Check it out.

Isn’t the red one just adorable?

It’s been far too long since my last post. Again. You see, my computer crashed…

It really did! Last Monday there was a lovely bluescreen waiting for me when I got up to say good morning to my darling laptop, and it turned out the hard drive was, well, indisponiert. Then we went on a mini-vacation… and returned this Monday, at which time the hard drive decided to work again. I don’t get computers.

Anyway, to make a long story slightly shorter, there was something wrong with the hard drive, and some tech guy from Dell was here yesterday and replaced it. (I have a next business day warranty thing. They replace stuff for me.) I even got more storage space (well, 40Gb instead of 30, but what the heck).

There was only one thing left to do when the tech guy had left — reinstall Windows. That’s when I realized I have absolutely no idea where the Dell/XP restoration CD that came with the laptop is. It’s vanished. So, after trying out Debian for a while and not quite liking it, I am now running Fedora Core 5. (Everything works but the SD card reader, if anyone’s interested.)

Oh, and I didn’t knit one stitch during our tiny vacation, but instead managed to almost finish the left front of the green patterned thing as soon as I got home.

That’s when I realized I had misplaced the pattern by one stitch. One. Lousy. Stitch. I’m so glad the baby was asleep when I discovered it, or he would have gotten some very unwelcome additions to his vocabulary. (Not that he’s talking or anything, I just don’t want him to get the wrong idea of his Loving Mother.)

What this will become remains to be seen — so far it’s the back of a vest or a cardigan. It is very loosely based on something I found in an old Bernat knitting pattern book. The narrow border comes from Aran and Fair Isle Knitting. The diamond-ish pattern is my own design, based on a chart for a 1940s sweater I stumbled over while looking for the perfect Norwegian star (which I found, but it didn’t seem right for this project).

I love what you can do with stash/scrap yarn!

… is what this past week has been. Well, I think so, anyway, I mean:

Monday. Bought new DVD player #2 as #1, purchased Saturday, turned out to be defect.

Tuesday. Got baby lots of clothes on sale. Got myself slightly smaller pile of clothes on sale. Got my better half a jacket and a pair of pants on sale. Bought baby new, much needed, carseat. Found The Perfect Bookshelf at IKEA, half off.

Wednesday. Spent (almost) whole day with my family at their summerhouse. Picked (and ate) blueberries and redcurrants.

Thursday. Results of shopping: new ridiculously pink knitting notebook and practical boxes for storing knitting/sewing stuff. Made redcurrant/strawberry/raspberry pie.

Friday. Ordered new contact lenses, bought some yarn I needed; otherwise nothing, too hot.

Saturday (today). Spent (almost) whole day with my uncles and grandmother at their summerhouse.

The above list is why I haven’t posted anything since Sunday. I consider myself excused. Now behold this picture:

Yes, I finished the acrylic vest. It doesn’t look acrylic at all (to me anyway), and best of all — it fits perfectly. Let me repeat that: It. Fits. Perfectly.

There are two reasons why this is quite astonishing. One, I didn’t swatch, even though I didn’t use the recommended yarn. Two, I didn’t cast on and bind off the way the pattern specified, but instead used a provisional caston and grafted. It still fits. I can’t believe it.

Well, it’s been a busy couple of days. Sort of. I got a little tired of Forecast getting practically nowhere, and due to a certain financial problem I was unable to buy myself the right size dpn’s for the sleeves, so… I did as I always do, and started something new.

I decided on this vest-thing. Also, I’m much better off knitting this right now, since I’ll be too big for regular cardigans in a couple of months and the vest is sort of bolero-length instead. It turns out the vest-thing makes wonderful TV knitting, especially after I got my contacts this Thursday and was actually able to make out the characters’ faces without squinting. (I love my contacts.)

Yup, that’s the Dallas season three DVD that’s peeking out from underneath the creepy acrylic piece of knitting (from this cheap acrylic stash yarn) that’s destined to one day become the (hopefully) quite lovely and very practical vest. I had just finished the Who Shot J.R.? episode and was about to replay the last ten minutes of it for my boyfriend, who had missed that crucial part of the intrigue (I keep him updated), when this evil, evil piece of equipment decided to develop a mind of its own:

(Doesn’t it look evil to you?)

It stopped working. It just stopped. It won’t play my Dallas DVDs anymore. (Well, it won’t play anything anymore, but I wouldn’t be nearly as upset had this happened during, say, uh, anything but my darling Dallas.)

I’m sure it’s the acrylic yarn that finally pushed the DVD over the edge. It probably would have survived much, much longer had I used the alpaca the vest pattern originally called for.

Fortunately, there’s a computer here that my boyfriend promises will play my precious little babies, but it’s just not the same. It doesn’t have a remote, for one. I think we’ll be getting a cheap new DVD player very, very soon.

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?)

Actually, I think the correct quote from Pride and Prejudice is “A whole camp full of soldiers!” (uttered by Lydia).

Why is there not a single online bookstore in this rotten country that sells this book? Argh! I want it! (And preferably yesterday…)

I’ve had dealings with the Swedish post today. They’re why this is a rotten country. At least today; maybe I’ll think better of them if and when they deliver a certain package to a certain person.

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.)