Can You Say Endorphins? (yes, knitting related content!)

I got my new tattoo last night. I've been planning it for a while. I drew up a sketch of a ball of yarn and needles, and futzed and played with it. When I went to the tattoo shop, they decided I had to talk to the custom guy (Al), because I wanted it more realistic and colored fancy. He was busy, so we made an appointment. When I showed up a week later, he had a nicer ball of yarn, and he made it littler (although it still feels huge, and it's smaller than I had planned! Good thing he thought it should be smaller than I asked for!), and changed the needles, and we flipped it over a bit...I was planning on the needles being vertical, he was planning on horizontal, so we split the difference...another good choice!

It's neat how he transferred it to my leg, like a Cracker Jack tattoo! Then he set to it...with that buzzy pen. It didn't hurt as much as my old tattoos did, but it hurt plenty! There were a bunch of long lines, and those are the worst, I think. The coloring wasn't too bad, it was just slow. But the whole thing took just under 30 minutes. I'm clearly a wimp when it comes to tattoos...others get ones that take hours!

After I left I could feel those pain induced endorphins...I felt wonderful! My leg was only sore to touch, really, but the hormones were still zipping around, it's very weird.

So, here is Al. I think he's now convinced that knitters are lunatics...or maybe just me.




And isn't my new tattoo pretty?



The color is somewhat pinker in person. The needles are just about as long as my index finger.

HUZZAH!

Been a long time since things turned out this well! No nightmares tonight...

Good Night.

Politics

We are watching and waiting.... 538 has called it for Obama it seems a little early to do that to me!

As we were sitting here, all of us on our laptops, with NBC on, all of a sudden, there was a huge scratch on the door! Scared me...after scooping up the dog and cautiously opening the door...in popped Peggy! How on earth did she get out? We haven't had a cat get outside in probably ten years!

Political Hallowe'en!

I don't have photos of the kids, the boys were a soldier (Well, he calls it an Army Guy. I say Soldier) and Indiana Jones. They put together the costumes themselves, so I'm satisfied.

But I did Rapunzel's costume.


Teddy loved it...our little political dog.

The kids were quite enamored of the pumpkins in Yes We Carve, so we downloaded some stencils, and they went at it.

Teddy did a respectable job on his pumpkin.



Harry carved one the day before, a typical skull, but when he saw Teddy's, we wanted to play, too. So he went and got one of the carvable fake pumpkins (surprisingly real looking) I bought last year, and set to it. He has a great deal of patience....can you believe that a TEN year old did this?????



Boo!

Something to work on

I have finished clue 2 of my MS4. I'm noticing that my YOs are not the same size, depending on if I do an SSK or k2tog next to them. I need to watch and see if it matters if the YO is before or after each sort, to see what I can do to make them more similar.








The sides area curving in and out in the most intriguing fashion! The purl column that delineates the edging is curving too. There is a little indent in the bottom corners, and I just can't tell if the very bottom of the center section will want to be straight or not!

I can't wait to find out! Now I just have to catch up with clue 3!

Frogging a section down

I have been thinking that simple counting on the wrong side rows wasn't going to be enough for me to be sure that my Mystery Stole 4, from Pink Lemon Twist was going to be enough for me to not have massive mistakes. I was right. About 2 pattern rows before the end of Clue 1, I looked more carefully and noticed a honking big hole in the bottom of the left diamond.


See it here?


That won't do. Not at all. No way am I gonna frog this...it has the right number of stitches in the section, so there won't be an issue with too much or too little yarn, so I'll just drop it down to fix it.

But first, I got out my supplies!


Then I picked up the stitches just below the mistake by inserting a skinny dpn into the right leg of each stitch. I followed those stitches up their columns to the needles, and dropped the stitches off and let them ravel down. They won't go past my dpn, of course.


What a mess, huh?



Well, it's not hard to make it look more manageable, just a simple pin does that.


This is what a yarn over on the right looks like, when it's all lined up correctly.


If this is confusing, I recommend dropping down a few more stitches, so that there won't _be_ any lingering yarn overs...make sure that the edge-most stitch and the one next to are not yarn overs, or at least not yarn overs that get decreased over to the side that isn't raveled!

This is what it looks like WRONG!!!



That yo is lost due to a chain of lost YOs from above. To fix it, I had to go to the top, and find the highest one, wrap it correctly, then go down a row, wrap it, etc, down to the bottom. As you see above, it worked.

Then I knit the row correctly.



I got confused and had to undo a bit, when I did two pattern rows in a row, forgetting the plain knit row in between...when fixing something from the right side, I just knit across the rows I'd purled, of course!

And it worked nicely!

Good Grief!

I am making a little dragon for myself. He needs taming, but we are getting there!

His name is Good Grief.

At this point, he's just bones... and he is NOT tamed...all those little wires are quite sharp, and my hands have many bite marks from them to prove it!



I have wrapped him in layers of quilt batting. This helps a lot...but is it his muscle or subcutaneous something or other? I guess it must be his muscle, because there still remains another layer before the skin.



And his close up:


Now he has his subcutaneous...um...what? When you give guinea pigs fluids, it's called giving them subcutaneous fluids. But is that a noun, or what? At any rate, he has it here.

little red what?

I am in the TsockFlock Club, by the Tsarina of Tsocks. This is the Tsuspense Project....


I have to work on loosening up those left slipped stitches. This always happens to me on a slip before a knit. The slips before a purl are fine!

I will frog this back to below that little gusset....I think I can do better than this, and I'm feeling compulsive about it!

I have finished the Tallit, and the Bar Mitvah was fun....more on that later.

The Tallit Grows!

I've been stitching and stitching on the Tallit. I had a disaster with the base fabric....there was a weaving error in the middle of the fabric, making the texture different (not smooth), sort of like seersucker! Washing and pressing and adding sizing did nothing. I have some other fabric, which will be _fine_ but is a different color, and not already half hemmed (which is when I discovered the problem). But I have to get over that and deal.

The stars are coming out fine...well, I have to fix a tiny two thread snip in the underneath fabric, and then finish up one point, and the stars will be done! Turns out I should'a basted the lining down the middle before I did the applique. So now I have to kluge the edge all around. I think I'll unstitch the wool lining and redo the sides...but we'll see tomorrow. It's too late to make a decision. But that is a detail.




This one is the closest in color. It's all silk and shimmers.




I started the applique at the Wholesome Trottin' Race we went to yesterday (not the kind where they set down right on the horse)...it was really windy, and I only got 3 done. Today at the Marlboro parade I got a bunch done, and got even more done at the Unit Party afterwards....I think Wendy go some photos of the pirate ship in the pool, being manned by Teddy and Harry, and attacked by Dana and Brian and Adam (I think)...They had a blast...so did the kids.

I meant to watch just one episode of Gilmore Girls, but Wendy insisted we had to see another...and it looks to me like Lorelei will marry Luke at the end, but Wendy won't tell me...there are only a couple of episodes left, and she wanted me to stay up late and watch, but Abe has to work (HUZZAH!) tomorrow and I have to drive him, he has a sprained ankle!!!!

I hope to get the tallit cut out tomorrow morning, before Teddy goes to school, so I can hem it during the PA meeting. Then finish that one star, get the neckpiece on, and then just something for the corners, and Tzit Tzit!

Unless something else goes wrong....

I have photos!

This one is GONE!

She is off being a political intern for the fall semester. We miss her, it's weird having a kid grow up!

We went to Battle Ship Cove for a reenactment.

Teddy is the happiest boy in the world.





Don't worry, he's just drilling, it's a non-firing piece. He did well at his first drill, and all were happy with him. He was VERY tired!

Wendy got a new hat.



And Harry did some virtual Fencing while watching Teddy's lesson





experimenting to see why this photo isn't showing up for some people, so it's there twice, now...


And I'm well into Alex's Tallit, and it seems to be going ok.



But what I want to be doing is knitting, of course...I have some lovely silk to make a dragon with (for me!) and I have my lace with nupps and my earth stripe wrap....all on hold at the moment. And when I finish this Tallit, I'll be working on French Sleeved waistcoats, whose name I forget at the moment. It's not Gilet, which is the sleeveless waistcoat.

Bracelets

I got my friend Sharon to make my daughters and me bracelets. Pictured here on my mohair Snowdrop Shawl, pattern by the Yarn Harlot




I'm pink, Beth is green and Wendy is purple.



I asked Sharon to design them, I just requested the colors, she found the great Mogen David clasps and all the silver spacers. (next photo background is the Earth Stripe Wrap, by Kaffe Fasset).



Eventually, I asked for each bracelet to have a bead from the others. At first she wasn't too sure about that (and I wasn't, either, really), but Sharon came up with the really neat way to manage that. I wasn't sure it would work, artistically, but Sharon took it and ran with it, and we love them!

Ravelympics Projects!

A Monmouth Cap



This one is a large, fits my DH, who has a head size of about a 7 7/8 or 8....yeah, hats normally stop at size 7 3/4. I SAID it was large!

It's been felted, and is drying. No one here was too happy with me, as I made them all try on the wet cap out of the washer (and I have a front loader....you can felt in and stop a front loader....just push in the knob and wait for the light to go out, and open the door. Easy).

Here is the loop.

ETA


Here is my first FO for the Ravelympics.




Angora wool mittens for my DD to take to college. She won't get frostbite in the Frozen Tundra of Waltham. I mean, it's a hilly campus, and she'll be rushing from building to building, I remember college, and there will be miserable days, when she'll NEED them. And they are soft and fuzzy and wonderful. She may make fun of me now, but she'll love them come February!

Aren't the little medals cute?

I'm well into the second cap, I think it'll be a medium. Oh, and they take less than a ball of yarn. But I'm getting bored with it.

Ravelympics!

I'm doing the Ravelry Olympics, and I'm testing to see if the countdown timer works.


Clearly, it does!

We did the VINEYARD!

Harry and I did it! We loaded up our bikes, got dropped off at Wood's Hole, and took the ferry over to Martha's Vineyard. After the obligatory stop at the Carousel (I got the brass ring our first ride, so I was done and happy, and Harry took my free ride)



We got a snack and headed for Edgartown.

When a another group of tourists wanted me to take their picture, they returned the favor.






In Edgartown we checked out the harbor....we've seen SO many of these red jellyfish this year! Are they the same kind they have at Prince Edward Island? They don't look like the really colorful and nasty man-o-war's I remember as a kid. This one had a clear bell around the red body (if you call that a body), and it was pumping it in and out to move very effectively.

For lunch, Harry's choice was the rooftop of a fish restaurant. We rode back, taking the wrong road, naturally. Harry wasn't too happy about that, but it only added about 1 mile, and it was in shade, rather than the blaring sun....the day was HOT!

Oak Bluffs is really pretty, and it is amazing how great being independent on bikes feels!



Harry did great, and I was really proud of both of us...14 miles! I know lots of people do way more than that, but we're just starting, and it was the right amount of challenge for us!