I’m back (sort of)

And I have some knitting progress to report:

Yep, I used Syncopated Ribs as my Officially Permitted Distraction Knitting whilst finishing up a bunch of work at the end of this semester, and came very close to finishing off the knitting on the body. I’ve only got a few more inches left to knit down the body, and then it will be time to pick up stitches for the neckline and cuffs. Just in time for it to get hot this summer!

I’m still not feeling too great. My back is still a mess, and I’ve been under the weather with allergies and bad medication reactions and such, but c’est la vie. I did have a successful try at swimming last week, though, so I’m feeling optimistic about that becoming a new means for getting exercise that won’t aggravate my joints. I’ve still got a lot of things that I need to be working on (in grad school, the end of the semester is pretty meaningless since research projects never stop), which is hard to do when I’m not feeling that great, so even though I’m “back”, I’ll probably be a bit lower-key on the blogging front for awhile longer. I’m doing my best to catch back up on everyone’s blogs, but after essentially ignoring my Google Reader for two weeks (relatedly, if any of y’all are as easily distractible as I am, I highly recommend LeechBlock), I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up again, and I may have to just do the dreaded “mark as as read” and start fresh. It happens.

 

Happy Birthday, mom!

It’s my mother’s birthday today, so I just thought I’d pop my head into Internetland for a second to wish her a happy one. The quiet time is serving me well, as I’m making progress on my various non-knitting projects, and also on one of my knitting projects, which I’ll share with y’all once I’m done with the non-knitting ones. Take care!

 

quiet time

It’s the end of the semester, which means it’s time for me to hunker down and get a bunch of stuff finished. Normally this wouldn’t be so bad, but given that I’m also dealing with a lot of pain and am having a bunch of my time eaten up by physical therapy, I need all the help I can get to focus and get my work done. So I’m going quiet for a little while. I’m even closing the tab where I keep Google Reader in my browser, so I’ll be quiet (even quieter than I have been, recently) on all y’all’s blogs, too. I’ll still be reachable via email if something vitally important happens, but I’m hoping to keep the distractions to an absolute minimum.

Until then, enjoy this photo of bright green spring buds. I’ll catch up with y’all in a couple weeks!

 

making plans

I don’t have any knitting-related photos to share, so for now, I will regale y’all with photos from our garden. I have the above picture as the background on my laptop now, that’s how much I love it!

We’re in the final weeks of the semester here, so I’ve been a bit busy with all things academic. And also busy with PT, and unable to sit for extended periods of time because of my back (or stand up for extended periods of time; so basically, I’m doing this crazy sit-down/stand-up dance all day), so as you can imagine, things aren’t quite going as planned with the crafting this month. I’m trying to be really laid back about all of the plans I’ve made on the crafting front; I know I’ll get to them eventually, and seeing as this is what I do for fun and creative release, it’s really not worth getting too upset if life interferes with the schedule I’d set for myself. And on that note, here are some of the plans I have for the remainder of the year, crafting-wise (just the bigger stuff…things like socks and mittens tend to get stuck in wherever I feel like it):

• At any point:
  • Sewing: I’m not sure what I’ll wind up doing, but I want to sew something, just to get back into learning how to do it. A quilted placemat, a skirt, an apron, anything…we’ll see.
  • Crochet: Nothing fancy, I just want to be able to make little toys and put borders on things.
• May:
  • Syncopated Ribs: I want to finish this up by the end of May, so that I can clear off the needles for yet another bright green sweater!
  • Tweedy Aran Cardigan: Just keep working on it. This will probably be a long-term project, with how slowly some of the twisted stitch patterns are going for me.
  • Cardigan for Arwen: I’m hoping my friend and I can start our little two-person knitalong for this sometime in May.
• June:
  • Rainbow Yoked Sweater: I have this idea in my head, of knitting a striped sweater, where one of the stripes is grey Eco-Wool, and the other is the rainbow Noro Kureyon I’ve had sitting around for awhile. And since grey is one of the Project Spectrum colors for June, what better time to start? And what better celebration of the spectrum than a sweater with rainbow stripes?
  • Lace Blousson: I have had grey hemp yarn to knit this project (from the Summer 2004 IK) since shortly after that magazine came out. That’s four years, people! So I definitely want to start it during the June/July period of Project Spectrum. It will probably take awhile, despite the small size, given the tiny gauge at which it is knit.
• July:
  • Me-sized Gansey: Remember how I did a little Tour de Gansey during the Tour de France last year? Well, this time I want to do it again, except instead of knitting the tiny sampler gansey, I want to knit one to fit me. I’m pretty small, as far as people go, but it’s still going to be a big challenge. I’m not sure if I’ll finish the sweater during the Tour, but that’s my goal, anyway.
• August:
  • Forecast: Yes, I’m going to knit Forecast, in a lovely deep heathered purple. After pretty much the entire knit-blogging world has knit one, I’ve finally decided to give it a go. And the purple color is perfect for the Project Spectrum colors for August!
• September:
  • Imogen: I have the pattern, and I have some gorgeous handdyed blue BFL yarn to knit it with. I’m starting to really dig loose flowy cardigans (I wore a store-bought sweater with a similar design in my brother’s wedding), so I’m excited to make one. And the color of the yarn is perfect for the “water” theme of Project Spectrum.
  • Tangled Yoke Cardigan: I have some light blue Silky Wool that I want to turn into this sweater. We’ll see if I get to it this year!
• October:
  • Husband’s Sweater: I’d like to finish it in time for his birthday (the 18th). I’ll probably be knitting it from now until then, in small chunks.
  • Socks: Ok, maybe I actually will knit socks during this year’s Socktoberfest! And I’m sure I’ll still have bits and pieces of sweaters to be finishing up at this point, just in time for it to get cold enough to wear them!
• November:
  • Bohus-Yoke no. 2: Maybe this time I can actually succeed in knitting a yoked sweater during NaKniSweMo. I’m planning to knit another one pretty much just like the first Bohus Yoke (I have enough of the natural body color left over to do so), but in warm fall colors this time around.
• December:
  • Holiday gifts: This may just consist of knitting stockings for my husband and I, but we’ll see.

Yeah, yeah, I probably won’t come anywhere close to keeping this schedule, but I’m the sort of person who likes making lists and schedules and things, so it makes me happy anyway. We’ll see how it goes!

 

from scratch

This banana bread has been my mid-morning snack the past few days. I thought other people might like to enjoy it, too, so here is my recipe (invented by me, on the basis of a few other recipes, using my usually-successful “throw stuff in until it looks like the sort of dough it’s supposed to be” method):

Ingredients:

• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt (or a little more, if you want)
• 2 tbsp. wheat germ
• 1 cup mashed bananas (2-3 bananas, depending on size)
• less than 1 tbsp. citrus juice
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1/2 cup (or so) miniature semi-sweet chocolate chips -or-
• a couple handfuls of slivered almonds and raisins -or-
• whatever the heck you want to put in! The possibilities are endless! (sort of)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350°.

Then, mash up the bananas with the citrus juice. You don’t want much juice, just enough to moisten the bananas and keep them from turning brown and yucky (hooray, citric acid!). I mash them with my hands…it’s fun! Take off your rings and such, and go at it (I find that punching them with my knuckles works pretty well). Set these aside for now.

Next, cream the butter and sugar. Then add in the egg, mix, and add in the rest of the wet ingredients (bananas, sour cream, vanilla), mix again. Then add in your mixed dry ingredients (the flours, wheat germ, baking soda, and salt), mix well. Fold in whatever added ingredients you want (I’m a chocoholic, so I went for chocolate chips). Pour into a greased 9×5-inch loaf pan, and bake for 50-60 minutes or until you can stick in a toothpick and have it come out clean. Let cool, and then…eat!

Speaking of things-made-from-scratch, I started a small project a couple of days ago:

Yep, I’ve fallen into the cowl-craze, and decided to make one from my very first batch of colorful handspun yarn. It’s rather chunky and fairly dense, but I think it’ll make for a nice neckwarming device once I’m finished. But before I can finish it, I’m going to have to finish plying up the rest of the singles that I spun, because I’m all out of 2-ply at this point. So I’m not sure when that’s going to happen, since my back is still a bit of a mess.

On that note, I’ve learned that I have a rather bad L5-S1 disc herniation, in addition to scar tissue inflammation (thanks to healing improperly after a spinal tap), putting pressure on the nerves in my spinal column. My doc is optimistic that we can resolve it with physical therapy, but warns that it may be months before I have much less pain. We’re trying to do anything we can to avoid surgery, because I have a tendency to heal poorly and over-scar, which is part of what led to the problems in the first place! So anyway, this has put a hamper in my spinning, and also in my gardening, because neither thing is very comfortable to do. C’est la vie, but boy do I wish la vie would get a little less painful one of these days.

 

squares and circles

Squares first. I turned 25 this Saturday, and hence am officially a square (though some might argue that I’ve been one for a good long while!). And that square you see up above is one of the delicious brownies we made to celebrate. We used the American Heart Association Cookbook recipe, which is the one I grew up eating (heart problems run on one side of my family, so it only made sense!), and is also my favorite. It’s very basic, simple…no boxed mix and no chocolate chunks or anything like that, just good old dutch process cocoa and some other “real food” ingredients. Normally we would have made the traditional Space Shuttle Cake, but it being a weekend, we couldn’t have just brought it into the office to share it with my colleagues (most of whom were out of town at the conference I’d hoped to be at, anyway), and a space-shuttle shaped cake is a rather hard thing to keep hidden away from the cats if we keep it here at home. So, brownies it was. And I quite enjoyed them.

These are the other squares in my life right now. The little knitting/crochet/crafting group of us in my department has a tradition of knitting squares to create baby blankets anytime someone we know has a baby, so I’ve been doing my share. I’ve started my own tradition of knitting a square with the cabled pattern from Demi on it, since I have it memorized and really enjoyed knitting it.

So, what then of these circles I reference in the title of this post? Well, y’all remember how I got rather obsessed with circular yoke-style sweaters awhile back, right? And how I joking referred to the existence of a secret society of fellow yoke-loving folks bent on world domination (or something to that effect)? Well, it exists now. I broke down and created a flickr group a couple of days ago. So, if you are interested, please join! I have no idea, by the way, what I’m doing administering a flickr group, but hopefully it won’t turn into a disaster. I realized after the fact that I’d screwed up and made it an invite-only group instead of a regular public group, but please just ask, I’ll be happy to take care of you. And on that note, a question: should I make a Ravelry group, too? It sort of seems to me like Ravelry is actually the better place for chatting about patterns and such (what with the easy “magic linking” and all that).

I’ve got another physical therapy appointment today, and will get to hear about the results of my MRI. My back is still a mess, but I’m feeling optimistic about things anyway. Other than this back thing (which is admittedly still sort of a big deal and definitely a setback), I’ve been feeling quite a bit better recently. More energy, and more at peace with the fact that fine, I have chronic health problems and have to be more careful than other people about pretty much everything (and probably will never run another marathon again in my life), but that’s not the end of the world. I’m eager to get to work on some of the academic projects I had to abandon as well as some new ones, but I promise I won’t push too hard this time around, since that only seems to make me sick again!

Oh, and I can finally reveal who the recipient of the baby booties was! Glad they got there!

Oh, and also, Lolly just posted a great interview with one of my favorite designers ever, Norah Gaughan. Go read it!

 

earthy sweaters

This particular period of Project Spectrum is so up my alley. I’m an earth-tones sort of girl, I’ve been an environmentalist since before I even knew the word, and now I’ve even got a garden where I can literally play in the dirt. There’s no way on earth I could knit all of the potential EARTH-themed projects I’ve got in my queue before June comes around, but that’s not going to stop me from trying!

First, here’s a little progress shot of Syncopated Ribs (you know, the sweater that got almost halfway knit without me ever blogging it!):

It looks a bit strange on the needles, because the construction is such that you cast on for the sleeves while you’re knitting up the front and knit right over the top of the sweater and back down to the bottom. So now I have this strange, scarecrow-esque thing on the needles, but I promise it will look like a sweater in the end! I’m really going to miss knitting with the Cork once I’m done…but there are plenty of other delightful yarns in this world.

And well, you know me, I can’t ever just keep things simple. And apparently I couldn’t live without something brown on the needles, because shortly after finishing the Sienna Cardigan, I cast on for another brown cardigan sweater:

The yarn is Classic Elite Skye Tweed, which I picked up in an exchange on Ravelry. The pattern is the “Tweedy Aran Cardigan” from the Winter 2001/2002 IK (also available as a download from the KnittingDaily store, which is how I have it…I wasn’t an IK subscriber back then!). Y’all, I’m in love. The yarn has a nice wooly feel to it, and I’m just infatuated with the tweedy, heathery look of it. This is going to be a fun, fun knit.

But just in case that’s not enough, I have one more earth-themed project that just might make it on the needles during the proper period of Project Spectrum:

Yeah, I know, that’s just a pile of yarn. But I’m planning to turn it into a Cardigan for Arwen (but really for me!). I’ve had both the yarn and the pattern in my queue of upcoming projects for quite some time now, but when a knitting friend of mine emailed me to ask a question about the pattern because she really wanted to knit one for herself, I decided it might be fun to do a little two-person knitalong for it. I’m not sure when we’ll be starting, but maybe I can finish up Syncopated Ribs first.

I’m actually supposed to be in Ithaca today. I was planning to go to a conference (just as an attendee, not as a presenter) this weekend, but the back inflammation and nerve issues made me decide that it was going to be a lot more trouble than it was worth. I’m disappointed, because I feel like I’ve had to back out of so many things I’ve wanted to do in the past year because of health problems, but it would just be too much. I’m still having tons of problems with my back and left leg, but I had an MRI a couple of days ago and started physical therapy yesterday, so I’m optimistic we’ll get it taken care of eventually. The upshot of all this is that I’ll actually be at home for my birthday tomorrow, which I certainly don’t mind!

 

As promised, an FO post

I finished the Sienna Cardigan (a very Project Spectrum-appropriate knit!) earlier today (after a marathon session of seaming and end-weaving…oy, now I remember why I love knitting sweaters in the round!), and we decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and walk up to Highland Park (which is essentially in our neighborhood, lucky us!). The walk maybe wasn’t the best idea, given that I am once again basically in the same amount of pain as I was in before they put me on nerve pain meds (I suspect it would be much worse without them), except, you know, medicated into a haze, but it was so nice to spend some more time outdoors before the sun gets too harsh and the bees get too thick in the air.

Anyway, this isn’t supposed to be a post about the park or about nerve pain, but rather, a post about my new finished sweater! So on that note, here are the vital stats:

Pattern: Sienna Cardigan, from Fall 06 IK
Yarn: Rowan Cork, in “Mouse”
Needles: size 8 Denise circulars

I knit it at a tighter-than-recommended gauge, hoping to get a sweater somewhat smaller than the 36″ smallest size. My plan worked just a bit too well, but I’m fairly sure that once I block it, I’ll get a little bit of growth (at least, the swatch grew a bit after I soaked it!). It does fit, but it’s a little snugger than I’d prefer right now.

This is actually the very first cardigan I have ever knit! I’m not sure why this is, really, since cardigans are really very useful. It won’t be the last cardigan I knit, that’s for sure!

 

playing in the dirt

One of the many wonderful things about our little house is the fact that it came with a beautiful (if a wee bit overgrown) backyard garden. Prior to this year, we’ve lived in apartments where we didn’t have the opportunity to do anything with whatever yard there was, so we’re very excited to be able to tend our own garden. I’d hoped to be able to convert part of it into a veggie garden, but I’ve been too sick and too busy to really put the time and effort into doing it right, so we’ve decided that this year will primarily be for educating ourselves, and learning more about our current garden (since we did not live here in the Spring last year, we don’t completely know what we even have in our garden! It is going to be fun, watching what comes up at various points this Spring), which areas get the most sunlight and which stay shady and that sort of thing. I think we might try to have a small container-based herb garden, but the veggies will almost certainly be waiting until next year. This is fine, because I want to put a lot of thought into what we really want to grow and where we get our seeds (especially after reading Lolly’s recent post) and learn more about organic gardening in general.

Yesterday we decided to take advantage of the warm, dry day, and went out back and just generally cleaned up a bit. We had tons of leaves that got buried under snow before we got a chance to rake them up, a whole lot of weeds, and lots of dead stems to cut back and such (not to mention the trash from litterers, which also got buried under the snow). In the process, we discovered that our little stone path through the garden is actually not so little after all, but had just been half-buried under overgrown plants. We’re hoping to keep the growth in check this year, so that we can have a beautiful, but not unmanageable or unnavigable garden.

I’ll have some EARTH-themed knitting content perhaps even later today…I’m half-finished seaming a certain sweater, which means there’s an FO post soon to come!

 

for real, this time

Does this look familiar? Y’all might remember how I was going to finish my Golden Dragon socks during the phase of Project Spectrum that included “metallics” last year. And yet, here we are, many months later…”metallics” have rolled around again, and those socks are still in the exact same state as they were:

But this time, I’m going to work on them, for real. Because honestly, the combination of the dragon scale pattern with that gold yarn is just too wonderful to keep hidden in the bottom of my bag of projects. And I’ve figured out why I was so reluctant to knit on them last year. The thing is, I hate the heel. Absolutely loathe it. My short-row heel is pretty darn ugly, but it’s not just that…after having tried on handknit socks knit with short-row heels, I can honestly say I don’t like the way they fit my foot. So this time, I’m going to rip back to the leg stitches, put in a heel flap, and make a pair of socks I’ll actually want to finish and wear. I’m more comfortable with basic sock construction at this point than I was last year, so I’m confident I can do this without doing undue harm to the beauty of the original pattern (which is really very clever).  We’ll see if I can finish these before the end of May.

Stay tuned for more EARTH-themed content!

 

first signs of spring

I’ve totally made up for my failure with FIRE, since it’s day 2 of EARTH and I already have a finished project! I was suddenly taken by an urge to knit a pair of Saartje’s Bootees, and had the perfect spring-green yarn leftover from a pair of socks, so I cast on last night and finished putting the buttons on this morning. And I just had to pose them outside with the first sign of spring in our backyard:

We had a warm day yesterday, and several flowers seem to have sprouted up overnight. I couldn’t be more delighted! I’ve been craving green like you wouldn’t believe, and to have it not just in yarn form, but in honest-to-goodness plant form too? Awesome.

It’s a lot colder today (it dropped 40 degrees overnight!), but the sky is the clearest blue and it’s absolutely gorgeous. I couldn’t stop myself from posing the booties in our red bush with that beautiful sky as the background:

The vital stats:
Pattern: Saartje’s Bootees (Ravelry link)
Yarn: STR Lightweight in “Lemongrass” (leftovers)
Needles: size 2 dpns
Buttons: actually, I used wooden beads, since I had no buttons. I like how they look like toggles.

I’m actually sending these booties off to a lucky somebody, but I won’t say who for now. I haven’t got much use for baby booties at the moment, but I know several people who do!

 

I failed at fire

Hey, remember how I was going to knit (at least) a pair of socks for each element of Project Spectrum? Yeah, well, what you see up there is my whopping progress on my fiery sock. Not even one whole repeat! And it’s not that I don’t love the yarn or the pattern (they’re both great, really), it’s just that life seems to have had other things in mind for me these past two months. I’ll finish these socks eventually, I’m sure. And I didn’t totally fail at FIRE, anyway…

I’d almost forgotten about this yarn (that I made with my own hands!), but when I pulled it out today to take this picture, I was reminded of another idea I’d had for Project Spectrum, which was to spin up some fiber representing each element. I’ve not been feeling up to spinning recently (the back pain I’ve been having sort of interferes with that particular activity), but once I do feel up to it again, I’d like to spin up some good Earthy yarn. I’m thinking this roving (Crown Mountain Farms Corriedale Pencil Roving) looks pretty perfect for that…maybe I can ask for some for my birthday?  (I’ll be turning 25 in less than two weeks now!).

Still feeling pretty zombie-fied on these meds they’ve given me, and am not having the level of pain relief I’d hoped for. So we’ll see how productive I can manage to be…I’ve got lots of possible projects ready to go for EARTH (what can I say, I’m an earth-tones sort of gal)!

 

catatonic

Oh my goodness, y’all, when they told me I’d be drowsy and out of it on these meds, they so weren’t lying. I got my presentation rescheduled for Tuesday, thank goodness, because all I could manage yesterday was looking at pictures on Flickr in a nearly catatonic state. Same goes for today, really…I’ve not even managed to shower, because I’m too worried I’ll fall over and crack my head open or something. I spent awhile reloading the recent “most interesting” photos page, and then realized maybe it would be fun to type “quilt” in as a search term. Oh, wow, the inspiration…

And lucky for me, Amazon was very quick to remedy the damaged book situation, and just a bit ago I heard a knock at the door, and found these waiting for me:

Much better. So now I have even more pretty, inspiring pictures to look at. And believe me, today it’s just going to be the pictures…I am not in any state to be trying to learn sewing techniques.

The other thing waiting for me when I went out the door was this:

Yeah, it’s even less spring-like than before. That’s some wet, goopy snow on those branches. C’mon Winter, give it up.

 

bad day

Let me tell y’all about my day yesterday. I finally got to see my doctor, and after a series of rather painful tests, got confirmation about what’s going on (swollen tissue in my back putting pressure on my sciatic nerve, making me hurt like crazy and also messing up my ability to walk), and two different meds that have drowsiness as a side effect. Am warned repeatedly that they take awhile to get used to, and that I will probably feel like a zombie the next morning (I do…this is taking me forever to write and is probably incoherent), and thus should probably cancel any meetings I have in the early part of today. This will be relevant in a bit.

I then manage to survive an entire day at the office, by not actually being in my own office, but instead hijacking the “comfy chair” in one of the labs I work in. Hey, whatever works, right?

We run a bunch of errands, which isn’t terribly fun when you’ve got shooting pain in your entire left side, but it’s ok, because I know when I get home, I have a fun Amazon package waiting for me. Except:

WTF, Amazon? I’ve gotten the quilting bug, and seeing Megan’s fabric goodies is only making it worse. So, in true Whitney-style, I decided to order a couple of books before I delve any further into this whole sewing thing. Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, decided to pack these books in an oversized padded envelope. So, when I got them yesterday, one of the books (a hardcover!) was bent completely in half, and the other had its spine broken. I’m rather upset about this…I know I’ll get non-damaged copies eventually through the return process, but I wanted to play with them NOW!

And then, just to top off my very-fun day, I sent an email intended just for my advisor, telling him about the medication situation and asking to reschedule our meeting…but instead of sending it to my advisor, I sent it to my entire lab (not hard to do, especially when one is a bit foggy from pain…the lab email is just my advisor’s email with “lab” tacked on the end…oh, the dangers of autcompletion). Way to go, self. I am so embarrassed!

And today, I’m supposed to be giving a presentation at 12:30-ish.  I’m also supposed to take another one of my drowsiness-inducing pills at lunchtime.  This’ll be…interesting.

 

I’m done with Winter, but Winter’s not done with me

Remember those treetops? Yeah, that’s the same little stretch of sky that was so brilliantly blue just a little over a month ago. But that’s what we’ve got, today. It’s wearing on me, a little…I’m just so ready to be done with winter, to be done with being cold (we keep our thermostat set very low, to save on heating costs, but it does get old to always need to wear so many layers and to still have that little chill in my bones even when I do), to have sunshine and flowers and all those things. But alas, while it is now officially Spring, Winter seems to have not gotten the message.

I’ve been knitting, but haven’t been in the mood to try to take pictures of it in this lighting, so I don’t have anything to share on that front. I’ve been having a bit of a tough time recently…all of the traveling really wore me down, and sometime in the midst of it (perhaps when we got rear-ended in the blizzard?), I managed to do something to my back that led to a recurrence of the sciatica I’ve gotten on-and-off ever since the spinal tap I had 4.5 years ago (when I wound up in the hospital with meningitis-like symptoms…it turns out this was probably the onset of the problems I’ve been having ever since). So I’ve been in pretty intense pain for awhile, which is starting to drive me a bit nutty. This morning I had an appointment on campus (alas, not with my doctor…I can’t get in until Wednesday!), and instead of staying at my office all day afterwards, I decided to walk home. It was probably a stupid idea (2.6 miles of walking, on icy sidewalks, with sciatica…yeah, I know, that’s not “probably” stupid, it is stupid), but at least this way I get to be in pain at home where I can cry if I want to.

But don’t worry…I’m trying to keep my spirits up despite the dreary weather and all the pain. And my collection of brightly colored handknits is definitely helping the cause!