Phew.

We live in a fairly small apartment. Today, we had some people over for baby’s not-christening. We managed to fit 14 people, including the celebrated little thing, around our kitchen table, temporarily moved to the living room. It wasn’t exactly quiet…

Anyway, now they’ve all gone except baby’s grandparents who are staying the night. And the apartment is finally clean, most of our stuff is unpacked, and, well, I’m sort of in heaven. I wasn’t this past week, as we were trying to restore the apartment to some kind of working order after all the moving chaos.

So I knit. I may be crazy, but when I’m in panic and Armageddon looms, I knit. It’s the only way I stay sane (and drive the people around me completely mad). The other night I got tired of Forecast and decided to see what my greenish sock yarn would look like when knit. I found myself an old Bernat knitting book and cast on for a cabled sock. (Yes, I know, not the best choice for self-striping or variegated yarn. This sock yarn happens to be both.)

I call it Camouflaged Cable. Do you see it?

Oh, and for anyone who’s interested, this is as far as I got with Forecast before temporarily giving up on it:

I’ve gotten about 1-2″ past the row where you divide arms and body. As usual, the colors are really weird and don’t come close to the dark blue of reality. (Poetic, aren’t I?)

I really hate this weather. Here’s why:

There’s hardly any wind, and it’s so hot and humid you can hardly breathe. Much less knit. Especially when the yarn is a wool/cotton blend (why, oh why, do I knit with wool in July?) and my hands are so — sweaty? not sweaty, but sticky that the yarn sort of clings to my fingers and to the needles and I have to go wash my hands to unstick them before getting back to knitting and stickiness.

I prefer summer when it’s not this humid — I wouldn’t mind it that much if we had some kind of air conditioning at home, but alas, we do not. We got in the car today, rolled back the roof all the way to the… well, all the way, and went shopping, just to get some wind in our hair. (I doubt if anyone’s interested, but if anyone were, they would probably be happy to know that we found The. Cutest. Stroller. for the baby, and it was on sale = really cheap, too!)

Anyway, back to the stuff that really matters: knitting. I’ve managed…

[off to count bobble repeats]

a little more than three repeats on the lovely Forecast. My baby. (Well, not technically, but it will have to do since the real baby is asleep — thank Someone.) Here’s a pretty okay picture to prove it:

when I went there the other day (or was it yesterday?) was stitch markers. I thought I’d seen some there earlier, but nope. And Forecast is absolutely impossible to knit without stitch markers, at least for someone as inattentive as yours truly. So I had to make some. By then it was 9 p.m. so I had to make do with what I happened to have at home, which was… some kind of extremely thin elastic thread for making jewelry, and tiny pink beads.

The result was, fortunately, satisfactory. Here’s one of my pink darlings in action:

Pretty okay, isn’t it?

(On a totally different note, but still re: the yarn store — they’ve updated their webpage, which would be great if it weren’t for the fact that it absolutely doesn not work with Firefox. Seriously, who uses IE these days?)

I’ve started on Forecast from Knitty’s Winter 2005 issue. I found some lovely dark blue yarn at a yarn sale yesterday (yarn galore coming up soon, promise) and have now swatched, bought new circulars, cast on, and managed knitting about 1/4″ of the collar last night.

More on this can be found at the KAL I joined for the purpose of actually finishing this project before my hair turns gray. (My first entry here.)