Some Progress is Made

As if losing my access to my email for 24 hours wasn't enough of a headache, I also had a migraine yesterday. Not fun. Luckily, my resident geek was able to fix the email problem. It only took him about 6 hours total time spent. Good thing I don't have to pay him like they do at his job for the same type of work! (My kind of payment he likes but I'm not going to ask whether it's better than money. I still have to pay him for this one.) After catching up on my email, I spent the day ripping all our CDs to my new and very huge hard drive and reading the Yarn Harlot's blog. That woman is a scream! Thom was noting that I was sitting up here laughing like a banshee for hours all by myself. Good thing he knows me well enough not to suspect that I'm finally losing my marbles. I'd never be able to write like YH. She is amazing — funny, pithy, and real. Canadian too! I especially love all the travel pictures with The Sock. I'm now working my way through the whole year and a half of her blogs. And I want to get her book At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much. I didn't realize it was hers when I saw it at Chapter's. Who was to know that one Stephanie Pearl-McPhee is The Yarn Harlot? They should have put that on the cover. Oops, they did. My excuse: I was wearing my dark glasses which are just my distance prescription and I can't read very well (at all actually, unless it's a large sign a block away) with them on.

Craft Report

As you can see I've started the poncho, making it up as I go along. Really the only thing I'm doing differently from the plan in my previous post is that I'm working the increases (lifted left and right stitches) before and after a central stitch. So far anyway all seems to be working out OK. I get to babysit Kiera today so I can surreptitiously try it on her and see how much more I have to go. Do you think she would actually wear the hat I have in mind to go with this poncho?


The Poncho in Progress

I'm not really happy with the needles I'm using. I started with Clover Takumi bamboo 3.25 mm dpn's but this is an older set with only 4 needles. (Phooey! Who knits on only 4 dpns?) I soon ran out of room on them for the increasing number of stitches so I switched to a circular. Of course I didn't have the right sized circular (go figure) so I'm working on an Aero 3.5 mm. I've proved to myself that I actually knit tighter on a metal needle than on a bamboo one because the gauge didn't change hardly at all. Even though I proved the needles were different diameters in my needle gauge. (That's the green plastic thing in the basket there.) I'd rather have a Takumi circular in 3.25 mm but I'm having a hard time justifying yet another set of needles to myself. Yeah, I know but after springing for those expensive Denise modular needles you'd think they should cover everything, wouldn't you? I knew they were too big for a lot of my knitting! The smallest one in the set is 3.75 mm and much too big for this yarn. Meanwhile I'm over halfway through the poncho on the Aeros so maybe I can get away without spending anymore on needles this time. Whew! That was well not-justified.