Mama said there'd be days like this....

I am having a totally fed up with the world kind of week.

Tuesday a 2 hour bus ride took 6 hours. Yesterday I had a conference call that was uninterupted by Harvard's snow day (a once in a decade occurrence, apparently). Unfortunately, instead of the scheduled 2 hours, we went for 4+ hours. When a meeting will stretch to fill the time it has, and everyone is snowed in... well, you get the idea. Today, more frustration and bad mood. I decided on my work break this afternoon that perhaps posting some knitting pictures would put me in a better mood.

I was going to go through my yarn this weekend and basically thought I should get rid of it all since I haven't knitted in months, and my yarn is just cluttering up the closet. Then I saw my pink scarf. It's the scarf that was my first knitting project. It taught me that knitting a single color scarf is actually a horrible beginner's project, because it takes so long!! I never finished it. I saw it this weekend, and decided to finish it. Voila! (Still need to sew in some ends)

The most amusing thing is that my gauge has clearly changed since I started knitting. Much larger now, and (thankfully) more consistent. I tried to show in picture the line where you can see the gauge change, but not sure it came out.

Next I saw some cotton yarn. A look through Last Minute Knitted Gifts, and I found little kid cotton hats. Perfect! I started this a few days ago, and knitted like crazy as stress relief last night. I'm quite happy with the result, given I thought I had sworn off knitting.



While I'm not really one to distinguish "boy" and "girl" things for kids (we get enough gender indoctrination in life), I am thinking of making one of these for my friend's son who is 12 mos, and I'm not sure how she'd feel about the bow. Any thoughts on making it more baby-masculine?

I also wonder you thoughts on i-cords. This was my first two stitch i-cord, and I didn't like it. I think the 3 stitch i-cord looks much nicer, and I can make it much more consistent. Your thoughts?I definitely have an improved mood from posting this! Yay for happy knitting blogs!

yes, I know it's pretty here

I know that, this week, many of you had worse weather than I did. But I also know that some of you still view the massive snowfall as wondrous and beautiful. And that was me about 50 inches ago. Maybe I'm more whiny (always a possibility) or maybe I've run by too many post office boxes buried with feet of snow on top of them or maybe I just live in a city that has decided that the best use of its rapidly-dwindling snow-removal budget is ONE "special snow melting truck" rather than actually plowing the streets when it snows. Whatever the cause, I've spent my spare time knitting this to avoid going totally crazy:

So, yes, the point of all that was that I've put aside all the things that I should be knitting to knit something that I don't need to knit but that makes me incredibly happy. And I don't even feel (that) guilty about it. Because, really, what's the point of knitting if you can't use it to stave off a potential nervous breakdown? Particularly when the cause is too much winter precipitation, knitting seems well-suited as a preventative measure. And my father wasn't the only one who wanted a hat like my grandpa's Christmas hat. So that's what I did: another turn-a-square, although absent the stripes, in a size more appropriate for my grandpa than me.
I don't have any modeled shots, but trust me that this hat is huge on me: it covers my forehead and most of my neck. It looks pretty ridiculous. I don't care. I love it and plan to wear it for the remainder of the winter. It's Plucky primo fingering, held doubled, in Nordic. I knit the whole thing on 3s and started with 108 stitches for the rib, increasing to 116 for the body of the hat. It's a very tight knit which means some of the decreases were very difficult to do, but that makes it all the better for facing the rest of the winter. (Rav details here.)

Another thing that has reminded me that we will survive this winter: sewing in the ends on spring break! socks:

Wamps told you about this project: I knit hers and she knit mine. (I asked her to block hers and she "asked" me to sew in the ends on mine.) But she didn't show you the freaky inspiration for the project, which I can do.
(Manicures done before stumbling into the yarn store and finding this yarn. How could we walk away from those skeins?)

Maybe the next time that you hear from me, I'll have some non-selfish knitting to show off. But I've been pretty glad for selfish knitting these last few weeks, just as I've been pretty thankful that my landlord takes care of most of our snow removal and even plows our street as a public service with his plow; that I have a car that might not be able to get over some of the snow but is still pretty likely to start each morning; that I've been able to go cross country skiing multiple times this winter; and that, unlike others in my state, so far, all the roofs that I've been under have held. Here's hoping that you all are staying safe and warm, wherever you are, and doing whatever you need to do to stay sane in this weather!