Purlene’s Corner

(ames)

OK, so here’s the deal. My camera died right after my trip to the Chicago Botanic Gardens. It won’t turn on, and it isn’t the battery, it’s just a seven-year-old digital camera and it’s gone to be with Elvis. I’ll get another one eventually, but in the meantime, I have no pictures.

Well, until last night, that is. Mom reminded me that her digital movie camera (that can’t be what they’re called) takes stills! And so I did that. The pictures are kind of grainy, which you should attribute to the lighting inside my apartment and not the camera itself, but look. I have things to show you.

Bayerische Sock The first one! Lorna’s Laces, I think the colorway is Sunshine (I will check when I get home), US1 needle and ta-da. I’ll probably cast on for the second one next week when I head home to Charleston for vacation. I have many hours of travelling that day, from the el to the plane to the other plane, which is lots of time to knit complicated twisted stitches and whatnot.

I’m gonna say that this sock is a lot easier than it seems. It took me a while to get the hang of it, and there’s an increase row right after the cuff ribbing that is BIZARRE, but if you want the pattern to flow out of the ribbing nicely, you’ll do it the way Eunny said to. Also, this is the second year in a row that I’ve knit on a yellow twisted stitch sock at Bitcherie Weekend in Ann Arbor. Either it’s a tradition or a coincidence. We will see what happens next year.

Here’s a closeup of the pattern:

Onward. This is a sock that is no more:

It’s lovely, and it’s going to be done, but I need to go down a needle size. But look at that - a toe-up sock. Honestly, why people do these and claim that they’re so much easier is beyond me. A figure-8 caston is just about the most fiddly annoying thing I have EVER had to do in my life, but I will not let it defeat me. Yarn: The Unique Sheep Sushi, in Garden Tomato, and it is gorgeous. Shimmery and beautiful. (dude. I need a new camera.)

There has been playing with the drop spindles!

There has been sock knitting and birthday yarn!

Lorna’s Laces Tuscany, in a simple 2×2 rib, offset by one stitch every six rows

Dream in Color Classy, in Happy Forest. One of four skeins given to me by Aya for my birthday next week, YAY. I’m thinking they’re going to be a pretty lacy cardigan. Summer’s End and I apologize for the Ravelry link, but the designer linked to it on Ravelry from her webpage. It’s awfully shortsighted of her not to have at least a page on her own website for it, since she has a website, but whatever. I don’t run the world. More’s the pity.

And that has been your knitting update from ames! \o/

(aya here)

Here’s the latest sock that I’m knitting on - a no-purl Monkey. The yarn is a combination of cotton, bamboo and nylon, and has a great stretch to it. I love the colors of the yarn too. I was afraid it would be too busy for the pattern, but I really think it works well.

The color’s a bit more accurate in this picture:

I’ve also  been knitting on the February Lady Sweater, but it’s just a sea of boring blue garter stitch right now, so I won’t bore you with a photo until I get further along on it.

I’ve been working around the house, getting things done, but I’ve gotten fairly lazy about it. I finally got my bedroom completed - the new blinds are installed and the artwork (if you can call it that) is all hung up on the walls. I’m really happy with how the room came out - especially now that the vertical blinds are up. Such a cleaner look than the old curtains that were there before.

Here are a couple of pics of the bedroom:

The brown chair is missing from this corner of the room - this picture was taken before I dragged it back into the room. See my lovely new blinds?

I’m trying to decide what to tackle next - there’s a list of things that I want to do, but I can’t decide which one to do first. Until I make a decision, I’m at a standstill.

(ames)

Seven thousand works in process, and nothing is getting finished!  Apparently it is genetic. This is what is going on.  Sadly, I only have a few pictures, as my camera has gone to meet Elvis in the great beyond.  It is dead dead dead, and until I can replace it, I got nothing by way of pictures.  WOE.

After casting on and ripping out several socks, I finally found a pattern that worked beautifully with Lorna’s Laces Tuscany - a yarn I bought at the LL factory sale two years ago and never really found a pattern that clicked with it.  I settled on a simple 2×2 rib, offset by one stitch every six rows.  I love it!  The leg’s a bit longer than I usually do, because I wanted it to be scrunchable.  (Totally a word.)  The finished socks are incredibly comfortable and cute, and I finished the pair in a couple of weeks worth of CTA knitting.

I’ve also been churning out the Babette squares, but again no pictures.  Woe, I have to replace my crochet hook, and haven’t made it to Hancock Fabrics yet (it’s a bit of a walk).  My hook has gone missing, and the end is a little chewed up (Buddy, j’accuse) and snagging on the yarn.  I’m going to need to replenish the yarn soon, anyway, so perhaps I won’t go to Hancock Fabrics after all.  Their selection is minimal at best.  I can swing by Joann’s on the way home one day.  Babble babble, welcome to my brain.

Recently, my mom posted some gorgeous pictures on her blog, and invited everyone to find bits of beauty in their own worlds.  Chicago was drowning in rain and fog and chill at the time (and it’s still kind of cold here, wtf it is MAY) but this was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in forever:

A stoplight! With accompanying DO NOT WALK/WALK signals!  At the corner of my street and the four-lane divided BUSY street that I have to walk across every day! GLEE!  I have been hoping for this for two years, and they installed them two months ago, and turned them on a couple of weeks ago, and my commute improved 51478178954%.  This is beautiful, trust me.

Erin and I visited the Chicago Botanic Gardens last weekend, and as soon as I can get her to upload the pictures from her camera, I can share them with you.  In the meantime, enjoy this one:

My cute-as-pie best pal, waiting for the METRA train to take us to the Gardens. Of course, we were on the wrong side of the track, but we figured it out in time. The Gardens were gorgeous, small enough to do in a few hours, but big enough to be interesting and to have lots of people without seeming crowded. I think next time, I would go earlier in the morning and schedule the tram ride that takes you all around the park to coincide better with the train ride home; we ended up with about two hours to kill before we could leave. But hey, when one person of a pair doesn’t really understand how the Chicago public transportation system works, and the other one has no sense of time, two hours isn’t as bad as it could have been!

(aya here)

I put my patio set together today - piece of cake. Great little set, perfect size for the space that I have back there. So weird to see it when I look out the slider though. I can’t wait for it to be warmer in the mornings, so I can drink my coffee out there!

See my pretty patio area? I never know whether to call it patio, garden, backyard…

I’ve cut the tags off the cushions since this picture was taken. The bench has brown cushions, and the chairs the pretty green striped ones. Heaven forbid the store have four cushions in the same color… It’s all good though. Both colors work well, and for the price I got that set for, I really shouldn’t complain!

I still have to plant my blueberry bush. I’m trying to decide where, but I think it’s going to go over near where that stick is, to the right and behind the fountain. I’ve got it placed there, to mull over.

I’m still fiddling with where to put the patio set. The big woody plant in the middle I thought was dead (it’s a hibiscus), but it started budding this week, yay!

Things are really getting green and are blooming out there. I spent some time twining the ivy in, but I still need to prune it back a bit. It looks really top-heavy.

Here’s some of the stuff I carted out of there. The dirt that was in that wooden barrel got spread out along the back fence.

I took Ollie out there today. until I get the holes blocked off, he’ll be in his harness:

Here he is noshing on some of the plants - eyes closed due to the sun in them.

World’s Cleanest Bunny! You can see some of the pretty purple flowers in this pic.

And him wanting to go back in. You can see my little starter plants there, the get sun in the morning, while still staying warm inside with the door closed when it’s chilly. Hoping to transplant them in a week or two, if the boys don’t get at them first, that is.

(aya here)

I finally narrowed down the paint colors for the living room to two colors. I was finally able to get sunlight pictures this morning. On the left in the first picture is Sterling (grey) and Mist (blue-grey).

The white spot in the middle of the right wall below is the white paint that will be on the left wall (also the hallway color)

I’m pretty sure what I’m going to go with, but I won’t say. Tell me what you think! Sterling (grey) or Mist (blue-grey)?

Last night I made some good ol’ German food. This time, ames, I found the perfect recipe for spaetzle, yay! I just halved the recipe. See how pretty?

More pics! It’s just a pic entry!

Knitty pics:

My current in process socks. About four more repeats until the heel, and I’m using an afterthought heel, which means I’ll knit about 8 more repeats, backtrack to put the heel in, and then finish the repeats, put the toe in, and be done.

After I finish those socks, I’m going to knit the second one of these. I knit the first one in July of last year, so it’s about time that I finish these up.

A couple of shots of the boys, taken this morning.

Ollie leaning towards the big flashy thing:

Stan slacking out under his shelf. Look how big he is! Look at that belly! Hard to believe I give them the same amount of food.

And I took this one of Ollie the other day. I got him a harness, and took him outside to explore:

He seemed to enjoy his time outside. Look at him getting his run on!

I spent some time out in the back patio the other day, raking up two years’ worth of pine needles and trash:

Before:

After:

I got a cute little patio set from Ikea the other day, which I’ll be putting out there once my father puts it together for me. I got some cushions for the chairs too, two in green stripes (for the bench) and plain chocolate brown (for the two chairs). It’s a really small set, so it will fit perfectly in the back patio.

I finally got some pain meds for my leg, which has been bothering me pretty much since I’ve been out of work. It seems to be working, although it makes me SO THIRSTY. I can’t get enough to drink, it seems.

No plans for today, though I do want to run to Target and pick up Caprica - it came out on dvd yesterday. If the sun stays out and dries out the back yard, I have some pine needles that need to be bagged up and dragged out, as well as the trash that I collected. It rained buckets all of yesterday though, so that may have to wait until the weekend before it’s dried enough. It’s supposed to come close to hitting 80*!

(ames)

Now that the big baby blanket of doooooooooooooom is done, I’ve been casting about for something to do.  Enter one trip to Boston to visit Aya, a shopping expedition to Michaels, and voila:

Three of the first five squares for the Babette Blanket (link to the flickr search result). I’ve got two more done, little two-rounders, but I want to figure out how to join them together before I make any more. I usually don’t mind seaming, even though I’m pretty bad at it, but I have no desire to spend hours sewing 190-odd little squares together, and then doing a three-round border. I will never finish it that way! If you look closely at the one with the green center, you can see where I decided to do the color change a different way.  MUCH better, yes?  Yes.

And, because I think it’s pretty, here:

A card made just for me by my mother. <3

(aya here)

(ames)

Well, this is a little embarrassing - it’s been two months since I last posted here.  Yikes.  Quick, let me throw some knitting at you!

I finished these! Twisted Tulip Socks from Interweave Knits. Done and done! And yes, I’m hiding the too-pointy toe of one of them, which spurred Aya to ask if I’d actually finished them, or was I just hiding the unfinished behind the finished. Ha. They are complete!

I also finished this! The Big Bad Baby Blanket from Stitch & Bitch, or whatever the name of that book is. The yarn is Patons Bamboo Silk, doubled, and the pattern was one of the more boring things I’ve ever made. But I was happy to do it! The blanket is now in full-on use by a brand new human being whose mommies are thrilled with it.

Here, have a closeup of the middle:

Pretty, huh?

I abandoned this! I’ll probably pick it up again later, but I kept screwing up the pattern and got frustrated. I do love the colors, though. It’s like the strawberry and chocolate parts of Neopolitan ice cream. (Anyone else call that VanChocStraw when you were a kid?)

I also abandoned this! Well, not so much abandoned as realized that Trekking Pro Natura isn’t the best yarn choice for the Bayerische Sock - far too many two-stitch twisting and cables. I’ve restarted it with bright yellow Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock, which I think will work out much better. Plus, I have four skeins of the stuff, which should be more than enough even for this yarn hungry pattern.

So, as you can see, knitting up a storm. I’ve still got knitting planned - there’s a baby sweater, some socks, I knit one sock and decided over the weekend that I hated it and it needs to be ripped out and reknit into a Monkey, or perhaps a Broadripple. Aya and I tackled crochet over the weekend, with an eye towards making the Babette Blanket, but I’ve decided that I want to use a bigger hook than I currently own. OF COURSE. So, it’s on hold until I can get to Michael’s or some such place to stock up. (oooh, if it’s nice this weekend, I can walk down to Hancock Fabrics. I bet they have the hook I need.) But tonight I am watching Farscape ( <3 Aeryn Sun <3 ) and watching my best friend’s dog sleep on my couch. Aw.

(aya here)

I finally buckled down and put all of the yarn stash in one spot. Now there’s the matter of weeding through it, getting it all sorted out into types (sock, dk, worsted, etc) and deciding whether to keep the UFOs or scrap them. For the most part, I am scrapping them. If they’ve been sitting on needles for over two months, they’re getting scrapped. Now I know where all my US2 dpns went!

I spent about an hour just reskeining yarns last night.

The sock weight yarns are all nicely put away in the yarn dresser, after I photographed those that I didn’t have, and putting their pics up in the stash section of Ravelry. I have two single socks (embossed leaves and crosshatch lace), and I will probably cast-on for one of them later today.

Today I will tackle the dk and worsted weight yarns.

As part of the stash reorganization effort, I had to clean out my bedroom closet - because the yarn bureau is located in the closet. That came out wonderfully as well! When I moved into the condo, I just shoved boxes in the closets, to deal with later. Now is Later!  I can actually move around in my closet now, even with the two bureaus in there. I also weeded through more of my clothes and put them in a pile to give away. Ames, I actually have some stuff for you - a couple pairs of jeans and a couple of button-down shirts that are too small for me, but that I think you’d like. You can take a look at them when you get here - make sure to save some empty space in your bag. :D

I also made space in there for my bed linens, as my laundry closet lacks shelving and there isn’t anyplace else to store them. I’m very pleased with how it came out.

So, today, I tackle:

-More of the stash

-the understairs closet

-the hall closet

-the bedroom closet

Once those tasks are completed, I am rewarding myself by watching the X-Files movie that just came in from Netflix. :D

First, though, I need to finish up my coffee and take a shower.  I am really getting used to not needing an alarm clock in the morning.