What comes to mind just now is: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. My BBBB was tucked away at the bottom of my my stash shelf, which I happily reorganised after pulling everything out to get my hands on it. My stash shelf, it should be noted, is approximately one purchase away from officially overstuffed. Once everything was put away again I took my blankie to the lounge, I pulled it out of it’s ziplock bag and I was NOT pleased. The beautiful, all natural, fancy baby soap that I had wrapped inside the blankie, as per Grandma Mary’s practice with all her yarns and knits, had oozed all over my BBBB. Evidently I chose the wrong kind of soap. I was horrified, to say the least. But putting my horror aside I held the blankie, I snuggled it up to my face and smelt it, I looked at it’s edges oh so carefully and I decided loved it just the way it was (apart from the soap mess of course).

It’s not perfect, but it is beautiful and it was the first real project I knit. Something in me just doesn’t want to fiddle with it after all. So I washed it oh so carefully and it is now drying on a towel for the second time.

I really am going to make some progress on Carla sometime soon. Truly I am.

My story is neither as dramatic, nor as wittily told as Stephanie’s and neither would a photo be as disturbing. But I am a copycat none the less. This afternoon I slammed my thumb in a window while trying to unstick the damn thing and get it closed. My thumb is not black and blue, but it HURTS and I am not even going to try to knit tonight, when I finally have the chance.

That last small job on Isabelle’s quilt top, which I thought would take 1/2 an evening has taken two. It may have taken longer than I expected but the quilt top is, at last, complete and the time has come to baste the layers together and quilt the thing! I am feeling a little intimidated and choosing not to think about it for a while.

This leaves me with no other choice but to pull out my BBBB and start ripping, ’cause February is for fixing and I am running out of time!

You may recall that the pattern stitch for Carla is :

R1: k1, *yfwd, sl 1, k 1, psso* to last, k1
R2: p1, *yfwd, sl 1, k1, psso* to last, p1

And that I thought R2 in the round might look something like this: *yfwd, sl 1, p1, psso*, or perhaps this: *yfwd, sl 1, p1, psso*. Wrong. Wrong. And the two or three other methods I tried - also wrong. Time to break out the books.

You know I enjoyed sitting down and reading Maggie Righetti’s “Knitting in Plain English” cover to cover, I learned a lot and she made me laugh. But more and more I am coming to realise that Montse Stanley always seems to have the answer. To knit Carla in the round you need to do this:

R1: *yfwd, sl 1, k 1, psso*
R2: *p1, sl 1, return slipped stich to left needle twisted, return purled stitch to left needle, psso, slip purled stitch purlwise, yb*

Sounds complicated but really it’s not, though it’s not quite as easy as the first row. And as you can see it works! The top 2 inches or so of my swatch were done “in the round” and despite the poor lighting and shadows in all the wrong places you can sort of see that it is indeed working.

I have some quilting to do tonight and then I will start playing around with doing the double increases and if that works I need to figure out how to handle the stitches at the top of the sleeve which need to be dropped and then (assuming it all works, which is no doubt assuming a lot) I am going to knit this thing!

I wrote this post last night in Adelaide and was pretty much done when Mum’s dog tore past the table, got tangled in the phone cable and pulled my laptop off the table, sending it flying across the room, thus ripping the screen from the case and rendering it utterly useless. I am currently computerless while Jesse transfers my harddrive back to my old (OLD) machine and prays to the insurance gods for a replacement laptop.

Thanks to everyone who offered advice on the pattern for Carla, with your help (particularly all the email support from Nancy) I managed to finish writing out the tricky part of the top down version of the patter. So today I swatched. I have to say I am a little confused, Nancy felt that a yarn forward was not the same thing as a yarn over, and Montse Stanley agrees. But clearly if I knit the pattern with a yarn forward (which does not create a stitch) there would very shortly be no stitches left at all. I don’t know if the call for a yarn forward is a mistake or if, despite studying the text and photos of my Knitter’s Handbook I don’t quite get it. I went ahead and knit the swatch using what I think is a yarn over and the pattern looks correct to me. If anyone who has made Carla can confirm that my swatch looks right I would be deeply grateful.

Of course this swatch was knitted flat. And, funnily enough my edge stitches are unusually neat and the pattern is very simple knit flat. So do I try to figure out how to reverse the pattern and continue on with the top down idea or do I just follow the pattern as written? Oh, and how much do you stretch out such a lacey pattern stitch to check your gauge? All these questions and more must be answered before I can continue…

In other news I went shopping. The other day while buying the rest of the fabric for Isabelle’s quilt I picked up a couple of skeins of Katia Nordic to make a Buttonhole bag for a friend. I got it home and realised I would need two or three times as much yarn as I had, which would be two or three times my budget for the project. Today I took it back and exchanged it for this instead:

It’s going to be a Market Squares Bag and I got so excited I bought this too:

You guessed it - a second Market Squares Bag. I am really looking froward to doing these but they will have to wait until after Carla, Peach Jacket, Isabelle’s Debbie Bliss Cardi, Isabelle’s Poncho, my Jo Sharp vest, you get the picture…

I think I am going to bite the bullet and try converting the pattern for Carla. I have in fact started already. Can somebody (anybody) PLEASE explain to me what “dec 2 sts at each end of 5th and every following 8th row to 11 sts” means. Is that on the fifth row and then always the 8th row from then on, or is it 5th then 8th then 5th then 8th? I have a lot to learn about pattern reading. Given my difficulty in reading the original pattern, the fact that I am trying to convert it probably points to some kind of mental problem on my part.

Oh, and problem number two… The pattern stitch is :
R1: k1, *yfwd, sl 1, k 1, psso* to last, k1
R2: p1, *yfwd, sl 1, k1, psso* to last, p1

If I am knitting it in the round does that make the repeat for R2 *yfwd, sl 1, p1, psso* (assuming that a yfwd is a yarn over and that on the purl row you would be doing the purl version of a yarn over). Or is it more complicated than that? Perhaps R2 actually needs a right leaning decrease if knit in the round? Would that be ktog or something similar? Clearly I have some swatching to do. Some serious swatching.

But now for a little light relief:

These are the knitted toys I bought Isabelle and my grandma’s spinner’s and weaver’s guild (or sinner’s and griever’s as my mother and her siblings are inclined to call it). Aren’t they cute? She has been toting them everywhere we go for three days now, which is a long time for any toy to stay popular in this household.

Thanks to everyone who stopped in with a kind word. Nana is doing as well as could be expected. I haven’t done any knitting but I did go to visit my other Gran at the Spinners and Weavers Guild this morning. I got to ogle all the gorgeous knits, yarn, roving, rugs and toys in the shop and bought Isabelle some hand made toys to keep her busy at the hospital. I have a photo but can’t get it off of the camera right now. You know reading that back I was so sure that “ogle” was supposed to be “google” that I nearly changed it, sign of the times.

I assembled Isabelle’s quilt top last night. Now I have to buy batting, backing and the fabric to add a border like this. I am thinking a thin strip of green, a wide strip of pink and then green or purple binding.

I am unexpectedly getting on a plane home in less than 2 hours as my Nana has had a heart attack. She is as ok as she can be, but it was severe and they are running out of options to help her so Isabelle and I are off to see her while we can. I am taking the makings of Carla with me, but don’t be surprised if I come home with a Sophie instead (not made from Cotton Tape of course). I grabbed some Cascade 220 from the stash just in case Carla is too much to get my head around while away.

I may or may not be able to post while I am gone. And now I am off to deal with the fact that I had a HCG trigger shot this morning to make me ovulate, right before I got the news that I won’t be here to make use of it.

What’s this? It’s the end of my secret project. No, I am not going to tell you what it is, but it does mean I can start work on something less secretive… I still have more than usual going on parallel to the knitting, so progress may be slower than normal. It may be slow, but I am making headway on all my projects in a rotating system at the moment. I am concentrating on one project per day and sometimes squeeze in some time on one of the others. It goes like this: book keeping, quilt, website redesign (not this site), knitting, start the loop again. None of it is moving as fast as I would like but everything IS moving and that will have to do.

Sometime in the next two days I have to figure out whether to fix my BBBB first or start Carla. I am a bit anxious about starting Carla with so much else on my mind. I fear I am going to need to be really concentrating on what I am doing, especially at the start. I have issues with edge stitches at the best of times and from everything I have read about this sweater it is really hard to seam nicely and I know that I just won’t wear it if I get it wrong. I am thinking pretty seriously about re-writing the pattern top down all in one piece. The fact that this is my first sweater with sleeves makes me feel somewhat anxious about modifying the pattern (at all, let alone so radically). I have never made a full sweater, therefore I have never knitted top down all in one piece before either. I don’t know why exactly this method appeals to me but it does, it just seems really sensible. As well as my concerns about the seams knitting top down would also allow me to get the waist and arm lengths just right. I suspect I may want the waist somewhat longer and the arms somewhat shorter than the pattern but I am not sure… On the other hand it could just be an all out disaster…

To say I have made no progress this week is not entirely true. I have in fact finished all the pieces of my secret project. Truth be told I made 5 pieces when I only needed 4, and lets not forget that I knit the first piece twice. I have been knitting. So why did I knit 5 pieces for a 4 piece project? I was having colour issues. I am still a little worried to tell the truth but Jesse says he likes it and he can almost always be relied upon to have sage advice regarding colour. I just need to get over my issues and seam the thing so I can get on with Carla.

What is really holding me up now is that I need to do some book keeping for our business and I have let myself get so behind that I have enforced a “no knitting or sewing until some accounts progress is made” rule. Which is great, but, um, not working. The last few days I simply failed to do anything useful while procrastinating over starting the book keeping. At least if I was crafting I would be doing something. I hope to get on to the books today and seam the secret project tonight so I can pop it in the mail tomorrow.

I have been terrified someone would send this my way (thanks Cara ;-)). I majored in film theory at uni and I was good at it, really I was. But you know what the net result of those three years of intensive study of film was? I watch only trash, with something of an emphasis on women in action roles. Poor Jesse feels very hard done by in this regard, he wants to watch “cinema” I want “movies”. It is a very sad state of affairs.

1. The last movie you went to see in a theater:
Elektra It wasn’t great. I knew it wouldn’t be great when I went, but I have a compulsive need to see action films with a female lead - see above.

My dad loved to go to the movies and took me a lot as a kid. I only went more often as I got older, right up until Isabelle was born I went to see movies at the theatre constantly, weekly I would say. Jump to now and I guess I go maybe once every 6 months. I don’t even know what’s playing unless I see it advertised on the back of a bus, which you have to admit is not the best way to keep your finger on the pulse of cinematic happenings. I just saw on a bus last week that Catwoman was on DVD, I didn’t even know they had finished making it yet!

2. The last movie you watched at home:
Runaway Jury - Love, love, love John Cusack and I really enjoyed this film, I even put my knitting down. I think Jesse would have liked it too but we almost never manage to watch films together these days. I can’t work without background noise/distraction while he can’t work with it and he is almost always working….

3. How many movies do you own?
Not many actually. Once you remove Isabelle’s DVDs and the two seasons of Buffy from the shelf there isn’t much left, maybe 15? And it’s a pretty odd collection.

4. Got Netflix (or a similar service)?
Yep, similar, I suspect inferior. However it has allowed me to give far more respectable answers to some of these questions than would have been the case if we didn’t have it. So it has it’s uses. Someone should do a study of the differences in film choices one makes when choosing lots at once, in advance, as compared to on the day, in the store.

5. List five movies you adore (or mean a lot to you.)
Dogma - there is so much to love about this film that I don’t even know where to start. I just watched it again recently after unpacking it from a box that had spent far too long in storage.

Anything by the Coen brothers. If I had to pick a favourite I would be choosing between Millers Crossing , The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty

SFW - For old times sake this is one from my uni days. I should try to find a copy and see if I still like it as much as I did at the time. I seem to recall really liking Spanking the Monkey around the same time.

The Usual Suspects - there a so many Kevin Spacey films that could be on this list but this is a definite favourite of mine and Jesse’s too (we do agree some of the time it seems).

I want to put Pride and Prejudice on this list but I don’t think a mini series qualifies so The Princess Bride - I bought this on DVD the second it was realised and I watch it whenever I am sick and sulking on the couch. Hilarious film.

6. What’s in the Netflix queue?
Um, my queue is huge and you can’t prioritize it much so I have no idea what will be coming at any given time, but here is what arrived this morning:
Vertigo
Mona Lisa Smile
Gothica

7. Name three people you are going to send this to:
Alison
Mrs. Pilkington
Stephanie