Knitdown2010 continues apace.
So far I have made three gloves, a hat for a baby, a shawl blanket for another baby, an infinity scarf and the cuffs you see blocking on the beer.
I have not made a workable .pdf of any of my patterns.
Win some, lose some.
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Confession:
After a day in the real world where I had to tell clients that the exciting new product had “just been in beta” and that the “beta” had been shut down for the moment, I came home and made the executive decision that I could not face fixing the crazy PDF problem. About all I could face were four episodes of 30 Rock, where I did nothing except gape at the television, punctuated with pointing at the screen and telling the Capt’n that my life! It’d be like that if I didn’t have you! except, you know, the part where I’m a zillion pounds heavier and not working in television.
I didn’t even knit. Since we’re in the safe space? I pulled out 30 rows on a glove.
I know. I know.
And I don’t even have the courtesy to illustrate this post with a photograph.
Such a slacker I’ve become.
Yeah, you think that the big announcement tomorrow will be the rumored iSlate.
Have I got a taste for you.
Just a taste of what's coming up in the knitdown
Just as soon as I can get myself together and shrink the original .PDF file from 16MB down to a reasonable 2MB, there will be the first official D’oh!Mestic.com Knitdown2010 project.
And you’re going to love it.
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And that is all of my yarn, all 69(!) skeins of it. Saturday afternoon was spent listening to U2 and sifting through the downstairs basket, the upstairs basket and the Bag o’ Summer Tweed, and logging the whole mess on Ravelry.
Outside of the Bag o’ Summer Tweed and five skeins of bulky cotton, I found that most my stash is composed of paired skeins. I foresee a lot of socks and gloves in my future. Lots.
And hey, speaking of Ravelry and gloves, I’ve submitted my first pattern. It’s the Fisticuffs mitts two entries below, and I’m just waiting for the good women there to hook me up.
But that won’t be the last pattern. No sir. Check back here on Jan. 15 for the first pattern in Knitdown 2010. It’s going to be a doozy.
Along about Wednesday it became obvious that the Quarterly Descent into Hell had commenced without my really noticing or getting ready ahead of time.
Intellectually, I am aware the QDiH is coming regardless of any preparations on my part. No matter where I am in the year, I am less than six weeks away from another QDiH. It always hangs over my head like a locomotive* released from high altitude and plummeting towards me. It’s always just a matter of time before before hits the ground at terminal velocity and squishes me like the sorry bag of endoskeletal protoplasm I am.
I knit to survive. Last time around, I started on a very intricate wrap. Previous quarters have seen socks, hats and a cardigan. Complicated scarves are especially good QDiH projects. I have dreams of someday working the Pi Shawl over the January QDiH (which lasts into May). But this time, I got hit unawares.
Stupid, rookie mistake.
When I climbed out from under the dropped box car of overtime and bitter tears on Wednesday, I knew I needed a project, and I needed one FAST! The first thing that came to hand was a ball of New Mexican-raised merino that I had purchased in Taos last year and then never used, and the first idea that popped into my head was a pair of nubby mitts, so that’s what I did. Forty stitches cast onto 3.5 mm needles, 50 rounds of mistake rib, thumb hole, another 15 rounds of mistake rib, cast off. Done.
I am really pleased with how they turned out. They were fast, they were simple, they fit in with my QDiH mental picture, which usually involves a lot of circa 1993 angst, loud music and heavy boots.
Fisticuffs
100 grams aran or worsted-weight wool (Cascade 220 would be great here)
3.5 mm double point needles
Cast on 40 stitches
Round 1: *K2, p2*
Round 2: K1, *p2, k2* to last stitch, K1
Work rounds one and two for 50 rounds, or until glove reaches desired length.
Round 51: Using waste yarn, knit 5 at beginning of next round. Slip these five stitches purl-wise back onto left hand needle. Knit over the top in pattern and complete round.
Work in mistake rib pattern for 15 rounds.
Bind off.
Thumb:
Carefully remove waste yarn and pick up live stitches onto needle — there should be nine total. Pick up and knit live stitches, as well as two stitches between top and bottom of the opening on each side. You should have a total of 13 stitches. Loosely bind off the stitches and weave in loose ends.
Repeat for the second glove.
Rock out.
*Interestingly enough, if my math is right (and I’d like to think that it is) it appears a locomotive’s terminal velocity would be approximately 195 miles an hour. Squish.
A craft hawk moved into the railyard and started feeding on the local pigeon population. Because I’m a major nerd still deeply entrenched in my Roman Phase, I had to take a picture of the bird guts for later consultation.
Signs point to maybe.
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Little purple socks for sale on my etsy store
I, um, launched an Etsy store today. For all your baby sock needs. D’oh!Mestic, the store.
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D’oh!Mestic.com Scribe Resorts to Press Release to Overcome Writer’s Block
Blames Form on Day Job
ALBUQUERQUE, Sept. 3 — D’oh!Mestic.com, the leader in web-based crafting disasters, today announced several updates, starting with the creative resignation of the founder. She cited decline in output to the day-to-day grind of her corporate position as a factor in the extreme lack of output with the website.
“I pledge to step up my efforts in the last month of the third quarter,” the founder said. “However, I make no promises as to a continued, steady output of posting.”
Factors cited for the decline in posting included:
“I started composing several posts in my head,” the founder went onto explain. “But they covered such insipid ground as ‘Why Flying Star is Okay in My Book,’ — a topic inaccessible to all but the most local of readers, and those three people would disagree, so why bother — ‘So, I Want a Working Typewriter, How ‘Bout You?’, a post which offered no insight into the consumeristic desires for a second hand piece of outdated office machinery, and went against the ethos of D’oh!Mestic entirely; and ‘Boy, I Sure Do Enjoy Summer (Except When I Don’t)’ which was a 300 word exercise in trite metaphors and drippy imagery.
“Other times, I would just sit in front of a blank window and wonder why I even bothered. It’s not like I have anything groundbreaking to say on the topics of crafting and cooking,” the founder continued. “Why, just ten days ago, I was read the riot act by one of my yarn ladies for having the gall to tie knots in my knitting. While I stood there and took the barrage of insults for being a subpar knitter, a disgrace to the needles, all I could think of was how maybe I didn’t need to be promoting the idea of crafting disasters anywhere. Not here at home, nor on the internet.”
Despite the founder’s personal feelings, there have been a few strides forward. The domain name of “dohmestic” has been registered on Etsy.com in hopes of establishing an online mercantile presence as early as the upcoming weekend. There has also been the acquisition of a bed side lamp from Target, which has been described as “super cute” and “homey” by critics.
Plans for the last four weeks of the quarter include a return to the sewing machine, an attempt at an elaborate meal for friends, possible pie baking, the beginning of Christmas knitting and the polishing of the library loft. Updates will be provided on D’ohMestic as they become available.
About D’oh!Mestic
D’oh!Mestic was founded in 2004 as an answer to all those perfect-seeming crafty blogs, where the knitting was knot-free, the food was styled and the houses were interestingly put together. While we acknowledge that those blogs are only presenting a sliver of their creators’ lives to the world, it gave us an inferiority complex. So we started posting our stupid crafts and dumb recipes here, to some acclaim, mostly from our friends Ange and April. We love you guys, we really do.
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On nights when the insomnia declares itself monarch, I try to lull myself to sleep with different life scenarios. Sometimes, I imagine what would have happened if I had gone to New England for school (one room apartment, lonely life, dead, bloated face eaten by feline companions). Sometimes, I think about how to renovate the house on the cheap. And sometimes I compose fan fiction that will never, ever, ever be transcribed.
And then Hermione Granger set down her bottle of Diet Mt Dew – Gamer Edition next to Piccard’s bone china vessel of Earl Grey — hot, just the way he liked it — and said, “I never thought I’d meet anyone who’d study half as hard as I did.”
The Captain tugged at his uniform. “Well, in the academy, I mostly relied upon my wits and Cliff Notes, as I spent most of my time playing WoW, but I think it was that time spent in my guild, that I learned to be a true leader.”
The crafty witch swooned. Here was a much better man than that crusty old Han Solo, the cheating bastard who’d broken her heart. And sold her out.
(Ahem.)
Right now, I’ve been thinking about The Next House.
Not that we’re moving. Or even considering putting the house on the market. But every so often, when I realize that we’re living in a suburban crackerbox, I crave something more.
My current fixation for The Next House is a two story library, or at least, a library large enough to require a ladder on rails to reach some of the higher-shelved volumes and an all-season sun porch, where I could set up my crafting area and spend long afternoons at the sewing machine, while looking out across a broad, green expanse — maybe even see a body of water. I’m sort of obsessed with the idea that people who don’t live in the desert southwest are surrounded by green grass, large rivers, small ponds and lots of lakes, and brother, I want in on that action.
Of course, that would require moving away from Albuquerque, so maybe not so much, but it’s something I think about. Especially on nights like this one.
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There were three selling points for this house: the kitchen was marvelous, we could afford the mortgage without any sort of adjustable rate tomfoolery and it had a loft.
The loft has had a couple of identities in the almost seven years we’ve lived here.
First, it was the Capt’n's motorsport loft. Oh, yes. Racing flags tacked to the ceiling, vintage Monaco posters, a few dead traffic cones, and the showstopper: one accent wall painted in black and white checkers. And even though we called it his loft, during the winter we’d both be up there, watching television, reading or just hanging out.
As time marched on, the Capt’n became less obsessed with racing and more intent on building an army of tiny robots. The loft, while staying with the original petrolhead theme, was overrun with Autobots and Decepticons in various states of transformation. Meanwhile, we were both indulging in a passion for books and running out of places to put them.
It all came to a head last autumn, when we decided to shift around the contents of the upstairs and better organize our junk. The robots were shifted into the front spare bedroom, the motorsports paraphernalia was moved into the garage. We painted over the checkers with a cheerful brick red, and lined the walls with bookcases. The loft now serves as our library.
At the time, we didn’t have to purchase any new furniture. We recovered the ratty old sofa I’d brought into the marriage, swapped the plywood-and-tire coffee table for the pedestal table I had refinished ages before, and moved in a nice club chair and mismatched footstool I’d found in a consignment shop and had given to the Capt’n for his birthday.
To quote the Shell Silverstein poem, it was almost perfect, but not quite. The sofa didn’t work with the orientation of the room. It was too bulky for the space, there wasn’t a good way to read in a comfortable position and the new slipcover was a magnet for cat hair. And really, I wanted my own chair and my own ottoman. I mean, who wouldn’t?
A trawl through the consignment shops and Craigslist didn’t turn up any immediate winners. I didn’t find anything I really liked in any of the furniture stores, but I kept my options open. I knew what I wanted in my chair, but I didn’t constrain myself to a specific time frame.
And then, almost six months after the unveiling of the library loft, I found it. The perfect chair. It was at a new consignment shop on Central, just sitting there in a jumble of 1940s mahogany buffets, reproduction Queen Anne sofas and four poster beds. It was a sage green velvet beacon of hope, in chair form. It was also $150 out of my price range.
I didn’t buy it. I thought long and hard and decided, no. It could wait. If it was there when I went back, and if I could knock a hundred dollars off the price, then maybe I’d consider it.
I went back. The seller knocked a hundred bucks off the price. We hauled the old sofa away, and baby, I got a chair. (And what a chair. A quick scour of the Googs tells me that it would have retailed for about three grand. I just about choked when I read that. I walked away spending pennies on the dollar. Viva la second hand.)
The loft’s not quite finished, but it’s getting there. I need to hang a curtain and put up some artwork, but that’s just details. It’s coming together. It’s just about my favorite room in the house.
