Holiday Knitting

I actually finished my holiday knitting early this year. Which means that I've been adding projects to the list. But they're all small.

Anyways, here are the projects I finished.

For one of Dan's sisters:
The Soul Sucking Scarf from HELL!!!!
I mean... the spiral scarf from Scarf Style.

For his other sister, I decided to do the Devil Hat from Stitch n Bitch:
Except it looked more like a red blob with bug pinchers on the top. So I snipped off the horns and added kitty ears...

Still not as cute as I'd hoped, cause now I wish I'd knit it in black...

And for my mom:
It's the Wool Peddler's Shawl from Folk Shawls. I knit the body in gray, the lace in a soft pink and then finished off with the gray again. It took FOREVER but I'm glad I stuck to it and finished it. I'm excited to see how Mom likes it.

Dan and I went and got professional portraits done last week to give to both our parents for x-mas. I'm so happy with the pictures. They're adorable. We brought props and cracked the photographer up with our different poses which are:

The traditional couple's pose
Us in black hats, back to back and looking at the camera
Him with a wrestling championship belt across one shoulder while I roll my eyes
Me knitting while he stands captive with the yarn wound around his hands

As soon as they get in I'll scan them and post them here, cause I absolutely adore them.

Well... time to write a few essays and study for finals!

Strange Week

This past Monday was my birthday. As per usual, the week either before or after my birthday is always.... interesting.

Take this week for example. Monday one of my professors had an emotional breakdown in the middle of class. I had left class after she announced there wasn't going to be a quiz, so I missed the show, but apparently she cried. I feel bad cause she cried. But she is a flake.

Wednesday another one of my professors had a breakdown in the middle of class. Only this time I had no sympathy and was about ready to stand up a slap her because she asked us to tell her why we weren't doing well in the class, inviting the criticism, and then got all uppity with us. At one point she responded to one of my comments, asking her to post class notes earlier than 15 minutes before class, by informing me that I'm lazy. Yeah. Then she announced that from that point forward she was dealing with adults. I wanted SOOOO badly to ask if that meant she was going to start acting like one too. I refrained. With difficulty.

Thursday I found out that I still haven't been paid by the second job I've been working at for nearly two months now. In fact, there's not even any paperwork in process.

Friday I was working and totally fried a powerstrip, losing all of the work that I had done during the morning. Obviously I had to switch projects while it was fixed, so I went to work on a different project and was reinforced in my opinion that people I work with, student workers at least, absolutely HATE me and cannot stand being near me.

Thankfully Friday ended with Dan meeting me at my place, us going bowling and then me spending the night at his place and us lounging together all day Saturday.

The semester is reaching critical mass and I'm looking forward to next week, when Dan and I will be spending Thanksgiving break with my family, lounging, relaxing and otherwise wasting time. It's just a matter of getting through this last week.

At the moment there is a teenybopper relationship support group going on in the living room and I keep catching little snippets of the conversation during quiet moments of my music. Allow me to share:

"We didn't even have sex this weekend. We didn't have it except for once!"
"I'm not ready to seriously date someone. That's why I want to just be dating him!"

Oy.

Anyways, to celebrate my birthday Dan's sisters made me two of the coolest cakes ever. And these ladies have never had a single class on this sort of stuff. Just made it up on their own:


Speaking of his sisters, I'm knitting them each gifts for the holidays and I finished one of them. It's the Spiral Scarf from Scarf Style, but I prefer to call it the Soul Sucking Scarf From Hell.


Just a few more holiday gifts to knit up, I'm keeping the list short this year due to time and money constraints.

Time to return to homework...

Hoppity Hoppity Hop

I have been riding the euphoric high of being completely finished with all my classes and using it for productive purposes!



Took me 2 evenings' work to knit. I love Jean Greenhowe's patterns. She is an absolute genius.

Up next:


I've actually got his legs and torso done. He's a sad, headless freak of nature...

Yay Karma

So apparently I've got some wickedly good Karma going at the moment. It all started when I was at work the other day. I had pulled up the picture of Lil D all knit up and my boss asked me "Oh hey... I was cleaning out my parents' house and I found a huge cedar chest full of yarn. You wouldn't want any, would you? Otherwise I'm going to throw it all out.

Needless to say, I claimed the yarn.
5 boxes so far, with more to come, and "A huge bucket of needles and hooks too. About the size of a paint can."

That same day on campus the used book store in the library was outside with some books. $4.25 for all these books.


I finished knitting this beret a long time ago. I need to felt it a little, as it's fairly large. I have problems with my ribbing always stretching out and losing the bounce. Maybe I need to knit some elastic into my hats...


Continuing with the great deals, I found this gorgeous necklace in a local thrift store today for a whopping $2.


And this fantastic knitting book for 25 cents.






And, to top it all off, I've been searching everywhere for Jean Greenhowe's Knitted Toys book, on and off for the past year or so. I was perusing Amazon and I saw a used listing for $2.98. I was positive that it was a fluke, that it would be one of her shorter pamphlets, but even for one of those that's pretty cheap so I bought it figuring whatever I get, I get.
WOOT!!!

Still Knitting

Knit this little guy up for D as a surprise present. He absolutely loved the costume he wore in the play he was in, but couldn't keep it.


Ruffles and a little bow tie.
The twins.

What The Dickens??

So I went from no knitting at all to knitting like a crazy person and 4 finished objects to show off.

I'm in love with Raynor Gellatly's patterns that have been adapted from those great teeny crochet patterns.

I have her monkey pattern a try and ended up with Dickens:

Hidden Ninja Monkey!

Highly Disapproving Monkey

Drunken Monkey

I also knit up the mini turtle and the little hippo:


And a beret. No action shot, it's hard to take a picture of yourself in a beret. I'll see if I can get D to take a picture for me eventually.

Small Bursts

As the semester trudges on I'm trying to find a few minutes a day to knit or be otherwise creative so that I don't completely stagnate. (Like my blog has.)

The projects can't be big or I end up consumed with working on them and end up ignoring my homework, which is bad. So here are the small projects that I managed to finish this month:

A photo collage: I bought a poster frame, lined it with some fun fabric I picked up and then used fabric glue to attach the pictures. I did it in two evenings. Quick. Fun. And it'll make moving my photos around much easier.

A springy 3-strand bracelet:This has been floating around in my head for a while now, so I hunted down the beads I needed and whipped this up last week. The colors are much brighter in person.

And then there's Oogie...Oogie is my personal gremlin and will also serve as a very good dammit doll when I'm having a bad day.

I knit him up Sunday while doing laundry and then did the finishing and detail work today.

He's based off of the Jelly Baby pattern from Jean Greenhowe's Gift Dolls book. I used my leftover yarn from my badly needed hat & scarf that I knit over the winter.

In the meantime, I have 3 research papers to write and no ideas on what to write about. Wheeeee!

Stampede!

Ok, so it's just one elephant. Not really a stampede. But it's a stampede of cuteness!
This little guy has been a fantastic project for me this week, which was immensely busy and stressful. He was the perfect escape. 2 legs one night. A body and the other two legs another night, etc.
Pattern is the Elefante (PDF), though I had to change the ears because the crochet ones were just not working for me.
Look at that face. I adore him. But he needs a name.

Herbert. Herbert the Elephant.

Emo FO Photos

I finished up my badly needed hat. We've been having schizophrenic weather lately, summer on Monday, arctic blizzard on Tuesday, spring thunderstorms on Wednesday, etc. So I knit up a hat to go along with my Irish Hiking Scarf. I took a few pictures of the hat on and every single one looks like it's an emo MySpace picture.



I also finished an annoying little project I've had on the needles for over a week. My supervisor at work showed up with two skeins of Red Heart and asked me to knit her a scarf just like my cabled one. But thicker. With a keyhole so she could tuck it through. You know, cause I'm not a college student with anything to do with my time...

Well the cables were out, I just didn't have the time, so I cast on lengthwise and knit up a thick scarf in feather and fan with a keyhole. Here she is in the scarf, which I finished today while I was working with her:

I'm done with these sort of projects. They just end up annoying me. I need to learn to say no to people who approach me with yarn that isn't a gift. Or better yet... charge them.

A Finishing Machine!

Pattern: Irish Hiking Scarf
Yarn: Wool-Ease in Avocado (2 skeins)

Sorry for the crappiness of the photos... I took them at 10 last night after finishing it.
The top photo is closest to the real color.

It's a fairly decent walk from the bus stop to my apartment. And it's a fairly decent walk from one building to another on campus and I realized that I don't have a fancy scarf. All I've ever knit for myself are plain 2x2 ribs or garter stitch scarves. So on Christmas morning I cast this on. I knit 51 repeats of the pattern and it's over 5 feet long. The pattern was engaging enough to not get boring. In fact, I'm knitting a matching hat to keep my ears warm.

It's FINISHED!!!

I've been working on this practically non-stop for the past week. D and I are exchanging gifts tomorrow, er today, so it HAD to be finished. I've been knitting since 10 this morning. So tired... hands so sore...

Cute & Nerdy

"I come in peace!"

I saw this guy on-line this morning and fell in love! I knew I had to knit him. I knit the body this morning before classes and finished up the arms and legs this evening. I've decided to give him to D, because they're both so cute and nerdy.

Stats:

Alien pattern
Yarn: Bernat Softee Chunky in Hot Lime
Needles: Knit Picks DPNs size 6

Changes to the pattern: I added arms. He just looked incomplete without them. And I did a felt mouth instead of an embroidered one.

The Mark Has Appeared!

So there I was, sitting at work, minding my own business. (And by that, I mean I was ignoring my work and perusing the net, bad Kelly!) When a strange box arrived in the mail. It had something of a threatening look to it. I opened it with hesitation and out burst The Dark Mark!Bag, that is. I got my Hogwarts Sock Kit Swap and I couldn’t possibly be happier. Hell, if she’d just sent the bag and left out everything else I’d still be happy. The bag rocks out loud. She included a zipper if I wanted to try and sew it in, she said in her note that she was afraid to try and end up ruining the bag. That’ll be tonight’s project.

Aside from the AMAZING bag I got 4!!! skeins of Knit Picks Essentials in Slytherin colors. Now, I’ve knit with this stuff before and they must have changed the type of yarn or something because this stuff is way softer than the older stuff I have in my stash. She also included 2 sets of DPNs in size 1 and 2, the cutest little stitch markers for knitting socks, they’re so tiny, Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, which I opened and peeked inside the bag and boy do I have the vomit flavored ones! To finish it all off she included Charmed Knits, which I already have so we might be having a dorky Harry Potter contest in the near future.

Thanks Debbie! You rock!

Continuing with the Potter theme we’ve got going, I saw on my Potter KAL that someone had knit a cute little Crookshanks. I couldn’t resist making one of my own.

I used Sensations Angel Hair and ended up attacking it with my hairbrush to floof it up a bit. He’s adorable, I couldn’t be more pleased with how he turned out. He’s sitting on my desk right now, guarding against evil rat-men. And by that I mean the guy who keeps stealing my M&Ms.