Auditions and Preparing

Happy Monday! It's the time of year again when I'm starting to get ready for Community Theatre, and I had my first audition on Sunday. I brought along my Rios Scraps Cowl to work on while I was waiting, and I got a good chunk of the next color knit up. We're doing Wizard of Oz this year, and while rehearsals won't start for another month, we'll hopefully have the show cast this week.

I also finished a new crop top over the weekend-and I broke my rule of springing an FO on you guys without ever showing it as a WIP. Remember a couple months ago when I mentioned wanting to knit a cropped version of Tallahassee? Well, last week I just jumped in and did it, and it only took a couple of days, and, well, now I have a finished crop top blocking on my bedroom floor.

It's looking like it's going to be a busy week for me. I have theatre callbacks on Tuesday, I need to take FO pictures of my Tallahassee, and I've also got a ton of plates in the air getting ready for some exciting changes that I'll be able to tell you all about soon. All good stuff, but it's all rushing at me at once right now!

Linking up with KCCO

FO: Nusa

Yay Nusa! I did manage to finish this by the KAL deadline last Friday, but I only just got around to taking pictures yesterday! I love this cowl so much-it's so light and airy, and a great length for a warm-weather cowl.

I went back and forth a little bit with yarn choice for this. I didn't know if I wanted merino singles or merino-silk singles, and I am so glad I went for the silk. It's got such a rich texture, and a little bit of a sheen, and it's definitely a nice cowl. I already talked a bit about trying to choose colors-I probably had 20 tabs open with different colorways before I decided on these two!

I didn't make any mods while knitting this. The lace was a bit tricky, but most of that was probably due to the fact that I knit the first half of it in a dark auditorium (great planning, Kat). The stripes really zoomed by-I love having color changes to mark progress like that!

Ravelry Page: Nusa

Pattern: Nusa by Cory Ellen Boberg

Yarn: Three Fates aether singles "Woodsmoke" and "City of Books"

The Perils of Hand-Knits

Yesterday morning as I was rushing to get ready for work, I noticed the dogs' water bowl was empty. I went to fill it, and turned from the sink to put the bowl back on the floor when it happened.

I'd been wearing a handknit lace shawl. It was a chilly morning, and sometimes the office HVAC can get a little persnickety, and I wanted the extra layer over my shoulders before I headed out the door.

Unbeknownst to me, one of the large eyelets in the shawl had gotten caught on the knob of the cabinet beneath the sink as I'd filled the water bowl, and as I turned to step away from the sink I got tangled in my shawl which was stuck to the cabinet and I went down like a roped calf.

My mother, of course, hears something in the kitchen fall, and comes to investigate to see me lying on the kitchen floor, tangled up in a shawl, tied to the cupboard, and water everywhere. Fortunately, I went down pretty softly, so I'm okay, but it serves as a word of warning:

Caution: wearing handknit shawls can lead to embarrassing situations, bumped heads, and bruised egos. Use care while wearing.

Weekending

Hello, my friends! I hope you all had a wonderful, refreshing weekend. I made sure to get some cleaning done on Saturday so I could spend all day Sunday reading and knitting. I've been carrying around my Make Up Your Mind as lunch knitting, so I decided to work on my TPCT this weekend to change things up, and I'm absolutely loving how this yarn is knitting up.

Also, the plain stockinette is perfect for reading and knitting, and once I picked Ahab's Wife back up this weekend, I couldn't put it down! I found this book in a thrift store several months ago, read the first 10 chapters, and then stuck it in my current reading pile and buried it under other things. But the writing is so engaging, and Una is such a great character-I have just over 100 pages to go, and I'm definitely going to be sad to see it end.

Linking up with KCCO

Productivity and WIPs

Gosh, you guys, I am feeling so productive right now! My Que Sera is finished, I finished Nusa (pics to come!), and I'm well into summer knitting, which is all cropped and sleeveless and quick! It feels great to have my mojo back-as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I spent most of the first part of this year ill, and while I didn't stop knitting entirely, I certainly didn't knit as much as I usually like to.

My pile of WIPs is starting to get a bit more overfull than I usually like it. While I wasn't feeling well I let myself cast on new things willy-nilly, but it feels good to be getting some stuff wrapped up.

For now I'm trying to be good and get a lot of summer tops knit up. I've got a couple of other things planned, but I'm trying to stay mindful of the fact that I'm still not back up to peak knitting form yet, and I shouldn't cast on more than I can keep track of.

FO: Que Sera

Readers, I finished it. Overall, I'm thrilled with how this came out. I love the color, the stitch pattern, the puff-sleeved look I was able to get (yay!), and the most adorable buttons ever. It's a great length, the sleeves are perfect, the neckline is flattering. It's super comfortable, and hopefully I'll be able to get some serious wear out of this.

My only issue with it (and it's by no means a dealbreaker) is that the front gapes quite a bit when it's buttoned. I really only have myself to blame-I knew it was going to happen, and I ignored it, and I kept knitting as written instead of putting in more frequent buttonholes. On me, this cardigan really needs twice as many buttons as it has. Sigh. I think I'm going to try to get more of these buttons from Athena's (fingers crossed!) and make up some kind of afterthought buttonholes in between the real ones to get the kind of closure I need.

So that's a bit of a shame, because I think this would be great to be able to wear closed, but I'm definitely going to be wearing it open for now, and hopefully the next time I get into the city I'll be able to find more of the same buttons. Otherwise, this was great. It used up just over four skeins-I needed to break into a fifth just for the last row and bind-off of the second sleeve, and for the sleeve and shoulder seams, so it was just three yards that I needed.

Ravelry Page: Que Sera

Pattern: Que Sera by Kirsten Kapur

Yarn: Lion Brand Cotton-Ease, no color listed, but it's pink :)

Linking up with Yarn Along

Making Plans

After some consideration, I decided that I just don't have the quantity or variety of me-made garments to be comfortable wearing one every day, and in the end I decided not to do Me-Made May this year. It's not a total loss-I have some great pieces already, and I have some fantastic things on the needles, and I just need to work on figuring out how to make the kinds of things that I'm comfortable wearing every day, instead of just a couple of times a month.

On Saturday, I went fabric shopping with my mum, and I got quite the supply. I have a small fabric stash already, but these are all destined for specific projects. I'm currently at the uncomfortable point with sewing where my abstract skills are much higher than what I can actually make my hands do, which is really frustrating, but there's no way past it except to sew a lot.

Here I've got fabric for three dresses, a tank, and a cardigan. I have fabric for another couple of dresses already in my stash, and I've got a sub-stash of fabrics to make some tops. I had hoped to do more sewing during March and April, but that didn't happen for a few different reasons. I've made my main goal for the rest of spring and summer to get my technical skills closer to my abstract construction knowledge, and hopefully end up with some cute stuff!

Linking up with KCCO

WIP: Nusa

Since there's just a week left in the Nusa KAL, I thought it would be nice to check in. This has been going so quickly since I got to the stripes-the lace border is charming, and I did enjoy knitting it, but it's nice to have something almost mindless. It still requires a bit of focus, because this yarn really wants to split, and I really don't want it to, and the silk content really just wants to snag on my gross rough crone hands.

Up until I actually started the stripes, I was really nervous about my color combination. I love both of these colors a lot-I wanted colors that would work with a lot of my wardrobe, which these definitely will, but I wasn't sure how they'd look together. Fortunately, now that there's enough of the stripes to see how it's working out, I'm loving everything about these colors. There's just enough of a pirate-punk thing going on, which I was kind of going for, but didn't want to be overwhelming, and I think I totally nailed it.

This has been my lunch knitting for the past couple of weeks, and hopefully I'll be able to get a couple more stripes done this weekend, too. It's going to be a busy one-the high school is putting on Beauty and the Beast and the university is doing The Marriage of Figaro, so I'm going to be spending a whole lot of my weekend in auditoriums.

Que Sera, Sera Fini

Because I have little self-control, and you're my favorite accountability system, I will finish Que Sera this week. Look at it-a beautiful, pink sweater, lacking only half a sleeve, languishing in its project bag. There's no reason for this to still be on the needles (except for the 406 other projects I have on the needles).

So, I swear on all that is woolly that this sweater will be finished this week, and that seams will be sewn and buttons will be attached and blocking will happen, and if there's not an FO post next week, please publicly shame me. Because it's a shame that I was so enthusiastic for this project back in January, and now that I'm practically done I don't want to touch it. And it's literally the perfect weather for this sweater right now, and I want to wear it at least once before summer's here and it's constantly a billion degrees out.

Linking up with Yarn Along

I Have a Fever, and the Only Cure is More KALs

So...I appear to have been bitten by some kind of radioactive KAL bug. I really loved participating in the KALs for Great Northern, and I've had a blast with the Holla Knits KAL, and I'm well on track to finish my Nusa KAL cowl on time (two weeks left and I'm almost halfway through the stripes!), so clearly it's time for me to jump into two more.

I watched several bloggers do the Tops, Tanks & Tees KAL last year, and I thought it looked great, so I decided to jump in this year. After some deliberation, my project for this KAL is Make Up Your Mind in a couple of skeins of Colinette Jitterbug. I'm loving how it's knitting up so far, and since this project has been in my queue for years I'm really excited to finally be working on it.

I'm also jumping on board with The Perfect Crop Top KAL. I've loved seeing all of Teresa's crop tops on her Instagram, and I feel like I've been waiting for ages for this pattern to come out! I had planned to buy yarn for this at my retreat, but I didn't find anything that grabbed me, so when I got home I went stash diving and found these two perfect skeins of malabrigo sock that weren't already assigned to a project. So now I just have to get around to setting up my swift and winding these.

What about the rest of you? Anybody else participating in these or other warm-weather KALs?

Linking up with KCCO