Busy Week This Week

Well, my week started on Sunday, getting a new toilet installed. It's a Kohler toilet that only uses 1.6 gallons, compared to the original toilet that used 6 or 7 gallons. As it was being installed, I was doing laundry and I noticed water running down the side of the water heater. We looked and the pipes were so corroded that it was a wonder that any water was going the right way. I spent the afternoon doing as much laundry as I could and going to the supermarket.

Monday I went over and had the first crown prep done and then came home to meet the plumber. He agreed immediately that we needed a new water heater and we scheduled it for Tuesday afternoon. He cut the insulation jacket off to be sure we had the right size (50 gallons) and that set the water hiding in the fiberglass free. By this morning it was really wet and messy in the garage.

So this morning I had to take my husband by the blood lab for a test first thing (fasting test, you know how that works). The guy is installing the new water heater as I write. The corner of the garage is sodden. There's no other word for it but that. Fortunately the wallboard around the water heater base is purely for looks and the 2x4 frame provided the real structural strength.

It turns out that the old water heater was installed in 1980, making it 28 years old. Apparently this is beyond geriatric for water heaters, which have a normal lifetime of about a dozen years. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't really think much about my water heater. It just sits there in the corner of the garage, working away. I try to drain it once a year, but I suspect I really only manage about once every three years.

So we're about to have hot water again and I'm going to get the laundry finished, hopefully today. You see, I have an appointment for my third crown prep tomorrow (Wednesday). I'm hoping it goes as well as yesterday's did and I can get the laundry put away, etc.

Then on Thursday I have another dentist's appointment, to fill some cavities. The crowns won't be back from the lab for another couple-three weeks, so I'll have some time off until it's time to glue them on. A year or two back, I got a crown replaced and when we tried the new crown on, it was such a perfect fit it wouldn't come off after the trial fitting. Of course the dentist didn't want to do anything extreme to it so it took some time before it finally popped of. Then I nearly swallowed it. What a farce that was. Funny now, but not so funny at the time.

I'm almost done with the central section of the dramatic stole I'm knitting for a friend. I've taken so long to get even this far that I'm going to give her the Forget-Me-Not Shawl just to tide her over. The shawl has been finished except for blocking for literally months, so I've got to get myself in gear right now. I got a new blocking set, with wires and pins, etc, from Overstock.com for about $20 (I'm a member of their club and get an additional 5% discount and free postage). This shawl is vastly oversized compared to the original pattern, because I read it wrong.

Abut five minutes ago I got my copy of It Itches by Franklin Habit. Wonderful book. So much truth in it, too. I recommend it highly. I've only read the cartoons, not the essays, because I want to get this published before I get distracted by something else.

Down In The Low Desert

We got back to Palm Desert a week ago and it's been unseasonably warm here. It was 85° today. The lemon and the clementine are absolutely covered with buds and blossoms and that whole corner of the back yard smells heavenly. The clementine is also covered with orange fruit, but they've been on the tree too long and they're kind of dry. The lemon, which did poorly after the hard freeze, has exactly two lemons on it. I expect a lot more this year.

I've got three shawls and a scarf to block and about a dozen boxes of books to put away and I've been buying lace yarn and fingering weight yarn and Aran weight yarn. I don't know quite how it happened, but I bought four skeins of five different Elann Baby Lace colors. That's at least ten shawls. That wouldn't be so bad, except that the twenty new skeins are sitting on a twelve-gallon bin full of lace yarn and there's six skeins of Zephyr Wool-Silk (three shawls) on the way. I also bought three shawl patterns to go with the Zephyr. All I have to do is hold off from starting another shawl before I get the blocking and unpacking undone. That may be very difficult as knitting shawls is sort of addictive.

I got a copy holder from Office Depot to hold the lace charts. I've been fiddling around with markers and correction tape and magnets. Right now I think I like the copy holder best for knitting here, particularly on long repeats. I think I prefer highlighter pens and multiple copies (a lace book, to use the proper name) for shorter repeats.

The repeat on the Dramatic Shawl is 80 rows, for example, and the copy holder really works well. I've just finished the half-way row in the third repeat. Photos will follow as soon as I find my camera. I know it's here someplace and I think it's in a knitting bag. I'll also take photos of all the lace weight yarn on hand.

Lace Shawls And Blocking

I thought it would be interesting to show before and after blocking photos of the lace Diamond Fantasy Christening Shawl, to show how much it stretches and how much flatter and lacier it looks after blocking.

This is the before photo:


And this is the after photo. See how much bigger the yarnovers are and how flat it is? It's a lot less dense and the shawl really grew.


I'm still working on the Floral Lace Shawl; I'm somewhere between 2/3rds and 4/5ths of the way to being done. That is to say, I'm nearly at the end of the fourth ball of yarn but I don't know whether I'm going to use five balls or six. I think I may have to go to the next longer cable (Knit Pick Options Harmony interchangeable circular needles) before I go much further. The current one is getting kind of crowded. I meant to measure the christening shawl before and after blocking, to help me estimate how big I wanted to make the current shawl, but I totally forgot. Since this shawl is for me, I'll probably use up all the yarn. I don't think there's much I can make with just one skein of it, as they're fairly small.

I mentioned the whatever I'm knitting for what's-her-name earlier. I'm sorry to say I seem to have mis-measured the gauge swatch and have to frog nearly six inches of 2x2 ribbing, 440 stitches per row on circular needles. It seems to have come out about 150% bigger than I thought it would. If I'd kept going, it was going to be the heaviest and warmest scarf knitted in the history of the world, including the Dr. Who scarves that are such perennial favorites. I'm going to abandon this for a while and make an entirely different whatever for someone else. Fortunately, I have enough victims friends and relatives in colder climates that finding someone else won't be too hard.

If you look here you can see the next lace shawl I'm going to knit (this won't be the next thing I knit, just the next shawl). I got the pattern in November, from Elann, and I've got several choices of yarn in my stash. I'm thinking that blue, rather like Wendy's, might be nice. I married into an entire family of blue-eyed Iowans, mostly with brown hair, so I buy a fair amount of yarn in colors that will look good on them. I've also got some lovely natural (cream) merino from Knit Picks in both lace and fingering weight, but I think a mildly variegated yarn will look really good in this pattern.

Christening Shawl Finished

This afternoon I finished the christening shawl that I started on 15 November. It took eleven days and I was doing a lot of other things during that time. I've woven in the ends, but I haven't washed and dressed it yet. I'm washing the baby blanket I finished ages ago, so that I can mail it off to baby Josh. I've only got one good place for drying large pieces and the blanket gets to use it first. The christening shawl won't be needed until March, after all.

I didn't take any photos today because it was quite overcast here. I hope that tomorrow will be clearer so that I can snap a few photos in the undressed state. This shawl looks a lot nicer and more like the finished product than most lace I've knitted. I don't remember the previous Diamond Fantasy Shawl looking so good, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it's probably the yarn and the gauge. Don't be fooled, it really does need dressing but I've got a lot better idea how it's going to look than usual.

I'm back to knitting the Bigfoot Shawl. I think I've only got a few more repeats to knit on it. I think it might look good with a toggle catch right at the neckline, so I've got to look through a few jewelry supply catalogs soon.

I joined the Year Of Lace 2008 club. It's four lace wrap projects in luxury yarns dyed in special colors using new patterns. The patterns are said to be restricted to club members until 2010 and the yarn colors won't be repeated. Not that I care about either bit of exclusiveness, to tell the truth. I guess it's supposed to make people feel more special somehow. I joined mostly to get myself over my dislike for lace weight yarn, on the theory that I'll have spent so much money on the club that I have to knit the wraps up. We'll see how well that works.

New Book

The newest Donna Andrews book The Penguin Who Knew Too Much showed up at my house at about 1730 this evening. I had to make dinner and quickly finish the book I was reading (I was almost at the end anyway) but now, as soon as I send this, I'm going to start reading it. There were six other books in the box and I didn't even look at them. Nor did I open the other Amazon box that arrived at the same time. I won't be back here until I'm done with it.

I love Donna Andrews' books, particularly the Meg Langslow series. They so funny and so well written that I just can't resist them. Some people think some kinds of yarn are crack; with me it's good books by favorite authors.

I finished Reggie the Alligator yesterday. I've got to get my yarn needle out and finish him up, as well as the Dragon Scale and Noro Argosy scarves. Then I have to wash the See's chocolate off Reggie and gently block him. The other two scarves don't have any chocolate on them, but they'll still get washed and blocked.

I got some of those rubber foam tiles for blocking, after reading about them on a couple of blogs. I'd give credit but I can't remember. They're great. Two sets of four 2x2' interlocking tiles, with edges. Amazon, intended for work-out rooms and free weight work. Inexpensive. Recommended.

Not The Kind Of Fantasy I Was Looking For

I've been knitting away quite diligently on my Diamond Fantasy Shawl for the last four or five days. The day before yesterday, just as I finished the 18th row of the sixth repeat of the 20-row pattern repeat, I held my lovely shawl up so I could admire it. I discovered I'd screwed up an entire row. Twenty rows back.

I tried (oh, how I tried) to convince myself that no one would ever notice, that I only noticed because I was looking for errors, even if someone did notice it wasn't that bad an error, and so on. All the time I was coming up with these rationalizations I had a nasty sinking feeling that there was no way in the world that I was going to be able to leave that row in my shawl. I was just going to have to rip out twenty rows and correct it.

I even tried the acid test. I held the shawl up for my husband to look at, telling him there was an error in it and could he see it? He studied it briefly and then ran his finger along the offending row and I knew I was doomed to frog.

So I did. An entire day of knitting gone in a few minutes.

Mid-morning today I finally got back to where I'd been when I found the error and now I'm halfway through the next pattern repeat. I'm more than halfway done and I'm pretty sure I'll have it done well beforehand.

I'm so sure of this, in fact, that I ordered the interlocking foam squares for blocking from Amazon.com. I'd already bought two pounds of 1.5-in. T pins on eBay, so all I need now is the shawl, a bit of beading cable, and a yardstick.

No photo for this post because it doesn't look that much different. Maybe tomorrow, since I've got some new yarn to show, too.

Empty Nest

The Forest Canopy Shawl and the Feather And Fan Stole Leave Home

We all know how it goes. One day we're winding off a ball of yarn from a beautiful skein, picking out a pattern, and casting on. The next we know, we're blocking a finished project. The blocking is a rite of passage for a lace project. After it's blocked, it wants the car keys, stays out after curfew, and leaves home as soon as it can.

Here's my Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawl being blocked. It's not really visible, but there's a plastic-covered wire cable threaded through the top edge and tied to the front legs of the day bed. The points are pinned out with clear push pins, except for the two Clover blocking pins in the top corners. There's carpet under the sheet.

Here's a close-up of the blocked leaves. See how flat and regular they are? They didn't look at all this good before the blocking.

Here's a photo taken outdoors, in the sun. The shawl is lying on a Natal Orange bush with the leaves and the scalloped edge plain to see.

Here's its big sister, the feather and fan stole. It's strung on two lengths of cable, which are tied to the frame of the day bed (that white blob in the upper left corner is a paper towel wrapped around the arm of the bed, to keep the wire from rubbing the finish off). This gives nice straight edges, except that I can't tie the cable tight enough, so it bows in just a bit and is pinned out straighter. The scallops at the ends are also pinned, but gently, not drawn into points like on the other shawl.
Here it is, lying on a bougainvillea and showing off its fans, its feathers, and its garter-stitch edge.
It's a little washed-out in the sunlight. The colors in the previous photo are more accurate.

And here's the shawl with its new owner, ready to leave for its new home.

The stole is departing with it, for another new home. The two new owners are sisters and they assured me the shawl and the stole would see each other frequently.


Meanwhile, back at the ranch....

The Argosy Baby Blanket keeps growing. I've had to switch to the longest Options cable to lay it out this flat. I'm exactly half done with the last increase-side pattern repeat, the sixteenth. It's got 373 stitches in 31 repeats. I'm on the fourth ball of yarn.


Here's a different view, looking down the rows. See how the columns are quite rounded, so that the yarn overs and decreases aren't readily visible except as dips.

Here's the view across the rows, with the columns patted flat and a little apart to show off the yarn overs and decreases.

And here's another photo of it in its entirety. I think I can see some color patterns in it. Does anyone else see them? "Trends" might be a more accurate description than is "patterns", now that I look again.

Blanket Progress and Lace Blocking

I just started the fourth ball of yarn on the baby blanket. I've knitting the fifteenth pattern repeat, and have over ¾ of it done. My tape measure and I think that the edges are well over 40 in. I'm pretty sure I'm going to quit increasing at the end of the sixteenth pattern repeat. I'd show you a photo, but it doesn't look that much different, even to its devoted creator's eye. Maybe later today.

As soon as the casita cools down, I'm going to go unpin the Forest Canopy Shawl that I blocked earlier. It's definitely dry. It looks pretty good; I'll take a bunch of photos. I threaded a strand of plastic-covered steel wire (bead stringing wire) through the long straight edge and pinned out the points on the other two edges. I strung the wire tightly between the two front legs of the day bed to be sure the edge was really straight. That worked very well.

The feather and fan stole doesn't look nearly as good. I didn't have enough long pins or wire to get the two edges straight, so they wobble all over the place. The scallops came out way too pointy because of the pin shortage. I'm going to re-block it by threading the wire through the edges and tying it to the day bed frame. I'll make the scallops more scallop-y and less pointy, too. I'll take some photos of it now, but I may not show those to the world. However, once I get it wired up, I'll snap a few more for show and tell.

The casita was 88° F when I turned the A/C on, so it should be pretty comfortable after lunch. Blocking is surprisingly hard work with all the back-and-forth iterations. I have to work fast because the relative humidity is 14% outside and things dry very quickly indeed. Spray bottles help a lot.

Today was probably our last day of having our groceries delivered for a while. We intend to go back up to Lancaster for the rest of the summer, only coming down here for short visits. I think we're leaving on Thursday or Friday, but that could change. I've been packing up yarn from my sub-stash down here. Some of it's returning to the main stash, but too much is joining the main stash for the first time. I'm going to leave the heavier winter stuff here and concentrate on summer knitting. My goddaughter needs crop tops and shells and tank tops and cool little skirts.