Woops, went a long time without posting again. Well, I had a friend in town for a couple weeks, and we went to Bangkok and Langawi, Malaysia. The rest of the time I was just being lazy as usual and not taking pics.

Actually my guest is the recipient of the Lily sweater I am knitting. I am soooo glad she came before I finished it, because she tried on the WIP and the waist shaping was totally off for her body shape. I was going to have to rip back at least half of what I'd knit. On top of that, I started to worry about yarn usage (I suspect I will need that odd-dyelot skein after all) and was hating that the bottom was flipping constantly. I don't think the unruly bottom edge is a design flaw, it's more about my casting on crappily.

Anyway, long story short I decided to rip back the whole thing. The current state of the sweater is this:

I don't feel bad about ripping at all actually, because I'd rather get it done right. I think I will try doing a hem instead of purling for the bottom and see how that works out. I'm looking into details about it; making a hem is dangerously close to a sewing technique which is very scary to this girl.

Until I get the urge to plunge into that again, I've started a couple other things.

The socks I started for Ravelympics are way way behind schedule, but honestly the Ravelympics gave me a knitting mojo boost so I'm happy that I participated anyway. These will be for the bf, so I let him pick a pattern from Wendy's book. Of course, he picked my least favorite one, isn't that the way of things? Anyway, all those twisted stitches cause my hands to cramp so I never knit on it for particularly long. I must admit though, that the pattern looks very nice in this yarn, from Dream in Color.

After starting this sock I read some comments on Ravelry about this yarn being a little unruly. The color is unbelievable, absolutely the most gorgeous blue yarn I've come across. The yarn itself is probably not durable enough for socks though. I'm OK with it since we live in the tropics now, so these socks will get used only on trips, but I'm sure they wouldn't last long under regular use.

Today I cast on for the East Meets West bag. I am planning on taking, oh about a million years to complete this thing but I'm excited to do some challenging colorwork.

I had to go buy a needle for the bag project, which caused me to go find LYS Golden Dragon and check them out. I also picked up these:

Because my bf asked me to show him how to knit. I don't know whether to be excited or to go buy a lock for my stash hehehe.

Gearing up for Ravelympics

So, again the wrap I've been working on is pushed to the back burner, because it's almost Ravelympics time! I'm on Team Merlion and my goal is to finish a pair of socks. I'm going to use this yarn, Dream in Color Smooshy in Romeo Blue:

And I'm going to use a pattern from Wendy's book.

I haven't even wound the yarn yet though, and I've got a big sweater project to work on, so finishing this one pair of socks will really be a challenge. Even the mass cast-on is going to be tough for me to make since I've got some non-knitting plans this weekend.

Anyway, I realized how much I missed a certain tool that I gave away when I moved, and I finally replaced it. Behold, my new scale:
Since I don't have a kitchen it's only half as useful as my old one was, but it's still really handy for things like halving a quantity of yarn etc.

I went back to the Orchid Gardens this weekend, and also went to a seaside park on the east end of Singapore. I have to go a little out of the way to see nature here (it is a city of 5 million people after all) but it never disappoints:

I planned to make a sweater for a friend as a Christmas gift and I never even cast on. Which is pretty pathetic, there wasn't even a pretense of getting it done in time. Anyway, I finally got around to it last week, and I'm really going to try to finish it before she visits me in late February. It's Lily from Twist Collective.

The yarn is from Knitting Notions and the color is gorgeous! Unfortunately, one of my skeins is clearly a different dye lot, but 1) what can I expect when I waited until she put the yarn on clearance, and 2) I might be able to squeak by without it because my friend is small. I used the oddball skein for the swatch, stitch gauge is spot-on with 3.75 mm needles but row gauge is a bit off (8 rows/in instead of 7 rows/in). Since my friend has a long torso anyway, I am trying to gently correct for my tighter row gauge as I go.

Also, knitting bobbles is a pain in the ass. But they're kinda cute. Reminds me of boys, actually.

Loot

Most of the last month I have been traveling, including going Home (with a capital H) for a week. Now that I'm back at home (with a little h), with a bad case of jetlag and a little bit of homesickness, I haven't felt like blogging. To make matters worse I'm having a hell of a time finding good opportunities to photograph stuff - the lighting in my room is total crap and I kinda have to work during daylight hours.

But, there were so many goodies waiting for me in my mom's mailbox. I'll show just a few.

The biggest thing I had ordered was the East Meets West bag kit from KnitPicks.

I also got a book to help me use up the leftover yarns and feed my newfound addiction to mittens:

I got a ton of sock yarn (most of it not shown), some more 2.0 mm circs (I like to knit socks using two circs), and another book about knitting socks:


I've been reading Wendy's blog for a couple years now and I'm looking forward to trying some of her patterns.


Before I dig into any of this stuff though, I have more pressing projects. First off, I really want to finish, or at least get close to finishing, this damn Cleopatra Wrap. I've definitely made progress while travelling:

Secondly I've got a sweater that I really want to finish by the end of February. Of course, I just cast on a few days ago, so it's not likely. But, I will give it the old college try and so the wrap is back to being train knitting until further notice.

Wow, has it really been that long?

So, what happened to the last two months? One of these days I will get internet at home and posting will become frequent again. Right now I'm chilling in a crappy hotel in California on my way home for a week, really getting wild for New Year's:


The blue tube is Oreos I brought in my carry on from Singapore, don't ask me what language that is. The rest is courtesy of the pizza delivery man. :)

Anyway, my knitting output has been embarrassingly small. But, it's that time of year so I finally finished some gifts that I've been working on for ages, nobody reads this blog so it's safe to post about them a couple days early.

Here are some socks I finally finished after being a WIP for like half a year. They go to a male friend of mine.


I really enjoyed this cable and moss stitch pattern (from Sensational Knitted Socks) and wouldn't be surprised to see it on my needles again. Earlier I mentioned that one of the toes is screwy, I realized that I simply had more stitches on one needle than the other and needed to do some rearranging before beginning the decreases. My non-knitter friend will absolutely not notice.

This is a pair of mittens, knit for my bff and crafty genius Corinna. I just finished one of them, so one is blocked and the other is still unblocked. Funny thing, the unblocked one is the bigger one. I guess that just goes to show how stressed I was at work a couple months ago when I knit the first one!

It was a joy to knit this pattern (Ruba'iyat Mittens that I found on Ravelry), though if I did it again I would shift the cuff so it matches up with the hand part. The yarn is from Knitting Notions (note: this price of this yarn definitely puts it in "splurge" category for this student-loan-laden lady, but I've got a pair of mittens and a pair of socks out of two skeins, with oodles left over), and I adore both colors. Colorwork mittens are likely to be my next obsession, I can bring them to work knit them while I am taking a youtube break, and they are the right size project so that following the chart is fun.


I also knit a Koolhaas hat with the extra yarn from the sweater, another gift for a male friend. This guy happens to have a ginormous head so I added two pattern repeats (cast on for 120 st). Since there were more stitches remaining at the last round, I added one last round of k2togs to avoid a big hole at the top of the hat. I took the pics pre-blocking, but this yarn is from colormart and had to have the oil washed off of it so it did get blocked before gifting.


I love this pattern even though the first time I knit it (before I had the blog) I had an awful time. That was a couple years ago, and I realized how far I have come as a knitter. I remember the first time with this project that the pattern was tough for me to figure out and I had to refer to it frequently and frog a bit, but this time everything seemed so intuitive that I knit most of this on the train without even having the pattern with me.



With all these projects finished I have only one WIP. One!


This is the Cleopatra Wrap (Rav) from Sensual Knits. It's been on the needles for roughly a year now and at this point it's almost-mindless knitting for the next eternity.

But, waiting for me at my mom's house is a whole bunch of new yarns to play with, so I'm not likely to be monogamous for long. ;)

Mittens! Green and Blue! How could I help myself?

Details to follow.

Neckline

What little I have been knitting lately is mostly boring. But, I haven't shown the sweater in a while, so here it is:
(grey sweater+lavender bedspread+flourescent lighting = crappy photo. Sorry.) I decided to go with short sleeves, because I live practically on the equator and even if the A/C is blasting, it's crazy to have a long sleeved wool sweater in Singapore. The sleeve on the left has been in that almost-done state for like five days now. How lame is that. But, sometimes there are things more important than knitting. Such as making friends and socializing when one is alone, 12 time zones away from home.

Anyway, I am happy that at least the neckline is done. It gave me such a headache, and I am still not sure that I found the best solution. But, here is what I did.

First of all, I cast on waayy too loosely, so when I picked up the stitches at a rate of one new stitch per cast-on stitch, it looked totally wonky. I ripped, tried a few things, and in the end I picked up 2 new stitches per old stitch on the cast-on section of the neckline and one new stitch per row in places where I was picking up along the side of the knitting.

Then I did a row of k2togs. I should not have done all k2togs, because it puckers a little at the shoulders, but I am willing to deal with that.

Also the way I picked up the extra stitches is making the neckline bend wildly... I am hoping against hope that blocking can help this out. But at least the part of the neckline in the Cleavage Zone isn't too bad, don't want to give people an excuse to stare there!

My goal is to have this sweater done by next Wednesday, so I can wear it in the arctic blast room where my weekly seminar at work is held.

Well, I wouldn't want to leave without showing a couple pictures of Singapore. I haven't whipped the camera out very much lately, but I did go to the Esplanade to see Afro-Cuban All Stars last weekend. Here's the view from outside:
You can see the Merlion in the foreground. The Esplanade building itself is really cool, I didn't get a good shot of the whole building, but the surface of the roof is neat. You can see why many people call the building the Durian:
I'll be going back to the Esplanade for a SSO concert tomorrow. Yay!