it's june!

Oh my god, how is it June already? This year is flying by. The Ingenue sweater, not so much - I finished the body (finally!) and am making my way through the first sleeve now. In a perfect world I'd be knitting a lot faster, but, I work all the freakin' time and type like a maniac for most of it, which means I can't knit in the rare free time I do have, or my arms would actually fall off. 

Speaking of work, I went to NYC for one last work trip, where I ate cheese cake and was too busy to do much else:

mmm, cheesecake...

... and then came back to LA, where I had one glorious day off and ate this: 

... because I was feeling nostalgic for New York. Magnolia cupcakes in LA = proof that California really is the best state now. 

I also bought yarn for the first time in months! Having vowed to buy no new yarn at the start of this year, I figured six months was a respectable amount of time to wait before venturing into one of LA's many awesome yarn shops. They're not particularly summery colors and it's rapidly getting too hot to imagine being near wool, but, yay nonetheless! 

one skein & one month in...

One month and one skein in (and about 2 days off since my last post later), here is what my Ingenue sweater is looking like! Hooray for Sanguine Gryphon codex! And why yes, I am using safety pins as stitch markers because I can't find any of the gajillion stitch markers that I swear I do own, and which end up pretty much everywhere anywhere I live, except when I'm looking for them. Now that the dust is finally settling and I'm a little more used to life and work in Los Angeles, I am feeling much more inclined to knit now - I just don't have the time! Fortunately I have my first (and only, until we finish shooting) two day weekend in a few days, and I fully intend to spend as little of it as possible wearing shoes or doing respectable grown-up things like errands or laundry, and instead spending it knitting with an audio book on my couch. Best! Weekend! Ever!  

One of the reasons I'm getting virtually no free time is that I've had to go to New York for work a few times lately. I say "had to" but really it was so exciting that I didn't even mind the lack of sleep or free time. I hadn't been to New York since I moved away and started traveling four years ago, so being back - even for ten seconds, and spending virtually all of it working - was crazy exciting. 

So that's here! Busy but good and trying to knit more :) 

ghosts of sweaters past

A weird-and-nice thing about coming home in between yearlong stints abroad is finding all sorts of things you forgot you had wedged in your mother's closet. In my case, this not only involves a lot of stashed yarn (exciting!) but also sweaters of the past. I started knitting five years ago in hopes of making sweaters, and - in typical me style - bit off way more than I could chew in the start, so there are a lot of malformed lumpish things that beg to be unravelled - though after putting in as much work as I had, I never had the heart to oblige. It wasn't until I stumbled across this book that suddenly I realized that a) sweaters didn't have to be this giant Everest of a project and that b) customization is infinitely possible. Fortunately I had lots of time to experiment - in the 1.5 months between returning to Brooklyn from an epic backpacking trip and moving to Vietnam at the start of 2008, my boyfriend of many years and I broke up, and I found myself sitting in a half empty apartment with very little to do except apply for my CELTA program, practice Vietnamese, sew a skirt (badly), cobble together a quilt (even more badly) and of course, knit. Which I did, a lot, accompanied by marathon sessions of Project Runway and giant cups of Dunkin Donut's coffee (I lived next door to a Dunkin' Donuts, it was awesome).

This was well before I'd learned about Ravelry, and I didn't have access to many sweater patterns that weren't boxy and unflattering. The great thing about Ann Budd's books is that you can totally customize based on the bare bones she provides, so both of these sweaters are actually from the same pattern. This white sweater - knit in KnitPicks Shine Worsted in Cream - was, if not perfect, at least more or less what I was going for - a very wide v-neck with waist shaping and lace at the cuffs. The neckline is a little weird, and the underarms are a bit baggier than I'd like, but I was still pretty happy when I finished.

As for the first of the January 2008 sweaters, the less said the better - there are so, so many things wrong with this sweater, it's best you don't see it close up. I ran out of yarn, so the collar is a totally different dye lot than the rest of the body and it shows. There are weird holes in the fabric that still baffle me. Best of all, the shape of the neck was so totally wrong and wonky that - in what I'm sure is a reflection of my mental state at the time - I decided to just fudge the neckline by FOLDING IT OVER and picking up stitches from elsewhere in the fabric. 

Amazingly, I wore this first sweater on many a Dunkin' Donuts run while knitting the second, though in my defense, it was winter and the offending details were well covered up in winter clothes. Oh, sweater. It's so sad and messed up, but I was so proud of actually making a pullover that fit at the time. I still don't have the heart to unravel it.