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November 30, 2006

I Know!

I've been slack! I know! It's been so crazy with Thanksgiving and everything. Speaking of which, I hope that all of my US readers had a great holiday. We ate way too much! Thanksgiving and Christmas are big eating days for Geoff and I since on those days we spend mid-day to afternoon with his family and late afternoon to evening with mine. The good news is that the scale isn't showing any holiday weight gain (in fact it's gone down 2 pounds in the past week!). I hope that trend continues!

And I did not get nearly enough knitting done over the holiday weekend. Very disappointing. I'm still working on the Aran Tree Skirt and right now I'm just hoping to have it finished by Christmas. There really isn't any reason to kill myself over the next week or so. I'm halfway done with it so here's a progress shot... click to make it bigger...

I'm not doing much gift-knitting this Christmas. Just one special gift on my list. My grandmother turned 95 this month and I mentioned to Geoff that I wished I had knit her something for her birthday and he asked if I could eek something out for Christmas so I looked for the perfect pattern and found it. I'm knitting her this afghan...

It's the Cathedral Afghan from the Interweave Knits Holiday Gifts special issue. It's knit with bulky yarn on size 13 needles so it really flies and I should have no problem finishing it for Christmas. I'm using Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Bulky in color Pewter. I'll try and get a progress shot this weekend.

One knit that I'm feeling SO guilty about is that blanket for my nephew. I blew through half of it in no time and then... nothing. I think I know why. You see, the animals are knit using intarsia and it's knit with cotton yarn. It's so hard to make cotton yarn look neat and clean in colorwork! The stitches even looked wonky in the pictures in the book. The wonkiness of it all and the fact that doing the colorwork pretty much requires me to line the blanket have made me dread picking it up to finish it. I'm the worst aunt ever! And every time I see my nephew he is using the blanket I made for my other nephew. He needs his own blanket! So I think I'm going to rip out the blanket down to the point where the animals begin and then reknit it without the animals. I know the animals are sooooo cute but I think they just look sloppy in a cotton yarn and I don't like sloppy. So it will just be a color block blanket and this will avoid my having to line it. Joy! Now I just need to make myself frog almost half of what I've done already... grrrrrrrr...

Well, better run! I've got Stitch 'n Bitch tonight! Wahoo! I promise to not let another week go by without posting! Have a great Friday everyone!

Posted by allison at 05:43 PM | Comments (3)

November 20, 2006

Thanks!

Thanks for all of the great advice! After reading all of your comments I started panicking that maybe this person did send the promised prize and it got lost and all the while she was thinking I was some ungrateful b*tch for not acknowledging the gift! So I sent a little inquiry and hope to find out more very soon.

I also wanted to let everyone know about a correction I made to the Entrelac Scarf pattern found in my sidebar. Thanks to Caitlyn for pointing out that I left out a ssk on the first triangle of the final tier of triangles. Sorry guys! But if you download the pattern again you'll get the corrected version.

I'm still plugging away at the tree skirt! I think I have a plan to get it finished in the next two weeks. Geoff and I went ahead a got an artificial tree this year (with pre-strung lights, thank you thank you thank you! String lights was the worst part of tree-decorating!) so I think we can wait to put it up until the first week of Dec. And hopefully I'll have a finished tree skirt to go under it. I promise to try and take some pics of it in the next couple of days. I know how boring these pictureless posts can be!

Thanks again to everyone for your advice!

Posted by allison at 01:48 PM | Comments (1)

November 17, 2006

A mini-rant

No knitting progress pics to show. The tree skirt is growing slowly but surely. Hopefully the Thanksgiving Holiday will give me some good quality knitting time to make a good dent in it.

But I wanted to ask everyone's opinion of something. I was hesitant about whether or not I should post about it but I'm kinda wondering if it's happened to others.

First of all, the knitting blog community is full of super-wonderful-thoughtful-nice people (as are the usual traits of knitters) and sometimes knitbloggers are so nice that they will actually GIVE things away to people! No strings attached! Wonderful! Maybe it's associated with a contest they are having or maybe they are just in a giving mood. I remember entering a little contest on High Energy Jenny's blog last year and winning some Dale of Norway Svale. So nice of her! I loved it!

Well, back in May I entered a "contest" of sorts on someone's blog and was one of the winners! Yay! She asked me to email my address to her and she would send me a little goodie! So nice! But my goodie never arrived. :( And of course, because it was pretty much a gift and there wasn't much effort on my part, I wasn't going to contact this person about it because I felt that would be very selfish! So I just chalked it up to her being busy and stuff and moved on.

So then in September I happened across a new knit-a-long for a pattern from the fall 06 knitty. They were having a button contest! Fun! So I created a button for them and entered it. The prize was sock yarn, people. Can't resist the sock yarn. Well they posted the button I made as the first official entry and after that no else entered and I noticed members of the knit-a-long were already using my button on their blogs. At the end of the contest, I sort of "won" by default. So the knit-along hostess asked me to email her my address and she would send me some sock yarn! Yay! So nice! But alas, no sock yarn for me. And of course I feel bad about contacting her about it because I feel like it would appear selfish. But this was something I actually spent time on! It took time to create that button for them. And not only did I not get proper credit for it when I entered it (she spelled my name wrong) but she "lost" my original email so at the end of the contest I had to email her to give her my address and also to remind her who I was. I even left a comment on the post announcing me as the "winner" thanking her for being kind enough to want to send me yarn! So nice!

So I was wondering if this has happened to other people. Is it just my bad luck? I mean, I already feel awkward entering any kind of contest because I feel guilty about getting something for nothing. And these experiences have just made me feel more awkward. (this is the reason I don't join secret pal things. I just know I'd get paired with the person who flakes)

Anyway, that's all. Just wanted to see if I'm the only person getting shafted out there. I'm 1 for 3 in good contest experiences and those odds aren't so nice...

Posted by allison at 03:15 PM | Comments (10)

November 06, 2006

Remember this?

So I started the Aran Tree Skirt from Handknit Holidays back in May so that I would have plenty of time to finish it before Christmas. Then the first section of it went so quickly I wasn't worried about finishing it on time. I had all the time in the world! Um, yeah. Where did all of that time go?! I'm gonna have to kick it into overdrive!

Of course, it's not very portable so I've been carrying another project with me wherever I go. Remember the Badcaul sock? Well, I ripped it because it looked like it may be too small. Instead of starting over with that pattern I started another. Pomatomus from Knitty. I've finished the first and am about 2 inches into the second one.

The Koigu KPPPM pools a bit with this pattern but I still love it. I work on these when I'm on the go but when I'm at home it's all tree skirt all the time. Wish me luck in getting it finished! Ack!

Posted by allison at 09:16 PM | Comments (1)