Recovery is progressing...

Was officially released from therapy last week, yay! (never mind that it hurts more this week... heh.) I'm not out of the woods yet, but I have exercises and stuff to do, and once I stop fencing (in a couple of weeks I'll be done, possibly forever) and have less writing so that the irritation goes down, I can maybe start to pick up the needles again. So perhaps you'll be hearing from me again in three or four weeks. We'll see...

Verboten.

So. That forearm/wrist pain? Tendonitis. My athletic trainer has told me not to knit until/unless I hear otherwise from the physical therapist, who I start seeing tomorrow.

Thus, no progress.

If I can't knit it'll be kind of pointless for me to post. So I guess that this is a warning to consider me on an indefinite hiatus (maybe I'll post updates on the hand every now and then...). Hopefully the therapist will tell me that knitting is okay... I'm kind of going crazy right now knowing that I can't do it. Even stockinette is tempting!

Stockinette is boring.

Sorry for no post last week. I was at Notre Dame, fencing. Since it's fencing season, posting may be a little sporadic. I'll tell you now that I probably won't post next week, since I'll be returning from another fencing trip then.

Tasha continues. I'm petrified that my gauge is changing and I'm not noticing, especially since I hadn't knit for like a week and a half before I picked it up again for a few rows last night (no time/energy due to fencing trip, and I was worried about my hand/wrist -- but I'll talk more about that in a moment). The sides are currently about 5 3/4" (OMG I'M PAST THE HALFWAY POINT THANK GOD) -- so in the past two weeks I've actually knit about 3 1/4"... not bad... but I wonder when I got it all done? *sigh* only... lessee... 3 3/4" left. Woooo.

Have I mentioned that stockinette is boring?

In other news, I'm vaguely worried that I'm giving myself a repetitive stress injury, what with fencing plus knitting plus computer plus writing. My wrist/base of thumb/forearm have been kinda sore and stiff or tense for the past two weeks... I got some tension/slight occasional pain in my forearm during knitting starting last fall but it wasn't terrible. This isn't terrible either, but it's more noticeable and much more persistent. Lucky me, I had an appointment with the athletic trainer for tomorrow anyway (bum knee, which funnily enough has been basically fine for the last few months)... I'll ask him about it then (and pray to God that I just pulled something).

New year, new project

Sorry for no update last week. I flew back to school on the 7th and things were kind of too crazy to update.

I finished the scarf! Only thing I have to do is block it... problem is, I don't have pins and I'm not wholly sure I have space here to do it. (Come to think of it, I'm certainly lacking something to help make sure that I block the edges straight.) It may languish till spring break.

With the scarf finished, I've started work on Tasha. I actually had quite an adventure when I was preparing to knit my swatch. Scroll down a bit and take a look at the picture I uploaded of the 5 skeins of yarn for this project. I thought that they really were skeins, all ready to knit from, but I planned to roll them into balls anyway.

Turns out they're hanks. Not only are they hanks, they're folded in quarters, and the manufacturer didn't leave any scrap yarn tied around them at any point to ensure they stayed untangle.

Need I say that my first attempt to deal with one of these was a disaster?

To make things worse, I started doing it in the car on the way to visit my great-aunt and great-uncle, who live about 2 hours away. Maybe 5 minutes in, I tore the paper wrapping away. One "oops," and then another, quickly followed... and I spent the entire ride trying to untangle the mess, mostly working on a single knot and not getting more than a tenth of the way through. I was literally crying by the time we got to our destination. It was miserable. Of course, that meant that my mom and dad confiscated the yarn and proceeded to work on it themselves to spare me further trouble. Which was probably actually a good thing, for a while. We finally got it all untangled, balled up, and set to go about halfway through the visit, at which point I started in on the swatch I'd planned on being nearly done with by the end of the day.

The next time I had to wind a ball, I was much, much more careful. And wonderfully enough, it went just fine. Even though I did it on an airplane, with a wall on one side and a guy on the other. And I didn't even bang him with my elbow that much!

The swatch is done, but not washed (this yarn may shrink with washing, so I have to do that), and I've started in on the bag itself. I chose to begin with the sides because a) washed gauge/shrinkage doesn't matter too much with these (all other pieces can be knit to fit whatever size they come out); b) other than the strap, they're probably going to use up the most yarn, so I want to start with full balls for them; and c) I was apparently feeling masochistic (two 9.5" squares of plain stockinette, anyone?). I am knitting both sides at once on a single circular needle because I don't trust my gauge to stay consistent. That means dealing with two balls of yarn at once -- a bit of a pain, but I quickly learned to rubber-band them so that they don't go unravelling and rolling around, and I manage all right.

Here's a picture of how the sides look so far:



They are about 2 1/2" long. No clue how many rows I've done; I haven't been keeping track, since these are to be knit to length.

I don't know how quickly the bag is going to progress, since I don't think I'll have much knitting time this quarter. I don't have lecture classes, and I'm not sure if knitting group will meet (no one's written me back yet) so it might just be an hour or so per week at my Dickens reading group, plus a little down time (ha ha ha) here and there. We'll see.

In other news, my grandma sent me yarn! With the promise of more to come, if I've started knitting with wool and like it (what she sent me was mostly acrylic or acrylic/wool blends). She's so funny. When she saw me knitting once, she got a huge kick out of it. The scarf I finished is going to her when it's blocked.

...anything else? Naw, I think that's it. Expect short posts for the next few months, barring some huge disaster... I have seven more inches of stockinette, and I don't think it's going to fly by.

Yarn store adventures!

First of all, a scarf update. This is how it looks at the moment:



It's about 3 1/3 feet long. I'm in the middle of the thirteenth repeat. Probably only a few more (seven at absolute most) and I'll be done. I'd better look into getting some blocking wires (it's curling up awfully)!


In (IMO) much more exiting news, I went to a yarn store a few days ago! I chose to go to The Knitting Room in Arlington, MA, since a friend needed a ride into the city (it's a ways away and her car had broken) anyway. The store was nice. It was quite small, but given that it could offer a rather limited set of yarns it carried a decent variety in terms of weight, fiber content, color, etc.

I got:


(the second picture is an attempt to better represent the color of the yarn, which is really a magenta -- the first picture is too washed-out and pink, the second too red)

This yarn is for making Tasha from Knitty. (I also picked up size 5 and 6 circs to make this project.) I am kind of shocked at myself for getting a yarn that's even remotely pinkish, but whatever. I like it.

Because it was on sale, I also got:



I have no idea what I'm going to use it for, but it's purty.

Yay for yarn stores!

Progress!

I think I'm working on the fifth or sixth repeat of the cable part of the scarf. (Can't say for sure; it's downstairs, and the dog is sleeping, so I can't go down there tonight.) I've been sitting for thirty minutes to two hours at a time, knitting while watching TV with Dad and sometimes other family members. I only got the chance to do that a few days this week, but it's added up. I'll try for a picture next week, if I remember (is it New Year's Eve next Sunday? ...maybe no post from me till two weeks from now, then...). It seems to be going so fast -- big yarn and big needles and only something like 30 sts/row seem to knit up amazingly quickly after the armwarmers. But I've still got at least two-thirds, probably more like three-quarters or four-fifths, of the scarf to go. It's maybe nine inches or a foot long.

Cables are still scarily easy. And it's getting easy for me to read my knitting with this scarf -- I still check the pattern, but I can usually see what should come next without checking.

Guess what I did?

Ta da!

YAY!

Pattern: Dragon Scale Gauntlets

Yarn/Needles: Plymouth Encore D.K., color 425, something under 2 50-g skeins, on size 6 DPNs

Time: Three and a half months (but not much knitting got done for the first few weeks).

Modifications: Cast on four (?) more stitches than the pattern dictated. Nine rows of ribbing at the top rather than six.

Techniques learned: knitting in the round, knitting on DPNs, m1, ssk/k2tog, sewn BO (which I LOVE LOVE LOVE!), following a chart, tinking (I dropped stitches at one point and had to go back twelve rows to fix it...)


Notes: Did I mention that I LOVE the sewn bind-off? So easy (if a bit time-consuming), so good-looking, so stretchy!

The pattern was pretty easy to follow once I figured out a couple of the more confusing directions (thanks to help from folks on LJ!). I thought that working back and forth for one chart repeat to create the thumbhole was a neat trick.

These are so comfortable and warm! My only gripe is that my row gauge changed during the course of the project, so one of them is shorter than the other. But ah well. It gives them character, right? ;) I definitely want to knit these again, only paying more attention to gauge (maybe do both at once?), and using a yarn that will actually show off the stitch pattern better -- it's visible on these, but not really from a distance.

I got wonderful help at various stages from several different people on the knitting LJ community and am so thankful for it!

All of my pictures relating to this project can be found here.

And aw, heck, just a couple more in the post for good measure:

Of course, I've already cast on for something else -- the Ropes and Ladders Scarf, sans ladders (I didn't like how they looked in my swatch). It's my first time doing cables, and I was blown away by how easy they are!

I am using this yarn:

It is some sort of wool/acrylic blend on a cone. No idea what. I got it from my summer roomate. Whatever it is, it's wonderfully soft, very fun to knit with except that it's a loose single ply so it's kind of splitty/fibrous. It's probably worsted weight or so on the cone, but when it comes off it poofs up a bit so it's probably one and a half to two times as thick.

Here's how the scarf looked earlier today:



Since that picture was taken, I knitted another repeat. I really hope that the yarn is woolly enough to block well, since the stockinette sections bordering the cable are curling. We'll see...

(crossposted to the knitting LJ community)

WAY WAY WAY busy -- so this will be brief.

No pics still -- no damn time to upload them. (I don't even really have the time to be making this post.)

I've finished row 7 of the 7th pattern rep. Chart is 11 1/2"ish in length, ribbing 11 5/8". So 28 rows, 4"ish in the past week.

I think that this one is coming out shorter than the other. It's really frustrating. I may have to knit more chart rows before starting the thumbhole so that they come out even.