Time is not on my side

Okay I got a week's extension on my project from my partner. An entire week ... so wouldn't you know it, its been the week from HELL.

Saturday was 'sick kid day' and for that fact so was Sunday.

Sunday was also "Got To Get The Rest Of The GirlScout Cookies Delivered" day. it also turned into "Oh Geez we forgot to finish homework" day which included an essay my son was supposed to have done on Mahalia Jackson (you would not believe how much info you can soak up looking for info for your kid)....of course it wasn't until he was at the end of the report working on his bibliography that he announced he needed one non-on-line reference which he had but couldn't remember the name of it ---- arrrrghhhh. But he said he got it done okay. We will see.

I could double check for him but there is a time when I have got to let him do this on his own.

Anyhow back to my week. So that was Sunday. Sunday night hubby wanted attention so no time to work there either.

Monday, day ... I tried to work on the project and wound up not being able to do anything because I suddenly remembered it was SCOUT NIGHT. Aw man....had to find and make sure his uniform was clean....tried to find my Badge magic and gave up on it....It was also my daughters first Varsity Chior Concert. What to do -- both were at the same time but we didn't know how long hers would last so we could very well leave him at scouts alone, nor could we have me go to the concert just in case she got done early then we would have been stuck there until when hubby & son got done. So we worked it out...mom to scouts--dad to concert--mom with phone to call other son for ride.
So we got home late and hubby wanted to go straight to sleep. No crafting (even though I took my work with me to scouts, the other mom's kept me too busy to do anything --- ugggg)

Then there was today. i thought everything would be great. Sunny day, almost 50*F outside, it was wonderful. So I sat down to get ready. My problem was I dared to check email. My son is being kept at school for detension since he is missing homework.....uggggg.....thought we got all this straightened out! But no he had to put his head in the sand for the last couple of weeks and not write all the work he needed in his planner. So it was a morning of writing notes back to his teachers.
then hubby decided to skype me for a chat....well that took an hour...can't craft and chat at the same time. So when he finally got back to work (must have been his lunch break) I thought finally so I got out all my stuff I would need. Had everything laid out. Then the dog wanted to go out.
Okay seems easy, put the dog on her collar and throw her out the door -- except she was just as demanding as a kid ... "I want water"...."play with me"..."watch me romp thru these muddy puddles and then jump on you".
okay so I noticed I was late for lunch ... if I don't eat on time I get the shakes so there was another half hour wasted. Then it was kids home from school time.
"oh by the way mom I have to give a speech and we are having a dress rehearsal tomorrow so I need a costume for my character" .... geez thanks. Well that was going to have to wait. we had more important things -- like the work he forgot at school again. So big bro took him back to get it - again - and I dug out some gas money for him to defer the cost for all the runs he's done for us. And it was nose to the grind stone time.

But I think we did it, all late work done...but after dinner I had to go get the stuff for his costume -- at least its easy....suspenders and a good shirt (couldn't find hubby's suspenders nor could we find them in the store). Thank goodness we live so close to Hancock Fabrics.
So then we got back and kid hadn't even started his speech yet! Oh he needs to remake his research cards ... because he FORGOT where he put them. Oh man. good thing it was easier since he finished his report.
Even the speech went easy.
Now mom needs to de-stress. But man...I have to take off the entire last row I swear! ARGGHHHHH!!

I'm going to scream I swear.

So now I'm done to the wire....I've got one day -- that's it. I've got tomorrow to finish this.

I had this all worked out. Why me??? Why did I have to be sick for a week? Oh well time to stop whining about it, time to shut down the computer for the night, and time to start ripping I guess.

Bummer.

stupid stupid stupid

I am such an idiot. I worked all day yesterday on that sock waiting for hubby to call and then about 11pm last night I looked at the heel and thought I had made a major mistake--I had nearly twice as many stitches as I thought I should have...

So I ripped it back to the stop-line...thank goodness I've learned to put that bit of string thru to make going back so much easier-it even makes it easy to....well I'll get to that.

so then I had to figure out how many stitches needed to got back onto the heel flap needle and how many were to go back onto the circ to hold for the top of the foot. Well I picked up the stitches---count them out and discovered that I was missing three stitches, this is wear that stop-thread comes in real handy.

When you drop a stitch it will not let it run all the way down--did I mention this before? This means that you can easily find a loop with the crochet hook to re-trellis it up. And it just so happens that the frequent color changes of this yarn worked to my advantage too....it was very easy to find when I had missed picking up a stitch.

So I have to admit that was fine....and I was able to figure out which stitches needed to go back onto the circ needle--yeah!!

So I got stitching again...about 1am I looked at it and realized that I screwed up on the heel somehow and had to pull out the stitches on more time. UGH! Atleast it wasn't so bad...only about 13 rows...but while undoing it....I discovered...

I didn't have to frog it the first time!!! (this first time, not the very first time)...I was so mad at myself. I forgot that I was trying it on without finishing that portion of the sock completely yet...in fact I was only 4 rows into that section--that's why I still had so many stitches==what an IDIOT.

Well I finally caught up to myself this morning at 3:30-4am...so I started taking what hubby calls Mini-Vacations...15 minute naps...somewhere along the way it got to be a bit longer than a 15 minute nap...I woke up about 5am with what amounted to about 1/2hr of good sleep and I have to say that I wish I could take a couple of those rows back, I didn't do the best job of picking up stitches but then I never claimed to be an expert stitcher.

In fact I'm pretty sure I was only a beginner. I will have to play with tugging some of the stitches a little.

Well that sentence doesn't make any sense---I'm just so tired.

I have got to finish this sock so I have time to wash/dry/block them to get them into the mail.

Banging my Head against the Wall now

UUUUUGGGGHHHH!!!!!! I'm so frustrated....can you tell?

I didn't get a chance to go to the coffee shop with the other Scout Mom's this weekend as I had hoped because it was cancelled due to lack of interest. If hubby hadn't answered the phone I would have pretended that everything was honky doory and talked the oldest daughter, gimpy and all, to come with me and we could have spent the entire time knitting and talking and sipping coffee and tea--she says they have tea, it would have only been my second time there and the first time I got away without ordering anything---but no, hubby answered and I didn't think fast enough on my toes.....so I didn't get any knitting done yesterday.

Instead I spent the afternoon cleaning the kitchen....especially the stovetop. This is the first summer that my oldest has been on his own while we went out of town--his favorite thing to do was use the deep fryer (and leave me the mess)....because I hate the dripping of the oil I have it on a sheet pan that's lined with foil for easy cleanup.

As it turned out 18 yr olds have no sense of oil life---I thought he had changed the oil at least once over the summer--he hadn't. Oil in a fryer, I'm told, needs to be changed at least every 3 months depending what you've cook in it...if you've done any sort of meat it needs to be changed sooner. Anyways, I never really thought much of the stove--I don't usually use it....I either use the oven (they are seperate units) or the microwave, the stove is mostly used when I want popcorn or fried eggs.....mostly its just the place I put the cookie sheets or roaster when they come out of the oven.

So I had been keeping the top of the burner cleaned up okay....but when I pulled out the burner trays to clean---OMGs---he must have spilled the fryer or something and wiped it up without thinking of cleaning under the spill-pan. I had sticky "dried" oil all underneath the dials, under the dial plate and the rubber gasket that holds the plate in place. He had switched the burner grate with the one from the other side knowing that I tend to put the big tea kettle & the Splatter Blue camper coffee pot there so you can't see it.....gaaaawwwwwkkkkkk. And only one single--just one--S.O.S. pad left to do it.....it died after I finished both drip pans, the dials, the dial plate, the gasket, the stove top, one grate....but it didn't make it thru the really ucky one.

I could have killed him, but you know he's a kid (at least to me) so I turned on the football game in the kitchen and started cleaning it up---everytime our team made a TD he'd say "did you see that?" or "Look at that, that's amazing" and I'd answer with "I didn't see anything, I'm too busy cleaning someone else's mess" or "no I was busy scrubbing this ____".....I think he got the point though because one time when our team made a TD he used it as an excuse to give me a great big hug....he NEVER hugs--"I love you" gets answered with "yup" or "huh?".

So I will have to wait until the next time I can talk hubby into taking me to the regular store to get some more and really pound it....MIL says she used to put them in a black plastic bag with a bottles worth of amonia, tie it shut and then put the whole thing out on the front lawn in the bright sun and it would just eat off the grease. It might be worth the try--except I have a hard enough time not getting sick from the smell of Moth balls, I can't imagine what the smell of amonia would do to me.

Anyhow, back to my knitting.

As it turns out not knitting yesterday would probably have been a good thing---because I got done with the first part of the second socks ribbing and found that --shit!--the guage is off again! I measured really carefully too--but the sock was WAY too big....I hadn't noticed it while knitting because I tend to keep the stitches bunched so quick work, but damn!

So now I've had to frog and now its back to the drawing board....so I like the simplicity of the pattern but the colorworks is driving me nuts....it is not working out the way I thought it would. One row one color, one row the next....no pooling!

{sigh} well I've got to get back to the needles---I have to get these to my partner by Halloween and hubby is taking three days off this week so I don't think there will be much knitthing going on then. He seems to get jealous of it....what he doesn't realize is that there are days that my crafting is the only thing that keeps me from-=-=-=-sending him back to work!!!

Home Sweet Home

I am so glad to be home. I enjoy going on vacation but it is always nice to get home to my full stash, um, I mean, my own bed.

We had 10 days of pure work work work. We got up on a Friday and the work didn't stop until Monday after the reunion, my mother-in-laws family reunion. I doubt there will ever be a reunion on my FIL side or even on my own parents side....which I think is really sad, but that's the fact of life.

I will try to write more personal stuff over on my yahoo blog because I have some major gossiping to do and this isn't the place to do it, the private blog is.

I did get some stitching accomplished:

I finally finished the first sock for my daughter, now the second sock will have to wait for me to finish my HSS partners socks...I am kind of disappointed with the way they turned out actually. I messed up the pick up stitches on my gusset and now I have some pretty big ventilation holes there...oh well...it is also the first time I've done a tailored sock so I was having some problems with double increases/decreases...I also got interupted so often that I had made one section too long and the other section too short.

So after I take a break from them and work on my partners socks (using a pattern type I'm used to) I will be comtemplating whether I will let the sock stand as it is now or make a new sock ripping out the stitches from the old sock as I go.

But I will wait....I may even wait until after I finish my daughters brownie socks, even though I was planning on them using the same pattern. I did find however that each sock takes one ball of Bernat Sox yarn...or about 1.75 ounces...50 grams....203 yards....186 meters.

so I was right in buying two skeins of yarn in each color. I found some hair binders at walmart while on vacation that will match them wonderfully!

I even had time to knit up something special for my partner using pearle cotton and size 0 needles...I will probably make another for her using even smaller needles but not until the kids start school so I will be nearly uninterupted, and I can put on three pairs of magnifying glasses w/o worry of being picked on.

I feel kind of bad because I came back from vacation and found that there have been some trivia questions going on the HSS2 blog that I've missed and let my house down on...time to pull out those books and keep them close to the computer I see.

Actually it reminds me alot of the trivia contests we used to have on the WB HPbbs...one person would ask a question and then whoever answered it would ask the next one, the moderator would decide the difficulty of each question and award points...only this time only McGonagall will ask the questions. Either way I've found it is helpful to keep the books handy...along with the URL for the HP lexicon!

Well football is coming on in about...ewww, NOW! Got to go.

Go Vikes!! I bleed purple.

Partner sock update

Okay so I got out my black, got out my yellow and tested/swatched the pattern that I thought would make a great Hufflepuff sock. Hmmm, tried doing it with black as the background color but it got lost in the yellow, so I switched....figured if the yellow was too overpowering I'd try the black as the main color, but it too "disappeared" with the yellow.

I really like the pattern but it just won't work with what I have....so what is it about the yellow that makes the black disappear, you might wonder?

I'm not telling! Back to the drawing board.

I'm not giving up just yet....there's a few other patterns I thought would look great too that might work out better actually!

Kids and Knitting do NOT mix

I love my kids, I really do.

I was in the bedroom (where the HD tv is) and I was working on my current sock...see previous photos...when the phone rang and I put down my work. I had just gotten to the heel flap so had switched from my size 2 dpn's to my size 1 circs, figured I would make life easy on myself and if I put the work down for a long period of time I could slip the stitches down onto the cable. Good Idea, right?

I'm not used to working with circs....I only got them because I was going to try making socks using the Magic Loop system but couldn't figure it out...so there they were laying on the bed.....next to my 11 yr old son....who was watching television with me....apparently he is not the fan of the news because as soon as I got into the quick conversation on the phone he decided to get off the bed....the call lasted all of 50 seconds....literally, if even that long.

Son and I passed each other thru the door...when there on the floor lay...you guessed it---the circs....no sock....just the circs!

I had cataract surgery about 4 years ago, at age 38, so my eyesight is not the best but even I could see I had a BIG problem on my hands.

So I popped on my magnifying glasses over my regular glasses (it makes my entire lens the same prescrib as my bi-focals) and proceded to slip as many of the loops back onto the circ without loosing them....this is not easy for anyone, but try to do it while fighting the urge to find the kid that did it (I know it was my fault for not sliding down those stitches)

{sighs} so I get all the stitches on, give it a gentle tug just to make sure...a run is easy to fix at this point, but {wiping sweat from brow} luckily I didn't have any runs--all the stitches were saved. Right??

WRONG! I started to do the next knit row. It was great the first half of the heel flap==not a problem EVERY single stitch was twisted correctly and right where it belonged, but once I passed the marker that's when the problems began.

1. most of the stitches are actually the ones from the previous row, or a mix of the previous row stitch and the present row stitch.
2.still hadn't dropped any rows, no runs...well that's good news at least...but I have stitches where I caught PART of them...which means I have split the yarn...which weakens it. On the heel this is not a good thing, in fact its a very, very bad thing.
3. hubby came home and now I haven't had time to straighten out the mess....only reason I'm writing this blog now is because I'm waiting for my stroganoff to meld together (keyboards are easier to clean than knitting while its on the needles).

So now I am sitting here dreading having to get out the crochet hook and redoing 15 stitches so that I am catching all the yarn fibers that should be there----and seperate the previous row from the current one.

You know the devil on my shoulder is saying "just stitch it the way it is, no one will notice the heel"....but I just can't do that....{sigh}

On the bright side I told my daughter, they are her socks, what had happened and that I would have to fix her heel and she said "on my leg or on the sock?" Maybe she knew I could have used that good chuckle about then.

Still Waiting....

Okay so I am really trying to keep myself busy waiting for a "yea" or "nay" from the sock swap....I've given hair cuts to son and hubby....I've fed the gargoyles....I even worked on my sock yesterday (some concerns here)...but this is really testing my will power not to send off yet ANOTHER plea to be let in.....how UNslytherin of me, if I give in I would suspect the others will really trounse me!

About my sock...

Well I noticed after I put up the photos of it that I was getting some pretty funky pooling of color suddenly. I rechecked my gauge, nope it was still the same....8sts/inch, 9rows/inch....so the color should have been the same. Then it dawned on me that what it could be is the dying sequence had changed....hmmm, why would they do that?

Because that was were/when they expected me to be at the HEEL...instead of the decrease of the calf! So now I had this really nice wide striping going on with a big muck of muddiness...but really that's not my issue with it...it doesn't look the best but I can live with it (so can my daughter for that matter)....by issue is:
what if there isn't enough to finish the foot!!!

I mean think of it....I could be most of the way done with the foot and suddenly run out! That would be disastrous because I only have 2 skeins of this yarn....the last two herrschner's had...and buying a new skein risks mismatching dye lots (even though bernat is usually really good about it, I ain't pushing it). I even thought of using a second yarn for the heel and toe decrease, but then I thought....well if there IS enough yarn I would have a bit left over from each ball and then I have to worry about matching the striping and working in ends on the other sock. yada, yada, yada.

That is the one thing I do NOT like about the Arachne sock calculator....it doesn't give you approximate yardage needed. I don't know why it couldn't....I mean its a simple mathematical equation...

(#of sts needed to complete) X (# of yds needed to make gauge swatch of specific portions)=yds needed

OR

(#of rows) X (yardage in 10 rows)=approximate yardage needed

since the calculator asks you to enter in your gauge anyways, all it would need to know is the international size of the yarn to give the best estimate of yardage (1-5, based on thickness).

I suppose I could figure it out on my own too, but it would be easier if I had one of those cool tools that you just pull the yarn thru and it tell you the yardage you have....that would really be SWEET for something like this.

Just think all I would have to do is make swatches for every size of yarn with all my different needles and then measure it out...viola! Instant yardage chart! But that seems like just too much work for this time of the morning.

Besides, it won't help with the problem I have now....although the number of yardage/sts. would be the best way to handle the decreases and increases....AHHHHGGG! Now that will be stuck in my head and rattling around all day.

But then.....it might be better than obsessing over the Sock Swap!

On My Needles

Not too shabby for two days worth of work and doing all the other stuff that has to be done at the cabin as well, huh? This is the test for the "Arachne Sock Calculator" that takes your measurements and makes a simple sock pattern for you. It can be found at:
http://www.panix.com/~ilaine/socks.html
This pattern is great for self striping yarns like the Bernat Sox that I'm using in Hot Tamale! I also thought I would challenge myself and broke out the size 0's for the ribbing, a single row in size 1 to step up to the size 2 dpns....normally I hate working with anything smaller than a 3 but I like the fabric made with the smaller sizes much better (I even make my washclothes with size 4s instead of the 7 or8 that's recommended).

I purchased the yarn last year when I was planning on making tons of socks for my niece who we dubbed "Dobby" because whenever you asked her what she wanted for Christmas or her Birthday the answer was always the same---SOCKS!!

The Sox yarn is made of 60% acrylic and 40% nylon which gives it a wonderful memory, it doesn't hurt my hands like wool tends to, but I know many sock enthusiasts are just dieing now yelling "NO USE WOOL"...I'm sorry my hands just can't take it, but then I've only used LB Wool-Ease yarn so who knows what other brands will be like.

Actually this is the second attempt at these socks....I was almost finished with the leg last week when I realized that I had been marking my rows wrong and I hadn't put enough rows before the decrease began and then had too many rows between the decreases. So I frogged it all and restarted it last Friday night and churned this much work out on Saturday (sunday was a travel day so nothing got done....I can't knit in the car).