Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Knitters really are good people

To help the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti, Kim McBrien Designs is donating 75% of her proceeds from pattern sales to Doctors without Borders for their Haiti relief effort. You can buy her awesome patterns here on Ravelry. I believe you can do that even without being a Ravelry member but I haven't tried to test that theory.

I bought both her cowl patterns and I am going to also go and make a donation directly. I hope you will do the same (donate either way, directly or through Kim McBrien Designs or both to get two chances). If you do, post a comment on this post telling me you did and I will have the random number generator pick someone to get a yarny prize for being so good.

And I do have knitting to show but I will save that for the next post since I still need to weave in ends.

Friday, January 8, 2010

This is ridiculous, you know.

For several weeks now I have on a day here or there popped up my blog and had every intention of writing a post. And then not done it. I don't know if it is that horrible pain in the patootie called "perfectionism" or just plain laziness or what. But its never gonna stop if I don't just blog something.

It's not like I haven't anything to blog either, I did in fact make more than one holiday gift this year. Although so far I am not doing so well on the post holiday knitting that is due.

Still, I did accomplish knitting in 2009 even in the last few weeks (actually quite a bit in the last few weeks and hardly any for weeks and weeks before then so maybe the break in the blog was just in the wrong place?

For the FoUI (my hubby the Fount of Useless Information - trivia? he has gobs of it) I made two pairs of socks this winter.

His Mars Tickle Attacks! socks knit in the Mars colorway (that and ticklish feet and his love of puns should explain the name of the socks) of Fiber Fiend's Superwash Merino Sock Yarn. This was a really nice yarn to work with. It makes a nice cushy sock.

I also knit him some socks in his alma mater's colors (Go Cal Bears!) in a stripe pattern I have done once before. But man, 40 ends to weave in by the time I was done! Not doing that again. If I ever decide to do this sock again, I will have to remember to weave in the ends as I go.

My daughter wanted somewhat more complicated things this year so I only got one thing made for her by the end of 2009. She is obsessed with penguins at the moment (and actually that has lasted a full year plus - interesting) so asked for a knitted penguin. I was stalling saying I had to order yarn because I didn't have the correct weight in a penguiny color and she made the mistake of saying I could use any color. I asked "even a wild variegate?" and she said yes. So she got this:

But she seems to love it so it's all good. Except I had so much yarn left I could make her a pair of socks. So now I have that on my "to knit" list for this month.

You know what else is ridiculous? We're 8 days into January and I haven't knit a stitch this year yet. Not a good way to get knitting done for Valentine's day. So I need to get back to knittin'!