tsubasahome | Entries tagged with knitting

Well, I'm paying for this LJ, so I might as well use it.

In the middle of a vast sea of commissions, I decided to try using the locked-loop method with nylon hair and so far so good, but it's taking forever! It still beats having to glue all those plugs. At least I don't have to worry about not being able to get the head back on the body. I'm rerooting a Roller Maze Lagoona with coral QT nylon from My Little customs. I'm a bit peeved because I had a particular hair style in mind for her and realized that she's got a defect in the vinyl on her forehead, so she will have to have bangs...not my ideal look for Lagoona but maybe it will surprise me in the end.

In less than 20 minutes we will have some divine Cook's Country tomato macaroni and cheese. Lauren and I made it...it didn't make itself. We try not to make it too much because of cheesebomb but it's so easy(well, compared to the other dishes we make, LOL!) that it seemed like a good time to have it again. I have 14 doll heads still in the process of rerooting, so it's hard time find time to make really time-consuming dishes. Actually, 12 of the 14 are done, one is almost done, and I'm waiting for hair on the last one. They're all hanging off the shelves in the guest room, looking stupid.

I wish I had some more yarn. I have a rather impressive stash of lace-weight yarn but it's so noisy here that I practically need to be sitting on the moon in order to knit an entire item and not screw it up. Sigh...

I'm convinced now that we had a Hard Freeze Warning back in November when we lost power for 3 days, because last night the temperature was in the upper teens and we had no such warning. I put the winter protection on Aptos two days ago, and I wound up having to cut the leaves off.

I got up this morning to find all my winter protection mulch frozen solid, yet the part of Moondance that sticks out of the homemade rose collar still has fresh green leaves. 0_o What gives? Uh...it got too tall, okay? This is the first year I've attempted to overwinter roses, but they're supposed to drop their leaves at some point, aren't they? I piled up a ton of mulch around the base, since it's the only grafted rose we own, but it just doesn't want to go to sleep!

I finished my last holiday scarf and wove the ends in. I'm about halfway through the first chapter of Ao no Kiseki. Nothing like a "serious" battle between rivals that ends with one punching another in the crotch... It totally looked like that was what happened! Then again, isn't Falcom kind of notorious for wonky direction?

I revised exactly one page of Chapter 14. Brilliant!

I also started my first knitting project in over 6 months. I decided to use a ball of orange Kidsilk Haze to make Lauren a lovely lace scarf, but I screwed it up 17 rows in and decided to make it out of some royal blue Karabella Cashmere yarn instead. I'll get back to the Kidsilk Haze later...

Lauren and I finished watching Ordet last night. I thought it was a pretty decent movie but it would have been a lot shorter if the characters didn't take so long to walk from one side of the room to the other.

Lauren gifted me with a paid Flickr account, and I can't even enjoy it because Flickr is down so much. I guess I should just take lots of pictures and upload later.

I also reread The Summer Book and found myself liking it quite a bit more than I had the first time I read it. Tove Jansson was such a genius--I can really sympathize with her outlook on the world, which possibly says some not-so-nice things about me, ha ha!

I haven't picked up a single game since I finished Ys Seven, ha ha!

I have the urge to customize another doll, but I have a lot of work coming in. Hopefully, it will keep me satisfied. :D This hobby of mine is getting too expensive! Sometimes I just look at all the pretty colors of doll hair and I'm like @_@ so it's better to do commissions for the sake of seeing the hair in person without having to buy it for myself.

It's getting to the time of the year to start my holiday knitting. Last year, I told myself that I wasn't going to be doing anything, but at the last minute I panicked and wound up knitting/crocheting five scarves over the course of two weeks. I lost my mind briefly after that. I won't make the same mistake this year!

I hope everybody likes dark blue...

I did manage to keep one promise I made to myself for the month of July--I finished the all-cotton crocheted afghan I started in May. I made it out of scraps(more like entire frogged projects)of yarn from abandoned projects Lauren and I had started ages ago and never got around to finishing. I've already crocheted/knitted several afghans but they're much too heavy for the summer. All three of the ones on my bed are wool and alpaca so I can't use them. It's nice to have a cotton afghan...I wove all the ends in in one evening while watching WALL-E and On Borrowed Time.

I also finished playing Ys Seven last week. The game took me about 32 hours to finish, which is amazing because most Ys games are under 15 hours long. My history with Ys is embarrassingly sparse--Lauren's played quite a few of them, though, and I recall her saying that Ys 6 was a pretty big disappointment. Ys Seven is a very good game. Possibly the best PSP game I've played so far. A lot of people say it's the best Ys game to date and in the end, I would probably wind up agreeing with them. I'll have to ask Lauren what she thinks in the end. I bought the game at launch when I heard that Famitsu gave it all 8s. That's incredibly high for a Falcom game. I think Ys 6 actually got some 6s...

No, I didn't really break the law! I just had a funny dream last night where I was going to Japan(why do I have so many of these dreams? I keep having dreams about being stranded in Japan with no money)with only 1,000 yen in my pocket and for some reason, I really wanted to surprise Lauren with some yarn. So I went to a yarn shop in the airport once I was there--for some reason, I was just landing in Japan and leaving right away?--and I grabbed 3 balls of Knitting Fever Firenze yarn, which they probably don't even sell in Japan! Those of you who knit might know that that yarn is something like $9 a skein and they give you something ridiculous like 50 yards, and I really wanted more but I realized I couldn't even afford that.

So I stole it.

And I gave it to Lauren, and she was really happy, and I said to her, "I hope you like it, because I stole it!"

Let me reiterate--THIS WAS A DREAM! I'm not really a criminal! The last thing I need is some random person(probably nobody on my friends list, because I think you all know better) skimming this message and missing that part, thinking I'm owning up to a crime and reporting me to the police!

I felt a strange urge to try 8 colors of yarn at once, so I was going to attempt the (in)famous Julia Roberts random-striped sweater, but Wool of the Andes really shouldn't be knitted to 4 stitches per inch(unless you like see-through sweaters), and Knitpicks has no heavy worsted weight yarn, so I adapted the stripe pattern to Rowan's Carpenter sweater. Which is a completely sensible sweater. I'm eliminating the eyelet holes on the bottom because I think the drawstring will be too distracting with the stripes(plus it didn't appear to be cinching much of anything on the model) Here's the embryonic sweater back:

Because I lack foresight, I thought, "Oh, these stripes will be so easy! I'll just carry the colors up the side!" But hardly any of the colors finished on the proper side for me to be able to carry the color up to where I needed it again, so I'm stuck with a bazillion yarn ends. Yay. Blame Julia Roberts for making each stripe be an odd number of rows.

Not feeling too good today. I hope I don't really have a cold. -_-

Didn't play too much of Kuzunoha Raidou today, or work on my sweater. At least, not as much work on the sweater as I planned. I did manage to make dinner, which had to sit around until 7:30 because Mom went out to get Ed a pizza. What am I going to do with 22 veal balls?

Okuninushi is in Kuzunoha Raidou. I'm wondering if he's the only pretty-boy demon in the game. For some reason, he's as big as a house. Looks pretty much the same as in Nocturne, but he's a big as a house. Also, he's not very respectful of me, and I'm supposed to be his master!

Sometimes, I swear I must be the laziest person on the planet. But for some reason, I still feel like I have no leisure time. Maybe I just don't know how to budget my time? I also don't think I get nearly enough sleep... 0_o Anyway, I just finished knitting a scarf for my father's birthday and it seriously wrecked my eyes. It had a kind of complicated color pattern that wasn't difficult to do, but it was tedious and it gave me quite a bit of eyestrain, to the point that I was worried that I wouldn't be able to finish it on time. I think it turned out well, but I can't take a picture because I'm TOO LAZY. I wish I were a cyborg. I wish I had a Time Turner. I have so many activities that I want/need to cram into one day, and even if I find the time, some part of my body gives out.

I hardly ever knit anything for myself--I got some worsted weight yarn from Knitpicks and my gauge turned out 1/4 inch too big on #9 needles, but I finally managed to go out and get #8(the only ones I'm missing in straight needles!)...I thought I'd be kind to myself and get bamboo needles(the #9 ones were lucite)...BIG MISTAKE! My gauge on the bamboo #8 needles is the same as the #9 lucite! I guess I knit that much looser on bamboo, huh? I feel bad going down 2 needle sizes(is this normal?) but my most recent gauge swatch was kind of...holey. So, in theory, I should be able to use my #7 bamboo needles without a problem. In theory. In reality, I just had to start knitting that lace scarf for Mother's Day on those very needles...and it's not like I can take it off and put it away for a while, I'd probably wreck it. So I guess I'm just gonna have to finish that damn lace scarf, huh? Even though I just wanted to do my stupid all in stockinette with no stupid eyebreaking endless pattern stitches cowl neck sweater...

And on the other hand, what am I thinking, knitting and knitting and knitting to the point that my eyes are constantly bothering me, and never taking a break?