A classy bathroom mirror shot, in our new bathroom!

I really wanted to finish something this month, so here’s the somewhat unflattering Asymmetrical Cardigan. I finished the sweater this morning, while waiting around for the appliances to show up and the movers to arrive. Details forthcoming, we just moved today and I’m beat. The moving went amazingly smoothly, although the cats were totally freaking out when they arrived at the new digs. They’re down with the place now, I can hear one of them trying to claw their way into the cupboards. Silver is going to be pissed when she finds the childproof drawers in the bathroom…

I haven’t been knitting much lately, with all the packing and refrigerator purchasing going on around these parts. I’m almost done with the Asymmetrical Caridgan (abc – all but cuffs), but that’s about it. I just realized that I haven’t finished a single thing since the beginning of the year, eek! I need to bust a move! Here’s a little photo story in place of the usual knitting photos:

Nate the wind-up nigiri goes for a stroll…

Doop de doo!

Oooh, what’s this I see?

Is that… Koigu!

Nate is clearly not much for words, but he knows a good yarn when he sees it. This is what happens when I work from home – I document toys and yarn. I’ve spared you all from the cat photos (Joe was totally laying on top of Blackie, SO CUTE!).

My love for Koigu is has no bounds. You guys can have your Socks that Rock, I’ll just sit here and gaze lovingly at all the colors in my little skeins of Koigu. However, I need a new crack dealer – my LYS carries Koigu, but their selection sucks rocks. I’ve lived here for a year and a half, and that store has never gotten new colors of Koigu in – their stock only decreases, it’s amazing. I’ve made three socks out of Koigu (Pomatamous, Retro Rib, Baudelaire), and they no longer carry any of those colors, gah! I’m running out of good colorways in the shop – the skeins above were the last two left of that particular color (and were hidden underneath a bunch of ugly yellow skeins), and there’s only one other colorway that I like. If you see any dark berry-colored variegated Koigu on this blog, you’ll know that my supplies at that shop have run completely dry.

So what’s your favorite Koigu source? I find it tough to purchase Koigu online, since web photos don’t usually accurately capture the complexity of the colorways, but I’m desperate, people!

Seaming the Asymmetrical Jacket. We’ve got one buttonband and the collar down, all that remains is the second buttonband and sleeve cuffs. The second buttonband gets the buttonholes, and I’m changing the buttonhole placement from the pattern, so it requires some serious procrastination.

I tried on the sweater yesterday, and holy crap, it fits! This is somewhat shocking, because things didn’t look so hot fit-wise before the buttonband and collar were seamed on.

There have been some excellent yarn store sales in Houston this month. Last weekend I bought some Blue Sky Cotton from Twisted Yarns at a discount, and started this brioche stitch number. I’m feeling a bit Eh about the result – it’s pretty, but I’m not wild about it in this yarn. I think the yarn wants to be mistake rib. Or a Squarey – I’ve made two Squareys for friends, and I want one for me! Another LYS is having a winter sale this weekend, and I bought a bunch of the sportweight Louet merino for 35% off!

I (cough!) took a sick day from work today, which gave me plenty of time to work on the Cambridge Jacket and photograph it on a mildly pissed Silver. The progress photos for this sweater are going to be bo-ring – how many photos of a straight, semi-ribbed sweater back can one take, really?

One of my favorite Valentine’s seasons involved those little candy conversation hearts.

Back in the day, pre-Rob and pre-Houston, a friend and I were alone in the lab with a bag of hearts. Writing on the hearts with edible marker is hot stuff these days, but we were old skool and used a regular old pen. We weren’t planning on eating them – those things taste like crap! We also weren’t writing love notes – we would change a letter here, add a word there, and create some decidedly unsavory valentines. My Baby Is Ugly wasn’t my idea, but was one of my favorites. I’m Sorry You Suck was another classic. Happy V Day!

A not-so-unknown kelp! fact – I am not a huge fan of Houston, the city where I happen to currently to be living. Houston makes me cranky. I’ve been known to purse my lips and mope when I think of this city. But all that’s going to change – no more blaming Houston for my problems. Why the sudden change of heart? Because we just bought a house! It’s an adorable small bungalow-ey place about four blocks from where we live now. We lucked out when we first moved here about a year and a half ago – we knew we wanted to live in Montrose, but we selected our current location pretty much by chance. I love where we currently live, and I’m pretty psyched that we found a house so close by!

I’ve love to show off some photos of the new place, but Rob was in charge of photography. Instead of sweeping views of the front porch or gorgeous shots of the interior, we have these:

Thrilling. Rob’s main concern in house hunting was the sturdiness of the roof and electrical system. My concerns were: Does it have a porch? What’s the neighborhood like? Oooh! Pretty!

I absolutely love house hunting, it’s amazing to see the crazy places that are out there. Like the vacant garage apartment (at least half the places that we looked at had them) that was stinky, moldy, and icky, but had a HUGE widescreen TV. Or the place where the owner was a complete slob, with clothing lying around in the kitchen (unmentionables drying in the kitchen!) and an open container of soybeans chilling on his bedroom floor. Or that 70’s era apartment we saw way-back-when that had a mirrored wall along the staircase going up to the apartment, and a set of gigantic stained glass windows in the dining room with shades embedded in them. So much fun!

Now for the packing and moving and purchasing. We definitely need to buy a fridge and washer/dryer before we move, and we also need some decent furniture. Between the two of us, the nicest piece of furniture we own is probably the Ikea filing cabinet we bought last year. I have my eye on a fancy-pants couch, now I just need to convince Rob that he wants it, too!

Rowanspun Aran. Delicious, no? Webs was pretty much giving this stuff away a couple of summers ago, so I snatched up enough for a sweater for Rob (and I may have purchased enough of the 4 ply in Blood for a cardigan for myself). The yarn has some lovely flecks of blue, green, and purple, but we’re hoping that Rob won’t really notice the purple bits. I just broke open the bag a couple of days ago, and realized that it’s an odd yarn – it is felted, and pretty rough to knit with. Dunking my swatch briefly in water softened it up a ton, so hopefully Rob will be happy with the end result.

The Cambridge Jacket, from Interweave Knits Summer 2006. Rob hates cables and other floofy details, so ribs it is. I’m planning on knitting the sweater on the sly, which shouldn’t be too tough because Rob is seriously oblivious to anything that doesn’t involve numbers, the working condition of his vehicle, or ATHF. Perfect! Since I’m keeping this on the lowdown, I measured a bunch of Rob’s sweaters to figure out what size to make. They all have a 44 inch chest measurement, even the closest fitting sweaters he owns. Rob is a tall, slim man, and it seems totally crazy that his clothing is all this big. Maybe I’m just used to the ease that I put in my own sweaters (zero to negative), but that amount of ease seems like a lot…

I’m planning on knitting this pretty much to-pattern, except one detail – the bottom of the center front and back is stockinette, which rolls. It’s not rolling in the photo, but it really wants to. Bad! I know you can block it out, but why not toss in an inch of ribbing, especially for a sweater that has other rib details? So, more ribbing it will be. My gauge is off from the pattern, so I’ll be doing some math, but that should be no biggie.

All this blue is part of Project Spectrum. I had joined PS as an attempt to reach beyond my comfort zone, colorwise, but I already see that I’m unlikely to make much of a stretch – blue, green, red/black, and purple are all definitely kelly colors and are well represented in the stash. You won’t be seeing any orange sweaters around these parts!

Silver is ready to step up and be the feline representation for Project Spectrum. You go, girl!

I’m going to let you all in on a not-so-secret – I have large feet. Not freakishly large, but larger than average. Finding shoes for my feet isn’t the problem – I take a US 10, and I’ve found some killer end-of-season deals on shoes because the 10 is the last pair left. No, the problem has to do with yarn (of course, welcome to my knitting-obsessive blog).

The cool thing in the knitting world these days is self-striping sock yarn. Pretty colors! Shiny! However, these sock yarns are made for feet much smaller than mine. Say you have a nice, normal, US 7 sized foot. Go shopping! Sock yarn everywhere, and it will stripe perfectly on your foot!

But when you’re me, and you buy a beautiful skein of Yarn Pirate in a colorway that you fell in love with (Hannah, yum!), then you’re bound to be disappointed. You’ve looked around the blogosphere, and people have beautiful results with this yarn, but you know deep down inside that the perfect striping is too good to be true.

The problem is pooling – the color repeats line up so that you get a big clump of one color on one side of the sock, and a big clump of another color on the other side. This clumpiness is exacerbated by patterns where you cast on a larger-than-normal number of stitches, like the Jaywalker pattern. Then you get results like this:

Boo! Lorna’s Laces is especially bad for me – there’s nothing that I can do to avoid it pooling like a mofo. So imagine my surprise when the Yarn Pirate did not stripe thinly, and yet did not pool:

Well. It’s not ideal, but I’ll take these wide, spiraling stripes over pooling and flashing any day!

I must say, this is by far the best fitting sock that I’ve knit for myself (although I only have two other specimens – Broadripple and Baudelaire) because I did something unheard of in sock-knitting circles: I knit a gauge swatch. Gasp! Really, you never hear people talking about gauge swatches for sock yarn – they just cast on some normal number of stitches (like 64) and knit away, regardless of pattern or yarn. The one issue that I’m having with the fit is the depth of the short-row heel – it’s not deep enough, and the stitches across the top of the foot are stretched out a little bit. I might work some increases before the heel on the second sock to try to alleviate this.

In my last post I said that I’d have these socks done sometime in ‘08. Well I’ve been knitting obsessively on this guy since Thursday, so they just might be finished sooner than that. Watching the superbowl helped my progress – I knit while watching the blue team win!