Cheating on my Addis...

I love my Addi circulars for sock knitting. The needles are beautifully crafted, the joins are perfect and the cable is oh so flexible. In general I'm a bamboo girl. Medal needles are too slick but for sock knitting, my Addis are wonderful. I'm also a 2 socks on 1 circ person using Magic Loop so the flexibility of the Addi cable is great for me. But I've been cheating.

I was working on some cashmere socks for my sweet mama and my Addi Turbo were just too slick for the yummy cashmere yarn. So I trotted on over to The Yarn Mart and bought a pair of ChiaoGoo Bamboo Circulars (size 1). THEY ARE FABULOUS!!!!!! The needle points are sharp - perfect for this thick and thin yarn I'm using. The joins are beautiful. But its the cable that I'm loving the most. It's metal - like a super thin version of a guide wire on a electric pole. It is more flexible than the plastic that I love on my Addi.

I know I will not completely desert my Addi but I will search far and wide to find more ChiaoGoo Bamboo Circulars with this wonderful metal cable. I'm in love.

Works in Progress Friday (instead of Wednesday)

I'm declaring today is Works in Progress Friday. I know it doesn't roll of the tongue like Works in Progress Wednesday but I have been making progress on several projects but I can't get them on my blog on Wednesday for some odd reason. So it is Works in Progress Friday.

I have been sick - strep throat to be exact. And twice in 4 weeks. I blame my son's day school, my forgetting to take my vitamins, and my month guard that I wear at night so I don't grind my teeth and get a horrible headache. So Monday afternoon I felt something coming on but I figured it was just a cold. But at 4 am on Tuesday, my throat was so sore that I could barely swallow. To the doctor I went and was ordered to take my medicine, drink lots of fluids and rest. The rest part is usually hard for me because I'm a little on the obsessive compulsive side of the spectrum and need to do something. But rest was not a problem since I didn't have energy to move out of my bed. My wonderful husband brought me wonton soup from my favorite Chinese restaurant for lunch and I didn't even have the energy to get out of bed to eat it at the kitchen table. By Tuesday afternoon I will feeling strong enough to knit at little but even that took strength my body didn't have.

By Wednesday morning I was feeling marginally better and used one spurt of energy to sanitize all the doorknobs and faucet handles in the house and soak my above mentioned mouth guard in Listerine. I'm not really a germ-a-phob until I or someone in the family gets sick.

Very little was on TV - a few Law and Orders that I hadn't seen and Cold Case - but I was bored and restless by mid-day. So I knitted because it took little energy and kept my attention unlike reading. Having said all this, I got a lot of knitting done on all the projects I have been working. I'm not advocating sickness to knit but it is the bright side of my horrible pre-Thanksgiving illness.

So here are fruits of my labor...

I restarted the pair of cashmere socks I'm knitting for my mom for Christmas. I didn't like how they were knitting up and this restart was well worth it.

I've finished the back of my Lace Cover-Up in Noro.

And started one of the front panels.

And I'm almost to the end of my Jared Flood hat for my mom. I just need to move to double points and it will be done.

So all in all it was a productive couple of days, laying in bed, watching Law & Order, and knitting.

Happy Thanksgiving! (notice my got bob? window decal in the window)

Those are Jane's words...

 I don't care what Kathryn Sutherland wrote or said or believes. I don't care if Jane Austen's editor added a comma or two or a semicolon here or there. I love the stories and the characters and the events of the novels. I believe those words were written by Jane Austen herself and whether an editor or her sister changed a word or a mark of punctuation, it doesn't matter. She dreamed up those stories and had the courage to write them down at a time when most women didn't know how to write. She dreamed of being a novelist at a time when women were not supposed to dream of such things.

For more on this topic, there was a wonderful piece on NPR today by linguist Geoff Nunberg. Here's the link.

Don't mess with Jane!!!!

Popcorn

Here are my husband and son making popcorn in our new air-pop popcorn maker. Son loves the bouncing action of the popcorn and when he wants us to make popcorn, he says "Popcorn mama!" and moves his hands up and down like popcorn popping! My wonderful husband is looking out the kitchen window - probably spying on the activity in front of the neighbor's house. We are noisier neighbors than one might think.

Frozen Juice???

I have just discovered Frozen Juice. I know...I can't believe it either. I don't know why my mom never bought it but we always bought juice from the non-refrigerated/frozen juice aisle or in the refrigerated section near the milk. I do remember my maternal grandmother or some other female relative on that side of the family using frozen orange juice when making her famous orange bundt cake.

So now that I have two men in the house (husband and son) who consume unbelievable quantities of juice, I have discovered frozen juice. And it tastes the same as the bottled stuff. And it is way cheaper!!!! All the money I would have saved...

On being an yarn snob...

Yes, I confess I'm a closeted yarn snob. I agree with my friends that acrylic and acrylic blends have their place in the knitting world but after I knitted with real wool, real cotton, real bamboo, and real silk, how could I go back?!?!?!

When I'm at a yarn shop, I look at the ball band before anything else. If it has more than 50% acrylic or other synthetics, I'll think twice about buying it. And as a southerner, I prefer cotton, linen, silk and other non-wool fibers because it just doesn't get cool enough down here for heavy wool. 

When I first started knitting, I read something about yarn snobs and how the 21st century acrylics were not our grandmother's acrylics. My first yarn purchases were from the local big box craft store because I was too nervous to go to the LYS.  My grandmother shopped at the LYS for needlepoint supplies but I hadn't been there in years. I was new to knitting and I wanted to do my research before trying to mingle with the experts.

So my first skein was Lion Brand Homespun and I knitted a garter stitch scarf. The Homespun color was very pretty but the yarn didn't have much give and because of the way it is spun, I kept splitting the yarn. Do all new knitters get a chunky yarn and better needles because somehow that will be easier?

Then a few years ago the Hancocks Fabrics in El Dorado, Arkansas was going out of business and they had a 60% off sale on everything - including yarn. I went crazy and bought skein after skein of Loin Brand Wool-Ease, Cotton and Landscapes. The check-out lady asked me what I was going to do with it and I responded "At prices like this, who cares!!!!" I knitted a jacket for my son with some of the cotton and started a sweater for him with some of the Wool-Ease but I frogged it because it was not working out. I have done very little with it other than that.

But I've made a goal for myself to knit something with it. So last week I search the Pattern Browser on Ravelry and assigned projects to all my stash yarn - even the acrylic. So as part of my "knit my stash down" resolution, I will also knit my acrylic down. Yes, there is a place for acrylic and I do have some in my yarn stash but if I knit it all down then I have more room for other yarns. YEA!!!

Work in Progress Wednesday: Textured Circle Shrug, Noro Lace Cover Up and Jared Flood Hat

This post was supposed to go up two weeks ago and then again last week but with a husband out of town and a sick child and then a sick me, I just didn't get the post finished. So here is my long over due Work in Progress Wednesday.

My Noro Lace Cover Up is knitting up quite nicely. I'm almost done with the back and this lace stitch is wonderful.

My Jared Flood hat is coming along slower than I thought. It has been awhile since I've done Fair Isle and with this design I have to have all my attention focused on it. I can't talk and do it. It is best if my husband and child are out of the house.

And I'm at a stand still with my Textured Circle Shrug. I need some quiet time to figure out my weird marker placement and how to resolve my missing stitch issue.