Friday, July 21, 2006

Pictures galore!

It's been a really long time since posting, but I completely blame it on Delta Airlines once again. This time, in touring the Lewis and Clark region of the country where the explorers picked up the lovely and indispensible Sacajawea, I had to endure two cancelled flights in a row! Can we call that fun? Brownie points go out to anyone who can name what town the Spaz was working in at the time. Hint: I picked up some less than half price rain pants at the Patagucci outlet in this town of approximately 5000 where the closest airport is an hour away up I-15 and has a grand total of one gate and three flights daily.

But, of course, flight delays do mean that I get a good bit of knitting in. I cast on July 11 for another baby sweater since they're also super portable knitting and DF has told me that I have too many knit socks. This one is the hooded sweater in the Debbie Bliss Special Knits for Babies book. Again, this one is going seamless, so I've finished the body and half of the hood. I tried to sew the shoulder seams so that the seam is invisible, but I think it looks a bit funny. The 3 needle BO seems to be the least bulky of all shoulder seams I've tried so far.

Upon my return, I spent a good day relaxing and knitting in the park. If you can call it knitting. I decided to push through and finally finish DF's zippered raglan. It took me something like 2 hours just to baste the zipper in place so that the zipper lined up on both sides. Then, actually sewing it in place with backstitch... just shoot me now. This is how much more I have left to do on the last side after 3 hours of sewing by hand. The white thread is the section that's just basted in and remains to be sewn. I sure hope that sewing down the collar doesn't take as long.

Having burned myself out on sewing, I decided that some good old-fashioned knitting was in order. Some of you may have noticed that I went yarn shopping with Jillian a couple of weeks ago. I decided to turn my purchases into something a bit more in season than the fuzzy alpaca long sleeve hooded sweater I've also been sorta secretly working on (working on the sleeves top down like you all egged me on to... it seems to be working!) So, I cast on for Deciduous by Marnie Maclean on Wednesday in the oh so delectable Rowan Calmer. I'm so in love. Just for scale, here's Deciduous on top of DF's zippered raglan. The thing is so SMALL.
On the wedding front, it's less than 3 months away and I'm getting more nervous. My Dad sent me a CD of my baby pictures to be used in an unabashedly cheesy, tear jerking video story of the two of us for the reception. Most of the pictures contained were just awful Go Fug Yourself moments (see them on the wedding blog, but please come back here to comment). But since this is a knitting blog, I thought I'd share these two:

I want to say that this little cardigan was hand-crocheted by my grandmother, but I can never remember her having crochet needle in hand. Even now, I think this one's too cute! I might however have to question my parents' judgment at pairing a pink cardi with a red checkered pant suit and sailor themed bucket hat.

Same thing with the crochet look here. And um, no, I didn't have the mumps. Clearly, it's drug store cheap acrylic, but darn it if there wasn't some impressive stitch pattern and colorwork going on here. Go grandma!