Mossy Cottage Knits

Bag Lady

In the interests of on-the-fly Dulaan stashbuster knitting, and because I live a weirdly nomadic life, dividing my time between the office (8 hours a day), my car (2 hours day), my house (weeknights), and The Mysterious K’s (weekends), I’ve been lugging around with me one of those crinkly supermarket sacks crammed to bursting with all of my Cascade 220 odds and ends (actually, this is bag #2 since “crammed to bursting” proved to be not an exaggeration for bag #1). Which was all well and fine until Monday morning when I semi-squashed the overly full bag into my knitting tote and set both on the front passenger seat of my car. At some point during my commute, I had to hit the brakes hard…and small, medium and large balls of brightly colored yarn immediately ping-ponged all over the inside of my car. Sigh. Maybe there is something to Washington state’s “click it or ticket” law after all, despite the fact that the catchphrase is woefully stomach-turning. I always wear a seatbelt, but perhaps it's time for my knitting bag to sport one, too. (A thought just occurred—thank God none of my windows were open!)

(To make matters worse, when I arrived at work, my phone was ringing. It was TMK calling to report that, even before I had gotten got into the car, and long before a single ball had caromed off my dashboard, I had dropped, a la Hansel and Gretel’s fabled trail of crumbs, a trail of Cascade 220 balls behind me on her driveway.)

(To make matters even worse, normally I would have just left the balls lying where they were and shepherded them all back into the bag (or maybe, genius that I am, a bigger bag that they actually fit in) after I got home but, that day of all days, a friend asked me to drive her to the mechanic's, so at 8:05am, you would have seen me wedged into the passenger side of my car, plumber’s crack most likely showing, groaning and grunting and sighing as I groped around in all the dark corners of my car trying to find that one last ball of yarn and praying to God that something gross wasn’t stuck in it.)

These travails aside, The Lugging Around of the Mini-Stash has worked well since this weekend, although I was at TMK’s abode and far away from The Holy and Revered MotherStash, I was able to spontaneously churn out these:

And this:

The checkerboard socks are from this fun and easy pattern. They took about 4 hours total to make, blocked out nicely and proportionately, and look like they would fit a 1-2 year old. I’m tempted to make just a huge rainbow-y pile of these.

The little hat pattern is from here. Super simple, super easy, although all I had with me was size 10 needles when the pattern calls for size 13s, which meant that the hat turned out quite small—newborn, maybe even preemie size—but it’s adorable, and took about 1.5 hours to knit. (Update: Churned out another one last night using size 13s, which came out to loose and floppy so I felted it, which, dang it all, made it become too short. I think this pattern has a lot of felting potential if I just knit more than the 20 rows stated in the pattern, maybe 30.)

Hey, rumor has it Dulaan has been mentioned in Vogue Knitting again! True?

The First 2006 Dulaan Knit-In

We have reached full capacity for the Knit-In. MaryB has a few people that RSVP'd directly to her, and on my list I have:

Devorah
Andrea
June
Perclexed
Rebecca Long
Rebecca Supergirl
LindaK
Lisa from Oregon
Kim
Karen
Patti
Elaine
Libby
Irina
MaryB, me, TMK and perhaps TMK's mother! (Hi, Marilyn!)

MaryB and I will be sending out address and direction information soon. I am so looking forward to this!

Posted by Ryan at October 5, 2005 11:17 AM