sherriknits

I just haven’t been in the mood I guess.  Today I went backwards more than forwards, but am not a bit discouraged about it.  This is an easy square and I somehow gained a stitch, but then I didn’t pay attention to how many rows I frogged back so the problem has been trying to figure out where I am.  No big deal, it’s enjoyable. 

Not sure if tonight holds knitting or staring at my computer in Ravelry.  Whatever I end up doing, my feet are staying up. 

Tags: my life

Knitting progresses, but no pictures exciting enough to show, I haven’t had long enough in one sitting to get much of anywhere but the first square is blocking as we speak.

Last night, the dog was growling and barking and growling again and I kept telling him to be quiet.  When the oldest boy got home, he brought in a sign that said we’d been visited by the sneaky norsemen.  This is what I saw this morning:

Next time I’ll pay attention to the dog and see if I can catch someone in the act.   lol

I got no time to knit at work today but had fun.  Wow.  The afghan book is selling like hotcakes.  The little imp came to spend the last 10 min. with me and we came home only to discover I’d left my camera at work so we drove back.  Turns out it was in my purse all along, but look at the beautiful sky!  I’ve been seeing this every night on the way home.

And why did I need my camera?  We had to get rid of those forks and wow did he kick into gear and get those pulled out in no time. This was all done to the great accompaniment of the 5 yipping dogs next door that are moving me to the edge of my sanity.  He is out there saying, “oh man!  those dogs!”

Tonight we are watching one episode after another of The Office.  The kids have all gotten into this and I resisted for so long.  Now I am going to have to go back and watch the early ones.  They are hilarious.

I’m going to pick up my needles now!

ps  Thank you SO much for your kind words regarding our encounter with the deer.  We’re all doing fine and have had no nightmares or flashbacks so to speak, we’re all just very grateful for God’s protection over us all.  I still marvel at how tragic it really could have been!

Tags: my life

Edited one hour after this was posted to add to the drama of the day.  It appears our bottom element in our oven burned out and hubby concocted a way to cook pizza for one small boy who was expecting it…we had a fire in the oven and we had quite the time to get the smoke alarm to turn off.  What do we do?  Go to bed and start again tomorrow?   lol 

We had therapy today and on the way up, we hit a deer.  Hours later, I am still nauseated.  The daughter was driving and her fiance was in the front. My head was buried in my afghan book when I heard him calling her name .  He saw it coming, she didn’t.  He was on the phone and thought she’d seen it.  I am so proud of her.  She hit the brakes hard but didn’t swerve at all.  When my head came up to see what was happening, the deer was directly in front of us but we came out of it with a small dent in the driver side front.  There were cars both beside us and behind us and how we didn’t end up in a big accident I have to say was God’s protection.  We pulled over and then I started to realize how close we came to tragedy and when I called hubby, I kind of fell apart.  I am so, so sad to say we don’t think the deer made it.  I am so sorry to have to report that but it just came out of nowhere as they do.  We called 911 to see what to do but they said there was nothing we could do. 

We did end up going for therapy and I’m glad.  Hubby called about half an hour later to see how we were and asked to talk to the little guy and I was so blessed to hear him calmly asking questions to make sure he was ok.  He seemed to understand what had happened.  The thing that really scared me was he got out of the car on the freeway side, he doesn’t understand to be careful, he just wanted to see what was going on.  I was so glad hubby thought to call and talk to him, though. 

Ok..I need to move on.  He had fun at therapy today.  We’re working on life skills.

He hates this part but was happy to show the fiance what he does.

And he got to show what he does outside, too.

When we got back into town, I ran into the shop and grabbed the new colors that came in for my afghan.  I’ll see if I can settle down enough to knit tonight, probably I’ll pick an easy square tonight.  I did start on one on the way up but am not sure it’s the one I want to work on right now.

Tags: my life

I managed to get the first square knit without any more problems.  It’s funny what happens when you decide you will do it.  I still wonder what it would be like, though, to just start knitting a pattern and not do the obligatory frogging 3 times before it just works.

I had a horrible night’s sleep last night, so I did the rare thing and stayed home from church in a quiet house.  I got through the hearts in no time.

If you plan to knit this, please understand the pattern is not difficult if you pay attention to what you are doing.  The problem was more with me.

Ready to start the outer edge:

This was taken without a flash so the yarn is really dark. 

The last 4 rounds, you switch from size 5 to size 6 needles and the edges seem really ripply.  This is after I kind of steamed them because I don’t want to block until I get the rest of the block done.

And here is a close-up of the hearts.

I do want to say that in questioning myself as a knitter last night…it wasn’t about comparing myself to other knitters.  It was more wrestling with letting my frustration to cause me to give up.  It felt good to push on through and I find it interesting sometimes to watch how I think out the process.

So now, I am not sure if I’ll start another square that uses the same color or just wait until I get the reds and finish this square first.

It’s pouring down rain today and the family is enjoying being warm and cozy indoors.  I hope you’re having a pleasant day!

Tags: my life

Does this sound convincing?  I’ll try again.

i.AM.a.knitter

I really had a struggle with myself this evening.  Yesterday, as I said, I started the first square of The Great American Afghan.  I thought it looked a little wonky but I convinced myself to not make this a stressful project by letting myself do the perfectionist thing.  However, I still don’t like sloppy.

Today I had so many interruptions and I watched Lauri pass me up even though she started hers today.  That was not a big deal because I was busy and I won’t make this a contest.  (for myself)  I also heard from the Diplady that she had finished the inner part of the square and was doing the outer edge. 

My struggle didn’t come from these two knitters, it was my own frustration at myself.  When I got home tonight, I was finishing the second heart which made the inner part 2/3 done.  It became apparent to me that I had skipped a row on the first heart and that was why everything looked odd.  I decided to do the easy thing and rip back to that (after a little struggle with myself).  After attempting to fix it several times, I was thinking about the first row that I fudged a little bit on (and really, it was no big deal because there is a little bit of stitching over the top of that row), but I just wasn’t happy with it, so before I knew it, I had this:

Now, this has become an all too common sight for me.  At first I kind of laughed and then I started to struggle with whether I really am a knitter.  I know that I am capable of doing things, but I think my tendency is to not pay attention to what I am doing.  Once I start making mistakes, I start to lose confidence.

I really feel like I hit a crossroad at this point.  Am I going to continue or do I just face the fact that I am wasting my time.

Suddenly, something started rising up in me.  Am I going to let this defeat me, or am I going to press through and become the knitter I want to be?  This afghan is a great opportunity for learning many new techniques ~ but MUCH more than that, I had to ask myself if I was going to choose to be a quitter or was I going to reach  for an opportunity to improve. I have learned that in many ways, knitting parallels my life.  Will I choose to push through the hard things, the hurts, the struggles, the things I want to see myself do better, or will I just choose to accept defeat and think I am who I am and I can not change it. 

I choose to fight the fight. I will learn the discipline of working with care and I will not make it a legalistic venture by putting unnecessary expectation on myself.  I am human.  I love talking to people while I knit and sometimes this causes me to make mistakes…but I do know I am capable of tackling difficult projects and doing well at them.  All I need to do is do my best.

That said, here is my second attempt:

The lighting is never great at night, but at this point, I need a record of where I made it back to.  I am much happier with it because I found that by missing the row on the first one caused everything to be backwards and there was another mistake I had made that was a simple thing to correct once I actually *read* the pattern.  And this one just knit back up quickly.

I do have a few more things to show.

I have no idea how to get a good photo of a scarf.  The color showed up better in an earlier post but I just can’t get a better look at it.  I have worn it 2 days in a row and I who do not enjoy wearing scarves really like this one and don’t want to take it off.

I knit a very few rows on the Fly*dyed Ruby Redmond sock that I believe will be a Coriolis at this point.  It depends on how the yarn behaves.  I had it with me at Barnes and Noble last night and knit while I read. 

This is the whirlpool toe and I like what it is doing to the yarn.

I finally remembered to get a picture of our Saturday sky.

Rain.

Have a great weekend!  I’m going to go look at Ravelry before I get myself off to bed.

Tags: my life

Hardly any pictures to show, though.

I finished my scarf just in time, it’s been colder and rainy.  I love it!  I’ll take a picture in natural light tomorrow.

I also was playing around with some of my Fly*dyed yarn and had some interesting results.  I thing they may end up being Spiral Coriolis from New Pathways.  I will *make* this yarn behave, though.  So far so good this time, I did the whirlpool toe and it’s looking good, not pooling. (no sock gets to live in my house if it pools anywhere but in the heel which often seems unavoidable)

Today was really exciting, though!  I got my Great American Afghan pattern book and the first yarn in to my shop.  It was supposed to be here yesterday but when it didn’t show with the UPS delivery of the day, I looked it up and it had “missed it’s connection” and spent a night in some unknown warehouse.  It was a little odd, though, because of 3 colors ordered only 1 was right so the correct ones will be here Monday along with the yarn for the next two squares.  For some odd reason, The Diplady and I thought we might need those extra colors but…the pattern is a bit more complicated than we bargained for.  Nothing we can’t manage, but we were both quiet at times while we counted, frogged, tinked…re-knit, frogged, you get the picture.  Square one was designed by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts and it’s really cool, they all are.  It was fun to have company because The Diplady arrived just as I was ready to allow myself to start knitting.  I had to get my work done first.  She warned me to not get scared if I heard squealing tires as she jetted in after leaving work early.  lol

These were the best pictures I could get.

Of course you can’t see square 1 in either of these pictures and they don’t do the afghan justice anyway..but tomorrow I will post a picture of my own square.

I bought new headphones for my iPod tonight on our date night.  The cord split on my old ones but when I got my new headphones on my iPod, it appears I wasn’t using the iPod brand headphones anyway so now I am wondering where they are hiding.

Even though it stormed all the way home tonight, it was a great date night.  There are few things I look forward to and enjoy as much as sitting with the love of my life, reading and drinking coffee and talking on the drive.  We both feel the drive is the real date part but the comfort of having that quiet time together is really nice.

Pictures tomorrow! (I’m kind of kicking myself for not bringing it all home)

Tags: my life

Forced myself to finish what little needed done on the second topper.

And here they are together.  I really like these!

I haven’t worn these boots for a few years, but they may just get some wear this winter.

Making good progress on the scarf, too. 

Tags: my life

I won’t mention the fact that I had to stay up until 2:45 a.m. doing bookwork.  Not helpful that we have had countless weird things happen that have made my life very difficult in this area.

My two girls and I took off today to do some wedding dress shopping.  Can’t show any pictures of what we think is *the perfect dress* but I will show you how cute my girl was.

And this is the aisle that I started crying in after she went in to try on the first dress.  Big sis was pretty sweet about it (no, i didn’t start blubbering but this one is a hard one because she’s lots younger.)

The dress is no where in sight of this picture.

I wanted to show you the coolest fog we saw the other day…and then again today,

Those two little things poking up there are cooling towers.  It was hard getting a picture in the car but I thought it was fun.

And then the rare-these-days shots of the boy.  He had a well-child check-up the other day and it was quite successful.  We’ll just leave it at that has not always been the case.  I didn’t know if the doctor would want her picture there so I left her out. 

And in knitting news…I did not touch the boot toppers yesterday or today because of aforementioned bookwork.  They are so close to done, though…probably an hours worth of work at the very most which includes weaving in a zillion ends.

I will make matching ones for each topper soon, but I’m still tempted to felt these. 

And today as we drove, I got to ride in the back seat and the only mindless knitting I had with me was this new scarf I am working on…and I, who as a rule kind of hate scarves, think I will actually wear this one!  I’ll get the name of the yarn and the pattern name when I am not so lazy.

This is a really fast knit and it’s really soft and pretty!

Tags: my life

I got my Lucky Lurker sock club yarn today and it is my favorite kinds of colors!  I was going to quit knitting for myself for awhile and work on other things but I am rather tempted to forego that promise to myself!

I just think she does the greatest job of packaging things and since I forgot last time to take pictures but ripped into it instead, this time I slowed down.

And here is the yarn!

Isn’t it pretty? 

I am going to have to figure out what I have done to my camera settings to make them so bad again but no time for that now.

I am almost done with the other boot topper.  I did one of each in the new gift issue of Interweave Knits for the fun of it.  I am not thrilled with the colors I had on hand but did try to get as close to what they were using as I could.  I may just find myself wearing these boots this winter.  Pictures soon.

Now I must buckle back down to work. 

Tags: my life

This was taken with a flash so the colors are a bit off, but this boot topper really was a fun knit.  I did use the  Philosopher’s Wool method and while awkward, it’s pretty easy and no puckers.  I am semi-tempted to lightly felt this after I get the second one done. 

The pattern is from Interweave Gift Knits, their holiday issue.

Tags: my life