Ready, Set, Blankies!

I've been away for a week, not by choice, but because the power supply on my computer died on Saturday. The new one didn't come until Wednesday, and I was too busy to blog on Thursday because something came in the mail....


KP Shine Sport in Cream, Sand, and Grass


Cream, Grass, and Willow


Cream, Willow, and Sand

Those are my center/inner border/outer border combinations for the triplets' blankies. I was so excited, I spent the whole hour before I went to work yesterday morning getting the first one started, so that I forgot to eat anything for lunch!

This is what I have so far, just starting the second ball of Cream...



I actually have no idea how big these are going to end up. I bought six balls of yarn for each, four Cream and one of each border color, and I plan on using it all up, that's why I'm doing this from the center out, so I'd end up with something square without bothering to swatch and measure and number-crunch first. Though I got so far from the first ball, we'll see where I am after three--if I don't need the fourth ball of Cream for each I can whip up some stuffed toys or booties or something from them.

The Thin Multicolored Line

Mystical Creation Yarns Cotton 10/2 in Tempus




Someday I'll decide what to do with this gorgeous stuff....

Lions and Nieces and Nephews, Oh My!

My brother called tonight, which is a rare occurrence, but since my parents just headed down to see them and go to Disneyworld together, I figured it was just to let me know they got there okay. My mother would have insisted, she's a worrier and I inherited that from her.

Instead, he calls, and tells me I'm to be an aunt, not just once, but three times over!

My first reaction was a squeal. My second was "Oh my God!" Third, I made the pronouncement, "I'd better get knitting."

The little ones' genders have not yet been revealed--he said it would be six weeks before they found out. So I immediately designed, in my head, a three-color blanket, so I could switch the three colors around for the three babies.

Next stop: Knit Picks. It ended up being four colors--one center color for all three, with two colored borders that would be the three switching colors (It will make more sense once you see me get started, I swear.) I picked out Cream, Willow, Sand, and Grass.

I'm so excited, I can't wait for the yarn to get here!

Pron in a Hurry

Another Warholesque pron day, because I really should have realized last night that I should have posted then, instead of cutting into my packing time this morning. We're going away for the weekend! So this morning's a quickie.

This time, I did all five palette switches, then I chose the one of the five I like best and would actually use, if I did have that magic wand that would change the color of the yarn in my stash at will.

Taxes, but no Death

Those big plans--or at least, those sort of big plans--that I had for an Etsy shop?

Sort of dashed.

This weekend I did a bit more research, and I discovered the tax information on the Etsy wiki. Super helpful stuff, I'm glad it's there.

But have I ever mentioned how incredibly intimidating I find paperwork? The year that I worked in three states, two of which had reciprocal tax agreements with each other but not the third, my taxes had me in tears.

I looked over the forms I would be required to use if I became self-employed and made more than $400, which would be nice, right?

It asks for information that I don't even understand!

Even the stuff that makes sense, doesn't make sense. I have half a dozen bags knit up, but it was all from my stash...I didn't keep receipts for any of it, so I can only guess at the materials cost for each bag. (I know I would track future purchases and save the slips, but my stash? WTF?) And that's just one example of how I don't know what I'm doing.

Etsy is nice and friendly and wants me to just go nuts selling stuff, but the US Gov't wants me to be a business and do all the paperwork that I just have no idea how to do.

Could I learn? Probably. Do I have any idea where to start? No.

In theory, I think I could just write everything down in a ledger and save everything related to this "business" and let a tax professional sort it all out...but then I'd have to pay someone, and I dislike spending money to do things I could do myself, especially when the point of this enterprise is to get a little more money into my pockets. And what if, through my ignorance, even then I'm still missing some kind of crucial information and my taxes end up fucked?

I know that this is just me being scared and cowardly. Some people throw themselves at these kinds of challenges, thrive on them. I hide in a corner and wait until they go away. I'm terrified that I'm going to do something wrong!

So the bag knitting mojo is gone, for the moment. How can I work up any enthusiasm when now, they're probably going to end up sitting in a pile in my closet being useless....

I did finish my tank top in time for the big party this weekend, it fits and everything, so that will be modeled shortly, but the light is bad today, and I feel kinda blah about this whole thing, so I don't want to smile for the camera.

Do Not Adjust Your Monitor

I took new pr0n pictures this morning, but as I was editing them, I stumbled upon an option in my wonderful little faux-Photoshop freeware that I had not seen before.

Swap Color!

So I pulled out the first pron I ever did, a still life of the KP Palette I was using for this project. And then I went a little Warhol.







I'm going to have to play more and see if I can come with anything else interesting this program can do...

ETA: The program I use is Irfanview, an image viewer with a basic array of editing options. I do miss having access to Photoshop, which I did in college, but honestly, I don't really need all those bells and whistles just for blogging...

The Tank Soldiers On

My funk is over. I won't go delete the post and pretend yesterday never happened, but I feel better, and it's time to move on.

Move on....like a fox! (Still watching old Simpsons episodes, if you couldn't tell. They're great to knit to.)

It's a gray, thundery day chez Avrienne, but the poor lighting still reveals that I just bound off the armhole stitches on the OMGit'snotabag tank.



Though close inspection also revealed a mistake! Gasp! Horror! But it's six inches down from where I am, and I'm not going to fix it. If I weren't on a timetable here, I probably would. But having to rip all that back and reknit it does not make me want to keep going right now--being on the armhole shaping does.



If I keep knitting and not playing video games, this should be done by the end of the week. Then I get to find out if my first from-the-ground-up garment design is a total knockout or a total failure!

The one where I whine and ramble

I wonder, sometimes, if knitting blogs are like cable TV...because you know that if you had every channel, then the same old movie is probably playing 24 hours a day between all of them.

Lately a lot of the blogs I read have had posts about comments.

I stopped posting to, then deleted my blog that ran for three years, in part because I wasn't really satisfied that anyone was reading it anymore. There were other reasons, ones that made a great deal of sense, but I won't deny that I felt like I was speaking to an empty room sometimes, and it was frustrating.

Of course, since this was pre-Bloglines, I couldn't really know that for sure...maybe I had a thousand readers. Maybe I had a million!

But if so, they were all lurkers towards the end.

At the time, how was I supposed to know if I went for months without any comments? I couldn't know.

Now, we have Bloglines. I know that I have eight subscribers, and that makes me happy.

Now, the challenge is not to feel like I'm wasting my time because I have eight and other blogs I read have hundreds, with one or two clocking in at 1000 or more.

I got several comments on a few posts in a row last month. Since then, almost nothing. (First off, I know it would be helpful if I actually remembered to do YPF every week. I haven't been, I'm a slacker, and I am once again resolving to be better about it. But even my YPF posts don't get the volume of comments they used to. I think traffic on that ring has slowed down a bit as people get lazy...I know I don't leave as many comments every Friday as I did in the beginning.)

I could say that I blog only for myself, but that's just not true. If this were only for me, I'd be handwriting shit in a journal with a picture of a stained-glass window on the front or something, and it wouldn't be about knitting, it would be about....well, I don't even know. It's not like I have all the high-school-type drama in my life that I used to.

I told myself when I started blogging again that I wouldn't get all uptight if my blog turned out to be unpopular. I told myself it didn't matter if I only got one comment a month, or twenty.

But you know, it does matter. When I see a sudden drop-off like this, I wonder if I'm being boring. I wonder if I said something that scared off my readers. I wonder if someone else is saying shit about me somewhere I'm not seeing it. (I've witnessed enough inter-blog drama to recognize it as a possibility, even if I doubt it's actually going to happen to me, since I tend not to say inflammatory things for that very reason...she says as she finally posts something that may very well be inflammatory. Argh.)

I'm even writing this in Notepad before I actually post it, something I normally reserve for heated personal correspondence that involves stuff I probably would regret saying a week later, in case I decide to just delete it without ever posting it, in case I want to set it aside to stew for a day or two before editing it into something useful. It's awful hard to write a post on the subject of commenting, without it coming across as a desparate plea for more comments. But it also bothers me that I'm afraid to say what's on my mind on my own blog, for fear of it being misinterpreted. Because readers do often think posts about commenting are pleas in disguise--most of the recent posts I mentioned reading got record numbers of comments in response, even if the authors of those posts never intended that result. So am I doing this because it's something that I was thinking about when I couldn't get to sleep last night, or am I writing this huge rambling whinefest to make people react to me and prove they're out there? I'm honestly not even sure. I guess you could say I'm pissed off about feeling like I shouldn't say any of this, so I'm saying it anyway, and my fears be damned. Part of me is worried about getting flamed or something for whining about comments....and part of me is worried about getting flamed for being arrogant enough to think I have anything to say worth being flaming about! I can't win!

Why am I afraid of people thinking that I want attention? Why is it such a horrible thing to want your efforts to inform or entertain to be acknowledged? Why would I even bother to be here, doing this, at all, if I didn't want to hear any response to it?

Ugh! Blog politics make me tired. I wish I didn't have to go in to work early today, so I could go back to bed for a while.

No writing, just knitting!

So there! I do so still knit! :)

Four WiPs in various states to show off today.

First, the OMGit'snotabag tank. The front is done...



...and the back is up just past the decreases in the waist shaping. The event I hope to wear it to is just under two weeks away, so this is going back into the high priority category. (For shame, I haven't worked on it in a week.)

The yarn is somewhat of a mystery....no, gilraen, I don't mind you asking, as long as you don't mind me taking my sweet time getting around to answering, and not getting that satisfying of an answer. Five years ago, when I first discovered knitting blogs and ebay, I went a little nuts. I trolled ebay a lot, and I got a few good deals on good yarn, and a few super deals on what turned out to be very bad yarn.

This "vintage" yarn was apparently acquired by the seller at an estate sale. I got nine skeins of something with skein wrappers that only said "Unger Gypsy" and "50% silk/50% acrylic". No yardage information anywhere I could see. The paper was crisp with age, and the printing and graphics style screamed ancient--at least, for yarn--my best guess is late 60's, but as I've been unable to dig up any useful information on the intarwebs, it is only a shot in the dark.

I made it first into a shawl based on an enlarged doily pattern...but I didn't like the way it turned out. Next I tried a Typeset Tee, and it was turning out beautifully, until I got halfway down the back and realized that I wouldn't have enough yarn left for the sleeves. Well, maybe one sleeve the length I wanted, but not both...so knowing that I had enough for a largish body but not sleeves, I knew, this time, I would have enough yardage for a close-fitting, low-necked tank.

Okay, on with the WiP parade. Three bags! My bag-craziness continues!

Here's the very-nearly-finished version of my SWS mosaic piece--it only needs a lining.



The side "seams" are really single crochet over the cast-on and bound-off edges. The dowels I attached by single crochet as well, and the handles are lucet braids.

Next up is the completed body of the freeform bag, front and back:





When it got wide enough, closing it to make a tube wasn't all that hard; the large navy rectangle in the center of the back was my bridge piece that first closed the gap, and I worked out from there.

Closing the bottom, however, was a nightmare I won't attempt to describe. If I do another one of these, I'll decide on the height and make both the top and bottom edges straight instead of just the top so I can do a simple seam.

Now, it's waiting on some kind of finishing for the top edge, the strap(s), and a lining. I'm really not sure what I want to do with this one, so it may stew for a while.

Last, but most certainly not least, a bag inspired by my day at work yesterday. I was taking orders in drive-thru, and it was a slow afternoon, so I indulged in a bit of sport I like to call purse-watching: studying the purses of the women who come through while I wait for them to get their money out.

The bag I saw that gave me this idea was actually rather ugly. It was a rectangular wicker hamper with a profuse fringe at the top edge. The fringe was awful, it was four different colors of thick cord strung with single matching-colored disc-shaped wooden beads at the end. The cord and the beads were so large, and the fringe so thick, that the top level of the fringe stuck up and out from the opening of the purse.

I didn't like the colors. I didn't like the beads. And I most certainly didn't like the knots! So I started pondering how I could make a knitted bead fringe with no knots, and as soon as I got home from work, started swatching to test my theories. Eureka!--I could have cried (but I didn't.) My method worked.

I was so excited, I spent all of yesterday evening knitting this...fortunately we'd just bought season ten of The Simpsons, and my husband was perfectly content to watch the first three discs with me while I worked.





This is also awaiting a decision about the strap(s)--little double straps for handbags are always easiest, but I do like the extra-long shoulder strap too, and the war always rages within me--and a lining. Though I'm pretty sure I have the lining fabric picked out for this one already, I just have to make the straps so I can sew it all up at once.

And with that, I am spent. I don't think I've ever done a four-WiP post before....

No knitting, just writing

It's weird how things fall together sometimes. When I lost my hard drive just short of a year ago, I lost all the fiction I'd written pretty much since college. Most of it wasn't all that great, most of it wasn't at all finished, but I was still bummed that it was gone.

I hadn't written any more stuff since I failed to finish NaNoWriMo last year, but last week, I remembered one of the lost stories that I'd started, and decided to restart it. Some of my ideas about where it will go have changed, and so have the names and details and such, and so has my writing style--this is a story I must have started years ago, and while I still wouldn't say I'm a good writer, I would like to think I've gotten at least a little better.

I've written maybe six pages in between work and knitting and WoW, so it's slow, but I was happy to be writing again.

Then the charming DomesticOverlord starts talking creative writing over on the Knittyboards.

While this isn't at all indicative of my style, nor is it polished, I will throw pride aside and present my response to her prompt.

----------------------------------------

It was so much worse this way.

I was ready for it when I first heard the news, at least, I told myself that. I remember crying after the phone call from my mother--she was upbeat and optimistic as ever. The doctors were confident, she said, so she was confident too. Everything would be fine.

But deep in my heart, even as I was still talking to her, putting on a brave face, I was preparing for the worst. I told her I loved her, and to give my love to him, and said goodbye, and before I took another breath I was sobbing.

I couldn't tell my parents about my doubts, about my fears. I felt ashamed of myself for not believing that my brother would live.

And then he did live. And I never told anyone that I had ever thought it would be otherwise.

Five years of reasonably good health and daily thanks to God, he had. Five years of thrice-a-day medication, five years of followup surgeries and not-quite-routine-anymore physicals.

Three years with his wife.

It was so much worse this way, having believed the worst was over.

This time, when I hung up the phone, I didn't need to feel ashamed of my tears. My mother had sounded like she'd aged ten years in a day, and I had barely been able to keep my stomach down when she fell back on the tired platitudes the doctors had fed her. It had been sudden, and he probably hadn't felt any pain. But that wasn't any comfort, not to me. He was still gone.

Five years of distant fears, of telling ourselves that the risk of complications was so small, it practically didn't exist at all...he was always so strong, so happy, that it was even easier to forget that the thing in his head had nearly killed him, to forget that he would never really be out of the woods.

What was that line from Macbeth? "Macbeth shall never vanquished be until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him."

My brother's woods finally caught up to him, held back by a surgeon's knife and that scar that made us all laugh because it made his hair stick up in the front.

Someday, remembering his funny hair may make me laugh again. Today, I just can't.