Tofu-knits

Eye Candy Friday

I made it on Friday, it's not the last second, and it's even a recent photo.  This is another picture I took a couple of days ago while hiking in Sedona. This is pretty typical of the red rocks of Sedona.  But I have not yet gotten tired of hiking amidst the beauty.  Now, if I can just stay away from the man-eating yucca plants.............

Photo update

Lots of pictures here.  I figure it's about the easiest way to get everything caught up.  Besides, shouldn't a knitting blog be visually oriented?

(Very) Good Friday found me hanging out in my office before church waiting for this package.  When opened, and with some assembly, it revealed this. It's my brand new Jensen Ashley.  She's lovely, spins smoothly, and is very fast.  The other wheel in the picture is a Reeves, which I also love, and thought was very smooth and quiet.  But after spinning on the Jensen, the Reeves seemed a bit clunkier in comparison.  Hmm, I'm starting to feel a little guilty about saying things like that, almost as though I'm comparing my children.

In the knitting world, I've finished another pair of socks.  They're not ready for their debut yet, as I never trim the loose ends until they've been washed.  That's just in case they do some unexpected size changing when they hit water, and I have to rip back and re-knit.  I'm not usually a stickler for matching color repeats in socks.  After all, they're socks!  But looking at the photo, I can see that these might look better if they were closer in appearance.  One looks like an orange sock with stripes, the other like a striped sock.  Oh well.

 The baby yarn I posted about here is becoming this.  I'm making up the pattern as I go along, using elements I've seen other places and liked.  The bottom and the cuffs are a picot hem.  The body has an eyelet pattern, adapted from one of the Barbara Walker treasuries.  One of the biggest surprises to me has been how many decisions need to be made for just a simple drop-shoulder cardigan like this.  It's not just gauge.  It's not just size. (which I fudged after looking at baby sweater patterns in a book to come up with chest diameter, body length, and sleeve length.)  It's how long to make the hem.  Should the eyelet pattern spacing get smaller as the sleeve diameter decreases, or should one repeat be eliminated as its location is decreased away?  Ribbed button band or picot?  Should the collar extend across both button bands so it overlaps itself, or should it end at the junction of body and band on one side?  How many stitches should I pick up for the button bands, and the collar?

I already learned one pitfall on this.  If you are tacking down a hemmed cuff, and you don't go quite far enough up the sleeve on the inside, the hem will curl outward.  Badly.  So there's some undoing waiting in my future.  I've tried taking notes on this, thinking maybe if it comes out pretty, I could write up the pattern.  But my notes usually end up being scribbles, unintelligible even to me more than 3 hours after I've written them.  And often when I do write something comprehensible, I discover that what I'd planned doesn't really work, and have to change something as I'm knitting.

In other news, I've been traveling a bit.  The beginning of April found me in San Diego for a conference.  My sister came down to visit the first day there, and we spent the afternoon up in La Jolla.  That is a lovely community, with a great yarn store, but.......it fulfills the 4 criteria for standard tourist town.

Art galleries, expensive restaurants, T-shirt shops, and bad parking.

I've done more hiking in Sedona.  (Standard tourist town, too.)  And that's where I encountered the dreaded man-eating yucca plant.  At least it inspired me to go get my overdue tetanus booster.  I also found evidence of a Borg visit to the region.  And I met the largest snake I've ever seen in the wild.  I'm not sure exactly what kind he is, but pictures I found online hint that he's a gopher snake.

There was also a brief visit to Albuquerque, where 2 people I know spoke at a conference.  And I got the true Albuquerque experience at the Frontier.  Cheap, casual, good food, varied customers, that's my kind of place.

Next month we're headed back to Ohio for our annual family gathering.  It'll be nice to see my Dad and my sisters, and the hiking is great.  But like so many middle-agers, we're watching Dad's health decline, wondering how long he can keep living alone with no nearby relatives, and hoping it isn't a crisis that brings about change.