Thank you, Turtlegirl

Thank you very much, Turtlegirl, for figuring out that I was missing a /div tag in my sidebar. THAT is what was fouling up my formatting. And yes, this is the second time I've managed to do that. *sigh* No pictures today - I'm saving it for tomorrow's YARN PR0N FRIDAY! I know what I'm going to post, I just need to... um... take the picture. Hee. I have made some actual progress on some Christmas knitting, though, as you will see in the sidebar. I finally started the gifts for both my Dad and my brother. Yay! Now comes the hard part... finishing them!

Woo Hoo!

So, after an evening of playing World of Warcraft, Kris remembered that he was supposed to be helping me figure out why my freaking blog was misbehaving. He finally (after a couple of hours of fighting with it) figured out that Blogger is putting a tag at the beginning of my posts which causes things not to flow, and makes either the sidebars or the center column appear at the bottom. He then figured out a way to trick it into not doing that, although I'm not entirely sure what he did. (Something about putting the post in a table, which would then flow, but which would make the non-flowing a non-issue because it would be inside the table? This is waaaaay beyond my grasp of HTML) So, anyway, yay! Speaking of yay, today (for those of you who do not know this) is WorldWide Knit In Public Day, so I met up with Alice and a few other people down at the City Dock in Annapolis, where we had a lovely time gabbing and knitting by the water on a gorgeous day. I think I may have gotten a little sunburned, but no biggie. I wore my finished-as-of-last-night Ribbon X-Back, which I was very pleased with. I also started a pair of Pomatomus socks with my Socks That Rock, so we'll see how those go. I keep hearing horror stories that they are quite difficult, so I'm trying to be patient with them. So far, I have the cuffs done. I am doing them at the same time on two circs as usual, so I am hoping I won't have too many problems with the pattern. While we were knitting, Kris was running around Annapolis taking pictures. He even got one of us from across the water: Left to right, that's Alice, Maggie, Sarah, Kathy, and me. And you can't quite tell from the angle on this one, but my chair legs were about a foot from the edge of the sidewalk along the water. It was awesome. He got some really wonderful pictures of all sorts of stuff in Annapolis. After lunch, we went to Allen Pond Park here in Bowie for some more picture-taking. And now, we're both wiped out and I'm going to go sit and work on my socks. And maybe start my HushHush. =)

Playing Catch-Up

Let's see... I know I owe Kennywood pictures, so for those of you who are interested, Kris has a flickr set here. It's not all of them just yet, but he's going to put the rest of them up soon. Also - current knitting progress. I have put my One Skein Tank in time out until I decide I have the patience to untangle to one ball of yarn, which has gotten horribly snarled. I'm annoyed enough with it at the moment that I am considering ripping it all out and scrapping the idea. This is why it is in time out, until I can deal with it more rationally. So, in the meantime, my June Free Day for the Yarn Focus Challenge was (shockingly) used on June 1, and I placed a couple of online orders, including one with elann for some Rowan Cotton Tape in "Fever" to make a Ribbon X-Back. As much as I hate seed stitch (and oh, do I hate tedious seed stitch), it's going pretty quickly. As of this morning, it was here: Not too bad, eh? I'm hoping to finish it up tonight or tomorrow. If I do finish it, I'll probably wind some sock yarn to take with me to World-Wide Knit In Public Day in Annapolis. Maybe I'll even start on my Socks That Rock, finally! Other than that, I ordered a bunch of KnitPicks' discontinued sock yarns, which will keep Kris and I in socks for a while, some Wool of the Andes for a sweater for my Dad for Christmas, the Palette sampler to make the Palette Fair Isle Cardigan (gulp!), and some more WotA to make We Call Them Pirates hats for Kris and my brother. Finally, I pulled out the cone of Valley Yarns cotton I ordered ages ago from WEBS to make Hush Hush, figuring on swatching it and getting it started. It was then that I realized that I had ordered the 10/2 cotton, and the pattern calls for 3/2 cotton. There is a significant size difference there. So, I had to order a cone of the 3/2 cotton, which arrived yesterday. Once the Ribbon X-Back is done, I'll get started on Hush-Hush, but it's not really travel knitting, so I won't worry about it for tomorrow. Last, but certainly not least, I got a package yesterday from my Knittyboard Cheap Ass Secret Pal 2 Pal, Cheapy Cheep. My goodies are pictured here (along with the sheep candleholders that Kirsten gave me when we were in Pittsburgh): Apparently, Cheapy Cheep was helping out at a garage sale this weekend, and was allowed to pick some goodies for herself (or in this case, me) as a thank-you. The red bag is this awesome little clutch that will be perfect to take along a sock WIP. The card is a really pretty embossed petroglyph design with a lovely note inside from Cheapy, one of the candles in the sheep is a yummy vanilla tealight, and the little bag in the front is just right for carrying stitch markers or other little necessities. (And, like I said, the candleholders from Kir, which Kris insists on calling my "friendsheep". Sigh.) Oh, and my sidebars may be a little wonky today. I am trying to switch to a 3-column layout, but we are having technical difficulties. Everything is exactly the way I want it, except that my two sidebars refuse to play nice and line up at the top. We're working on it. In the meantime, if you can figure out how to fix it, I'll give you a prize.

A New Look!

So, what do you think? My darling hubby did some redesigning here at Katydid Knits, and put together the lovely header image up above. I'm probably going to do some more playing with the minor details, but I think the logo is a definite keeper! And he even made me a button! Go on, you know you want to grab one. (Please, no bandwidth stealing!) I'm making some progress on his socks (had to take time out tonight to make him biscotti for doing the design work for me, though). I am not sure if they will be done before the Olympics, but I already warned him about that, and he's cool with it. I made this a few days ago, when Zknitter first mentioned it, but I forgot to post it until now: It's my very own Word Cloud, courtesy of SnapShirts. Kind of fun, really.

One Quick Thing

Hey - If anyone reading this links to me here and is not already in my list of links over in the sidebar, let me know so I can add you, ok? I know there is probably a way for me to go looking for that, but I am just not that web-savvy.

New day, new home

Ok, not a LITERAL new home - we didn't move or anything, but a new home for my blog. I decided that I really wanted to be able to post liks and buttons and stuff in the sidebar, and I can't do that on LiveJournal, so I've moved here. The plan is to move all my old posts, bit by bit. EDITED - All moved! Quick and painless. That, and I have actual knitting news. I FINISHED IT. I finished the unfinishable sweater. The cables that would not end. The self-designed sweater for Kris. You want proof? What, you don't trust me? Ok, here it is, in all its finished glory: I actually managed to finish it in time for his birthday, although it was too warm for him to wear it. Did I mention that it IS DONE? Background on this sweater, just so you understand why I am so blinkin' happy. About a year ago, I was starting to get really serious about knitting and leave my crochet phase behind. So, I offered to make Kris a sweater. We looked at some ideas, and he settled on the "Knit-Down, Made-to-Measure Jumpers" pattern from Sally Melville's The Knit Stitch. Then he picked the yarn - Lion Brand Wool-Ease in "Forest Green Heather". I started it. I got 2/3 of the way through the front, and there was one small problem. I HATED the stitch pattern, and I was fairly sure that the neck was going to be WAY too small. So, we discussed it. We looked at the article on knitting by percentages (OK, just I looked at that), and we determined that I could design a sweater to his liking. His liking involved cables. No problem - I like cables. So, I swatched (!), I measured, I drew. I came up with this: Not all that exciting, I know, but it was my very first design. I picked up a couple more skeins of Wool-Ease in "Wood" because 1. I was afraid of running out of yarn, and 2. I figured I could use that color change to help blend the change from the cables to the stockinette, because I was NOT going to attempt to do the cables through the raglan decreases. Basically, the ribbing is a 2x2 rib with a 1/1 cable for every other rib, and the body is a 4x2 rib with a 2/2 cable for every other rib, with alternating cables crossing off 2 rows from each other. (Does that make sense?) What did not occur to me while planning this gift of love to my husband was that cables? Are SLOOOOOOOOW. Pretty, but they don't exactly cruise along. As of June 29th of this year, I was about 8" into the body. Yes, that is after something like 6 months of working on it. I kept getting distracted by other (smaller) projects. I would work on it for a while, and then put it aside because I felt like it wasn't growing at all. About a month ago, I decided to work on it in earnest, with the hope that it would actually be done in time for him to WEAR this year. As of two weeks ago, I finished the body (up to the stripe) and started the sleeves. They took me about 5 days, including some time sitting in the movie theatre before both opening-day showings of Serenity that we went to with Jen. Starting last Monday-ish, I joined the sleeves to the body, and started working the decreases. Finally, Wednesday night, I finished. Happily, he loves it. Now if it would just get cold enough for him to wear it. =)