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...
i could go crazy on a night like tonight
shhh...
don't be too noisy, because you might wake me up and i may actually post something...
although i have a few things to blog about, including directions for playing War and Whist, the great Yaymee reunification project of 2007, two FOs (!!), and upcoming autumn shenanigans including a pirate ship and a corn maze.
also, this is just for my reference: when making a single batch of Nestle's toll house cookies with gluten free flour, 3/4 tsp of xanthan gum is just about perfect.
i love my life
Single side of an actual conversation
Pants:
If humans were to become extinct and meerkats were to rise and evolve and take the place of humans as the dominant life form on Earth, they’d have a really hard time creating space shuttles because everything they’d make would be SO TINY. I mean if dinosaurs weren’t extinct and had created space shuttles, they’d be heavy, but huge and have tons of thrust, but meerkat shuttles would be little and so easily blown off course.
Why are you laughing at me?
my mom is funny
from a recent email:
We had lightning a couple of nights ago, then a few good crashes of thunder (I do believe that a bunch of Rhinos is also known as a crash).
that panda...
pei lo mein's so vain, she probably thinks this song is about her.
ETA: she has confirmed that in fact, she KNOWS this song is about her.
falling, falling
it's september in the lovely capital, and it's still in the mid-90s. i'm ready for fall, people! so to hasten it, i'm still chugging forth on my back-to-school u-neck vest (wow! hyphens!) and am about 2/3 of the way through the body. pictures would be dull, so there are none.
the pei lo mein is getting settled, and when we were leaving a grocery store today i had a completely great one-liner blog post to put up, but have completely forgotten it. panda, do you remember what it was?
in helping her procure a mattress upon which to sleep, i rolled in beds where many have rolled before. that's actually pretty gross and i feel more than a little skeeved out about that, having just typed that. and one mattress store went so far as to advertise that you will be sleep-free until 2010 (or that 2010 will be sleep-free year). either way, the sign made me giggle at first glance. she did not purchase this store's mattresses. partially because that's a less than ringing endorsement and mostly because it was pricey.
the pants is a funny pants who utters sentences like "YOU ARE A RABBIT" not hoping for a response, or even acknowledgement which makes me happy. therefore i bought a pizza pan in which to bake him homemade pizza... mmm... pizza.
for the past year, the bloggobug has been limited and it continues - so my posts are going to be knitting related, sarcastic, cop-out, or just plain boring like this one.
p.s. i sort of wish i lived in boston. for many reasons, but right now i refer to this place.
it's early. or late.
either way, i can't tell because i wish i were still asleep. but i digress, because look! knitting!
here's some stuff i made:
everlasting bagstopper
pomatomus socks
(as well as how they dyed my needles blue)
back-to-school u-neck vest
i finished the knitting on the UO circular shrug too, but it's not quite big enough so i'm deciding what to do about that.
i'm dull, i'm sorry.
