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Hover your mouse over any link on my blog and you can see a preview of the page you’ll go to if you click the link.  It’s fancy!

Try these:
Yarn Harlot
Grumperina
Knitty
Aggie Basketball

Well, I’ve had a mostly crap day today.  It has nearly nothing to do
with the fact that it’s V-Day, even though I generally despise the
holiday.  There are some good things about today, though:

1) It gives me an excuse to send people mail!  I love sending mail! 
This is also an excuse to go to Hallmark.  I know Hallmark gets blamed
for Valentines hoopla (I’m one of the blamers, too, don’t worry), but I
really do like Hallmark.  Their cards are hilarious, and their stickers
are super cute.  I consistently spend large amounts of money there. 
2) It has inspired people to work to end violence against women, which is always a great cause.
3) It also inspired the Red Scarf Project.  I didn’t learn about it early enough this year to participate, but I plan to do so next year.

I love what the Harlot had to say about today.  Some excerpts are:

Today, I’ve been studying all day, and it’s far slower and more
difficult than anticipated.  I really like abstract algebra, but it’s
gotten quite hard lately.  Also, I knocked a plate off my desk in my
room onto the base of my chair, and it shattered everywhere.  Shards
went 6 feet in each direction (!)
- into my yarn stash, into the suitcase from Nebraska that I haven’t
quite unpacked yet, towards my bathroom door, and even out into the
living room!  I spent almost 20 minutes (of good study time) picking up
shards off the floor, out of places they’d landed (including into a
pair of shoes…my room is really messy right now…), and attempting
to vacuum them up.  Add to that coldness outside (I know 31 degrees
doesn’t compare to what’s happening north of here, but that’s really
cold for us!), more sleep issues, and general Valentines grumpiness,
and you get a pretty blah day.

And now, I really really need to get back to work.  This has been a nice study break.   I leave you with today’s XKCD:

I’ve been slacking on the knit-blogging lately.  Here’s a parade of finished objects for you to enjoy.  It’s picture-heavy, so my apologies to those of you without a broadband connection…

Spicey’s ‘Britney Spears’ Sweater:
 
The finished sweater, and all the ends I had to weave in, most of which promptly came unwoven once we put it on her and it stretched out.  Does anyone have a solution to that?  It drives me nuts!  I weave in the end, stretch the fabric, and then try to find a good balance, but when it gets stretched again, the end inevitably pops out.  I know you’re not supposed to knot them, but I think that I will on Chloe’s sweater just so the dumb thing doesn’t fall apart.  (They are dogs, after all…)
Pattern: Penny from Knitty, which is decent, but ran really small.  There should be a lot more knitted after the leg holes.  I also don’t think the way the selvedges are written is very clear, but I think I figured it out by the end, and will just do it my normal way on the next one.
Yarn: Berroco Touche`, which I highly recommend.  It’s a soft, non-itchy cotton blend, which is machine washable!

Purses for the Deeds Sisters:
   
I sucked it up as a knit-blogger and didn’t get pictures of the actual finished objects, so here are the most complete pix I have.  The first two are from Amberley’s clutch purse.  The first shows the stitch pretty well, the second is more accurate on the color.  Take the second, fold it in half, sew in a black satin lining, add a snap, and voila!  A clutch!  The last is the two sides of Britta’s being blocked.  Add a black seed stich gusset between the two sides, and black pleather strap, and voila, a bag!
Pattern 1: My own design, basically a rectangle of standard ‘clutch’ size, done in Stitch 47 (Float Stitch Blocks) from Vogue’s Stitchionary Volume 1.
Yarn 1: Universal Yarn’s Bellagio.  Decent yarn that looks black mostly, but shimmers copper.  I have a lot left over that I’m not sure what to use it for.
Pattern 2: Berroco’s Brea Bag.  Honestly, it’s a lot cuter in the pattern picture than real life.  If I made it again, I’d use a more earthy-toned yarn and ditch the gusset that joins the front and back, opting instead to just sew them together.  I’d also probably use a single strand of yarn, or two strands of a thin yarn, and a smaller needle size.
Yarn 2: Lion Brand’s Lion Wool.  A good yarn, although it stained my needles teal.  It didn’t run during blocking though, so that’s good.  Again, I’d use a thinner, smoother yarn (but probably still a wool or wool blend) if I made it again.

Jackie’s Christmas Scarf:
   
You may remember a post about this scarf a looong time ago.  I finally finished it (last ends woven in on the plane!) and brought it to her when I visited two weekends ago.  It’s not designed to be the warmest scarf ever, but hopefully one of the cutest ones!
Pattern: A modification of an extended twin rib dishcloth from a pattern-a-day calendar I got last year.  Comment if you want the pattern and I’ll go look it up for you.  (I’m a little lazy today, can you tell?)
Yarn: PaintBox.  The first skein was amazing!  The second was the worst yarn I’ve ever knit with.  It was spun so poorly, it kept tearing apart as I was knitting, and I don’t knit extremely tightly by any means!  I probably weaved (wove?  Sherry?) in 30-40 ends from where it broke.  That’s why the scarf took so dang long, because the second half of it was miserable to knit.

Charlotte’s Odessa Hat
   
I finally made Odessa and I loved it!  The pattern is great (I would expect nothing less from Grumperina) and tons of fun to knit.  Simple enough that you don’t need to look at the pattern until you get to the decreases, but interesting enough that the hat never got tedious.  Love it, and have already purchased yarn (in Kansas, whoop!) to make one for myself.  This one went to the lovely Charlotte R., who has received the package, thus I can finally post the pictures – outside, stitch detail, and inside!
Pattern: Odessa, written by Grumperina for Magknits
Yarn: Plymouth’s Dreambaby DK, a nice yarn because it’s microfiber (so non-irritating and machine washable!), but not very stretchy.

The hat was so cute, I couldn’t resist modeling it real quick:

I hope you enjoyed the parade!  Hopefully I will blog soon about the t.u. game and my trip to Nebraska!  But first, homework and test and grading to do! 

I went to Kansas this weekend to visit Jackie & Karl and watch the
Aggie Men’s Basketball team play KU at the best college basketball
arena in the country, Allen Fieldhouse. Here are the pix (as always,
click for bigger versions):

From the University newspaper, an un-gig-em yell leader Jawhawk. I thought it was pretty funny!

The famous Molly’s, where so many of my friends have slaved away. The food’s actually pretty good!

The
famed Allen Fieldhouse, and the line to get in. This was the General
Admission line; the student ticket line was even longer. It was so cold
outside!

Inside
the Fieldhouse. It’s an amazing arena, with some pretty great fans (for
the most part). The final score was in our favor (whoop!), although
just barely, because the Jayhawks are a really good team. The last pic
is of the players celebrating on the court after the win!

We
hit the bars in downtown Lawrence after the game; of course I kept all
my A&M garb on! Chaci (in the red puffy jacket) is a big Jayhawk
fan, and was maybe a little upset about the game outcome.

One last picture at the airport before I had to leave. It’s always sad to come home from Kansas, but always so much warmer!

To see all the pictures, you can click here:

Kansas + Basketball!

The first week and a half of school was so busy! Large amounts of sorry-ness for the lack of updates. I promise that sometime soon (hopefully!) there will be some good knitting content. I’ve finished a lot of things lately and want to show them off. But first I have to take pictures of them…

Until then, quick updates. Lisa came to visit this weekend which was a ton of fun. We were going to hit NGate, but we are old ladies and got tired so we didn’t go out. Instead we dyed Jennie’s hair, and it looks really good. I have lots of pics, and will try to do a blog on it.

Mostly I’ve been doing Wiley and School and Aggie Basketball nonstop. I get my first set of papers to grade tomorrow – yay! (Not yay for the time it will take, but yay for the money I’ll make so I can go to Kansas this weekend! )

Mk, back to the lab (hisssss…). Have a great week!

PS – You can check out my pictures from the ice storm by clicking on the albums below. I added new ones to Day 2 today, so even if you’ve seen them before, check ‘em out again!

Winter Blitz 2007

Winter Blitz 2007 – Day 2

I spent a week in Seattle attending the AAS Meeting and visiting my
friends Amberley, Britta, Molly, and Ben. Here is Seattle in pictures:

Seattle in Coffee:

1) Starbucks in Seattle with the Space Needle.  (Manicure from Head-to-Toe Day Spa in the Admiral District of West Seattle.  Go there.  It’s amazing.  Especially the steam room and Loi the manicurist.)
2)
Carosello Coffee, in West Seattle, where Britta works, where I never
remembered to take a picture of my coffee because I was usually running
late for the bus.  (You should get coffee there.  They are friendly, it’s tasty, and there’s free Wi-Fi.  Also, you can buy cheap furniture next door…)
3) After dinner at the AAS Banquet.
4) Seattle’s Best, with random downtown buildings on Pike (or maybe Pine) in the background.

Seattle in Yarn:

1) Seattle Yarn Gallery, in West Seattle
2) A section of the very hilly walk to SYG
3) Plymouth Yarn’s Baby Alpaca Grande from SYG that got immediately
added to the short row rib scarf. This yarn is nothing short of
heavenly to knit with because it is ridiculously soft.  (FYI, if I make this scarf again, I’d probably use worsted weight yarn and smaller needles.  It’s really wide, especially since I don’t live in a very cold climate…except for this week…)
4) Hilltop Yarn up in Queen Anne, a short bus ride from the Convention Center
5) Yarn from Hilltop: the greens are ultrafine merino that will
probably end up as a hat and the purple is superwash worsted (!!!!!!!)
that will become something for Baby Katherine…swatching already in
progress.  (Superwash worsted wool is approximately impossible to find, hence the large number of exclamation points!)

And now, the most amazing yarn news from the trip:

The top photo is the ball band from the Baby Alpaca purchased at Yarns
2 Ewe in Houston. The bottom photo is the ball band from the Baby
Alpaca purchased at SYG. SAME DYE LOT!!! More exciting than I can
express in words, really. See, I bought two hanks in Houston
anticipating making a plain garter stitch scarf but then decided to do
the short row rib one, which takes waaaay more yarn. So I figured I’d
just buy another hank, not even try to match the dyelot, alternate
between the two for a bit near the join, and hope the short row shaping
would hide any color variations. No need! I got the same dye lot
thousands of miles away! Whoop!

Seattle in landmarks:

1) Cute luggage carts at Sea-Tac
2) Pike’s Place Market
3) The Frank Gehry building that houses the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction Museum (Guess which one I went to…)
4) A strip club run by women famous for its funny signs…this was the day of the Seahawks/Cowboys game
5) & 6) A mockup of the James Webb Space Telescope (basically, the next Hubble Space Telescope) at the meeting…so cool! (And behind the JWST is the hospital where Mrs. Deeds worked…)

Space Needle:

Seattle with the Deeds Sisters (and animals):

1) With Amberley, after a good night at the bar, watching the Sonics lose
2) It’s an Ashley sandwich with Deeds bread!
3) With Britta, who is not a gangster, just had dirty hair
4) Gorgeous flowers that Amberley brought me
5) Spicey in the sweater I made for her. I seriously underestimated her size, so her sweater was more like a tube top and she looked like Britney Spears. Luckily, it’s a look that works for her.
6) Chloe, looking all pretty after she spent the day at the groomer
7) Eli, perched on his favorite post

Seattle in snow:

1) & 2) Ok so technically these aren’t in Seattle (duh) they are from the plane flight in.
3) The lightpole outside Carosello…it was a little bit windy too…
4) View of the front yard (from inside!) on my last night
5) Snow falling!
6) View of the front yard the morning I left

Seattle in Food:

1) Pepperoni pizza from Pegasus Pizza
2) Holding the Pegasus menu, with pegasus pictures in the background. We ate at Pegasus in 1998 when we visited my cousin Mercedes (Baby Katherine’s mom) and it has been a Pagnotta family legend ever since. And yes, it is as good as, and possibly better than, I’d remembered. Mmmm…

Seattle Trip!

Here it is: the New Years account, with lots of photos (sorry if you don’t have broadband).  I’m writing from the AAS Annual Meeting in lovely (cold, rainy) Seattle, WA, where I am staying with the Deeds Sisters and Molly (Nixon) Whiddon, some good friends who I don’t get to see nearly often enough.  Seattle blogging will come soon, as well, I promise.  But first, New Mexico…

I was supposed to fly out to ABQ at 7:30am on the morning of the 30th.  However, due to the ridiculous weather, my flight got cancelled.  Luckily, I was able to be rebooked onto a flight later that afternoon that actually made it into ABQ during the few hours that day that planes could land.  The airport was pretty desolate, although there were a few other travelers landing, a few more whose flights had been cancelled, and random news crews reporting on conditions at the “Snowport”.  I picked up my rental car, and as anticipated, was stuck in Albuquerque, which is not my favorite town in the country by any means, but is really pretty when blanketed in snow that shuts down the whole state:

I majorly majorly lucked out and managed to get a hotel room at a reasonable price, ordered a pizza, and broke out my knitting, crossing my fingers for open roads the next day.  Here’s the view outside my hotel room:

and my projects:

Next morning I woke up early to watch the one-hour news special on the weather, road conditions, etc.  Imagine my surprise when I was actually on TV!  It was a total of about six seconds, of me and other passengers walking by one of those TV cameras I had seen at the airport – so cool!  Not so cool was the fact that the roads were still closed up to Cimarron.   I waited until checkout time and then decided to go ahead and start driving.  25 was open up to Santa Fe, so I made a hotel reservation there and figured I’d see how far I could get.  Well, when I got to Santa Fe, the signs still said 25 was closed north of there, but there were no barricades or cops blocking the road, and about half the cars drove on, so I figured I’d drive on too.  I did swing through a gas station and stocked up on survival food, just in case I got stuck and ended up sleeping in my car.   We made it all the way to Las Vegas, NM, with no problems, but found the road still closed up there.  I stopped and got some lunch, then got back on the freeway to wait in the long line of cars waiting for the northbound lanes to open (southbound had opened about an hour previous).  I figured I’d turn off my car and break out the knitting again, but never had the chance, because traffic was moving very very slowly at first, and then made it up to a normal speed because the road finally opened!  Yay!  I think that the delay was caused by the fact that Monk was in charge of the project, because by the time they opened, the roads were spotless (on the interstate at least).  No snow or ice, two lanes, and even the shoulders were clear most of the way:

Finally made it to the Ranch (scouting dot slash dot org dot philmont slash htp semicolon…) just in time to find my friends, put on some more layers, and head over to New Years Eve dinner!  It was delicious, and tons of fun.  They had a bunch of crews in for Kanik that weekend, all of whom were back in base, and got to come to dinner as well, which I think they enjoyed.  Most of the crews were from Texas, which is of course, awesome.  After dinner, we went over to the Deuce’s for a while (where I did my best to lose my hat from Jackie…but luckily found it the next day!) and then to the James.  *shakes head*  Only in Cimarron, NM, where there is only one bar, do you have only one bartender working on New Years Eve.  ONE.  And then, Roger called last call at 12:15 – yikes!  (Ok, that one was probably the State because it was Sunday, but whatever.  No fun.)  It took 30 minutes of waiting to get a drink, surprise surprise.  Oh well, it was still fun, because there were tons of people there:

The next morning, I got up early and went to breakfast, where Mark announced that there was “Extreme Snow Danger EVERYWHERE” which pretty much made our day, haha.  Went back to Kate/Anne Marie’s and talked with Kate and Jill for a few hours, mostly about camp and reminiscing about Fish.  Then Kate and I took naps and headed over to Doug’s (Jill had to go home).  Doug has a New Years fiesta every year on the afternoon of the first and it only makes me love him more.  There was tons of good food, all of it in honor of people.  The best was of course the Texas Chilli, in honor of Bob Gates (WHOOP!).  (Doug went to WTAMU back when it was just West Texas and happily adopted the Ags when they took over his alma mater. )  I also had elk sausage, which was so yummy (shot by Doug himself, of course), but avoided the rabbit because that freaked me out a little too much.  After Doug’s, Bucko and Kopsa and I went over to Dave’s place to watch football – what else do you do on New Years???  Watched SC beat the crap outta Michigan which was awesome, and watched the beginning of the Boise State/OU game (yay for the underdogs, but embarassing for the Big XII…), then they all had to go take care of a crew for a bit.  After that, none of us really wanted to go out (so tired) so I just hung out with Kate, Anne Marie, and Bucko since it was my last night.  Here are some more pictures from around the ranch, including the bonus that came with my car (which was very useful!):

Next morning, I got up early, took care of some business stuff, turned in my contract for this summer!!!, took some final snow pictures,

and headed back to Albuquerque on the still-cleared roads:

I had anticipated road problems so I left plenty of time and got to Abq. waaay early, but luckily I had scoped things out ahead of time and knew exactly where to drive: Village Wools!  Perhaps the most impressive yarn shop I’ve ever been in, VW is huuuuge.  They had tons of yarn that I’d never even heard of and amazing colors.  I managed to restrain myself (I’m on a yarn diet right now, after the holidays…) and only bought one skein that is a third of the way to a super-cute scarf, which I sadly don’t have any pictures of yet.  Finally went to the airport and flew home, mostly uneventfully.  They did manage to leave one of my bags in Abq, but luckily got it back to me the next morning!

I think that’s about it!  I hope you enjoy the pictures!  (I will try to post more details about the knitting later…)

http://picasaweb.google.com/ashpags/NewYears2006Philmont to see all the pictures. I’ll crop and post the best ones with captions, hopefully later today.

Christmas break!!!

Finals are over, all went well, or at least well enough.  I do so love curves.

Home is lovely, except the weather sucks.  Tshirts and flip flops do not equal Christmas.  Have been mostly very productive.  Did some scrapbooking, Christmas shopping, reading, cleaning, lots of knitting and CSI watching.  Am thinking about my grad apps.  Unfortunately, thinking will not actually get them done, but that’s coming…

I joined the ranks of Tricoteuses Sans Frontières (Knitters Without Borders) with my donation to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), as per the encouragement of the Harlot.  Think about it.

Most of the things I’m working on are still supertopsecret but I can share some pictures of Mike’s scarf, now that he has received it:

 

 

It looks like there is color variation but that’s just the shadows from the blinds.  It’s Caron’s Simply Soft Brites in Lemonade; as requested, a bright yellow scarf.  Garter stitch the entire way, begun in New Mexico and finished in Tuscany.  A well traveled scarf.

Tomorrow, Mom has signed us up for a beading class and I am so excited!  I plan to learn how to make my own stitch markers because they are so pretty but generally more expensive than I can justify.

…is a  collection drive my church is doing for Hope Pregnancy Center, and a good excuse for me to practice the techniques in Iris Schreier’s fabulous book that accidentally fell into my basket at Hobby Lobby a few weeks ago.  I present, the washcloth:

 

And my fabulous washcloth model Jennie: 

I hope that some nice baby enjoys it!