Sweater FAIL (and why sometimes it is good to get a second opinion)
What a busy little bee I’ve been!
So, Iceland…dear Iceland…..bane of my existence….why have you failed me so? Was it the pattern? Most definitely not! The yarn? Well….maybe. I thought I had gauge….I did swatch it three times. Maybe it was my leaving the first repeat for so long before picking it back up? I just don’t know.
I thought I was in the home stretch. The top was knit and ready to be blocked. I purchased gorgeous buttons from my LYS that flashed teal and fuschia. Like the most beautiful of polished abalone It was going to be the most gorgeous sweater ever.
One night at my stitch n’ bitch Vilma said she had the room and was ready for me. I was going to meet her at lunch and block that sucker! I got all my supplies ready and left work to go meet her. We stuck my lovely Iceland in the sink and soaked it…..then what happened…well, I can only say it made my brain go kablooey. It blew up….like, literally. It was so huge we didn’t even pin. We laid it out gently on the towels and tried to shape it. We checked dimensions, but then decided it was best not to try and agonize over it. We were trying to make it as small as possible. I decided it looked flat and straight and I left it there, with my heart broken in little pieces all over it.
The next two days I tried not to think about it, but I made little comments to non-knitters here and there about how I utterly failed. It was my first sweater fail and that seems to be the hardest. I almost vowed to never knit another sweater. Yes, it was *that* bad.
So Friday rolled around and I went up to the shop. I was hardly excited. I knew she’d be there with it. I didn’t want to look at it, which is sad because I had also had a total win blocking one of my handspun scarves. It didn’t matter….my gorgeous sweater was ruined.
I walked in and tried it on and wanted to cry. It was enormous. Too enormous to save. I had lost all hope.
Then something wonderful happened. The ladies at the shop decided to change my perspective. A few of them offered to buy it off of me after hearing that I planned to rip the entire thing out and restart it. But then they started to offer me another option. I think it was a miracle (well, for a knitter at least).
For those of you out of the loop, this is what it was *supposed* to look like:
Iceland, the right way
This is what it ended up being:
My Iceland, repurposed...
And the back....
So, I may have saved this one. Of course, It isn’t quite a finished object yet. I need to make a black sash for it….that ribbon is just for “show”.
And while I am sitting here going on and on about saving this, I did have a win…
My handspun "Saltwater Waves" yarn made into a purty scarf for me.
You know you have a yarn “problem”…
…when you start keeping your stash at work.
Rowan Big Wool
In my defense…it is VERY cold at work…and I almost never remember to bring myself a sweater…so a blanket for my desk seemed like a good idea….although I may look a little silly all bundled up in the corner of the office when it is 90 degrees outside…
Summer is coming…
…so why am I looking for alpaca projects? I do live in Southern California after all…
Lots of things happening around here. I wish more were fiber related, but we have been super busy and my folks came out to stay with us for a couple weeks to help celebrate the twins’ fourth birthday. There have been trips all over the place, including Disneyland (which I hear will not allow needles in the park…good thing I didn’t have any down time there)!
So, it started with the Cookie A class I took after meeting her at Unwind. I designed my first pair of socks! Of course I am still test knitting them…so we’ll see how they turn out. Then my folks came bearing gifts from Frankenmuth.
Pictures from my parents trip to Frankenmuth
My folks scored me 2 3/4 pounds of fluff!
1lb. white combed top, 1 lb. white alpaca, 3/4 lb. of dyed alpaca
I am now swimming in alpaca and I have no idea what to make with it. The hot weather is here, but the office has been in deep freeze, so I might have a good reason to make some alpaca garments. I still have the bag of alpaca and bunny that my mom got me on her last trip to the mill. That will be the next thing I spin. I have some yarn on the bobbins right now that has just been chillin’ there. One of the bobbins is a surprise project I can’t write about here….the others have just been waiting for me to get some time to dump my photos onto any random computer I can find so I can make room to take proper, non-mobile phone pictures.
Once the parents left I went a little cuckoos mcgoos. The last two days I have spent dyeing fiber after the kids have gone to bed.
Messin' around with acid dye
I dyed some mills ends wool with some Jacquard acid dyes. I was messing around with dye to try and find my groove. I am new to this.
Then I decided to take that pound of alpaca my folks brought and hit it with some black food coloring. It turned out gorgeous!
Alpaca in purty greens and purples...
Of course, this whirlwind of crazy doesn’t include all the stuff I did last night which included handcarding some other stuff I dyed and making goodies for my Fiber Collective Swap Partner. But those are secret….shhhhh…..
I am the bringer of life!
Look at me! I am growing cotton…on my dinky balcony! Woohoo!
OMG!
*please live, please live, please live…*
Cookie A!
Friday night was so much fun! I had missed a few Friday Night meetups for various reasons, but I couldn’t miss this past Friday. Cookie A was at Unwind and I was going to hopefully get my sock mojo back. The place was hoppin’…
Everyone hanging out...
Pagewood Farms!
Cookie A!! Oh...and me...
Socks!!
So quiet…
No, really…it is.
I haven’t had many pictures to post lately. My lazy butt needs to try and get to a computer that works to upload photos. In the meantime…photos from other folks…or crappy ones from the Blackberry. It’s just to tide me over until I can get my hands on a laptop that works. I am hoping for the best. 
In the meantime, what is cuter than a baby wearing something I made? Nothing I tell you!!
Baby William in his kippah
Easter Fun!
What to write? What to write? It isn’t like things have been boring around our household as of late, but things are starting to settle down a bit, thankfully. After a month of bouncing germs off of one another, we all seem to be on the mend again. We have fought a mighty battle with the pink eye and won (for now). Everyone still seems to be coughing all over each other, but hopefully that will start clearing up soon. Oh, and my laptop with all my bloggy/photo stuff is still toast. Boo.
Easter is never normal around our house. The kids are still small and we haven’t really established any real traditions yet, although I may have started one. In order to combat my homesickness, I decided to make Easter dinner up Midwestern Polish style. Now I am not saying it was authentic, because quite frankly, I have *zero* time to be making pierogi from scratch…but it was tasty.
Tasty!!
Easter day was different for us too. We decided to take the twins to the Aquarium of the Pacific…
The twins checking out the fish...
Where my daughter dropped her pink poodle (which she named “TX”) in a tank of toxic stuff….
The "stuff"
Which I stuck my hand in and fished out before seeing this sign. Awesome. So TX ended up in the trash and lil’ girl and I headed straight to the restroom to wash our hands, all while she cried hysterically. An emergency call to Grandma was made so we could ask where she bought the pink poodle of doom. Answer: Walmart. I hopped on the twitter, my husband talked to the folks at the aquarium, and before we knew it, wehad directions to the nearest Walmart in Long Beach. We picked up the last poodle they had.
TX, number 2
And all was again right with the world.
So what have I been doing fiber-wise? To be honest, not a whole hell of a lot. Or at least it seems that way to me. I have done some dyeing, I mean, who wouldn’t given some extra wool and some food coloring and Easter egg dyes?
Green-blue roving dyed with food coloring
I gave this green and blue roving to Wendy for her birthday… I also attacked the Easter egg dyes once the kids were done dyeing their eggs.
Wooly Easter fun for me!
Meeting up with the Fiber Collective…
Time for a little lunchtime blogging. It seems to me I am starting to get in some sort of groove with this lunchtime blogging situation. It helps that the work computers are fast…and quite frankly, as far as our home computers are concerned right now, we are practically off the grid. But that is another story…
So, on 3/29, the ladies of the Fiber Collective (on Ravely) had a meetup up at Edward’s Air Force Base at Stashymama’s place. I convinced Wendy to go up there with me, which took absolutely *zero* armtwisting on my part. We don’t know many folks around these parts that are into spinning, so the idea of getting together with a bunch of spinner’s for the day was incredibly exciting! So we packed up our wheels and some food and headed up there!
We got up there a little late, but we walked in to see this:
A Louet, A Lendrum, a Ladybug
A Mach 1
All sorts of fibery goodness!
I want a drumcarder...I had better start playing the lottery...
Wendy's grey angora with purple mohair
The Alliance Starbird.
Tweets!
I meant to write a real blog post today about all of the exciting things that happened at Stashymama’s this weekend, but my husband came to the lot to have lunch with me today. I guess it will have to wait until tomorrow.
In the meantime, I thought this was my quote for the day:
Jedimom13@AlpacaFarmgirl It’s why I have to work full time in the “entertainment industry” as opposed to hugging cute, fluffy animals all day!!
OH! And one more thing…
I completely forgot I had pics of completed yarn to post. Silly me, so many pictures and not enough brain power to remember everything…
Here is my first attempt at Navajo plying:
It turned out very yummy and a good 460 yards.
I also decided to ply my “Cheater’s Garden” single I spun from an artclub Cuckoo Batt ages ago:
I plied this guy on my Kundert spindle.
So look at me go! Two whole posts on my lunch hour at work. Awesome!
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