I have finished my Flaming Froot Loops Socks and lo and behold, they fit!! There is definitely something to be said for toe-up socks. Kristi's pattern is super, I highly recommend it. Just don't be a dork like me and choose shorter balls of yarn because all of those passed over stitches and mini-cables eat up that yarn... What worked for lace socks, clearly does not work for texture. Always a lesson to be learned.

Progress on my Heartland Shawl is slow and infrequent. It is now about 10 inches long. I finally got a copy of Knitted Lace of Estonia by Nancy Bush and there are quite a few projects in there I would like to get started on... I am trying to tell myself not to start anything new until the old is finished.

Speaking of old, can I say that I LOVE Sugarmomma? She saved my ass swapping me a desperately needed ball of Cascade Sierra Quatro and it has arrived! So soon the monkey will have ears and a tail. Perhaps I will find the time over Thanksgiving to finish her up.

So many other projects I am desperate to start. Where do I begin? I am having trouble focusing this week... I, like Teenuh, am suffering from Twilightitis. With hot young vampires on the brain I have very little time to think about anything else....

Zoinks!

I have totally bailed on blogging lately. I have been busy with soccer and school stuff. Walkathons and book fairs and junk like that. Today is Halloween, the most wonderful time of the year!! DS, DD and DN had a jolly good parade at school wearing their cute costumes. Pumpkins were carved. We went to a party tonight and I baked a delicious cake! As well as made a couple of nifty brains for dinner. Duh, I forgot to take a picture of them after cooking covered with bloody ketchup. Damn. It was quite the party, Judy found it to be eye popping... We had a fantastic time and got home about 12:30 am, which sucked for getting to the soccer field at 9:30 on Saturday.

On the knitting front: I struggled for a while with a pattern called Gail. Which is not very well written so after 6 failed attempts at it, I have decided not to make it and am instead using my precious Handmaiden Sea Silk for Evelyn Clark' s Heartland Lace Shawl. It is going much better. The numbers actually add up, which is always a good thing. Sorry tarded out again and didn't take a picture.

Finally, after months of putting it off, I have begun my pair of Froot Loop socks, with 1 done and the second about 1/3 done, but a word to Kristie. My sock is TOO SMALL because I ran out of yarn at the toe, this is why I knit toe ups and not top downs! ARGH! Someone with size 8 feet will be the lucky recipient of this pair of socks. Damn socks.

The knitting of the pink monkey, drones on forever. I haven't worked on it in a couple of weeks. I get a very dirty look from DD everytime she sees me knitting anything other than her monkey. I will go hide my guilty face and work on my sock.

Woo Hoo!! I finished the Mystery Shawl. It is not longer a mystery. The secret it out. It is some sort of insane punishment. Yeah. That's it.

Well, here it is all ugly and scrunchy like a new born...

Then here it is as blocked as I can get it in my living room. It is 86 inches across and doesn't fit. I have it partially pinned under my couch, but clearly you can see that it is not round at all. It has one flat side., this newborn is suffering from Plagiocephaly. The patterns are 1c, 2c, 3a, 4a, 4c, 3c, then the edging. Now the question, as always, is what to do with it?

Now what to do with myself? It is back to the Monkey...
Here is DS's sock monkey in progress. I am just going to punish myself and relentlessly crank this one out. I do have some plans for a sock and some fingerless mitts, but I will be good and make the damn sock monkey... Mr. Ben, gosh! He's like a monkey on my back...

Run lemming, run! Jump lemming, jump!

So yeah, if all of my friends jumped off of a cliff apparently I would too. I joined Sundara's Season's Club. Choosing Fall. I was a little tempted by summer but then was wooed by this picture into the Fall category.... This thread on Ravelry offered a clear view of temptation... I just hope DH doesn't figure it out... All I can say is um, Thanks TEENUH!! And you too Lisa.

Now actual knitting content....
For my little Nephew's birthday: a sock monkey! It is a ~50% reduced, quite modified version of the Two Old Bag's Mr. Ben pattern. Made from Paton's Grace on size 2 needles. Made in about 3 days. Someone has let the monkey out of the bag and he loves it! He said,'Thanks Auntie it is a baby monkey to Diddy Kong!" The kids are very into baby this and mom and dad that.... My grandma likes it and says it is better than the big one that I made for DS. I think she really wants me to make her one too and thinks the smaller size more reasonable to mail away to Hawaii. With my huge over estimation of how much yarn I needed I totally could. It took less than 1 skein of the main color and way less than half of the cream and only a tad of red before I made the hat. He is lounging by the pool in San Diego here... His cap perhaps should have been larger? I finished him the night before around 1:50 am, struggled to take a picture of him because he wouldn't sit up straight and realized that he had no tail!! Ha ha! So 30 minutes later (at like 2:30 am) he was finally, completely finished... He would've been a sock ape instead...

He loves the monkey in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that the monkey is nearly as large as he is. Because of the red baseball cap, he has named his monkey Diddy Kong. I may put a letter D on the hat at a later time. He has been carrying it around with him all day!
On the Mystery Shawl front. Here is my zephyr. Half of a cone wound on the awesome gianormous ball winder I got for my birthday. It is a giant cake. I have not been on the ball about taking photos. So here is a crappy photo of clues 1 and 2 both are chart C's. Not much to look at at this point, I was going to shift to a larger needle for better photographic opportunities, when to my chagrin I found that I do not own any other size 3 circular needles!! I have size 2's in 4 lengths.! I have of course Knitpick's options in every size from 4 - 15. But no more size 3 's (or 1's for that matter. hmm time for another order??)

Now I have realized that I ordered some in a co-order with Teenuh in 40" and 47" and the order has arrived at her house. So I just need to be patient and wait to meet up with her to get the order! So for another day or 2 the shawl will have to remain crumpled up.... In the mean time, here is a glimpse of clue 3 chart A. And thanks to the brilliance of Janet I will begin work on Clue 4 for which I plan to work chart A followed by chart C creating the same length as using B or D alone.

King Monkey is finished! 2 down, 1 to go!! DS was quite the task master. Catching me working on the mystery shawl or something else, he would say, "So I guess my sock monkey must be about done, huh?" Or" Mom, why don't you finish my sock monkey instead?" Woo, tough boss! His hat is a top down increase with an added brim. The brim was made with short rows and folded over with a piece of plastic garbage cut to size and and sewn in the middle. He weighs a ton. Being made with about 525 grams of Blue Sky Alpaca Cotton. He was filled with 1.5 bags of Cluster Stuff. So he is pretty weighty. He is about 5" taller than the previous monkey but quite a bit fatter. Here is his bald pate photo. So along with half of the internet knitting world I am also working on the Goddess Knits Anniversary Mystery Shawl. I was not smart and did not take progress shots. I have numerous photos to download from my camera and the fear is causing me to not take pictures. I know, how lame is that. I am knitting wtih Zephyr wool silk in the Blueberry color way from a cone split with Blogless Melissa. For clues 1 and 2 I have used chart c. For clue 3 I am using a and have decided to use b for clue 4. I have already fallen behind as I spent much time trying to finish off King Monkey. DS loves him quite a lot, especially since we didn't use the scary eyes! Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to that! And i f you are wondering, yes they are metallic and do reflect, they sure would like monster eyes to a sleepy imagination...

I haven't spent so much time knitting as I would like to, instead I have been doing that evil thing called housework and really trying to get ahead on all of the laundry, wash up all of the winter coats and get them stored away as well as enjoying 4th of July festivities. I could spam the page with photos of fireworks. There were so many to see. I just can't feel free on the 4th without smoke filling the air, gigantic booms filling the air and the vague smell of burning sulphur and the opportunity to be in a huge crowd that fills me with terror and a sense of forboding!
Here the kids and I are downtown enjoying the Fireworks. I have decided that since I am never in any pics I am going to start taking pictures Gina style. Me and Teenuh, we loves the fireworkz!

Earth to blogger, come in blogger!

I have been so horribly busy and to make matter worse I was a little shell shocked after everything was finished. I was about ready to have a nervous breakdown from all of the busy school activities. So Art Vistas is done, classes, Art show, extra classes, all done! 3rd Grade play is done done done! I ended up in charge of costumes. Tried to delegate them out but people flaked on me (and you all know how I feel about that). So I ended up making 60 of the 120 costumes my self. It was a lot of work. It went went. It is over! Woot!

So needless to say I did not get a lot of knitting done. I got plenty of shopping done, which I won't drone on about here (think Knitting Arts going out of business and a trip to Green Planet) . I will post pics of my 2 whole FO's I accomplished during the busy time.

Here is Mr. Ben Sock Monkey Extraordinaire!
Seen here in a child's booster seat for perspective. And posing here with his new best friend the ever-so-slightly-smaller Mr. Ben Cain. (who has an awesome hat!)



I also finished my Aster from the Beyer Band 361 Kunst Stricken , Kleine und Grosse Decken. From Herbert Niebling and Irmgard Sorenson. It is about 23 inches across. (56cm) just shy of the original dimensions given for the original design. This instruction for the pattern was written in German. Knit in size 40 cotton from Daiso. Knit with size 000 needles. I did this as a knit along with a blogless friend who made her much larger with lovely seasilk on size 2 needles(?) Now summer is here I will be a better blogger....

Give me a minute....

So on Thursday I sat watching television and felt inspired to do this:
Kind of ugly. Kind of dorky looking. Kind of splotchy, like a dog with mange.



On the sock monkey progress:

I finished the second arm today and triumphantly held it up! Victory!! But alas! No! The first arm was about 1-1.5 inches longer than the second!! I had just counted the rows on the second so I knew the problem was with the first. I counted rows. No, not 90 like it should be, or course not! It was 100!! Ugh! I unraveled the bottom from the cast on edge (hence the needles in the pic) and have since bound it off. Just ears and muzzle to go and Mr. Ben will done!! The kids are excited, they can't wait to see him! Me too!

Funky Monkey!

So the monkey totally jumped the queue. I was ogling Snuffykins' fantastically HUGE monkey and well I just HAD to make my own. She took all of these crazy pics of it. She was having so much fun with her monkey that I became inflamed with jealousy and set upon my own monkey (it only made me feel slightly better that she was giving her gianormous monkey away to live somewhere else).

So here is the fetal stage of my monkey dude. He is looking a little odd with only the one leg. The progress of this object is occasionally pornographically phallic in appearance and while knitting it in the Dr.'s office waiting room a man could not resist commenting "That is either for a REALLY big foot. or SOMETHING else!" He then turned red and sat snickering to himself for the duration of our wait in the chairs. On the other hand I have had several people practically falling over to come and touch my neonatal sock monkey, joyfully grasping him and cheering "Oh a sock monkey, a sock monkey!!" I have opted for the "striped" sock. I think I will make him the striped cap as well. Now back to work!