Aruni in Her Sweater

Here's a snap of Aruni wearing the Baby Surprise Sweater. The sleeves look a bit short, but Anju says this is perfect given Aruni's propensity for sticking her hands in her mouth and drooling down her arms.

Distractions

I'm supposed to be working on my taxes this weekend -- that means organizing all my papers and filling out a questionnaire so that I can take it all to the accountant next week. I hate doing this, and would rather be doing just about anything else. To make it a bit more palatable, I got two new CDs (Dave Alvin West of the West and Carrie Rodriguez Seven Angels on a Bicycle) to keep me entertained through this mind-numbing task. I actually did sit down on the living room floor this afternoon with all the unsorted/unfiled paperwork that had accumulated since last March, and it is now all sorted and filed. The questionnaire is the hard part.

Now I'm taking a wee break and goofing off, working on my spreadsheet for my upcoming trip to San Antonio. Since Flickr provided me with such a font of inspiration for the London trip last October, I recently joined three (why are there three?) Flickr groups for San Antonio, and I must say that they've been less than inspirational. There's lots of cross posting, and none of the groups seems to have any particular niche, like historic, folkloric or kitchy San Antonio. Lots of macro flower photos, birds, and bbq, none of which do anything for me. Using Roadside America instead, I found a few items of interest to put on the spreadsheet:

• Giant Virgin of Guadalupe candle mosaic (2 stories high!)
• Pig Stand Cafe (a drive-in pink pig)
• World's biggest cowboy boots
• World's biggest wooden nickle

Molly promises to drive me around in the hill country one day for some antiquing and photo ops. I'm looking for a vintage travel trailer parked in someone's yard that I can get a snap of to use for a new Flickr buddy icon for myself. Also, we'll hit El Mercado for a couple hours -- it's the largest Mexican market outside of Mexico, and always a great place to shop for gifties.

If anyone has suggestions for places to visit in the San Antonio area, let me know. The trip's not till May, so there's plenty of time to get your comments in. I hope to be better about blogging from the road than I was when I was in England. And I just got a USB card reader thingie, so I should be able to post to Flickr from the road as well.

Back to the taxes now ...

It's finished!

The Baby Surprise Sweater is done and ready to mail to NYC. I didn't have 5 buttons that matched, so I decided to go with the mismatched vintage buttons. I think it's kind of a bohemian chic look, which is fitting for a little girl who is spending her first months of life going to classes at Columbia. I hope Anju and Rahul send me a picture of Aruni wearing it.

Now I'm going back to knitting socks for moi.

BSS is almost done!

This lumpy mass doesn't look much like a sweater ...


... but here's how it will be folded to become one.

I've made a ton of progress this past week, particularly on the snow day when I beached myself on the sofa with cat and comforter and knit most of the day. At this point, with nearly 200 stitches on the needles, a row can take me about 20 minutes to do. I've made the button holes, and now there are only 4 rows left to go. After that, I'll sew the seams on the top of the sleeves, work in the ends and sew on the buttons and it will be done.

I haven't heard from my knit-along pal in days, so I hope it's going well for her, too. We usually consult when she gets to a tricky row where Stuff Happens. It's been a swell project, and I'm glad Erin suggested it, but I'm looking forward to having this done and going back to knitting socks.

BSS Update

48 rows done!


This is how the sleeves will be formed.

The Baby Surprise Sweater is coming along nicely, although I can't claim that I've been 100% accurate about the pattern. Somehow I ended up with more stitches than I should have around row 48, or I went two rows too far, but then I was miraculously back on track around row 58. It's taking on a very weird shape as I work on the body, but that's what's supposed to happen. The yarn is great -- a much richer purple than these crappy pix show. I'm not stressing about the pattern so much any more. It is what it is. I guess that's the zen approach to knitting.

Freaky Friday Knit-Along

Erin and I are doing a knit-along. We're making Elizabeth Zimmermann's Baby Surprise Sweater -- she for her cousin's new baby-to-be, and me for Anju and Rahul's 10-week-old baby girl. (I'm sure that the surprise will keep as I doubt A. and R. have any time for blog reading between grad school and taking care of baby Aruni.) Erin's plan was to use some yarn from her stash. I ordered the pattern (link above), and on Saturday I ran out to Webs to pick up two balls of Jellibeenz. Arriving shortly after I returned from my Webs mission, Erin came in clutching a Webs bag of her own. "Look what I got in the bargain corner," she said, pulling two hanks of Araucania Pehuen hand-dyed cotton in a green colorway from the bag. I went over to my Webs bag and pulled out two hanks of the SAME yarn in the orange colorway. Of the hundreds and hundreds of yarns to choose from at Webs, we bought the same stuff! (We're both saving it for some other as-yet-to-be-determined project. Any ideas?)

Now, you'd think that a sweater knit all in one piece in garter stitch would be easy-peasy, right? Wrong! Elizabeth Zimmermann, who is, apparently, the knitting goddess of Britain or the universe, wrote this pattern in 1968 in a conversational, tweedy English lady prose that's a wee bit short on the details. We cast on our 160 stitches and puzzled over how to mark the places where the decreases were supposed to occur. Finally getting the hang of it, or so I thought, we knit four rows before heading out to the annual Roe v. Wade anniversary event. Later that night, thinking I was on a roll, I knit another half dozen rows, reaching the tricky row 11 where I totally screwed up. I couldn't figure out how many stitches I was supposed to have on either side of the markers, and I ended up un-knitting back to row 7. Next day I went online and found the BSS notes -- a row-by-row explanation of what the fuck we're supposed to be doing. Now, just what kind of screwy thing is it where you need a pattern to follow a pattern? I think I'm back on track now, and I'll be posting some pix of the WIP here and/or on my Flickr page. Erin and I will give each other e-mail progress reports as we knit along. I'm pleading for words of support and helpful hints from anyone out there who's made this sweater and lived to tell the tale.

Sunday afternoon I put the BSS aside to go to the Silver Chord Bowl, Northampton's a cappella alternative to the Super Bowl. JJ and I met for lunch beforehand and she gave me my birthday giftie -- a little Uglydoll to be the mascot of the Mini Cooper, the SAME Uglydoll (Icebat) that Erin has hanging from her rearview mirror. This is just too weird. It's like I've been reincarnated as Erin and I'm not even dead. I went over to Faces and exchanged Icebat for Bop n' Beep, all the while having this Freaky Friday feeling (although Erin and I don't look anything like Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis). Something cosmic was definitely going on. Comet McNaught? Groundhog's Day? Who knows.

One Year on Flickr

It was a year ago today that I created my Flickr account, just after giving myself the digital camera for my birthday (I'm still accepting this year's birthday greetings until the end of this week -- hint, hint). Here's a snapshot of my stats as of today:

Number of photos: 338
Number of sets: 13
Number of contacts & friends: 23
Number of groups: 29 (Guess Where London is my favorite)
Views of my photostream: 4930 (My goal for my anniversary was 4800)
Flickr inspector number: 1483 (I'm not entirely certain what this means. It's some kind of relative number based on your photos, views, comments, favorites, etc.)

If you haven't looked at my photostream in a while, check it out. Leave me some comments if you're so moved. If you have a Flickr account, add me to your contacts and I'll do likewise.

Crafties!

One of my loyal readers (of the four or so that I have) has requested pix of the xmas crafts. Here they are:

This is Erin wearing her lime green, vegan zig zag scarf. The yarn is Feza Carnevale, which was a bit of a pain to work with because the fuzzy bits obscured the adjacent stitches and I often dropped them. But the results are quite nice -- soft, warm and a bit stretchy, with a hint of shimmery stuff. We decided that lime is the new black.


Velvet bag with milagros. This is the one I made for JJ -- it has milagros that are significant to her (cat and fish) on it. The one I made for ST has a bird and an ear. The arms, legs and donkeys may become significant at some point -- you never know. Spooner brought the milagros back from Mexico last summer. I'm now out of them, except for babies, pigs and praying figures, so I'll need to have a pal fetch me some more from south of the border.

Elvis, Rudolph & the Xmas Cat

See, I did do some holiday decorating! It took me a bit to get these pix uploaded because I've been laid low with a stomach bug for the past couple days. Before I got this nasty little virus, I also managed to get all holiday gifties finished and wrapped, although not entirely distributed. But I forgot to take photos of my creations before wrapping them. I'll just have to snap the lucky recipients wearing their swell gifties.

Excellent stuff arrived from Spooner today! A hefty box contained McVities HobNobs and Ginger Nuts (biscuits from the UK), some Pope John Paul junk he picked up in Italy, two Jesus shot glasses, a book of London street art, and -- from his recent visit to the Reagan presidential library in sunny southern California -- a Ronnie Raygun pencil and a postcard of all the living first ladies. Cool! Apparently his brother lost the package of gifties I sent him. If it ever surfaces, he'll see that we were thinking along similar lines in choosing meaningful items to give each other this year (hint: Jesus and writing implements).

Happy new year, y'all!

I'm with Jinx the Cat

(Note: If you're a serious vegan or some kind of animal rights nut, I suggest you stop reading right now.)

As far as I can tell, there are few good things to be said for living with another human. Fobbing off pest eradication duty on that other person is one of them. My pal ST has learned much about getting rid of mice in the years that she's lived alone, and she's passed her wisdom on to me. I know that I have mice in the basement but, without someone to assign to mouse patrol duty, I generally ignore them. A couple years ago they decided to nest in my kitchen towel drawer and that put me in serious trap-setting mode. ST's technique is to put the trap into a paper bag which is laid on its side, so that all you have to do when you've caught, i.e. killed, one is pick up the bag, fold the top over and toss it in the trash.

Recently, I've seen meeces in my garage when I go out there in the morning or open the door to drive in at night. They must be getting in the wall between the garage and the house because Florie often sits in the hall and stares at that wall. They're nesting in a heating unit that's suspended from the garage ceiling. Needless to say, I'm never going to turn that heater on! But the sight of them running up and down the wall was getting to me, and I put a trap-in-a-bag in the garage a couple weeks ago. After about a week without finding a mouse in my trap, I had almost given up on it. Then one day I looked in the bag and the trap was gone! No sign of it anywhere. A mystery. Slowly the realization of what I'd done sank in -- the mouse had no doubt been caught by the trap, but not killed, and carried the trap off with it, to die a slow death somewhere. There's now a faint odor of rot that greets me when I open the door to the garage, but I'm not going to move everything in search of the putrefying mouse carcass.

This brings us to yesterday, a Saturday afternoon of chores and pre-xmas tasks. I'd brought a bunch of wrapping paper down from the storage room, and was planning to sit on the living room floor and wrap gifties but got sidetracked by another trip upstairs for something. When I next came downstairs, what did I see but a MOUSE among the rolls of wrapping paper and Florie circling around it! With the horror of what I'd done to the garage mouse still weighing heavily on me, I didn't want to kill this one. (Anyway, how could I do that without making a mess on the carpet?) I shoved Florie aside, grabbed an Amazon.com box that was in the hall and put it upside down over the mouse. That bought me some time to think.

Now what? Get the mouse out of the house. Catch and release. I carefully slid the box across the carpet to the edge of the lino in the front hall. Not quite sure what to do next, I saw the carpet doormat -- flexible yet sturdy -- and slid it under the box. Then I slid the whole assemblage, with mouse still inside, onto the front porch. Lifting the lid, I saw the mouse lying on its side. It didn't look dead, though, so I ran back in the house and turned off the porch light. I wanted it to leave, but I really didn't care if it did that under its own power or if it was taken away by a neighborhood critter.

Five minutes later, I turned the light on and saw that it was sitting up, looking out towards the steps. Another five minutes passed, and I checked again. It was gone, probably to creep back into my garage and start this whole thing over again. I hate those meeces to pieces!