Belated pictures

Here are the fingerless mittens I finished on Sunday. Tomorrow I'll post them to the Loopy Ewe yarn shop (my favoritest! If you need sock yarn or lace-weight and want the best, this is where to go! And the customer service is THE. BEST.EVER. Ahem. Shameless plug over.) Note the extreme lack of fancy patterning or even hand-dyed sock yarn. Yes, these are somewhat ungenerously plain fingerless gloves, but come on. I knitted them on size 1's so they are eminently close-knit and practical.

Note also the wonky stripes on the lefthand glove. There was a knot in the yarn and then the color sequence reversed (stupid cheap Knitpicks yarn). I thought it was kind of funny and cute (also, I might have been reading and not looking at my knitting and maybe didn't notice till I'd knitted another couple inches) so I left it. I hope some poor teenage girl in Russia doesn't hate me forever for making her mismatched gloves. Am I the only person in the world who thinks it's cute when the stripes on handmade socks and things don't match?

Yarn: Knitpicks simple stripes, 1 ball
Needles: size 1
Pattern: One of the free ones linked from the Loopy Ewe site, plus a few modifications (like a half-inch of ribbing added to the thumb).

Tejas is shocked by my hijinks with the camera.


Knit Night and the baby bobble sweater

On Monday I went to the knit night at a nearby yarn shop, Full Thread Ahead. It was the first non-KnitWits knit night I've ever been to! And, you know, I don't really think I'll go back, though it was kinda interesting. The shop was nice and the ladies there were mostly really nice, but they spent the whole time talking about cloth diapers and cruises and stuff I couldn't really relate to. And there was one very loud lady--associated with the shop somehow--who raised her voice and talked right over me both times other people started talking to me. Jeez! But everyone else was nice and one of the ladies told me that the Sunday afternoon knit night at the pearl tea cafe tends to have a younger crowd...I may try that, though it will mean buying bubble tea (alas, the budget! Suppose I can afford $3.50 for a bubble tea, but still. Oh the guilt). I'm thinking I'll go once and see if everyone is all Young Hipster-ish (in which case, I will take my uncool-but-pretty Fair Isle tams and go back to knitting at the Hobbit Hole) or if they're friendly.

The project I brought to knit at the knit night was my baby bobble sweater, which isn't really a knit-in-public thing since it's complicated enough that you have to keep an eye on it. I brought a sock too in case things got really interesting, but since I didn't get to talk, I didn't switch to my sock. Anyway, the evening cemented my extreme dislike of the baby bobble pattern. HATE YOU PATTERN! It's so incredibly badly (confusingly) written and full of mistakes. None of them are all that hard to notice and figure out, but come on! How hard is it to do a test knit? I don't like having to second-guess a pattern. To be fair, I think a lot of problems may have come in translation, but I don't think that completely excuses them. So...LOVE the sweater, it's adorable and I think my cousin will love it, but HATE HATE HATE the stupid pattern. Grarrr.