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.