A Bag of LIES!

I have been sold a bag of lies. I have never met something so "easy" that was so damn hard to do! Working on the beaded scarf kit, I decide to use my yardage meter to neatly divide the skein of ribbon yarn in two. First I wound the entire skein onto a bobbin while measuring it. What the hell!? The card says 200 yds. My meter says more like 145 yds!? I'm thinking, the meter must be goofy, so I carefully measure out about 20 yds with a tape and then run it through, and surprise, surprise the meter is working properly. So I wind the yarn back across onto a second cardboard bobbin I cut out. OMG! The fucking skein is still 55 yds short of what the label says!?? How can that be?? What a rip off!! It is a good thing I am not making something big that I bought skeins based on the amount of yardage I need. Jesus. I am still pissed though.

Now that I am all mad about that. I go on to "easily stringing the pre-strung beads onto the yarn." Ugh!!! It was a fucking nightmare. Just to do 1/2 of the skein of yarn with the 6 strands of beads, I swear that the frigging string untied no less than 12 times and broke no less than 20 times!!! It was a nightmare. The string (or even the yarn!) would break and beads would to FLYING off of the string and onto the couch, the floor, the secret place where all lost things go.... Btw, if you have to remove every bead that won't slide easily over the bump, I think you would not have any beads left. But the really bad ones could not easily be removed by "untying and removing the bad bad." No, no, no, no, no! You have to nearly dump the entire lot of beads on the ground, so instead I got out my pliers and began CRUSHING the beads off the string. Crunch, pop! *bead shrapnel flew through the air....* Then I got up, picked up all the loose beads and corraled them inside of a plastic box. . So I have all the beads in the box and DUH! I tip the friggin' thing over and spend the next 35 minutes or so picking up the beads!! This project has been SO frustrating. And I am realizing that I get to do that ALL over again when I made the other half!!!

Here is my progress at present. Sliding the beads along the length of the skein is a pretty big pain in the butt. I think it might be a better plan to slide 2 strings of beads onto the terminal end of the yarn so that you didn't have to slide all the ends beads along 70 yds of yarn. At least it looks good, right?

Stitch Markers.

During Stitches I was TOTALLY inspired by Teenuh, who bought a spiffy bag of glass beads on Friday, ran home and cranked out some stitch markers and had them to show off on Sunday. Which for some reason she has never posted a picture of *nudge nudge*. Seeing how cute her stitch markers were, I just HAD to make some too. So on Sunday of Stitches I picked up a bag of the glass beads and last night I finally got around to making something with them. These were my favorite beads in the bag.
They are so cute, these little duckies. Sorry for the blurry picture it was late last night and I was a spaz.
These wierd little guys, I had a lot of debate over. The kitty heads (and purple mushroom) came in the bag and I had the weird little underwater mine beads already that happened to match so well. I tried several different configurations with lots of other beads, but DS really like them like this and so I went with it.
Lastly, I quite like the birds, they are opposite colors, the white bird (not clear in this pic) has lavender wings, so I did opposite colored beads on them to make them a "matched set". The hearts I just had to use. I actually hate hearts. Hate em!! But I am a SERIOUS crow and I LOVE shiny shiny things and they are SO shiny and red.

Not too much longer I'll post pics of the Ostrich Plume shawl. It is almost done, probably 1 more repeat and then the border before I run out of yarn.

A yarn buying blog.

That is what this has turned into. It looks like I am just a yarn collector and not a knitter. Well, just to disprove that, here is my Falling Leaves Shawl (Lavish Lace, Carol Rasmussen Noble) All pinned and blocked and good to go. I wore it to Stitches on Sunday. It is my first beaded work. It has a good weight to it. Because of the pattern it comes out longer on the front than the sides/back, so if you are wider than you are tall this is probably an excellent choice in design styles. I just worked until I ran out of beads then finished off. You can really make it as long or as short as you want, it has no specific size, you are only limited by your yarn supply (and your desire to have a 11 foot wide shawl). Most of the time it drapes on looking quite a lot more like a shrug than a shawl. The beads add a nice sparkle. I think I am addicted now to putting beads on knitting. So you will probably see a whole lot more of that on here.

My current project is the Ostrich Plume Shawl using the Cherrytree Hill Silk I got at FTA. It looks very, very (annoyingly) similar in color to the Schaeffer I just finished with. It has less yellow and orange, red where the last had none and quite a lot more green. However it is still similar. Several muggles have asked me if it is still the same project and where the beads went. This pattern goes really fast. It has only 1 truly patterned row per 4 rows of knitting with the WS rows are all purl and 1 row, with only yo's at the center stitch and edges. Very simple. Unless something derails me, this should be done within a week or so.

Hooray for a day spent shopping with a friend.

The sun was shining, the weather was a beautiful 80 deg. F. and not a cloud in the sky and we spent the whole day shopping to boot! Went to the 20% off everything sale at the Yarn Place. Hit, Micheal's, Joann's, 3 Beads and a Button and Starbuck's as well. What fun. Got some cute measuring tapes at Joann's. Hot fix crystals at Michael's. Memory wire to improve my beading device and lots of goodies at Yarn Place. More lace weight yarn: Also some really super yummy, yummy soy silk roving to spin. Now if could just get durn good at spinning and make it worth my while. This is a HUGE bag, it weighs 2 lbs. Yay for 20% off sales!
I can't wait to grope this and play in it and hopefully spin it into something usable.

Reinventing the Wheel.

Sometimes things seem like they should be simpler. For example, putting a bead onto your knitting. What I started out doing, was what everyone said to do. Work until you reach the stitch you want the bead on. 1. Put down one needle. 2. Pick up the crochet hook. 3. Stab the bead onto said hook (max # of beads that will fit on the hook at once - 2) . 4. Use hook to lift desired stitch to be beaded and slide the bead on. 5. Drop crochet hook. Repeat as needed per each beaded stitch. Was it me or was that WAAAAAy too many steps and way too inefficient?

I sat and thinked for a minute (ala' Pooh bear... Think think think..) The light above my head went on and I grabbed a piece of floral wire, put a curly loop onto the end so the bead wouldn't fall off, then carefully bent the other end of the wire into a tiny hook (this was the hardest part getting it small enough to fit through the bead and not to snag onto the yarn and never let go). Strung the wire full of beads, then realized a giant 14" long piece of wire loaded with beads is a bit unwieldy.I curled the wire into a spiral so the beads would still slide nicely and instantly eliminated step 3, the slowest and most tedious step, completely from the procedure. It is now twice as fast to slip those beads on. I can even have my eager small helpers put the beads on for me. Instead of picking up a new bead every stitch, I now have 100 beads ready to load. In the right pic you can see the next bead on the wire, right at the top. Sometimes the answer to something can be SO simple if you just think about it. Now I just need to dangle it off of a necklace so I don't have to keep grabbing it off my knee. Tidy it up, make it look professional, with a dangley clip on it and market the darn thing to all the knitters of the world still wrestling with one bead at a time...

Falling Leaves I.P.

Here are some quickie pix of my Falling Leaves in progress, modeled by my DD. I have decided to put the beads only in the center of the leaves. The pattern is not terribly clear because of course this lace has not been blocked, but you get an idea sort of. You can also see the bottom edge is actually V-shaped and not a blunt line. Here is a blurry close up of the bead work. Sorry, the camera did not want to cooperate and we had like 2 minutes of sun before the clouds blew back in. I had threaded all the beads on (PSYCHO!) then realized this was a bad idea and I ended up pulling them all off anyway and now am using the crochet hook method to place each bead (sllllllow) on the WS and RS rows. If I have enough yarn left I am going to knit on an edge with beads on it too, though I think I will probably have to go buy more beads, I bought 70 g of size 6/0 and I think it will be enough to just do the body of the shawl and not the edge. And of COURSE I picked the beads that were $6.50 per tube instead of $3.50 like all the rest.... gold and sparkley mmmmm.