Me. Not Weird.

I've been celebrating fall mainly because I get to wear my handknit socks again. I even publicly congratulated my pink Monkeys for being the first out of the drawer in fall 2011. 

Way to go, Monkeys!

I have to admit I was feeling a little weird about this, until I hopped on over to Knitting to Stay Sane. Most of the post is about steeking, which is intentionally cutting up something you have just knit. Intentionally. But at the very end she gets all excited about wearing socks. Just like me. So, me. Not weird. In that particular way.

Brewster Gets a Haircut

Brewster has lived here for a year and a half, and he's never gone to a groomer. Finding a groomer I would trust with a stuffed dog, let alone the Little Dude, is HARD. Some of them insist that you leave the dog all day so they can groom it whenever they get around to it. One refused to let me see the back room where they do the grooming. The groomer/pet supply shop near here would be convenient, but every time I go in there, the groomer has a half-shaved dog on the table and she's across the room reading junk mail and eating Cheetos. So . . . no.

But Little Dude looked like this:

I call this the Crotchety Old Man Look

So we spent the morning near Valley Center at Rags to Ribbons, the groomer associated with Wag'en Tail Ranch, where Brewster and I did obedience training. (Turns out neither of us is very obedient.) The nice ladies let me stand in their shop for 20 minutes last week and ask them annoying, stupid questions ("Would you ever put a dog on the table and then wander off to have a snack?") until I felt like they were good enough and kind enough and smart enough to be trusted with the Dude, who can be a bit of a handful, to put it mildly.

Now he looks like this:

"I'm too sexy for this dumb bandana."*

I'm kind of sad that his mohawk is gone and he smells weird (like, vaguely clean or something), but other than that, I'm pretty happy. And the report from the groomer was that Brewster did not try to mutilate any of his crate mates, and they didn't ban us from the shop, so we're calling that a win.

*Alternative picture captions:
"Lady, put down the g.d. camera and get this flippin thing OFFA ME."
"Do not bother me while I stare sexily into the distance like that dude in the Abercrombie & Fitch ad."

Stalled

This purse will get done one of these days, but it's not looking like this week. It isn't because the Noro is too hard to work with or because the cables are too complicated. Those are the obstacles I expected to run into that turned out to be no problem at all.

I also picked up some muslin for the lining and chose two buttons, one of which will be a lovely closure as soon as I pick the one I like the best. (That in itself might take a while.)

The problem is that the strap is made of braided i-cord. And, dudes, knitting i-cord is boring.

I-cord: Easy. Fast. Mind-Numbingly Dull.

I'm off to look through The Joy of Sox and go diving in the sock yarn bin. Maybe if I get really frustrated over some complicated socks, knitting plain i-cord will suddenly seem really appealing.

Ta . . .

Almost done. The bulk of the knitting is finished. I still need to do the handles (I think I'm going to do two short ones instead of a long crossbody) and a button loop, and then find some fabric to sew a lining. Everything I have in the house is in pastels with little flowers on it. (One wonders how I of all people came to own a bunch of pastel fabric with little flowers. I can only speculate that it was cheap.) She's having a soothing soak now, but here she is before her bath:

My verdict on my first experience of Noro: Meh. It has its uses, a purse being a great one because it makes such a nice, stiff fabric. But it certainly won't become a go-to yarn for me, particularly not in the spring and summer when I'm having my lovely skin allergy on my hands that no doctor can be bothered to identify. Trying to knit Noro with flaky, dry skin is never fun and sometimes painful. Noro knitters may like it rough, but, folks, I am not that masochistic. I'm looking forward to getting back to dependable Cascade 220. If I want color changes, I'll get busy and learn Fair Isle. 

As for the cables, I guess they have their place. I think I'll always be a lace knitter, but I've done enough cabled projects lately that I think I can call myself competent. Frankly, I'm amazed I was able to complete the body of this purse in about two weeks. I have to grudgingly admit that it was the rough stickiness of the Noro that made that possible. I've never had such an easy time cabling without a needle, and that was thanks to the Noro's tendency to stick to itself. And the cables do look impressive, don't they?

I hope the "Da!" portion of this little saga will conclude in another week or two!

Brevity is the Soul of . . .

. . . things that are brief.

Two full pattern repeats of the main body complete:

Two more to go. I'm thinking the knitting might be done next weekend. Then all that will be left will be the part where I cajole, flatter, and badger my mother into helping me sew a lining. That should only take about a month.

And Some Moderate Cussing Ensued

My first provisional cast on did not go smoothly. When I picked up the stitches in the first row and pulled out the crochet, I found that I had 20 stitches instead of 24. That's a pretty neat trick, given that I had 24 stitches for all 143 rows of the top band. I don't know where the 4 lost stitches in the very first row went, or how I managed to knit the correct number of stitches from a base of incorrect stitches, but through some careful finagling and fudging and fussing (and some other F-words, at least one of which has four letters), I was able to create 4 stitches in what I hope will be inconspicuous spots and get the two ends grafted together. 

Behold, the horizontal band:

In a stretchier, lighter yarn, this would make a lovely headband pattern.

I spent this evening picking up 144 stitches along the bottom of the band and have knit 2-1/2 rounds. At this rate, I expect to be finished sometime in September.

Jinx!

I don't think of myself as a superstitious person.

That said, I never fail to throw spilled salt over my left shoulder (it occurs to me I don't actually know why--must Google that*) or knock on wood when talking about something I don't want to happen (if all that's available is laminate, I knock my own skull on the grounds that it's more authentic), and it's no coincidence that my street address is an even number (my own personal idiosyncrasy). So understand that it is taking all my courage to publish these words:

KNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCK

KNOCKKNOCKKNOCKThe cabled Noro purse is going well.KNOCKKNOCKKNOCK

KNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCKKNOCK

I realize that the knitting deities now have no choice but to smite me. I accept my fate. 

That's not to say that there's been no trouble at all. For one thing, I have discovered one of the reasons Noro haters hate with such passion. I mentioned that this yarn is spun loosely. In some places, it isn't spun at all. 

The empty needle is pointing to a spot where the yarn is not so much yarn as unspun batting. When I run into these spots, I have to resist the urge to yank on it to make the gauge match the rest of the yarn. The problem with that is that yanking creates very tight stitches, and knitting too tightly makes it very difficult to cable. I'm learning that, whereas most yarns go out of their way to please you, the Noro insists on being itself. The knitter has to adjust to the Noro, not the other way around. I can respect that, as long as it doesn't get out of hand.

I also had a minor setback yesterday when I had to rip back one full pattern repeat because of a miscrossed cable, but careful "proofreading" of the cables has caught most errors early and kept ripping to a minimum. (Who would've thought that editorial skills would come in handy in knitting?)

As of this evening, I have knit the top, horizontal portion of the purse to here: 

I have four more pattern repeats to go. The empty needle is at the halfway point, at about 9.5 inches. I'm planning to try to block it to at least 10 inches wide. I am a ridiculously slow cabler, but the cables on this portion are going much quicker than I anticipated, and I hope I might finish it tomorrow. 

But then the hard part starts. The cable chart for the main body of the purse is so wide it has to be printed in landscape view and contains instructions to repeat the center section four times. Didja catch that? It's too wide to print on letter-sized paper, so it can't be fully charted. And since the purse has a front and a back (doh!), it actually repeats eight times, not four.

This will be prime smiting opportunity for those pesky deities. But, like Odysseus battling the cyclops, I will persevere! Or stab myself in the eye with a dpn. Whichever.


*Apparently, I'm throwing salt in the devil's face.  Another site says that good spirits live on your right side and bad spirits live on the left. Good spirits cause you to spill the salt to warn you about the bad spirits. The origin of knocking on wood is less clear; it may be associated with good tree or wood spirits or with the Christian cross.