Quick boring update. I don’t talk too much about my medical issues here, but I’ve got a boatload of them, and they’ve got me down for the count. Good (? well, better anyway) blogging will resume before too long. For now, a few completely random notes on the state of things:

1. I finished and blocked the body of Rogue. I’m a wee bit disappointed — it’s a little shorter than I’d like. I was worried this was going to happen, and debated with myself over and over and over again about adding an extra cable repeat to the side cable, and decided against it. I’m kicking the hell out of myself now and very upset. Hubby says it still looks great, but I dunno. Will be seaming and sewing in sleeves very soon, maybe today. Pics to come.
2. Hubby’s first sock has turned the heel and is coming down the home stretch. Ugly (and I mean ASS-ugly) pooling on the gusset, but nice striping has resumed now that I’m on the body of the foot (does a foot have a body?). I’m afraid the foot is too big. I’m going to finish this one, let him try it on, and then go from there — adapting and reknitting sock #1 if necessary.
3. My bag for sew? I knit! is (ha!) coming along. You can read about my adventures with my sewing machine here. I do not have the fortitiude to post about it again. So far I have not heaved the sewing machine into the wall. My nearest and dearest have a pool going on when it will happen.
4. My cousin is going to have a baby! First grandchild for her parents. New little person for me to knit for. I’m excited.

And in non-knitting news:

5. We had a realtor come look at our house today. Getting ready to put it on the market. Looking at getting a better price than imagined. Very scary.
6. The boy was in a wedding this past weekend. He did what he was supposed to do for all of about 32 seconds, did NOT go headfirst into nearby water despite my greatest fears, provided great entertainment for everyone there, and most importanly, was so cute I almost died.

Be back soon with more interesting and relevant stuff.

. . . but I can’t bring myself to actually finish it. What the hell is up with that?

I finished the knitting on the hood for Rogue, and to be completely honest — that’s when this sweater felt done. Never mind the ridiculous amount of work that was still left to be done at that point, I still got up and did my happy dance.

Then I set about the work of grafting the hood. I’d been dreading this part, because who really does grafting well? (Hint: not me.) And — in a combination of knit and purl? Over cables? I will admit, I considered taking the easy way out and doing a 3-needle-bind off. Because a neat, well-crafted, pretty unobtrusive seam would be better than a mangled, ugly grafting attempt, no doubt. But I decided to keep that in my pocket as a “what to do if you screw this up beyond words” option and got started on the grafting process.

I looked around, both on the internet and in my library of printed resources (which grows bigger all the time, and I don’t understand how that happens), and the very best instructions I could find were in Montse Stanley’s Knitter’s Handbook. So I opened it up, put all my live stitches on crochet thread, and took a deep breath:

Then started working:

Okay, this isn’t turning out so bad, only had to redo a couple of stitches, about halfway done now and still able to breathe:

Done with the grafting of live stitches to live stitches (notice my blue thread is still in there; my security blanket):

Just gotta graft these live stitches onto this edge here:

and DONE!

I’m pretty proud of how I did. I found it much easier to do well with the stitches off the needles like this, rather than keeping them on the needles and holding the needles parallel, which is how I’d done all grafting before I had the esteemed Montse Stanley to tell me, quite emphatically, to never do it that way. (Ole Montse was right; this way is better.)

I have to admit, though, I did have some help:

Guinny (short for Guinevere) came in from playing in the sandbox and immediately offered her services as superviser. She did a great job, too. (My apologies for the photo. High ISO, too much noise, and on this computer screen it looks desperately oversharpened. I’m on a laptop away from home so I can’t fix it now.)

So, what’s left for Rogue? She’s practically done. I need to knit the applied I-cord border on the front edges, then just blocking, seaming, and installing the zipper (see how cavalier that sounds? Did I fool you, or can you tell that I’m shaking I’m so afraid of screwing things up at this point?). I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I need to knit the applied I-cord border AGAIN. You see, I did it once already. And after finishing the first side, I blindly (stupidly? incomprehensibly?) ignored what anyone could see — that it was puckering — and knit the other side, picking up the same ratio of stitches, knitting with the same size needle. Grafted the ends of the second cord — I was well and truly FINISHED, folks — and then gave up the self-delusion and ripped it all out to start over.

I started by picking up 2 out of 3 stitches, as indicated by Claudia’s most excellent cardigan modifications, but for whatever dumbass reason, that looked kind of “off” to me. (I don’t know why I’m all the sudden not trusting Claudia, who’s only done this twice so far and has been knitting a lot longer and knits a lot better than me, when I’ve been trusting her all along, but there it is. Just an attack of dumbass, as far as I can tell.) So instead I picked up 1 out of 2 stitches, because that “looked better.” Dumbass.

Now that all that has been ripped, I did the first side again — this time, picking up 2 out of 3 stitches all the way down, then doing the edging with a size 9 (US) needle (the sweater has been done on size 7s). It looks, if I do say so, gorgeous.

And I just have to do the other side.

And I just can’t seem to get there.

But. Hope springs eternal. I am away from home (visiting my Mom and Dad on the other side of Houston) and my family is going out for sushi for dinner tonight. I’m hoping to con them into taking my kiddo with them, so I will have a free evening, and be able to finish this edging. We’ll see.

I’ll leave you with images from my husband’s garden. (This is part of the reason I’m not finishing Rogue. It’s lovely outside, and Nate and I are spending a lot of time out there. This isn’t a bad thing.) He planted irises because I like them — and I like them very much.

I have a knitting notebook. It’s not really a knitting journal, as this blog serves that purpose pretty well, but it is a “where I keep track of things as I do them” notebook. I am almost ashamed to admit that when I’m knitting something where I need to actually keep track of rows (like Kiri, or Rogue) — I don’t quite trust myself to read my knitting really well yet. (It’s kind of sad, because mostly I can read my knitting well enough; I just don’t trust myself to have faith in it. I have issues that way sometimes.) So I keep track of every single row by making a little tick mark for it. I like it better than using a row counter, and this works really really well for me.

I’ve grown pretty attached to my book. This is the outside:

Isn’t it pretty? One of my students gave it to me. It’s just a composition book, covered with pretty paper, but it was done with such attention to detail; it’s quite lovely. And it just tickles me that she made it just for me. I couldn’t think of a better thing to use for my knitting book.

The inside? Not so pretty. This is what my notes on Rogue look like (as of a few weeks back, when I took the photo):

You can see all my notes and all my math go on the page. (And while I’m capable of doing math in my head, once again, I don’t have faith in my ability to do so — so you see my pitiful written out long division.) Kind of scary looking, huh? (Though to be truthful, some pages look significantly worse, thanks to a little boy who loves to play with writing utensils.) I have a page in this book for every project, even the ones that don’t require me to count rows. It’s just a place for me to scribble my notes to myself and keep them all in one place. I find myself wondering if everyone who knits has something similar.

But. It bugs me that I need it. I want to not need my notebook, as much as I love having it. I don’t know why. I don’t know what about keeping the notebook bothers me, makes me feel like a “remedial” knitter. I realize this is probably just my own insanity, that there is nothing wrong with keeping notes, even keeping row counts, for my knitting. This is supposed to be a fun hobby, not a cause of stress! But I feel like, somehow, I ought to grow out of my book. I keep wondering when that will happen. Maybe it never will. Maybe I’ll have a knitting notebook for the rest of my life — and for the rest of my life, I’ll be able to go back to any project that I knit and recall detail about it that would never otherwise have been accessible to me. That can’t really be a bad thing, can it? Gah. I don’t know what’s into me, why I’m trying to make something awful out of the pleasure that having this little book gives me. Sometimes I’m crazier than even I ever dreamed.

Enough rambling. I had a new adventure today — I dyed some yarn for the first time! I have a very large hank of laceweight yarn that was black, but faded desperately in places. I overdyed it with some Wilton’s in burgandy today. I think I’m going to have to try again — I got a lot more of a pink color than I was looking for. I may try using Red Red next time instead of burgandy and see what happens. To dye it, I put water, coloring, and vinegar in a large stock pot and heated it until the color dissolved. At the same time, I presoaked my yarn with water. After all the color dissolved, I put the yarn into the stockpot and put it on the stove on low heat. It took about two hours of “cooking” before the dye was exhausted. It was really cool to me to see the water actually become clear again — intellectually, I knew that’s what should happen but it was quite another thing to believe it actually would. Once the water was clear, I let it cool for a few hours, then rinsed the yarn — now it’s drying in the shower. I’ll take photos once it dries, but as I said, I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to go another round (at least) with it before I’m happy with the color.

Still working bit by bit on Rogue. I’m on row 72 of the hood chart — really getting close! I’m having a bitch of a time with the p3togtbl on the double decrease rows — I think part of that may be because I’m using Addi Turbos, which are about as pointy as my thumbs. Ugh. I’m missing my Denise’s, but the Addis are just soooo much faster with this yarn.

Also, progress on hubby’s sock:

Just started the heel flap. I love the stripes. I love the yarn. I’m just thrilled with this whole sock experience so far.