Random Sunday!

Clearly I'm the worst blogger in the world. Oh well.

1. I missed the Silent Poetry Reading, apparently. Here, have some Emily Dickinson anyway.

Hope is a strange invention —
A Patent of the Heart —
In unremitting action
Yet never wearing out —

Of this electric Adjunct
Not anything is known
But its unique momentum
Embellish all we own —

2. My throat feels like I've swallowed a cactus.

3. I've dropped way more money on yarn than is appropriate lately. Stuff I've bought, oddly enough solely from Käsityötalo Priima in Helsinki (I need to rambe about yarn stores sometime):



Colinette Jitterbug in Monet. Oh my.



Sandnes Garn Mandarin Petit in possibly the greates blue ever. I cast on something with it, but I don't know whether it looks like arse or not. Also the picture was useless.



Twilleys of Stamford Freedom Spirit, 10 balls. Enough for a sweater, I think.



Colinette Point 5 in Sahara. Two skeins of PRETTY.

4. Speaking of PRETTY, this happened within two days of me getting my paws on that yarn:



Pattern: Painfully simple. Cast on some stitches, knit 2x2 rib until you run out of yarn. Bind off.
Yarn:Colinette Point 5 in Sahara, two skeins
Needles: telephone poles 12mm plastic straights

I love this scarf. It's really long (longer than my wingspan, at least, which admittedly isn't teribly long) and warm and pwetty. The yarn is really bulky, and I love thick-and-thin thing going on. The whole scarf took me maybe four hours, spread over two days.

The colourway is amazing. I also think it's funny how Colinette colourways look nothing at all alike on different base yarns. I usually love all of them. Here, for example, the colour is sort of subdued and vaguely brown, and on Jitterbug Sahara is a colour I believe experts call Really Fucking Orange.

5. I need more bookmarks.

6. I went through my button stash and did something that vaguely resembles organising. I took pictures and dumped it all back in.





7. I've fallen in love with steampunk. Again. (My second NaNoWriMo novel was steampunk. Seriously shitty stempunk, but still.)

I blame this necklace, which I found on sale for four euros last week:



The photo is horrible, but it's a black fake clockface with silver numbers and hands, with a silver gear hanging from it. I love it.

My stash is bloating. Not that I mind.

Now, I go to Upper Secondary school. I guess. I've always been a bit fuzzy about such things. Anyway, around here the school year is divided into five periods with different subjects and courses and stuff. We have all the exams, up to seven, during seven consecutive days, but nothing else. That means so much free time it's only barely funny. (You're supposed to study for upcoming exams, but I simply can't spend that much time reading the books over and over again without going crazy, and I do pretty well anyway.) That, in turn, means that I have the time to go to yarn stores.

So, yes, most of this post is going to be complete yarn pr0n. Yay!



Two balls of Regia sock yarn. Of course I managed to get two different weights, but I think I can mess around with needle sizes enough to make it work. I'm going to have to hunt for a ball of yellow and a ball of turquoise, so I can make the Tiptoe socks. The green I'm going to get from the leftovers of this ball:



That's a one-hundred-gram ball of OnLine (OnLinie?) Supersocke in a really, really great green. I visited one of the three yarn stores I go to, with no intention of buying anything, but then I saw this, and, well, I can never resist a good green. It's going to become a pair of Pembrokeshire Pathways socks.

The store I got that from is the smallest of the three, but they have lots of good, cheap sock yarn. The second one has Colinette Jitterbug and Skye and some basic yarns in tons of colours. The third one, which is my favourite, is the largest, the farthest away, and the only one that stocks Rowan. (I'm a Rowan Ho, can you tell?)

This is from the second one.



Colinette Jitterbug in Mardi Gras. Jitterbug is the only handpaint available around here, so it's a good thing I love the yarn itself as much as I do. (I just finished my Snakes on a Sock, FO post forthcoming.)

And this is from the third shop.



A ball of Rowan Felted Tweed. I bought this for swatchy purposes, mostly because I didn't have enough money to buy an entire cardigan's worth. Eventually, though, I'm going to knit Mrs. Darcy with it. I have no chance of getting gauge, but I'm not afraid of a tiny bit of math. I actually rather love math. :D

I think a part of why I love Rowan so much is their ballbands. So wonderful. (Also, Finnish craft mags occasionally translate Rowan patterns, and I've loved most of them so far.) I was going to see if I could persuade myself to buy a cheaper yarn that has the exact same fibre content as the Felted Tweed, but it was just so much uglier. Oh well.

I have actually done some knitting, too. I finished the socks I was working on, for example, and cast on the Felted Tweed, and worked on Tempting II. Photographic evidence:



I'm most of the way through the body and still a bit worried about running out of yarn. I think it'll be enough, though.



It's a Topi hat. I knit it in two days and did a few mods to be able to call it a swatch.

I knit the top as set, though with more increases, and then knit the straight part flat. I was halfway down the brim when I realised I had skipped a bit of the instructions. At that point, I safety-pinned the hat together and tried it on. The result? It looked like a shower cap. My flat gauge and circular gauge are so drastically different the hat flared out and was then pulled back in by the ribbing. That and the screwy brim were all it took to make me rip it. Of course, it took me an entire James Bond movie to un-tangle the ball and wind it into a center-pull ball by hand. How I managed to knot it that badly I'll never know. I'm just special that way, I guess.

Most random photo ever:



It's my tape measure. Yes, I only have one. Yes, I've had to for a few years. I'm fairly certain I'm going to lose it sometime in the near future, because I simply can't keep track of my things. Also, it's starting to fall apart.

... Aand I'm back.

I clearly lose at updating. Oh well.

Since I last posted, I've come back from London and turned seventeen. Spring is sort of coming, but the weather is rather weird at the moment.

This was taken on our back yard last Friday:



Half of the lawn is covered with snow, and the other isn't. (Our lawn is actually mostly covered in moss instead of grass, so it's green all year round.)

On Monday, it rained, snowed and hailed in rapid succession. Oh, and it was windy as hell. I nearly lost a hat, and it was kinda skullcap-y.

Then this happened on Tuesday:



Yeah. I'm glad I didn't get the motorcycle out yet. And now it's pretty much back to the way it was last week, with half the snow melted away.

Also, yarn.



Four balls of Rowan Calmer in Coffee Bean. It's soft and squishy and springy and lovely. And oh, the colour. (Dark brown is like magic. It goes with everything, like orange and pink and greens, especially lime, and turquoise and white and oh. Yeah, a good portion of my clothes are in those colours. :D)

That's going to become Tempting II from Knitty. I've already cast on and am about three inches into the body. I'm a bit worried about running out of yarn, but we'll see. (Anecdote: this is the first time I've ever knit anything out of the specified yarn. And it's in the colour shown, too!)

Of course, it was my birthday on the 11th, so I had to buy something a little more expensive and nice. What I got after nearly and hour of browsing and trying to decide was this:



Garnstudio's Silke-Tweed in a lovely green colour. I'm a complete sucker for tweed yarns, and I've never knit with anything with any silk in it, so I got this. It took me a moment to realise that he whole label was in Swedish (I'm guessing), though:



Apparently I'm better at guessing than I thought. Also, the fact I've studied Swedish for four years might have helped a bit. :D (It does have English text on the back of the ballband.)

When I was in London, I only had time to visit one yarn store. It was Loop in Islington. It was alright, I guess, but not anything yarngasmic. :D

I ended up getting a skein of Colinette Jitterbug in Jay, and am knitting some Snakes on a Sock socks, from Lime'n'Violet. (There was a mistake in the pdf, but apparently it'd fixed somewhere I failed to find. Both Miss Lime and Lexy the Admin monkey were terribly helpful, though, and it wasn't anything I couldn't have figured out myself.)



Yes, my foot really is that short.

I also finished my Jaywalkers, but I'll post an FO report tomorrow, along with some pictures. (And a magnificent screw-up, too, but you'll have to wait. Or go to the Flickr, I guess.)