wait! come back!

Dear person who came here searching "Moby Dick Gluten Free",

YES! You can eat gluten-free at Moby Dick. Get the kabob plates (I have experience with the chicken and ground beef kabobs) with rice, ask for no bread and you should be fine.

Hopefully you'll come back!!

Did you know that Englebert Humperdinck wrote an opera called Hänsel und Gretel?

I have a lovely friend. She is a panda. She really is. See? This is her baby brother. He's 2, but I swear he outweighs her by like349091023 times.

Approximately.

So, anyhow, she recently moved to DC. Like, 2 months ago recently.

There has been much hanging out, much fun, much growing pains and culture shock associated with said move. And I didn't talk much about it, 'cause, see, I forget to blog. I could go into my sad, sad story about how I sit in front of a computer all day, yada yada, but really, I just come home, cook dinner, chill with the Pants, and do various nerdy things like watch Law and Order in syndication or play Starcraft do other completely cool things.

cough.

Anyhow! Panda! So she asked if I'd make her a hat and I told her to get in line. You know, because I have a line of greedy knitting. Followed by a line of things Pants has requested of me. And his Autobot hat, while it will be freaking cool, has taken a while to fudge the pattern, and Panda found the pattern she liked and the yarn she liked, and I sat down and hardly even blinked and then it was done! (Dear Hats, Love you! Heather)

So, Lo! Gretel (Ravelry) was born.



Started and Finished: October 2007
Yarn: Lion Brand Wool Ease in Green Heather
Needles: 5.0mm (US8) KnitPicks Options
Size: Standard Tam (a.k.a. Medium)
Mods: Nada dude
Notes: yay! Pretty! Hat! Cables!

Here are some more pics taken in fits of ridiculousness at the Moby Dick's House of Kabob (yeah, baby!) in Dupont Circle.

and some that I took one morning before 7 am because Dang I felt cute that day.

It is in Panda's custody now. Fare thee well, Gretel. Keep her head warm or I'll kick you in the (hat)shins!

yawning and wagging.

yawning and wagging., originally uploaded by swandive00.

I haven't been to the blog in a while. I bought Ernie a ninja costume for halloween because he's a ninja. It both pleases him and fills him with ennui.

I finished a hat for pei lo mein/pandles, and there are flickr pics but I haven't the time right now.

Cop-out blogging!!

i could go crazy on a night like tonight

i'm having major issues with the refusal of fall to take hold... this weekend? the initiation of fall weekend where the pants, the panda, and the... [um, doesn't have a webbername]friend and i will trek to the mysterious, wild and wooly land of west virginia (appalachian music? love it! also there are no laws regulating religious snake handling there!) for to pluck ripened apples from the tree, partake of freshly pressed cider, buy pumpkins for breads and cookies and pasta, traverse a corn maze and play on a pirate ship.

all of these are activities to be conducted in jeans, hiking boots, and cozy hand-knit sweaters.

but people? it's supposed to be 91 degrees in harpers ferry this weekend. the mornings are foggy, the nights have the chill of the ultimate surrender of summer... but it's too freakin' hot and humid during the day.

i'm trying my hardest, i'm doing my best to hasten autumn along, though. i'm baking, knitting, and even finishing things!

for instance, my back-to-school u-neck vest? that's done, and i've even worn it to work.



whoops. see what happens when you try to take FO shots at 7 am on a Monday morning? you get backlit crappy shots. here's a poorly photoshopped version showin' off the details:



i really like this vest. for a few reasons. one of which is i figured out how to work in short row shaping even though the bust is in a patterned stitch! can you tell?



yeah, didn't think so. i even planned out doing an edit so you could see them. unfortunately i couldn't find them so i approximated...



the only other modification i made (other than saying "meh, i'm not really getting gauge, i'll just keep knitting anyway!" and having it sort of miraculously work) was to just do a single set of purl rows around the arm holes... i tried one of the arms with the double rows to match all the other sets of two, but it made the shoulders too wide.

i also made the body a few inches longer because i'm just like that.

i have another quick and dirty FO... calorimetry. i cast on during dinner before seeing the yarn harlot, i cast off a about a half hour before she wrapped up her talk. quick, cute, warm!



i used a leftover button from the knitted corset top...



and photographed myself in it, with the omnipresent dogbutt sneaking into the shot



made with lion wool in teal on size 7 needles... mods? i cast on 104 stitches instead of 120. i knew i wanted to cast on fewer, but didn't know how much so i cast on with the twisted german cast on until i ran out of yarn. 104 stitches it was.

and it worked!

if only i needed warm things in this darned heat...