This blogging once a week thing is sort of lame, but for some reason my knitting has been progressing at a glacial pace. So a quick roundup:

I started another Ironwork Sock, for a gift.

I’m using the Spirit Trail sock yarn that I purchased at MDSW this year. I’m really liking the yarn, although it’s a bit more semi than solid, so it’s probably not the best match for the pattern. I’m pressing on, as I was determined to knit this from stash! I was planning on knitting a billion different sock patterns, but that evil mistress gauge had different plans for me.

I’m actually very happy that I’m knitting another of these because I’ve uncovered a couple of errors in the pattern. Ugh and apologies to all that run into the errors! I’m putting the errata on the pattern page, so you should definitely check it out if you have purchased the pattern. I’m learning a bit about this pattern writing process and I’ll definitely test knit changes I make in future patterns, especially with items as small as socks.

Tangled Yoke is starting to look like a sweater. Since I’m knitting the body top-down, I investigated bind off alternatives to make the bottom edge pretty and stretchy.

I’m a tubular bind off master now, thanks to Silver’s help.

Speaking of cats (do you like that segue?), say farewell to Jet Li!

He found his new home this past weekend! All five kittens have new homes, and I couldn’t be more excited. We thought we’d have Jet and Bruce for much longer - apparently, people aren’t too keen on adopting black kittens. The mobile adoption place seemed like a good idea in theory, but none of the kittens were adopted through it - we lucked out to find friends, friends-of-friends, and neighbors-of-friends-of-friends who adopted all of these guys. We’re going to miss having the kittens around, but I’m happy that we found good long-term homes for them!

Urm, from last weekend. I seem to have left my blogging mojo somewhere, and can’t seem to find it. It doesn’t help that I’ve been busy like a bee lately at work and haven’t really crafted much recently.

A friend of mine from way-back-when visited last weekend, and I showed her all around Houston. Which means we left town. We didn’t go far - we drove down to Galveston for the day to check out the Moody Gardens aquarium (I heart aquariums with big red poofy hearts!), the shore (windy!), and an Amy-guided tour of the island (rainy!).

The Mardi Gras arches were meant as a temporary exhibit, 20+ years later one is still standing. The girls can be seen here partying like it’s March.

Ok, I did show other-Amy a bit of Houston, mostly unphotogenic things like shopping and drinking. We also checked out the Mercer Arboretum before she left.

Pretty and spikey! The Arboretum would be the perfect place to visit in spring, when the lilies are actually blooming. It’s easy to forget that it’s autumn when it’s 90 and humid. I miss the gorgeous colors of the northeast fall so much! I seriously can’t wait for the day when we leave Texas. See ya, TX, wouldn’t want to be ya!

In kitten news, we’re down to a pair of black kittens! Meredith has been invaluable for sending suckers over to our house to adopt the others. Bruce and Jet continue being adorable and have become super buddies.

Aww! The cats are all big cuties until you leave your yarn lying around.

I’m usually very good about keeping the yarn behind closed doors since Silver loves to gnaw on it. This will teach me to forget! Whoever did this did an excellent job of running around the chair and table - it was so bad that I needed to cut it. Thanks, cats, for putting the tangle in my Tangled Yoke cardigan!

Oooh, I have had a royally bad week, people. Total suckage around these parts. And a certain Tangled Yoke isn’t helping manners any.

It looks perfectly tangled, huh? Well this sweater has given me nothing but fits the whole way. I actually had the yoke almost completely finished (sans neckband) when I finally counted my stitches and realized that it’s too big. I had originally cast on for a size too large. Damn! To seal the deal ripping-wise, my center motif wasn’t in the center, as I followed the directions on where to put the center portion without counting how far it was from the other edge. Then I sleepily re-cast-on on a plane and didn’t double check my stitch count, and I’m 8 stitches short for the yoke. Wha? I fudged the decreases before the cabley portion, and now we’re finally good to go.

I provisionally cast on at the bottom of the yoke so I can knit the body portion top-down and try on the fit as I go. I’m pretty close to one of the sizes, and hopefully my incorrect stitch count will produce the perfect amount of negative ease. If not, I’ll be creatively blocking this thing to make it fit, because I’m certainly not ripping it again!

Then the kitten adoption place that we’ve been working with has been effectively dicking us around with vaccination requirements and insisting we pay to spay/neuter the kittens (I shudder to think how much we’ve already spent on veterinary care). We’ve found a new place and will hopefully find these guys new homes soon. I mean, who can resist these stripes?

Or how about this spunky gal:

I totally want to keep her, but Rob says no. Boo.

I’ve been meaning to pile up all my works in progress and blog about them here to guilt myself into action, but I have been completely unmotivated to do so. So much for finishing most of them before the end of summer. But, summer doesn’t really end in Texas until some time in November, so I guess I’ve got a few months to actually finish something.

Before:

Petal used to look like an almost-complete sweater. I even seamed everything except for one sleeve, and all the ends were woven in.

Now:

The fit was bad enough to frog pretty much the whole sweater. The worst offender was completely my fault - I went up a size for the hip measurement, because I thought that my hips Are Not Shaped Like That. But as it turns out? They are! You knit the bottom band sideways, and then pick up stitches for the body. The picked-up-stitches measurement seemed pretty small, so I went up a size. However, that bottom band is a few inches wide, so the picked-up-stitches location was a few inches up from the bottom of the sweater, and going up a size made the sweater seem baggy and kind of frumpy.

I’d rather rip and redo this sweater than create yet another sweater that I never wear. I’ve already reknit the front, and the crumply yarn above is the back, waiting its turn. I did salvage the bottom band - it has less stretch (because it’s knit sideways) than the body of the sweater, so the size larger band feels like it fits perfectly.

In addition to knitting the right freaking size, I added about an inch of short row bust shaping (and could have done more), and fixed the top triangles. The sweater as knit is not going to cover my bra straps - they stick out where the top of the front piece meets the bottom of the triangles. I decided to work the triangles attached to the front piece, and they are 8 stitches wider at their base than the pattern calls for.

This is my main project right now, so hopefully I can finish it before the theoretical winter comes to this state.

Cambridge Jacket for Rob. Meh. I have a sleeve and a back and a half knit. I think my gauge was off, hence the back reknitting, but it’s been so long that I really don’t remember. I think this is going to get frogged in favor of a seamless hybrid. Those always turn out nice. The cool thing about digging this out is that I found my size 8 knitpicks tips and two 24 inch cords. I thought I had a monster in my closet eating all my 24″ cords, but here they were the whole time.

The new kid on the block: the Tangled Yoke Cardigan. I’ll be using Rowan Cashcotton DK for this - from the stash! Boo yah, no yarn buying for me! I was thisclose to buying some of the big Webs Jaeger closeout, but I recently reorganized my stash and remembered how many sweater amounts of yarn I have. I think I’m going to provisionally cast on the yoke stitches and knit the yoke first because it’s the fun part!

Questions for y’all (see, I’m texan, right?):

1. How much ease do you put into cardigans? I’m between two sizes of the Tangled Yoke, and I’m wondering how little ease I can go before the buttonband is going to gape. I’ll likely be wearing this with a very light layer underneath, so I’m not too worried about it being a layering piece over something bulky.

2. Have you submitted your goods to Yarnival! yet?

Oh, and I’ve also suddenly stopped receiving my wordpress comment emails. Wah! So if you don’t hear from me (like I’m ever on top of my email in the first place), now you know why. !@#$!