at the vet's office for nearly 12 hours before the vet even started on them. So they're still home with me tonight. They're getting a few treats this evening; all food and water stops at 11 pm.

I drop the dogs at the vet between 8 and 9. Then I can run a few errands. I'll probably wind up back at the vet's early--maybe with my knitting in hand--to wait until the dogs are ready to come home.

Finished "Fetching"

The pattern is called "Fetching," and it's knitted with Red Heart SuperSaver (acrylic) yarn in Piñata:



I've finished the knitting on my Tiger Eye Lace Scarf. I really, really liked the yarn, dyed by Lisa Souza. I need to finish the blocking and weave in a few ends. Pictures when that's done.

I went up to my mother's and helped her clean out her basement by taking away yarn she didn't want any more. There isn't any truly gorgeous yarn here, but the potential for a scrap afghan is here. I've always wanted to make one, but I generally find myself with scraps in about three colors, which is not enough. Now I have colors. And weights. And textures.

Doggies having fun

It's a video of lure coursing. The black dog is Cole (named for Cole Porter, officially named "SummerWind's Jazz and Cocktails FCh"; the fawn dog is Sweeney (wanna take a wild guess?); the white dog is Splash. Cole belongs to friends of mine. Cole finished third in the country in 2007, but Sweeney outscores Cole this day. (Dogs get points for following the strips properly.)

Who'd have thought that chasing a trash bag could be so much fun?

Work Stuff

I'm spending the last few days of chilly January cuddled up to a cold-pack. A German Shepherd pulled me off my feet yesterday at work. I twisted as I fell to avoid landing on my hands (great way to break an arm). I intended to land on my well-padded butt, but my back connected with the corner of the door frame before my butt hit the floor. (Contact was along the ribs, just south of my shoulder blade.) Nothing broke, and I'm just having muscle pain. Sorta like a crick in your neck when you move wrong, but this "cricks" when I bend over or pick up a dog--things I do fairly often in my line of work. I filed an accident report, so that I'm covered if this doesn't get better. The Medcor nurse said large muscle injuries can take a week before they feel better. Yay. (But I was able to answer "no" to the nurse's big questions: Sharp pain? Difficulty breathing? Walking funny?)

Stuff

I must be a serious typist. This laptop is less than 18 months old, and paint is coming off some keys. The D has a chip out of it. And the Shift key...oh my!



Finished the hat:



I was going to crop it differently, but what the heck...that really is my chin.

Idiom of the day

I bought the edition of Interweave Crochet that had the hat pattern I liked. I bought it on my day off (Tuesday), when I was out running errands that included recycling, Home Depot, grocery shopping, and the post office. (I was errand-running from 11:30 am to 4:30 pm--a marathon of 60 miles and 7 stops. Some day off.) The magazine, purchased from a yarn store 20 miles away, cost $7.99 and had only one pattern that I really liked--the hat.

So imagine my displeasure when I discovered last night that the milk that leaked in the trunk on Tuesday had damaged the magazine. By the time I discovered the damage, the milk had dried, leaving pages stuck together and un-pry-apart-able. (Yeah, I tried. Half the instructions from one page are stuck to the facing page.) The milk also hit the yarn, which, thank heavens, is washable. I washed the yarn last night (it's still in a skein, which makes it easy to wash), and it's hanging to dry. (By the way, I've forgiven Sam for showing an inordinate interest in my bag of yarn...and the milky magazine.)

The magazine is useless. I'm not inclined to buy another copy, and I don't think the local library has a copy I could make a photocopy from. So--I'll just make a different hat. There's a pattern I've done before, very easy, and I probably can knock it out pretty fast. This pattern is in a Leisure Arts book I already own: Caps, Hats and Helmets to knit and crochet--32 patterns for $2.50.

Yeah, you can see the idiom coming at you: No use crying over spilt milk.

And a side note: I probably will not buy another Interweave magazine. This was the first one I'd bought, and nothing impresses me nearly as much as the inflated price. The photography isn't even useful. Imagine a lovely shawl on the front cover--photographed from the back of the model--and the inside photo of the shawl also is a back view. There's no view of the front of the shawl, and unless the wearer plans to walk around backwards (or just wear the shawl that way), she probably wants to know how the thing looks from the front!

Stuff...

I frogged that hat. P2, K2, forever. Can you say boring? Besides, I found a neat crochet pattern after someone in the crochet community posted on LJ. She was using the same yarn--even same color--as the hat I was making, and I love the way hers looks. So I guess I'm going to crochet a hat.

(The hat I frogged)

I got more Kraemer Sterling Silk & Silver in black (I had one skein of it, shown below) to use for a cabled scarf. I also bought some in white to use for the Charlotte's Web scarf.

(Silk & Silver)

Several Ravelry Helpers proposed doing a knit-along for a lace scarf pattern called Tiger Eye. I've been plugging away a little almost every day since 15 January, but several of the other Ravelers have abandoned the project. The pattern is just a 16-row repeat. Sometimes it goes like clockwork. More often, though, I wind up frogging the repeat and redoing it. And re-redoing it. I've finally finished the 13th repeat (10 repeats are shown in the photo, with lots of lifelines), and the unblocked scarf measures about 6" x 24". I'm aiming for 6" x 60" unblocked, which probably will block to 72", but I may wind up going shorter for the sake of my sanity.

(Tiger Eye Scarf in Lisa Souza's Pumpkin fingering)

I bought a set of Addi Turbo Lace circular needles, 47-inch size 3 needles, from another Raveler. Along with the needles, she sent a bottle of coffee syrup and a skein of lovely sock yarn.


The dogs are fine. So is the family. Mother wants me to come help her clean out her basement, where she has too much yarn stored. I can help with that. ;)

A miracle greyhound

Her name is Genie.

If the link doesn't work, search the site for "old greyhound".

Greyhound blood donors

Article posted on the greyhound group.

Knitting lesson two: Know when to quit.

Holy smokes. I frogged the hat and reknitted. And did it again. I ripped the whole hat and started again with different (more cooperative) yarn and lifelines every four rows.

Today, finished with row 12, I looked carefully at what I had: A cable twisting the wrong way back on row 10. And one overlooked wrong-way twist back on row 1!

After almost a week of knitting on that blasted pattern, I had four decent rows of ribbing...and nothing else right.

Enough.

I frogged it and neatly rewound the yarn (yay, ballwinder). I got out some sport weight yarn and a totally different hat pattern (k2/p2 around and around to infinity). I've got two inches of ribbing done--and done right.

I'll get more cable practice later, preferably on something with sane cables. I think I might make Fetching, which has two kinds of cable stitches (not four) and looks sensible. There's a cable vest I want to make (from the same book as the accursed hat), but it's rated "easy" (rather than the hat's rating of "intermediate") and has the same C4B and C4F that Fetching has. If I can survive Fetching, I'll have some encouragement to attempt the vest.

A knitting lesson

Knitting is done with two points--or more. They can be individual needles or one big circular needle. The point in knitting is to keep all of one row of stitches on the needle(s) at one time.

Crocheting is done with one hook. Generally, you keep one stitch on the hook at a time.

This becomes a critical difference if you have to undo a part of your work because you've spotted an error. It's easy to remove your crochet hook from your work and just rip back to one particular, precise point, stick the hook back into your stitch, and start up again.

Knitting? Not so much. You have to get all those fiddly stitches back on the needle(s), preferably in the right order and with the right twist. You can try to "tink" your work (that's "knit" backwards--basically you unpick one stitch at a time and hook it back on the other point), but it's time-consuming and, if you're knitting cables, it's a nightmare since the whole point of cable stitches is to work the stitches out of order. If you're knitting a four-stitch cable, you don't knit (or purl) 1-2-3-4; you knit (or purl--or both) 3-4-1-2. Fun.

So if you anticipate problems with your knitting, you run a lifeline. At some point in your knitting, when you're sure you've got a "good" row, you run a bit of yarn or thread through all the stitches. Then you keep knitting, knowing that if you have an error you can just unravel your work back to the lifeline, run the needle through the stitches along the line, and pick up your work at that point.

But there's a desire not to run a lifeline. Running a lifeline is an admission that you expect to screw up somewhere, and I didn't run a lifeline on the cabled hat I'm knitting.

The cable pattern is 20 rows long, then you work a repeat of the first 10 rows. I made it successfully through row 20, screwed up row 21, and only spotted my problem when I was on row 25. I spent hours tinking on Sunday night, carefully backing up stitch by stitch and row by row. Supposedly, I only needed to back up a few rows, but when I got to the point where the problem had occurred, I was missing a stitch, and every time I tinked back a row or two more, I wound up short a stitch, or with twisted stitches, or with an unexplained hole. I had run a lifeline after the ribbing, before I started the cables, so I finally just ripped the cables out completely--clear back to the lifeline.

So I've got a new rule if I'm knitting cables: Run a lifeline every fourth row. And leave the lifeline in place until the piece is nearly finished, and periodically examine the cables carefully to make sure they all twist properly. (I have some crochet thread that's too fuzzy for me to use on a doily--I'd get no stitch definition--and it makes for an inexpensive lifeline that doesn't leave yarn fuzzies behind on my knitting.)

I've gotten back through row 18. After all these hours of tinking and reknitting, I'm still not to the point I had reached early Sunday morning. But I will finish this hat, and I will get the cables right.

Yeah. Run a lifeline every fourth row.

All kinds of stuff...

I need to catch up on craft stuff:



This is the doily I made for my sister's mother-in-law for Christmas. It blocked to 17" x 30", so I'm sort of thinking of it on the dresser in her bedroom. The thread was size 10 in ecru.





This is another doily I've finished. I had this "Ocean" colorway of variegated thread, and I wanted to find a doily pattern that wouldn't fight with the color pattern. The doily pattern is called "Extraordinary," and it's designed by Mary Werst, who did the doily pattern I made last summer for Daniel and Ashley.



And I made these armwarmers--the first time I've knitted cables. The yarn is Red Heart's Farmland colorway (worsted weight yarn), so they're machine washable/dryable. I like the pattern, but I think I might try again on smaller needles. I knit very loosely, and these could be less "chunky" looking.



And I've finally knitted a pair of socks (third try). These are supremely boring (ribbed cuffs, stockinette foot), but I now can call myself a "sock knitter." The next pair will be something more exciting...and will not be in this yarn (Elann Esprit), which is pretty but is stretchy (cotton + Lycra). Since you need to pull stitches snuggly between DPNs when you knit socks, stretchy yarn is a nuisance because you can't pull it snug enough without stretching it too much. Next time? Conventional yarn, even if I use an icky acrylic.

For Christmas, I got 8 pattern books--lots of doily patterns. Woo hoo! Right now, though, I'm knitting myself a hat. Sitting with the hood up on my sweatshirt isn't always comfortable, but it's been cold around here. (Winter finally found Georgia. For a few days.) I've found a pattern with cables on it, and this is a good way to practice cables without committing myself to a huge sweater. On the other hand, this pattern uses some unconventional abbreviations for cable stitches (the pattern is in a book by Bernat, which is a Canadian company), so I'm having to pay close attention to what I'm doing. I've been knitting while my laptop reads me the Bleak House audio book.

What greyhounds do in bed

This is not one of mine...but it might as well be.

Stuff...

Craft-y stuff? I finished the doily for my sister's mother-in-law. That thing is huge! It's blocking right now, and I ran out of blocking board before I ran out of doily. (About 17" x 28".) Bits are hanging off both ends of the blocking board. I've started a color doily (Caro's doily was ecru--pretty, but borrrrr-ring) and it's going quickly. It'll be about 16"...or probably smaller, since I'm way under the gauge. This doily uses a solid medium blue and a variegated aqua/light blue/medium-blue. This is one of the few patterns I've seen where a variegated thread might not battle the stitch pattern to a mutual loss. I've also had an idea for another doily, this one in two solid colors...

I've postponed work on Sam's sweater. I have a coat he can wear if he thinks he needs it (he'll let me know, the fuss budget). That can wait until I need some mindless knitting for Christmas day, while we're sitting around and talking after the presents are opened and before lunch.

In reading, I've finished the sixth Harry Potter. At lunch I'm reading Chocolat, and I'll start the last Harry Potter at bedtime. I got the fifth Harry Potter on DVD last Tuesday, and I've enjoyed it. (I don't go to theaters, so I hadn't seen it before last Tuesday.) I got the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet for my birthday (along with three doily pattern books; Caro's doily came from one of the books). And I just got the Charlotte's Web DVD from Netflix.

Most of my Christmas shopping is done. Mother discovered something I can get my father: flannel pajamas. His current set is getting threadbare, and the elastic is shot. Just think: flannel jammies for my father. I think I'm not allowed to buy him jammies with animals on them or with feet in them. :)