FO Friday Returns! Finally!

Pattern: Seraphim by Miriam Felton
Yarn: NatureSpun Sport by Brown Sheep in Chuck Berry, Seconds, 5 Skeins
Needles: US 6 Addi Turbos (I went up a size since I was using a slightly thicker yarn)
Dimension: ~75″ across and ~37″ from center back to tip
Recipient: Me (though it may go to grandma Schueler depending upon Mom’s success with the pattern)
Process Dates: March 17th, 2006 - April 20th, 2006
Adjustments: I took out a total of 24 stitches from the top stockinette section to account for my larger yarn, needles, and gauge. Also, on the last design row of the chart I took out the first decrease of each half of the shawl as the stitch counts weren’t working for me with that decrease in there. Since I was at SnB at the time I can’t say that the error wasn’t me, but it looks fine in its final state.

Monday evening I completed the knitting portion of Seraphim at SnB and following a wonderful last supper with Mom and DH at Bisetti’s I bound it off. It was a bit of a race as mom wanted to feel it off of the needles. Because I did not have blocking wires and the best place to block something so large is the guest bed she did not get to feel it in its blocked state. But, on Wednesday I got myself a 1 pound package of stainless steel tig welding rods that are 3/32″ in diameter. They worked great to block the shawl.

I’m quite happy with the shawl. There are a few wabi sabis in it that I noticed upon blocking, but nothing hugely obvious. The coloring of the first ball of yarn sometimes strikes me as a big deal and other times seems as though it could almost pass as being part of the design. It blended in better I think when it was wet. Partially because of this and partially because it is my first shawl and does have some mistakes it will likely be a home shawl, so it is now living on my chair in the living room.

Miriam did a wonderful job with this pattern. It is a great place to start if you are new to lace knitting I think. While I wasn’t new to lace knitting per se, I was knew to actually finishing a shawl project. The stockinette beginning was just what I needed as I took on this project shortly after learning that my paternal grandmother had taken a rather serious turn for the worse. She has improved since, but I found the stockinette to be quite therapeutic. The lace portion was fairly easy to memorize, especially when one design row repeated a few times. That repetition allowed me to do some of the lace knitting while watching television or visiting with friends. The charts were also very readable.

It has been a looong time since I had a FO! Man does it feel good!

You may still put in your guess for yesterday’s contest until Monday morning, whenever I’m ready to post. All correct guesses will get thrown into the hat so-to-speak.

I’ll leave you with some more photos of a modeled Seraphim (I’m taking suggestions on which shot(s) to send to my Grandma Bakke, a former knitter and sometimes fixer of mom’s mistakes, just click on them for larger versions)…

Have a great weekend!

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Edit: I forgot to mention the Dye-O-Rama Swap that Scout and a few others are hosting. For those of you wanting the perfect excuse to get into dyeing or those who are old hat but would like to have some fun knitting someone else’s dye scheme head over and sign-up. They are having sign-ups open for only 48 hours and the doors opened at 6pm (MDT) last night so time is ticking!

And the Winner Is . . .

First off, Lizzy B was the only one to guess the right answer! It was my niddy noddy and a cd drop spindle (courtesy of Spin-Off). Of course she had a little help since she had recently seen those at my house :-) But, as I said, all guesses would be tossed in the hat. Mom drew Ann of Purlingswine this morning! So, Ann, drop me a line with which pattern you’d like a copy off and I’ll e-mail it to you.

Thanks everyone for playing!

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Here is a photo of Seraphim as of this morning. Very little was done on it yesterday, just a row and a half. I was a bit too antsy to sit still and knit something from a chart. Though I do suppose the self-control would have been good for me, LOL! The color is a little off there. It’s really a bit darker than that.

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Mom’s plane was 45 minutes late so DH and I both went down and were able to have a leisurely supper before heading down. She had two people helping her out at baggage and later she found out that neither of them even had checked luggage! She totally could have gotten help to the shuttle, LOL! But we did get home almost an hour before she would have if she had taken the shuttle.

Emma and Gaston are doing their best to be friends. Emma did get up multiple times last night and sniffed at their door. But they ate breakfast together (that was somewhat entertaining, but nothing bad) and had a run outside for a while. Gaston is non-dominant and is actually a little scared that Emma will get him in trouble so he is liking to hide under furniture (which is a joke given how large he is). Emma is keeping vigilant watch on her toys, but has now finally quit pacing and has taken her spot on the rug in front of the patio door watching the kids walk to school.

We have no real plans for today yet. I suspect we’ll probably grab lunch somewhere and then get a few toys for Gaston to keep in “his place” in the bedroom. So if he is stressed he’ll have a bone to chew on.

Depending on what mom wants to do and that I may or may not get around to reading blogs or posting here tomorrow and Monday. But I’ll be back regular on Wednesday for sure!

Random Wednesday…

Firstly, preparations are beginning for the Estes Park Wool Market coming up in June. I know those on the east coast are much more concerned about the bigger and better Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, but those of us here in the heartland are pretty proud of our market too!

I went for the first time last year and had a blast! Snow, Margene and I went and met up with a few others. Well, this year we want to blow last year out of the water. We’d like to have a larger gathering of knit bloggers and there are wonderful people making the trek with Margene this year and a few east coasters are flying out to join in the fun as well. To make it a bit easier to coordinate a meet-up and so everyone can get to know everyone else a little better before June, Snow has started to collect names/blogs of those attending the EPWM. If you are going, please go leave a comment here.

To help her out, I’ve created several buttons you may display on your blog if you so choose. Just be sure to save the graphic to your own server.

I’ve also started a blog roll at Google Reader of those attending. You do not need to use Google Reader to access it. Once you get to the page you can subscribe to an RSS feed of all those blogs (as though it is just one blog) in any of your favorite RSS readers such as Bloglines or Sage etc. If you subscribe to the RSS feed of the combination of all those blogs you’ll automatically get updates to any new blogs that get added to the roll as we hear about others who will be attending the market. My EPWM button in the upper right there will continue to link to that blogroll so you can access it from here any time if you don’t use a news reader. I’m afraid if you don’t have a blog or web site we can’t add you to that list, but if you stay tuned to any of the blogs of the attendees we’ll be sure to post any info about a meet-up!

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Seraphim continues to progress. I’d post a picture, but there isn’t quite enough light coming into the house right now for a good shot. Perhaps I’ll get one added in later today, but no promises! As of last night I was at 85.6% completion aka I have 15 rows remaining! The yarn from Brown Sheep also arrived so I’m all set! I should be done within the week I think.

It’s funny, even though design rows only repeat 2-3 times and then it is onto a new design row I’ve really found my groove on this now and have had *many* design rows that didn’t need to have fudged YOs! Whee!

I may be getting my lace legs and may just have to try my hand at Mountain Peaks! We’ll see though, I really should try to decipher my problem with leaf lace first…

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We found out yesterday afternoon that DIA does not offer assitance to handicapped travelers between the hours of 8pm and 8 am. Mom’s plane is scheduled to arrive at 7:55pm so they will not provide her any assitance to get to baggage claim or get to the shuttle counter to purchase her shuttle ticket and then to the proper location to catch her shuttle. Now, the baggage claim is probably not a big deal, most of the people on the plane will be heading there so surely someone will be kind and help her out. But, she is flying a small charter company (because of thier larger seats and additional leg room to make Gaston more comfortable) so the chances of someone on that flight also needing the same shuttle service is pretty slim.

Mom wasn’t even going to tell me about this hitch in the plans until Dad told her she had to. So I have hemmed and hawed over what to do. I finally decided that even though mom was pretty sure she’d be able to charm her way to get someone to help her out, I’m just going to head down there tonight and pick her up. It does mean she’ll get to the house about 1.5 hours earlier than if she took the shuttle which will hopefully mean that DH can get nearly a full night’s worth of sleep. The dogs will need a bit of time to get reacclimated to each other before we can get everyone settled into bed too. It seemed to make more sense to do that at 10pm rather than 11:30pm. DH may go with me or I may make the drive myself. I don’t much care either way. I think I’m kind of glad to be picking her up because I’m going to be nutzo, crazy hyper and anxious all day as it is and that will give me something to do. It’s going to be one looooooong day!

I’m at a loss…

Seraphim is coming along, though not a lot of progress was made on it over the weekend. I needed to slow my pace as I got an e-mail from Brown Sheep (2 weeks after writing them) and they are sending two more balls from the same seconds dye lot so I didn’t want to hit the end of
ball 4 before the other two balls arrived. Fortunately, I’ll be heading to Boulder next Saturday and can return the other two I purchased at Shuttles a week ago. I’m also having to pace myself as for some reason or another spring and fall weather patterns tend to make me a bit more likely to develop tendonitis. I don’t have an actual flare, but I need to be sure to take a good break at the completion of a row now that it is over 400 sts in width. I have less than 30 rows to go, so I figure roughly 12 more hours or so as long as I knit my design rows without too many errors.

Mom’s yarn for her Seraphim has arrived! We first placed an order for some purple Jawoll, but they were out of stock so we called to find out what other options they had in stock in a pretty purple or a rose color. We ended up going with the slightly more expensive, but still superwash, Soft Touch Heather from Shelridge Farms in the color crocus. It is unbelieveable gorgeous and super soft! We ordered 6 hanks. 4 should theoretically do it and I’m hoping it does as any leftovers mom has I’ll get and I can make socks from them. Although, I’m thinking I might not be able to hold off on knitting socks from this, I may end up folding and ordering some of this yarn for myself in another color…

The heathering isn’t the deepest heathering I’ve seen. It appears to be just a magenta sort of color mixed in with the main blue-violet color, but it still is pretty and I think it’ll make a wonderful shawl for Grandma!

This Saturday also marked the beginning of the anniversary sales at Woolen Treasures so a few of us headed down there for lunch and yarn shopping. I was restrained and came home only with some needles and notions. The needles were pretty picked over when we got there, but supposedly a new shipment will be in before the end of the week. So I’m sure my mom and I will head down there at some point once she gets here. She said she’s taking me shopping for my birthday so I figure I can get yarn when I go down with her if I’m so inclined. I’m seriously thinking about picking out something to knit Calla. The largest size might be a titch too small, but it’ll be close. And, even though my weight has stayed roughly the same since January or so things have been shifting around and becoming more toned so the sizing on that may not be quite as far off as I think as I haven’t measured too recently.

We Have a Winner…

I know there have been grumblings out there that these blog contests are fixed. I hope this graphic proves that even though Snow and I are great friends that she won the contest fair and square! I have given her a choice between the fibers I dyed and the sock yarn to go along with the fiber-art journal. I’ll let you wait and see for yourself what she has chosen. I’ll be delivering it to her office tomorrow.

My thought on these contests and who wins them is that if someone is a regular to your blog, which in most cases means they are good friends whether just over the ‘net or in real life, they are going to comment with more regularity and more often than others. So, these game of chance sort of contests have a higher probability of someone who comments more frequently winning because they are playing the game more frequently so to speak.

In knitting news, I’ve completed chart two of Seraphim! That was the largest of the charts I believe. Also, my mom and I may tag team a Seraphim for my grandmother. Mom may also do the lace herself. We’ll see. There is a chance I might also change the lace at the bottom to a lace pattern she already has memorized or can easily memorize. For those people not in the know, my mom is blind, so while she is a good knitter it takes a certain type of lace pattern for her to knit it usually. We ordered some purple Jawoll for it so that it is blockable but still washable if the nursing home would accidently grab it on laundry day. It is going to be a gift to Grandma provided we get it knit fast enough. Mom bought some cheap finering weight yarn yesterday and is planning on practicing on a very mini version (36 sts on either side of the center st plus the edge sts on either side) to see if she can handle the ever changing lace pattern or if she’d like me to substitute feather and fan or something a bit more regular. Then, when she gets here I’ll get her started on the real shawl.

Yep, a week from today Mom is coming!!!!! I’m sooooooo excited!!!!!!! Last summer for her 50th birthday we told her to pick any time and we’d pay her airfare out here. Kind of a selfish gift I know, but she hasn’t been out since our wedding in October of 2002 and that was a quick and busy trip. She’ll be here to help me celebrate the big 3-0!!!! About 20 people are going to Dushanbe, a tea house in Boulder that was gifted to them by thier sister city in Tajikistan. We’ll be having high tea there. I think some of us fibery people will go a little early and also visit Shuttles before hand. Mom will also get to visit SnB that Monday as well!