A Riot of Purple

When I was in fourth grade my Mom bought me a ginormous bag of new school clothes. 

Every single item was purple.

Which was AWESOME! 

Because purple was my favorite color.

I have a feeling Sweet Pea would have approved

She too is a fan of dressing like a grape.  (and she's in fourth grade!  Maybe it's the age?)

Both her hat and her sweater were made by me.  But really I'm just show off what a cutie my fourth child is.

The hat pattern is "Goblin Hat."  I have no further details about this hat.  I have no idea how I even found the pattern.  It took me ten minutes of ravelry searching to find the pattern today so I could link it. I'm glad I found it.  It's really cute and I'd love to knit twelve more.  I think the yarn was the rejected yarn from this project.  But I couldn't swear to it.  I probably used size 6 needles for the whole hat.  But I'm just guessing.  I might have pulled out size 8 dpns for this but who knows.

I really am the worst blogger.

The sweater

The pattern was Little Boxy, by Joji Locatelli.  She's one of my favorite designers.  And I knit her grown up version of this sweater  last year  at some point in my life.  This was knit with Knit Picks Stroll Tonal Sock Yarn.  I used a skein and the left over bits and bobs from my Step Mommy's sweater.  If you look you can see where the two different dye lots are clashing.  It's all good.  It's another subtle homage to the 80's color block sweater.

The construction of Joji's sweaters is always a little more complex than your average raglan sweater, but I love the combinations of textures here, the rolled collar, the garter stitch at the shoulder, the smooth stockinette of the body. 

The Queen was very concerned that Sweet Pea look her best in these photos.

She appointed herself Sweet Pea's personal stylist, and made sure the sweater laid just so in each picture.

She did a good job.

It's Story Time!

We haven't had a good disaster story around here in a while.  It seems time for things to go horribly wrong.

See this beautiful throw

I test knit that for KnitPicks.  (It's now a free pattern available here)  Photo credit for this goes to KnitPicks because my finished project photo looked like this.

Why yes, I do still block my stuff on garbage bags.  Probably the exact same garbage bags I used twelve years ago when I first discovered what blocking was.

When I test knit for KnitPicks I have to knit a gauge swatch.

Turns out I only knit gauge swatches if I'm getting paid to.  Otherwise I like to live dangerously. 

The path from humble lowly gauge swatch to finished throw started out smoothly enough.

The designer also has five children and she likes to design patterns that are easily memorized but with just enough change to keep it interesting.  She achieved her goals with this one.  You had to pay a little attention to what you're doing but not too much.  It is perfect tv knitting.

And when it got big enough you could snuggle under it while you knit.

I knit this while marathoning Quantico.  Season one was better than season two (which explains why there wasn't a season three).

But I wasn't the only one in the house who loved this blanket

Pumpkin LOVED this blanket.

I don't know if it was the color, or the yarn itself (it was knit with Mighty Stitch Bulky which is super soft and smooshy) or if it just smelled so much like me she couldn't resist loving it.  But seriously, I could not keep her away from it.

Side note, when we did the big furniture change downstairs we upgraded my knitting chair.

The otter man opens for knitting storage!  How awesome is that!

But this is neither here nor there.  Back to the cat.

So Pumpkin loved the big grey blanket.  And the morning I was to block it I took this picture for Knitpicks.

Then I ran down stairs to grab my wool wash to soak it in.  And when I returned I discovered Pumpkin not only on the blanket, but doing that weird nursing/pawing thing cats do sometimes.

And while she was doing that weird nursing/pawing thing she did this.

It is hard to see from the way I was holding it in the picture, but she pulled out that loop, and it was broken.  She chewed through the yarn.  And that's not a third of the way from the top of the blanket.  That's a third of the way from the bottom.

And I realized as I pulled out my contracts that the blanket was not due the next week like I thought.  It was actually due in the Knitpicks offices THAT SAME DAY!  I have never missed a deadline and it felt terrible to miss this one. 

And there was nothing to be done but frog it back down to the bad spot, take it out, and reknit the top two thirds of the blanket.

Which I did.

In two days.

Sometimes I'm a crazy fast knitter.

Or maybe I'm just crazy.

That could be it too.

I told my little brother that she's lucky she's such a nice cat with lots of redeeming qualities or I wouldn't put up with her nonsense.   He laughed and asked "the nonsense of her being a cat?"  Yes, exactly.  If she weren't such an awesome cat I wouldn't put up with her being a cat.

And that's the story of the grey blanket.

Go forth and knit one of your very own.

And keep it away from Pumpkin.

It's Been A Long Time

Hello Blog.

As I told my group chat girls "There is no knitting.  There is only me strumming my guitar.  Badly."

And while that's a little bit of an exaggeration.

There is a whole lot of truth to it as well.

Which isn't to say that I can play guitar yet.  My chord changes are abysmally slow.  Bar chords are still an emerging skill.  But I am enjoying relearning music theory as it pertains to the guitar strings/frets.  Way back in the dark ages before the dawn of man I was a music major in college.  I was a vocalist who also dabbled in piano (the official term for my keyboard skills was "proficient", which isn't to say I was good, but I was passable at the basics).   All those long forgotten lectures on music theory and "using all the crayons in the crayon box" are starting to resurface, as is my love for music.  It was always there, the need for music in my life.  But I'd forgotten how much I love not just to listen to music, but to MAKE music.  It feels good.

And I got a new guitar.

I know.  I don't NEED two guitars.  But we wandered into the guitar store and there it was.  So beautifully blue I couldn't resist.  It is my favorite shade of blue and it matches my favorite nail polish (that I happened to be wearing that day).  It was love at first sight. The Greatest immediately bought it for me calling it my birthday present.  But even if my birthday hadn't been right around the corner he would have bought it for me.  My birthday was just a convenient excuse to spoil me.  He really is The Greatest!

So I returned the favor and bought him an upgraded guitar for his birthday.

Our music room now looks like this.

Guitar Acquisition Syndrome (also known as GAS) is real.

On the knitting front there has been knitting.

Unfortunately it is all Knit Picks knitting.  So I can't talk about it until the test knits are published.  Fortunately for me they recently released their "Merry Knitmas" collection and I can show you one of my favorite test knits ever.

Look how flipping cute that is!  I knit that pillow.

Here it is modeled less artistically on my knitting chair.

I loved knitting it.  I have to admit I looked at the chart and felt a little overwhelmed but once I got in to the rhythm of it it was very fun to knit.

I tried very hard to convince my contact at Knit Picks to send the pillow back to me when they were done with it.  I'm just so enamored with the rows upon rows of gnome-ish Santas.

But they weren't going for it.

I guess I'm going to have to suck it up and buy yarn to knit two (or three, or maybe four) for my house.

That's really going to eat into my guitar practice time.