i have knitting ADD

i wrote it all down – i have 7 (count ‘em) projects on the needles for christmas. ambitious much?  i’m trying to stagger everything to keep myself going without losing interest in any one project, while continuously knitting towards completion.  i carry a sock-in-progress around in my coat pocket (bless the ziploc baggie) and whip it out in free moments.  the skully sweater for my (very large) sweetie lives in a shopping bag in the living room and gets worked on in the evenings.  i’ve bought the wool for the felted tea cozy from knitty, but i’m waiting to liberate a pair of #8 needles from the two scarves currently occupying the pairs i possess.  i have another scarf living in a ziploc in my backpack and a fourth one occupying the top of the tv cabinet in the living room and just waiting for finishing and the dreaded weaving-in-0f-ends.  i’m going the full-on crafty route for christmas this year.  i also have some handkerchiefs to embroider, inspired by jess hutch – check out her handkerchief collection on flickr.

does the sheep felt?

i’m sure that other, more knowledgeable than me knitters have pondered this great mystery, but as i think about my first felting project (this lovely tea cozy), i’m wondering whether or not a sheep would felt if washed with hot water and vigorously scrubbeed with a brush.  has anyone experimented in this direction? the only thing that comes to mind is james herriott’s tales of sheep dips in the moors of Yorkshire, but these seemed like cold water baths to me – definitely followed by an air drying.

circle craft fair

Made my annual trip to the circle craft fair with M the week before last. we went with The Baby in tow and checked out the goods on display – a noticeable improvement over previous years. Much less of the nasty and more of the crafty – and noticeably more knitted goods on display (felted and otherwise). I was amazed at the chutzpah of one woman selling strands of various yarns (bernat matrix, boa, etc.) knotted together in 2-metre lengths – $25 for the thin bunches and $40 for the thick ones. Her stuff did give me some ideas about what to do with the 5 balls of matrix that i bought in a fit of misguided shawl enthusiasm ($2 each at dressew). i still dream of whipping up some crafty goodness and landing a booth at the fair and raking in buckets of dough…

post the first

if anyone knows of a good tutorial for the proper technique on knitting while nursing (knursing?) a wiggly 3-month-old baby, please notify me immediately. the rare opportunity i have to sit down almost always coincides with the need to feed The Baby, as he seems to be undergoing a growth spurt and is intent on literally sucking every single remaining droplet of moisture from my body.

i plop myself down and usually find myself staring at one of many works-in-progress (WIPS for the non-knitting cognoscenti) lying tantalizingly close by. it is only by contorting myself into the most painful and unnatural of positions that i can manage to ‘knurse’ and even then, with only limited success. knitting is easier than purling, and any pattern that requires counting of any sort becomes insanely horrid, because not only am i frequently distracted by The Baby -who has recently realized that by cooing and smiling adorably, he can win the attention of his frazzled mama without fail -post-natal hormones approaching the levels of Mt. Vesuvius and an attention span the approximate length of a gnat have posed considerable obstacles to my newly discovered fascination with lace patterns wrought in mohair.

You may pause to shake your head and chuckle condescendingly here…

my Nana taught me to knit when i was wee, and i’ve picked it up on and off over the years (including a half-finished afghan that was underway for more than half of my lifetime and is in colours that i now detest), but it wasn’t until the impending arrival of The Baby, that the urge to knit truly resurfaced. i can’t quite figure out why it was during this pregnancy, and not triggered by either The Professor or The Drama Queen, but so be it. i emerged from a knitless state to discover that knitting had changed! yarn had changed! knitters had changed! suddenly, it all made sense to me.