Change of Address

Effective immediately, Insaknity’s new address is:

www.insaknity.com/blog

I’ve already moved in even though it’s still under construction, come on over!

A Day At The Park!

Courtesy of Bank of America, Mom and I got a free day at Fenway!

I didn’t bring my knitting with me, since last time I went to a game the idiot security bitch gave me a hard time and tried to tell me that MLB didn’t allow knitting needles in the parks…ummmmm, ever hear of Stitch ‘N Pitch, sweetheart?

Despite the lack of knitting, it was an absolutely perfect day in Boston: warm, sunny, not at all humid, and a bit of a breeze.

After having lunch at the park, we got to watch some of the Oriole’s batting practice,

A flock of O’s on the field at Fenway

We had some interesting neighbors during the game:

the poor kid in the Jeter shirt took some serious crap from the drunken fools a few rows in front of us. =(

and a very cute little boy:

And some random pictures from our day:

Rem Dawg and Announcer Boy in the booth…

Our seats (and Pesky Pole)…

Tina Cervasio…

The Bleacher Creatures groovin’ to Sweet Caroline…

At this point, the game is all but over…Paps is in for the save!

And possibly the best part of the day…the lead is back up to 6 after beating the O’s and the D-Rays drowned the Spankees 8-2. Thanks, Tampa Bay!  It seems that Bad Juju still works, just for everyone but the Sox????

I hope you all had a great weekend, and to everyone in the US, Happy Labor Day!

~Bethe

Do That VooDoo That You Do

In a fit of temporary insaknity I thought it would be fun to make a voodoo doll. Customized, of course, to bring good luck to my beloved Red Sox and bad luck to the Yankees (of course).

The pattern already existed. It was a small project. And I needed a distraction. After 10 straight hours of bookkeeping on Saturday (so much for it being a “not very big” job) my brain HURT. I needed something fun and simple.

Enter Bad Juju from theanticraft.com .

Oh So Easy to customize. Dark blue yarn with scraps of white for accents. Some polyfill stuffing, one of those little scrapbooking kit things that has all the little sticky decorations in it for the logo.

Add some gamewatching time and you’ve got everything you need!

Please note the strategically placed knitting needles for prime impact:

1. Straight through the head to affect their thought process.
2. Straight through the heart. You can’t play without heart, right?
3. One through each hand so both righties and lefties are covered.
4. One through each leg. Who can play with two bum legs?
5. One through the crotch? NO BALLS.

Oh - and the eyes are baseballs. Covered by cross-stitches. Who can play if you can’t see the ball?

Now, of course this is done just in fun…or is it?

I started this during game 4 of the Red Sox/White Sox series (8/26). A game that the Red Sox won 11-1, so it’s got some powerful Red Sox winning mojo in the mix.

I finished it while watching the Yankees/Detroit game last night. A game in which the Tigers absolutely MAULED the Spankees 16-0. GRRRRRR. So it has some Yankee losing mojo in there, too.

Maybe there really is some powerful magic in this little voodoo…

Have a great day!

~Bethe~

Geez!

Wow - time sure got away from me this week!

Contest winners: I did NOT forget you! Prizes are going out today. All are packaged and ready to go. =) Wicked sorry for the delay, ladies. I guess I’m not the greatest contest hostess. Next time I’ll do better.

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Not much knitting progress as I’ve been trying to catch up on a few bookkeeping omissions for the shop. It’s not really our fault that I have some missing items. The accountant we had initially contacted (he was a referral from a friend of my mom’s who also runs a retail shop), kept saying “next Saturday, I’ll stop in next Saturday and we’ll take care of everything.”. Well, we finally got sick of hearing about next Saturday and went to someone else. Within 4 days of seeing this new guy, he had our state tax payment forms all set and ready to go, told me what I should be keeping closer track of, and basically gave his seal of approval on what I’ve been doing so far. Thankfully, there are only a couple of things I need to add, but that means going back through 8 months (WOW - I can’t believe it’s been 8 months already!) worth of sales and purchases and adding them up.

**********

I did start a pair of Red Sox Socks.

A little bit of good juju never hurt anyone, right?

These are strictly game knitting.

There are also at least a couple of us in a Red Sox Knitters group on Ravelry that are thinking about a Bad Juju knit-a-long. Little NYY voodoo dolls. Every little bit helps, right? =D (sorry Yankee fans. I enjoy the close competition, but I have to help my boys all I can!) Anyone that wants to knit along is welcome! If we get enough people, we could each get a NYY player and have one for each member of the team. (insert evil cackle here) How much fun would it be to poke and choke voodoo dolls during the games next week (T-W-Th) as the players come up to bat or are involved in a play????

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On another topic altogether now, I’ve asked this before, but I’m going to ask again: Web hosting. Who do y’all recommend? I’m 99% positive I’m going to stick with WordPress for the blog since I’ve grown pretty accustomed to the setup over the past year and I like it, but I’m wide open to hosting plans. My only requirement, and I don’t even know that it would be an issue, is that I would need to be able to host 2 separate domains, one of which needs to have shopping capabilities. Is that possible? I can’t see why it wouldn’t be, but I’m pretty tech-illiterate at this point and I’ll be learning as I go.

I need simple.

With hand-holding.

And lots of wine. And cosmos. And beer.

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Oh - What do you think of the new blog look? I kind of like the dark and gloomy vibe it’s got.  It’s a nice change from the bright, no?

I hope you all have a great weekend! I’ll be off kissing babies and working.

~Bethe

S(p)unday

Celebration.

4 ounces
144 yards

July Spunky Fiber Club in the Celebration colorway. I lovedlovedloved spinning the Shetland wool. It was much softer than I expected it to be and it was crazy easy to spin. The color combination out of the bag was - ummm - unique in appearance, to say the least. A glorious mis-matching of what seems like all the colors. Crayzee combos I would never in a million years think to put together in one place. This is why I’m not a wildly successful indie dyer. No color-knack and no imagination.

I’ve especially gotten a kick out of seeing how completely different everybody’s is coming out! It seems like no two look alike.

I took a slightly different approach to spinning this fiber than I have with others in the past. I still divided the original strip in half as I always do, but for the first half, I didn’t break it down any more than that. I predrafted it as one looooooong strip and spun it from the one continuous strip of roving, hoping for looooooonger color stretches (left bobbin). The second half, I broke into pieces of roughly 2 colors (maybe 6 inches long or so?) and ripped off narrower strips from those shorter pieces. I spun these shorter pieces randomly by reaching into a bag and not being at all selective. Whichever one I pulled out got spun next (right bobbin).

I love the result that this experiment yielded. There are a million different color combinations throughout the hank!

A hot water bath followed by a dunk in cold and a sound thwacking finished it off perfectly. Thwacking is great fun and such a wonderful stress reliever!

I’m really happy with the results! Nice and even, colorful, barber-poley, stripey goodness! Thanks, Amy! This one was a lot of fun!

*****

Wedding Bouquet.

4 ozs. (out of 8 ozs. purchased)
94 yards

This was one definitely less celebratory than the Shetland Celebration. Unless you count the celebration that occurred when I finally finished powering through it. Maybe I’m spoiled from the all the spunky stuff, but this Targhee was MISERABLE. The roving was SO compacted and smooshed together it took me 3.5 hours to (poorly) pre-draft 4 of the 8 ozs. I bought. Yes. 3.5 HOURS. It flared up my carpal tunnel syndrome something fierce. Not to mention that my arms were actually sore and tired and my thumbs hurt from having to pull so damn hard to separate the fibers. SO. NOT. FUN. But pretty.

I’m really questioning if it’s worth all the work…Even with all the pre-drafting, it was STILL difficult to spin. I’m not too sure I want to dedicate another 5 hours to get another 94 yards of bulky yarn (I made the executive decision that is was going to be bulky. My thumbs would have fallen off if I had tried to spin this stuff any thinner).

Good lord. 10 hours of pre-drafting and spinning for a lousy 188 yards of bulky yarn? I’m really thinking that it’s not worth it. At all.

But then I squish it. And it’s very squishy. No. Make that squooshy. Squoosh times 20. When I’m squeezing it, I almost start to think it was worth it, then I force myself to remember the ache in my thumbs when I was done…I’m torn. Suffer through the other 4 ozs.? Or spare my thumbs the aching and my fingers from falling asleep????

*****

Poison.

More spunky goodness.

8 ozs.
440 yards

Acid green and deep purple. Pictures do not do it justice.

I can’t help myself. I start singing ‘Talk Dirty To Me’ every time I look at it. The sparky green nylon thread I added to the 2 plies of BFL only add to the glam quotient this stuff had to begin with. I’m SO keeping this for myself. But what to make?

*****

Summer Fields.

4 ozs.
252 yards

Spunky goodness it was not.

It was not very good at all, in fact. This was my first attempt at a tencel blend. While I love the sheen of the finished yarn, it was fiddly to spin and difficult to pre-draft. The difficulties in the pre-drafting had everything to do with the dye job. Felted bits throughout making it hard to separate the fibers.

The finished yarn is ok.

I’d try the blend of merino and tencel again. But not from the same place.

*****

So as you may have already figured out, I’ve been doing a bit of spinning lately. Not all of this was spun yesterday, though. The Poison and the Wildflowers was done last week, but the Celebration and the Wedding Bouquet are both products of the weekend.

I’ve been a tad restless lately. I don’t know if it’s the impending seasonal change and my excitement for fall, or if something else is at fault. All I know is that I’ve had a mad case of startitis and I’ve not only started a second pair of socks (I rarely, if ever have two pair going at the same time!), but I’ve also cast on a Christmas present for my mom and I need to get cranking on booties to match the Baby Surprise Jacket.

The rush for the booties is because Little Lila (not so little as it turns out) came into this world on Friday night, weighing in at a (very) healthy 10.5 pounds and 21 inches long. Happy Birthday, Lila! And congratulations Jen and Tom!

(Thank goodness I didn’t make any newborn sizes!)

Oh - and if I wasn’t such a dolt, this would have been ready this morning.  I forgot my camera cord at home.  DUH.

I hope you all had a great weekend!

~Bethe~

Larger than Large

It’s finished.And it’s bigger than big.

More ginormous than gigantic.

It truly is LARGER THAN LIFE.

It’s a very fitting name for an startlingly enormous bag.

I like it very much though, in fact, I would even go so far as to say I still love it.

However, I fear it’s ultimate calling will be to hold and transport large WIP’s. Like Celtic Dreams, or maybe Babette.

Behold the beast:

and the belly lining of the beast:

(more pictures can be seen here)

Even as a newbie crocheter with no mad sewing skillz whatsoever, many modifications were made as I went along.

For starters, I decided to frame each square in black before I attached the squares together. Only then I did the edge around the panels of attached squares as instructed by the pattern.

I also decided I needed to have right sides from both the outside and the inside of the bag. (Why shouldn’t I be able to see the pretty side of the fabric from the inside, too?) This meant some major changes to the lining instructions. Just the thing a novice seamstress (Erin) and a sewing-illiterate newbie (that’d be me) should tackle, no? So not only did I change the simple single layer of lining to a double-faced one, I also put a double layer of plastic canvas in the bottom of the bag (whipstitched to the base of the bag) for some extra support since it was quite floppy. Last, but certainly not least, I decided that I wanted longer, 2-tone straps.

That Erin didn’t strangle me with those extra long straps then stash my body in the bag itself is a miracle.

Erin, I can’t thank you enough for all your help. I never would have been able to finish this without you!

Live Large, everyone!

~Bethe

OK - Start Pushing!

The knitting is done, Jen!

You can start pushing now…

Baby Surprise Jacket by E.Z. (Knitting Workshop and The Opinionated Knitter)

Started: July 20, 2007

Finished: August 12, 2007

There was a brief, heart stopping moment around July 25th when I realized that I was NOT going to have enough yarn. Running out of handspun is terrifying. Running out with only a few rows to go is utterly horrifying. I hope it never happens again.

The buttons are from the stash and I could not have found a more perfect match if I had the entire button supply of the universe at my disposal.

It’s got a cute little picot collar.

Now all it needs is the cute little redheaded baby to go into it. Hurry up and come out Lila! We are dying to meet you! =)

The only change I will make on future on BSJs (and there will be more!) will be to pick up that second panel of stitches from the other side…see that little ridge to the right of the bottom button? It’s irritating me. The BSJ KnitWiki page specifically mentions that little ridge and the simple way to avoid it, but it’s mentioned as a “how to avoid color blips” fix for when you pick up stitches in a different color. Since I wasn’t striping, I ignored it. Next time I’ll know better.

I hope you all had a great weekend!

~Bethe

Revealed (or not?)

OK - so something you may not know about me is that I can really be indecisive at times. Thank goodness I didn’t have to make any decisions myself on winners and the luck of the draw was the deciding factor.

So what color(s) did I choose?

Therein (kind of) lies the problem. While I HAVE made an absolutely final decision on 2 colors, one for the “outer lining”, one for the “inner lining” (and yes, I’m anal enough to want the “right” side of the fabric to show for both the outside AND the inside) and then the strap, I have no idea which will go where. Each color is at opposite ends of the spectrum and each has advantages and disadvantages in both places. I like them both for very different reasons.

How’s that for ambiguous and indecisive?

One of the final colors was my original choice and was going to be for the entire lining (inner and outer) and the strap, but all your fabulous guesses made me revisit my decision and resulted in a last minute change/addition.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. You wanna know if you won or not.

Here you go:

My initial lining decision was: YELLOW

Since she was the only person to choose it, first prize goes to Trek (trek casts on)!

~~~~~

After your guesses, and after my waffling, the color I added to the mix was: BLACK

The lucky name plucked from that baggie by blogless Jasmine is: Ruth (5elementknitr)!

~~~~~

All other guesses (the greens, oranges, blues, purples, pinks, white, cream, etc.) went into a different baggie,

And from that one Jasmine plucked: Lorinda (redhead ramblings)!

~~~~~

Notice to all winners: Send me an email with your mailing addresses and let me know your favorite colors, if you’re a sock knitter, if you spin, if you have any allergies, etc. While I’m not guaranteeing any specifics or making any promises, I’ll do my best to tailor your prize to suit your preferences.

~~~~~

At this point, I am leaning towards black for the outer lining and straps and yellow for the inside. But I’m thinking that yellow outside and the black inside (still with a black strap) would be nice too…final decision will be made tonight when Erin and I finish this off!

Thanks for playing, everybody! I had a lot of fun reading your all your guesses and my Google Reader got some new additions, too!

~Bethe

Detours

The plan was to have a finished bag for the contest winner(s) announcement tomorrow. Tragically, there has been a slight detour on that path to completion.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, and my inability to run either of the antique sewing machines in my house, I was unable to get a lining sewn in last night. It’s not going to affect the winners. Or when I announce them. I just won’t have an officially complete bag to display the color choice(s?). No biggie. I will however, make sure to include pictures of the incomplete bag with the lining strategically placed to make it look finished.

I do have to say that all of your guesses caused me to rethink my color selection and revisit the choices available. As a result, there has been a minor change in the color selection and there will actually be THREE winners. Better odds for everyone involved. =)

Since I couldn’t finish the bag as planned, I decided to spin myself stupid and get a start on that deadline project. No pictures of that either, but I did spin enough yarn to finish the sweater and it’s home drying right now. I should be finished in way under a week, and well before the mama’s projected due date. =)

I realized as I was spinning that I was also starting to miss knitting so I started a new sock as soon as I had finished cleaning up for the night. I had been looking over sock patterns while I was crocheting the bag, and I thought I had decided on Cookie’s Twisted Flower pattern and some (Project Spectrum-appropriate) Trekking Pro Natura I had picked up at Wild-N-Woolly. Weeeeeell, I kept the Trekking in the mix, but I wussed out and decided to go with mindlessly simple for the pattern. While the Twisted Flower sock pattern is amazingly gorgeous, simple it ain’t. This one is easy enough to work on in any conditions, and dammit, I think it looks pretty freakin’ good for something so simple:

A little closer:

It’s a variation on a wicked simple twisted stitch pattern I’ve used before. I’m sure others have done this variation before me, but I couldn’t find it in any of the Walker Treasuries, or in the other stitch dictionaries I’ve got. But I like it and I’m sticking to it. It seems like it’s going to have plenty of stretch and so far I’m liking the yarn. It’s really soft (but a little bit on the splitty side).

That’s it for now. I really should get some work done…

Have a great day and tune in tomorrow for the winners!

~Bethe

The State of the Squares

Wow - thanks for all the guesses, you guys! Keep them coming! =)

Despite a wicked busy weekend of work, errands, housework, some time spent with friends, and a little bit of house-hunting on Sunday, I was able to make some additional progress on the bag:

I made some “on the fly” modifications. I decided to edge each square with a row of black single crochet and I joined the squares with an additional row of black single crochet so everything is framed. I like it very much and it earned approvals from both Erin and Jasmine, too.

I’ll be attempting to join all the pieces tonight, then hopefully, we’ll be able to get it lined on Tuesday night after work.

I’m really excited (and really anxious) to get this finished.

You see, I have some deadline knitting to to take care of:

But in order to finish it, I still need to spin some more yarn. Four stinkin rows to go and I ran out…

Say it along with me: “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck”.

Miss Boogie came through with flying colors. Digging some additional South African Fine out from under a rock, dyeing it, and sending it at the speed of light. Now I just need to get my shit together and do my part.

I must finish this Baby Surprise. Baby Lila is a-coming. Soon. Mom is already having contractions and starting to dilate. I’m hoping that Stephanie’s theory is true and that babies aren’t born until the knitting is done. (fingers crossed)

The problem is that I am still consumed by the bag! MUST. FINISH. BAG.

Mama Jen: Keep your legs crossed and don’t push yet, ok?

~Bethe