Pi

So the Pi Shawl and I had a little photo session today.

Details
The Pattern is Pi Shawl by Elizabeth Zimmerman, from the Knitter's Almanac.

I followed the instructions exactly (with the only exception that I did only 1 row of diamonds in the last section instead of 2, but I think that still counts. Stop laughing.)

This is an astonishing accomplishment for me, and could really only have been done with a pattern designed by one as great as St. Elizabeth. It is perfect.

The yarn is laceweight merino from handpaintedyarn.com. The colorway is Applewood (forcing me to have to resist the urge to call it Applewood Pi).

It is yummy yarn and I will definitely use it again some day. This shawl took exactly 1 skein (950 yards). Actually it didn't take all of it, I had exactly this much left.

I was not worried because I actually had another skein, but still. You can't plan something like that.

(BTW, if someone wants the second skein, I can't imagine wanting to use the same colorway again so it's available.)

This picture does not do it justice because of the bad light in the living room and the whole broken camera thing. But I figured I'd better try to get 1 picture of the whole thing.
I am deeply deeply in love

Obsession

Last Wednesday I finished the main part of the Pi Shawl and started working out a border.

I spent most of the evening knitting and ripping out until I came up with one I liked. Basically I played around with how faggoting and eyelet holes would look in different numbers of stitches of garter stitch.
I ended up with a 12 stitch, 4 row repeat that I liked quite a lot.

Then I got a little obsessed with knitting the edging.

I knit on it all night Thursday at knit night. It may have been the first time I've ever worked on only 1 project the entire night. We tried to figure out how long it would take. I asked my math friend who's bad at arithmetic to figure it out. We somehow came up with a crazy ass number like 7 hours.

Uh, no.

But I really really REALLY wanted to finish, so I plodded on.

It became kind of zen the way the Yarn Harlot was with her leaves. I knit nothing else (which is unheard of). Lots and LOTS of border stitches.

(By the way, in case anyone was wondering, there are 13,824 stitches in a 12 stitch border on a Pi Shawl.)


I finished it last night. Here it is blocking on my bed (which, conveniently has a round medalion pattern on it already)
Kind of cool, I thought, how the patterns overlap.
By the way, blocking wires totally rock. It took about an hour anyway, to get it all blocked out. I cannot even imagine doing it all with pins alone.

Pics of the finished project coming later when the light is good and it's not raining.

Eternal optimism

Molly has been exposed to knitting for her entire life. So I would think she'd get the general idea. She has seen me knit things. She wears things I've knit, that she saw when they were yarn. She's 7 (almost 8 yikes!) but she doesn't always think like a 7 year old. Sometimes it's hard to really tell how she thinks at all.

While in the hotel from hell on the way to Florida, we watched an episode of Higglytown Heroes where one of the little whats-its guys was knitting a scarf (in about 10 seconds). In the episode (called Shear Luck) she ran out of yarn and had to call a sheep farmer to shear a sheep, and spin the fleece into yarn, so she could finish her scarf).

Ever since then, whenever she sees me knitting she asks "Are you knitting my pink socks?" Nevermind that the knitting in question is usually brown, or it was blue for a while, or deep purple. None of it has ever been pink, or a color even close to pink. Most of it hasn't looked like a sock (except the purple socks). Surely she can't think a cream/tan/peach/brown lace shawl is a pink sock, right?

Apparently she's under the same sort of delusions as the Yarn Harlot's nephew Hank, and thinks that knitting is transformative, not just to the shape of the yarn, but to the actual color. And apparently to the already produced bits of knitting. If you know what you're doing, you can turn brown yarn into a pink sock. Now that's optimism.

Molly has never actually *asked* me to make her pink socks, but just says several times a day "Are those my pink socks?" ummm, nope, sorry, blue pants (red-orange-pink head scarf/purple socks/bulky brown wrap/brownish lace). But when I found myself at Mass Ave last Saturday I had to find some yarn for pink socks.
This hot pink Babyboo DK weight bamboo blend yarn seemed perfect. It is, by the way, so so so soft. I can't stop petting it. I am considering making myself a pair of socks out of it too.

Last Sunday we were going to spend the day at my dad's house with a lot of extended family to celebrate a birthday and watch the Colts beat the Chargers. I wanted some mindless knitting for football so I brought the pink sock yarn.

In the car on the way there I took at guess at the size, cast on 32 stitches, knit for about an inch. When we got there I tried it on, and it seemed right so I kept going. Vinatieri kicked a 47 yard field goal that put us in the lead. Things were going fine.

All afternoon I knit the sock, and watched the game. The Chargers pulled ahead, but we'd been down before. I tried the sock on for length or foot length. It seemed a little tight, but that was just because it was still on the needles. It's hard to put a sock on someone else's foot. I believed, both in the game and in the sock, right up until the very end.

All the way to the toe graft, when I held up the sock declared the victory.

Then I tried to put the sock on Molly again and finally had to accept defeat. Knitterly denial will only get you so far. While I CAN put it on her foot, it's just too small.

Damn.

Now I have to go watch the Chargers get the crap beat out of them by New England.

And start over with the sock.

Results are in

Contest Winners

Well I finally got around to figuring out who the winners of my contest were. I am amazed at how close some of you came.

I got out the scale and the calculator and did a little math for the yardage. The actual answers were 2,468 miles driven and 1,047 yards knit.

Mileage guesses ranged from 2,050 miles to 25,125 (which was revised to 2,512!). The closest guess was actually placed very early in the contest by Debbie D, who guessed 2,450, just 18 miles from the actual answer.

Yardage guesses were more wild, ranging from 675 to 2,122. Winner of this one goes to Emily S, who guessed 1,050 (even closer!)

Check your email ladies...

I am in love

Look what showed up at my house today:

THAT... is over 16 pounds of Kauni.

You just can't tell how big these mountains of yarn are from the pictures. It is 2-3 skeins deep. Holy crap.

Too bad most of it isn't mine. Quite a bit of it is, though. I wonder what I'm going to make with it. I feel a swatch coming on.

The end.

The Tragedy
So Molly woke up Friday morning at 5:30 crying in the most pitiful way possible. Seriously, you've never seen anything so sad.

She was miserable, but we couldn't figure out what. She kept saying "I want the _____ back" But what it was? We couldn't tell.

I thought maybe she was saying "I want the body back" but that made no sense.

Then I figured out she was holding on to the princess bracelet we'd gotten her from Disney World and that one of them was missing.

And in fact it was Cinderella

It was quite some time before I realized that Cinderella wasn't missing, she was decapitated


See? A little Cinderella head.

Now it all makes sense.

Once I took the little head off she was able to calm down. But that's just freaky, really. You can hardly blame her.

Fortunately Downtown Disney let us trade it for another bracelet. We chose a metal one that seemed less likely to become decapitated, so all is well now.
Sean's favorite part of DTD was the itty bitty $2 train ride.

Anybody have an extra $100 so I can buy this kind of joy?
Friday evening we had reservations at 1900 Park Fare for dinner with Cinderella and her step sisters and step mother, and the prince.

Overall I found the dinner disappointing. We've done several character dining experiences over the years and this was inferior to the others. Cinderella wasn't at our table long enough to even talk to Molly. Some of the others were good, especially Anastasia.

The food was ok, but not as good as we've had elsewhere, and the price we were charged was substantially more than we were quoted when I made the reservation. Oh, and there was NO parking available at all, the tiny parking lot was more than full.
My favorite part was DH dancing with Anastasia. She cracked me UP.

But really, I didn't think there was anything all that grand about the Grand Floridian.

Plus, I hadn't found my coffee mug yet, that perfect one that I would love and would match my kitchen and I could keep for years as a souvenir. Oh, and this was when I broke the camera. So I was feeling pretty bummed.

I did cast on the second sock though, and knit yet another couple rows on the pi shawl. Nothing new though.

Saturday morning, getting ready for Ohana Breakfast.

See Sean's new Mickey crocs? I seriously considered buying those for myself.




This time it was Lilo and Stitch with Mickey and Pluto that we ate with.

(See the Dream Swatch scarf?)
We almost didn't go to this one because the dinner had been disappointing, but I am so glad we did. This day ended up being one of the highlights of the trip.

The characters were awesome, spent much more time at our table, played with our kids, made a point of connecting with Molly.

Oh and one of my favorite things about dining at Disney? See that plate in front of Molly?
That's all gluten-dairy/casein-egg yolk and peanut free.

The chef comes out to the table and talks to us about what she can eat and likes and then brings her her own plate of food. It's beyond awesome, and you can tell she just loves it. We can usually find her something at a restaurant to get by on, but it's always a plain chicken breast or something else equally boring.

But a pile of Mickey shaped waffles and bacon, eggs, potatoes, and guava orange juice?

Heaven.
The regular food was fantastic as well, there was a tray of fruit, some pineapple bread, and those were I think the best waffles I've ever tasted.
The Polynesian Resort is gorgeous, too. Really jaw droppingly beautiful.
And it's got a beach right on the lake by Magic Kingdom.

(See the Space Needle back there?)

That sand is super soft. And the weather was perfect.
This is actually a ficus tree. Who knew they got that big? I couldn't get far enough away from it to get the whole thing in the shot.
After a while hanging out at the Polynesian, we went back to our resort and went swimming again before the dark clouds rolled in.
There was some hanging out in "the hot pool"

And then the sun came back out.

I was trying to take pictures of Rob throwing Sean but somehow this guy kept walking in front of the picture Every. Single. Time.





Swimming was followed by more golf (the place had at least 3 miniature golf courses) and this very cool double rainbow.
Later my dad watched the kids while DH and I went out. We got to downtown disney again and had a beer, and finally found my mug, and the antenna ball Rob was looking for. It was all a perfect end to the trip.

This sign made the kids laugh every time we went by. It's on 192 and it's actually the House of BEEF, but the House of Bee is much funnier.
Sunday morning we were going to leave early, but I was irritated that I'd spent a week in Florida and still didn't have a tan.

So back to the pool we went. It was the best weather we had the whole week, I think it was around 80 with a nice breeze.
On the way home we stopped and picked real oranges. Molly loved this especially.

So that's the end of the vacation pictures. I'm not telling you yet what I finished knitting on the way home. I still have laundry to do.

Are you sick of vacation pictures yet?

There should be 1 more post after this one and then back to regular blogging.

Wednesday was apparently the coldest day ever in the history of the world, if you go by the way the Floridians were talking. The news people kept calling it "dangerously cold" and talking about how everyone needed an electric blanket to get through.

The lowest temperature anywhere was 28F (-2 C) and it wasn't quite that cold where we were. I think the high was 50 F (10 C). Oooh, yeah, dangerously cold. Watch out for frost bite.

I realized in the light of day and soberness that the purple sock was a bit too short. Truth be told, I realized it the night before when I tried it on, but I counted it as finished anyway because I wanted to say I finished a sock in 2 days. But having made that mistake before and discovered that it makes the sock wear out faster when it's stretched on your foot, I took out the toe and re-knit it in the morning while drinking my coffee out of the thimble sized mug they provided to the condos and wishing it was warmer.

I'll admit that we weren't really prepared for that temperature, it really was the coldest day in 5 years, so jackets and gloves were procured from local tourist crap stores.

But it was a high of 14 (F, -10 C) or something back home so 50 wasn't so bad. It was warm enough for golf. I even saw people in the pool, though you wouldn't catch me in there. brrrr!
Instead we drove downtown to the Orlando Science Center where we built a triceratops puzzle (well sorta... we finished it, but there were pieces missing and it was dangerously close to falling over)



Experimented with tornadoes...
And picked oranges... This was Molly's favorite part of the place. You pick them from these trees and put them through a chute and "wash" them, then they drop down and you collect them in baskets and load them into another machine which secretly puts them back on the trees.


Apparently this is really fun. I suppose that's what other people think about my knitting.

The science center was quite fun and I recommend it as an inexpensive and indoor place to go if you're in Orlando with small children. There was also a Science of NASCAR exhibit (which was more about playing with cars than science, but Sean didn't mind).

The only thing that sucked was it took us 35 minutes to get downtown and over 2 HOURS to get home. A few inches were worked on the pants legs but mostly I was too irritated about the traffic and/or too lost on the back streets to knit.

Thursday was our day at Disney World.






















We rode rides, we ate, we were cold, we saw Mickey (and Minnie and Pluto and Goofy and Cinderella, Belle, and Aurora, and Pooh and Tigger... whew!)


Did I mention there were rides? You don't really need to see 20 pictures of my kids on It's a Small World, do you?

It was crazy busy, and when I thought about it later I realized that people all did the same thing we did and went to the parks on the cold days so they could swim on the warm days. By mid afternoon quite a lot of people had left, either to hop to other parks or because they were too cold, I don't know, but it was a lot nicer, and we spent more time inside ride buildings than out, so it was good. It was definitely cold but not as cold as a lot of people seemed to think. Mid 50's isn't really so bad for January.




One really cool thing I'll show you was the lights on the castle. This picture doesn't even do it justice. It looked like someone iced it. Or covered it with crystal. Or fairy dust. Very cool.

Not a single stitch was knit this day and I didn't mind at all.

Vacation Clues (part II)

(I will note that there are some really good guesses so far, so if you're waiting for more clues you better guess soon... actually I have no idea how good the yardage guesses are because I haven't done the math yet.)

So Monday we hung around the resort, went swimming, went up and down 192, which is one of the tackiest places on earth, and bought some crap. I got Sean a 2007 Disney shirt for $3 since it was the last day of 2007, and talked my niece out of buying clams playing poker for her dad.

The resort was really nice. There were so many creatures right in our back yard. Caitie found another one, this time a very cool tree frog.
It was tiny (and sticky)



We had a great big new year's eve get together in one of the rooms.

I should say that this trip was a gift from my dad and his wife for our entire extended family. He got 3 large condos at the resort, each one not quite as big as our house.

This picture shows my dad and his mom(who lives in Sarasota), Dad's wife and BIL, with Molly laying across them, and my sister and her daughter. That's not even half of the people that were there.

There was food and wine and I knit until I finished the sock:
And then had more wine and played Euchre all night. I have forgotten how very much I enjoy playing cards and need to find a way to keep doing it now that we're back.
Some people didn't make it
This picture of daddy sends the kids into fits of giggles

Caitie and I managed to stay up until midnight and then collapse.

Next day (Tuesday) we drove to Clearwater Beach to visit DH's parents and aunt and uncle. I completely forgot the camera, but it was far too cold for the beach. Their pool was heated and quite warm so there was more swimming, but it was quite the shock getting out of the water with that cold wind.
On the way there and back I began and finished this Dream Swatch head scarf out of some acrylic yarn that my kid's had gifted me. I added an extra row between the drop rows because otherwise the yarn was pooling weirdly (and because I cannot follow a pattern, I just can't).

It's a bit bulkier than I wanted and a little too short for me, so I gave it to Caitie, who loves it.

I will have to make myself another one though, in the blue/green/purple color family, as I really like the pattern and the idea. Maybe I'll try to follow the pattern next time.

Contest Clues (or, what I did on my vacation, part 1)

We got off to a late start on Saturday. We planned on leaving at 8 (ish), but I wasn't that upset when we weren't ready until 9. Then a problem with the DVD player and lots of people getting back out to go potty caused further delays. A couple stores later, we got out of town around 10, and drove and drove and drove until we finally stopped south of Macon, Georgia, on Saturday night.

There was, of course, lots of knitting. I brought the Pi shawl, and realized that it helps a lot with the pattern if you read the instructions where it says work rows 1-10 of the previous section, and spent nearly an hour ripping back 6 rows of lace and getting it safely back onto needles. I apparently felt no need to take pictures of this while trying desperately to keep merino laceweight from running away from me.

(In case you're wondering, re-knitting doesn't count toward the yardage in the contest. This will come into play again later as well.) Then I started over and a long while later I got it back where it was when we left and a couple rows further before putting it away. (For the record, these are rows in the 288 stitch section)

Then I decided lace might not be the ideal thing to knit in the car and I'd better at least get some other things going. The gorgeous purple jitterbug was wound and cast on for a plain jane ribbed sock. This yarn is so wonderful and the colorway so perfect that I loved every stitch of it.

I was a good girl and also wound and cast on for the custom order jeans sheepy pants I've got to get done. They are size large and the yarn is Peace Fleece Galooboy Blue. I saved these babies for after dark knitting, for which they were perfect. I have now made so many sheepy pants that I can even work short rows in the dark, a feat of which I am quite proud. I got to the gusset before having to stop, because I don't think it's possible to kitchener in the dark.

We stopped for the night at the Worst Motel Ever, ironically called the Deluxe Inn.

It seemed ok when we first came in. Cheap, nothing spectacular, but that's what we wanted since we were coming in to sleep, shower, drink coffee, and leave.

The problem came when we were all asleep and the train came that was surely going to plow right through our room and scared the shit out of Sean, and continued to do so a dozen more times. I looked at my watch to see how often it was and it was 20 minutes between once and 40 minutes later the next time. I'm sure I somehow slept through it a few times after becoming delerious.

The only plus is that Sean seems to have become desensitized from his fear of loud train noises. By morning when the train came he started to be scared and then realized, hey, it's just that stupid train, and went back about his business.

The best part of all was when I got up to take a shower in the morning and found someone else's wet towel crumpled up behind the door in the bathroom.

So we packed up and got the hell out of the "Deluxe Inn" and drove the rest of the way to Orlando. More sock knitting was accomplished, and the gusset on the jeans and the beginning of the first leg. Oh and a couple more rounds of shawl.
This is the resort we stayed in (thanks Dad!).

Molly spent the entire vacation calling it our Orange house, and it took us much longer than it should have to realize she was calling it that because it is Orange Lake Resorts. She's a smart girl.
There was swimming...

(That is an optical illusion, BTW. That pool is much bigger than it looks from this angle and Sean is not nearly so close to cracking his head open on the side of the pool as it looks like he is.)
There were toads

There were cranes. That is our back patio, and behind those trees is the golf course.

There was knitting (and beer)

(no they are not both mine)

This is the sock at the end of the second day, with a bit of heel flap worked. The color in this picture sucks. I took no pictures of the jeans.

Up next - New Year's Eve and a little jaunt to visit DH's relatives.

Home!

We got home from Florida yesterday and we brought the warm weather with us.

I got some knitting done:

More on that later.

The bad news is I broke our camera. I was so careful with it the whole trip, I kept the wrist strap on or kept it in the camera case. Then on on Friday night I had the case clipped to my purse and it hung down between the van and the door and I closed the door. I didn't close it hard before realizing something was in there, and since it was in a padded case I didn't think that much of it, but the next day I discovered that the LCD is trashed.

What this means is that the camera still works, but I have no idea what pictures I'm taking. I can still turn the flash on and off, but I don't know if it's on or off until I take a picture and find out. I can't control any other settings, white balance, resolution (it's stuck on high, which I guess is better than stuck on low), or any other settings. This means my pictures will look like shit for a while until I get it fixed.

It also means that I have been taking many many extra pictures to make sure I got a good one (lots of them are out of focus). On the last day, on the way home, it stopped taking pictures. I thought the battery was dead, but when I got home and plugged it in, it turned out that my card was just full. 887 pictures (ALL since we left on 12/29). That's a LOT of pictures.

Here this is one of them:

And since I just feel like it (and to force you to read through the vacation portion of my blog...)

Announcing my first ever blog contest.

The contest has 2 parts.

Part 1: Guess how many miles we put on our van on the trip. First person within 50 miles wins. If no one gets within 50 miles then the first person within 100 miles wins. If no one gets within 100 miles then the closest person. The trick is when to guess, because the longer you wait to guess the more information you'll have to go on about where we went. For now I will only tell you that we live in Indianapolis, and that we went to Disney World, but that that wasn't the only place we went.

Part 2: Guess how many yards of yarn I knitted while away. Um, first person within 50 yards wins (or 100, or closest, blah blah blah). All I'm going to tell you is that we we left Saturday 12/27/07, and that we returned Monday around dinner time 1/7/07.

And I'll give you these pictures as clues...

This may or may not be everything that was knit on the trip. Probably not... but both of these items were started and finished away from home.

Rules: There aren't really very many rules. Send your guesses to sheepytime at gmail dot com between now and next Tuesday 1/15. Oh, and you can only guess once for each part. (Well you can, but second guesses won't count.)

Winners will get a choice of a cool prize that I haven't exactly picked yet. But there will be yarn. Or a copy of one of my patterns. Or a small knitted something. Washcloth or diaper doubler or something. One winner for each part. I already know the exact mileage, but I still have some calculating to get my best guess for the yardage.

Oh, and if you live here and you're coming to knit night on Thursday, you have to put your guess in before then because I'm going to bring stuff with me.