QA Says:

The kitty beds are a success! :)






Meet Smokey and Sugar.

Many thanks to Mom and Dad for providing the pictures. :)

Quick Saturday post

I wanted to post a few pics of Kitty Bed Progress, hopefully fleshed out by more words on Monday.

Here's the finished, bound-off after being ripped and reknit, Kitty Bed #2.






I wanted to take a couple of pictures to try and convey how big this sucker was. Look here.






And this one, feeling a bit silly... RAAAAAAR!!!






Then I felted it last week. I love the subtle coloring. :) To my surprise, the Wool of the Andes felted A LOT.






And again, for silly scale :)






Please forgive the bad Saturday hair. Especially in the case of the grey Dancing Vines sweater that I finally finished all of the end weaving for. I decided that since this sweater was Much Too Much Too Big, I was going to send it to Mom for a floppy keep-warm sweater. She said she was very happy with this on the phone. Hopefully she'll still be happy with it. I took a picture of it before I packed it, the kitty beds, and a couple other things in a mailing box to send to Mom for her birthday next Friday. I haven't finished the Branching Out scarf yet. Maybe she'll get it late.

Okay, I really ought to go before Dan thinks I fell in. =)

Hi there!

Back from doing the conference thing. The first one was the 2005 Annual Protein Society Meeting in Boston, which I commuted to. I had had fond fantasies of the knitting I would do on the train, a la Wendy Knits. Unfortunately, the reality of my situation was that I needed to finish my poster for the second conference, the 2005 FASEB Glucose Transporter Biology Conference in Snowmass, CO. So, instead of knitting, my first picture is this:






Yes, that's me in the yellow conference T-shirt. They ran out of poster board space so I had to tack mine to a wall. Enzyme kinetics confined to the ghetto! (Just kidding.) I had a lot of fun, went to conferences and was entertained by some and bored by others, went white water rafting in the rain, finished two books to the amazement of my coworkers, and even got a wee bit of airplane knitting done.






I admit, the scarf shows some SnB progress as well. This is the Branching Out scarf from Knitty. The ladies of SnB decided it might be fun to knit it as a knit-a-long. I'm knitting it in Knit Picks Gossamer in the colorway "Leprechaun". I hope to finish it for Mom's birthday, even if concentrating on knitting it can be a bit of a pain. I've not internalized the pattern yet so progress is slow.






The other thing I'm going to send Mom (though it's really a gift for her small horde of cats) is another Kitty Pi bed, made from the leftover Knit Picks Wool of the Andes that I dyed myself. Dharia made me the most lovely handspun, but I had enough for only one kitty bed and maybe a small purse (which I'm going to keep). I supplemented the dyed WofTA with solid colors in Spruce, Hyacinth, Blueberry, and Evergreen. You can see the first three in the photo, but I've not tied on the Evergreen yet.
Somehow, the kitty bed seems to be going faster than the scarf, but I will perservere.

Also, I will admit that I need to start knitting on my Mom's sweater. I've gauged for it and I think I'll need a size 7 needle... I swear I'll start after her birthday. :)

Oh, and the littly guy is my completed Gumdrop Monster. I just need to get Zeffrin's address so I can mail it to him. =)
He just begged to be in all the pictures this morning. :)

Kitty Bed Ahoy!

Yeah, I've been working a lot and stressing, but I finally got a zippered pillow case and felted my merino kitty bed.



Hopefully you can tell from this picture that it has shrunk considerably. Unfortunately I didn't have a 15-inch platter to stretch the felt on, so it dried on my 12 inch one wrapped in towels. (which wasn't very taut) I'm thinking Smokey might not mind the bumps in the center, or Mom can stretch it on her pie keeper perhaps after I mail it to her. I'm excited though... it was my first venture into felting and I think it went very well. I'm still amazed (though I shouldn't be) that the thing stands up on its own. Ya ta! (Now to mail it. :)

What else that is neeto is how the two vareigated yarns held together blended into a mottled-yet-purty whole. There's this spiral pattern on the back outside that is cool and was totally unanticipated (at least by me).

What's on the needles now? I've been working on a gumdrop monster inspired by a LiveJournal crafty person I know primarily as crochetsamurai (The coolest name!). She has a web site with critters for sale, Pepperberry. She's got the coolest marine stuff*d t*ys, and a couple weeks ago she tried her hand at making a monster. Now, I would be hard put to making a stuff*d squid, but hopefully I can try to make a monster. Especially since ideal symmetry isn't a requirement.

Since my 5 yr old cousin Zefferin is obsessed with Poke mon, (and his noun for random-animal-spotted IS stuff like 'water Poke mon', 'air Poke mon', etc) I thought he might like a blue homage-to-the-gumdrop-monsters. I'll try and post a picture in a couple days... right now he's a blue blob with two blue paws and two black horns. If I'd had a brain, I'd have taken a picture of him with the kitty bed... ahh well. I get to figure out how to sew a face onto him tonight at SnB.

Okay, gotta go do lab work. :)

The new Knitty is up!

This would be www.knitty.com, btw. Most of the patterns are pretty cool. Some are a bit odd, but that's Knitty for you. =)

I'm still sad that I didn't make it in. I understand now a lot of Dan's frustration that most form letters don't tell you what precisely was wrong with your submission, so that you could fix it for next time. Ach well.

I still think I might shorten Dan's vest a bit so it's not too long. That and someday make it up out of a less toasty yarn weight so the poor man doesn't cook because he loves me. And knit it in two peices, back and forth, so that there's not a wierdness issue when I go from circs to straights.

However, while I'm dissapointed, I still learned a lot. Just like baseball, maybe next time. :)