Pacing Yourself Through the Olympics

Taking a break from the Gossamer Lace Project of Malcontent (a/k/a "The GuLPoM"), I thought I'd show you my first Olympian FO:


Armwarmers are almost as hard as socks to self-model.


It's all about pacing your approach. Don't forget the stretch breaks!


And of course the presentation. She loved them!

Always Behind the Wave

Hare comes trouble.

I managed to knock out a couple opera-length arm warmers for a co-worker this weekend - cast on during the Opening Ceremonies (which, despite all the emerging controversy, were still amazing to me. I even cried a couple times because when I'm not being a twelve year old boy, I'm being a hormone-imbued softie.) tucked in the last loose bits in time for the birthday cookout Sunday afternoon. I'll post pics of them later. They aren't all that impressive - just tubes with... thumb tubes - but they are always a big hit at my office, where the climate control is set at arctic no matter the weather outside.

Since then I've been having several false starts with Eunny's Print o' the Wave Stole. I'm knitting it with Habu Textile's superfine merino in a green that is much darker than the grass green I'm finding on one of my LYS's website.

The figure 8 style invisible cast on gave me problems (I kept getting too much slack in the figure-8-ified working yarn) but I just sort of fudged it (by undoing the original slip knot and retying it to take up the slack).

For some reason, I started on size 2 needles with this probably-about-gossamer-weight yarn, which looked awful. So I picked up a set of Addi lace needles in 00 and everything is flowing much more smoothly... only...

Watching women's gymnastics and knitting on size 00 needles with gossamer weight yarn might not be the most complementary activities. I managed to drop a stitch in the last three rows of my second pattern repeat and will need to rip back and/or fake the missing stitch to get back on track.

Other than these false starts... it's been an interesting knit. I have been sticking to easy knits all summer and it feels good to be challenging myself again. I will have to remind myself of these warm-fuzzy feelings when I start to cuss my itty bitty superfine knitting later in the week.

Olympian To Do's

Overduecraftron 2000

I am not a joiner*, I will not be officially participating in any of the Knitting Olympics events happening out in the wired world - nor will I be joining any of the local activities.

However, since I am even more of a procrastinator than I am not a joiner I have decided to use my time gawping at the teevee to catch up on my backlog of gifts that I owe various people for various reasons (more on my Great List of To Do in future posts).  None of them are particularly ambitious, but together they have over the last year turned into a looming Voltron of crafty intimidation.  Time to face the monster and get this log jam out of the way.

* I just happen to often end up doing what everyone else seems to be doing. I'm going to call it zeitgeist 'cause that sounds fancy-pants.