Phew!

I've finished the Impossibly Complicated Baby Sweater just in the nick of time. My dear friend E. is contracting as I type this, ready to welcome her son into the world. And he will have knitting! After much freaking out and brow-furling, I have deciphered the unncessarily complicated Sirdar 1555 Sweater and Hat pattern. I made some changes but didn't document them because *I* will not be knitting this pattern again and I think it would be a crime against the knitting community if I published changes that somehow make this pattern work. No knitter, regardless of how masochistic they are, deserves the pain of this pattern.

So, we went from this:



To this:



Note the dizzying pattern:



But it has truly beautiful buttons:



I have been knitting on this sweater for 5 months and I can't actually believe it's done. I actually called my dear friend about 3 seconds after I cut the last end after tucking it in and exclaimed "The knitting's done! You can have the baby now!".

Indeed.

The Deal

Okay party people, here's the deal: I don't add photos to my blog because I am scared to death of Flickr. I know, I am completely pathetic (especially since I am married to a web developer, and because I work for a software company, and because I just bought myself a new top-o-the-line computer [Dual Core Intel iMac] yesterday, etc etc, lots of other techy reason for patheticy).

I've been doing lots of homework and knitting. I've also been feeling ill (again) which I think is a perfectly valid reason to have a temper tantrum and go out and buy yourself a new computer. My husband, he who is in love with the New Toy, thinks so as well. I could barely get my home work done last night after he came home from work because he was busy watching movie trailers and exclaiming every 10 seconds "Your computer is FAST!".

So my resolution today is that I will spend my finance class (we are having some boring speaker dude) figuring out how to easily post pictures so this will not be such a boring 'blog. It's really a self-serving goal since The Impossibly Complicated Baby Sweater is *still* not done, and I can't figure out what the hell the pattern is saying and I am beginning to suspect that the baby it is intended for is waiting for his knitting to be done before he makes his debut (which is really unfair to his mama...) and I need outside HELP.

Weekend Knitting

I always find that the weekend is a time when I get in over my head with my knitting and spinning (not that I can really spin all that well yet). On saturday morning I awake full of creative vigor, just waiting to finish a project/start a project/design a project/dye a pound of roving/spin a hundred yards of 1-ply, etc. I then go to my riding lesson (yes, I know I'm spoiled, please don't bother to point it out) and come home with half the day gone and frantic to get started creating.

The problem is that I never make any progress. I end up casting on something and knitting an inch of it while thinking of the 12,000 other things I wanted to do with fiber in my short 48 hours of freedom. It's distracting and ultimately rather, well, unproductive.

This weekend, however, I actually started *and* finished a project. It's the Dreadlock Poncho using Fleece Artist "Dreadlocks" in colorway "Origins". I'm not entirely thrilled with the color of it, but I am completely thrilled by the idea that I have finished something for once in my scattered life.

To be fair to myself, I knit a baby hat (with a darling leaf attached to its top stem) in Cashmerino during the baby shower I hosted last Sunday, but do you know how long a hat in size "Newborn" takes? Not a real sense of accomplishment there... I love the book "Last-Minute Knitted Gifts" by Joelle Hoverson for the sole reason that I can start and finish her projects in a few days. Nevermind the fact that I never actually *gift* them to anyone.

(Side note: I was trying to think of a present to give one of my very best friends for Christmas and I was so desperate that I actually considered opening up my stash and letting her choose a yarn that she'd like me to make something out of. About 15 minutes before she arrived at my house, I ran down the street to the bookstore to buy an alternate gift because I just could not bear to part with any my stash yarn. Yes I am selfish and hoard-y. Shut up.)

Okay, enough of this rambling entry. Next project up? A felted circular needle holder. I'm knitting it without a pattern; wish me luck.

Silly Beanhead

I am a complete silly bean head. It has been, what? Three months since I've posted? Even *I* don't read my blog!!

Tonight, having just given a baby shower for one of my dearest friends, I am exhausted and dodging my homework. Sitting in my favorite char listening to Norah Jones and thinking about what project I should pick back up. I know it should be The Impossibly Complicated Baby Sweater, but I just can't bring myself to it. I was going to have it finished for the shower today (ha!). That was a little bit of an, um, optimistic goal. So I ended up knitting a little white cashmerino hat with a green knit leaf attached to it as a consolation prize. My new goal is to have the sweater done by the time the baby arrives (any day now!).

I was just down in San Francisco last week and I made a $160 stop at Art Fibers (too lazy to link, just google it). What a fantastic place! I picked up some of their Kyoto and some Houdini and all sorts of other stuff, including a yarn that is made of 35% stainless steel. How cool is that?? Furthermore, the owner of Art Fibers is super nice and we talked for nearly an hour while she helped me hone in on my (massive) selection. I have to think it was fate that my company booked me at a hotel in San Francisco that was on the same block as one of the coolest yarn shops in the entire city... I'll post pictures of my haul a little later. Or maybe once I do things with it.

Between my master's degree and my job and my family and my pets, I am having a hard time staying healthy, which is most of the reason that I haven't posted recently. At the end of November I got shingles and then at the end of December I got a kidney infection. All that was after a week-logn stay in the hospital due to a Staph MRSA infection in September. To say the least, I have not been in a good state. Now I'm fully medicated and ready to move past the sick era of my life. The only problem is that I'm not sure I can do that while maintaining my current activity roster. I really do love my line of work and my horse and my knitting and school (shuddup, I actually really do like school!) and I'm not sure I can chose to scale back without feeling like I've failed in some way by not being able to do it all. As it is, though, I am running myself into the ground and worrying my husband and my family. I promised my husband after the shingles that I would make some sort of change to lessen the stress level in my life if I got sick again. Two weeks later with the kidney infection, that airy promise turned into reality. It's hard to take that as anything but a sign...

These next few weeks will be especially important in my deciding what in the world to do. We'll see what I come up with.