Saturday, December 22, 2007

Yarny Yarnmas and a Yarny Yarn Yarn

In either a personal best or a personal worst, I have four projects on my needles right now.



This is a shawl I started for myself several months ago. During the summer it is an icebox in my office, and it's impossible to buy a space heater because it is supposed to be warm in Texas in the middle of August. Never mind that the thermostat is turned down to the mid-fifties in every damn building. How much energy could we save if we let the temperature of the air conditioning creep up towards seventy degrees? And I bet we wouldn't lose one person in a tragic indoor heat stroke incident.

Anyway, if commerce couldn't solve my hypothermia problem, I figured I could take matters into my own hands and knit myself something to keep me warm. Of course now that it's winter, my office is perfectly comfortable, so I put this on the back burner for my next project.



I had just enough time to get this baby hat started before the Christmas knitting rush started. A month or so ago, the head of our young mothers' program at work mentioned that it would be nice to get some volunteers to knit blankets for the babies in the program. For some reason, she seemed shocked when I told her I'd be glad to knit some things to donate. I guess I don't seem like the knitting type.

This is my first project on double pointed needles, and it hasn't been too hard so far. With some practice I hope to be able to whip up tiny hats pretty quickly, as well as some blankets, which are super easy. I also have some patterns for knitted finger puppets I could make for the older children in the program. Unfortunately, even though we're dealing with young mothers (mostly under 18) many of them already have toddlers and another baby on the way. Other than that this whole "abstinence only" thing seems to be working pretty well. /snark



Pretty soon, this will be a smaller version of this hat for my nephew. I'm thinking about putting pom-poms on his, however. The yarn is Paton's "Rumor" in "Moonstone Heather." The name of it is stupid, but the yarn is awesome.



Last, but not least, is a scarf for The Husband. It's going to be one of his Christmas presents, but I don't need to worry about spoiling the surprise because I made him describe to me in great detail what the scarf should look like and approve the yarn I bought. Also, I've been working on it in the evening while he's sitting right next to me watching TV.

It seems like an awful lot of trouble to hand make a custom project for someone and not have it be exactly what they wanted. Maybe if I were a better wife I would have an intuitive understanding of The Husband's scarf preferences, but evidently I'm not that wonderful. He is getting a pretty great scarf, however; so that will have to be wonderfulness enough.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is one amazing scarf.

Anonymous said...

Have you seen ravelry.com?

It is a social networking type site for knitters.

UnrulyDuckling said...

Unfortunately, ravelry is only accepting members by invitation. They have almost 6,000 people on their waiting list.

Anonymous said...

I'm told that despite its length, it only takes a couple of days to move through the waiting list.

UnrulyDuckling said...

I've signed up for an invitation, and I'll let you know how it goes.

UnrulyDuckling said...

Also, I'm curious by whom you were told. Do you have some secret knitting connections I don't know about? Why are you holding out on me?

Anonymous said...

Infotropism – In which I join Ravelry

I find it interesting how different blogiverses sometimes overlap.