Idyllic Chick

I've decided to get myself a facial piercing for my birthday (September 15th, but the annual celebration usually lasts from the 1st to the 30th.), but I'm not sure if I would look better with a labret or a Monroe. So I turn to you, Constant Reader. Click on each of those links to familiarize yourself with where these holes go, and click a couple of times on my little wedding photo up there in the left corner to get a good look at the shape of my face. My nose ring doesn't show very well in the wedding pic, so keep in mind that my left nostril is pierced, and I sometimes wear a big ole hoop in it. Then tell me what you think!

Should I get a Labret piercing or a Monroe?
	Labret
	Monroe
	All of the above
	Neither
Free polls from Pollhost.com

So I present to you a new photo down there in the bottom left hand corner. I saw it while walking down an alley in Edinburgh on my honeymoon. It kind of freaked me out. Startled me, even. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I never saw a whole lot of Twin Peaks. But I loved Carnivale.

On the Rogue again!
We're heading to Jacksonville today! We'll take Schroeder to the beach for the first time, and I'm knitting like a fiend. Here you can see the side cable of Rogue. I'm just starting the increases under the arms. The top of the kangaroo pocket is just under the tips of my needles. I love this sweater! I hope it'll fit...

I was off reading LimeNViolet’s message board this morning (While working diligently, I assure you!) and came across a conversation on sock yarn between LNV and Nadine, a woman who lives in Germany. Nadine brought up a nifty sounding new sock yarn from Opal (A German fiber company) inspired by the Viennese artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. It appears that this stuff is all the rage in Germany right now. Being all about nifty sounding all the rage sock yarn, I Googled this ‘Hundertwasser yarn’. After registering on the Opal site (Go ahead and do it! Just put blahblah in the blanks, because if you don’t know German, you don’t know what you are being asked for!) I was able to access a bunch of info on the yarn and the story behind it. All in German, of course. But there is no language boundary for pretty yarn, so I was able to read the photo at the bottom of this page very clearly: It’s the yarn that I won on our yarn crawl to Tampa! How cool is that?! I wasn’t ever able to find out anything about the yarn when I won it because of the language barrier, and I’m thrilled to now know its story.

Hundertwasser felt that 'Man is shielded from nature by three levels of insulation: cities, houses and clothes.' Lonely Planet says, ‘Hundertwasser tried to limit the effect of the first two through his architecture.’ He tried to limit the effect of the third by removing his clothes completely, or by just not paying much attention to them. Case in point: socks. He did not wear matching socks. When asked why his socks did not match, he would reply, ‘Why are yours the same?’ Following this philosophy, Opal’s Hundertwasser sock yarn, while self-patterning, has very long, unusual pattern repeats. Opal also encourages you to knit your socks up and down, or sideways. Pattern included! If you can knit from German instructions. And want a seam down the bottom of your foot. Hrmph.

With colorway names like Road to Socialism and Rainy Day on Love’s Waves (Or something like that. German, you know.), how could you not love this yarn?! It’s bright and happy and different and inspired. And completely fits in with my obsession with fraternal socks. So I’ll have to find something beautiful and special to make with my free Opal all the rage sock yarn! Yay!

Happy birthday Veto! You rock! Maj!

Had a lovely yarn crawl to Sarasota yesterday. My shoulders are a little achy from being a little squished in the back seat, but it was worth it to be cuddled up with Miz Jenn like that. I didn't bring home a whole lot: Two skeins of Manos del Uruguay, of which I've heard lovely things, with which to make the Mini Skull Tote. And two skeins of Bernat Cottontots for the Viking Chicken Hat. That will go to an undisclosed recipient. Because we miscalculated on a couple of yarn stores, we went to a Goodwill to buy sweaters to deconstruct for their fiber. I picked up a silk sweater in a butter yellow color. I went to work taking it apart last night, and it was unraveling very nicely, but the yarn wasn't... well... *yarny*. It was made up of four threads that weren't spun together. So instead of unraveling yarn, I was unraveling all this thread. It was pretty messy, so the sweater went into the trash. But I also got a new-to-me little J Crew project bag, perfect size for socks. And a soooooft black angora zip-up hoodie. The one will not be taken apart. I will wear it this winter to keep cozy warm!

On Thursday, Marlo flattered me by allowing me to attend her Advanced Drama class at Keystone Heights High School. She asked me to speak to the class about costume design. What a lovely time I had! Her students are adorable, and were very attentive. They were interesting and asked good questions. I'm looking forward to working with them on costuming for their upcoming production!

Yaaarrrnnn!

Let the yarning begin! But let me finish my drink first.

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Mobile Email from a Cingular Wireless Customer http://www.cingular.com

It's been a helluva week. My car broke down yesterday, Monty the elder dog ran off today, and I've been trying to get time in on my on-line driving course that I'm taking because of the speeding ticket I got a couple of weeks ago. On the up side, the car is fixed, Monty came home, and tomorrow I get to chat with a bunch of high schoolers about costuming. On Saturday comes a well-deserved major yarn and tiki bar crawl to Sarasota. I'm working on a big list of things to do around the house on Sunday, but we'll just see if much of that happens. I am dubious to say the least. But I *know* some knitting will get done. You just wait and see!

The sweater of pink fuzzy Hello Kitty puke is no more. The yarn has taken its previous shape as a long straight line and no longer composes half of the front of a sweater. This thing was turning out waaaay too wide. If I do it again, it will be with twenty fewer stitches on the needle. If I do it again, it will be with the colors called for in the pattern. If I do it again, it will be punk rock.

I love pink, and I adore this yarn, but this project is the epitome of, 'Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.' If you Google 'pink fuzzy sweater' as an image search, 90% of the results are for dog sweaters. I think that alone shows why I should have never started this project in the first place.

Now I'm off to knit up a swatch for no particular reason! But only because I don't have the correct length of circular needle needed for Rogue.

I finished Nautie yesterday, and printed up some info on nautiloids to go with him. I didn't name him, I'll let Jack do that. I hope he likes it. But who couldn't love a nautie, eh?

After finishing that up, I went to pick up the yarn and needles for Rogue off of my craft table (It only *appears* to be a dining room table. It's really just for crafts, you see.) with plans to cast on. I had to move the yarn for the big fluffy pink London Calling sweater, and before I knew what was happening I had 25 rows of cotton candy in my hands. This knitting stuff, it's like magic! No pics until I get the whole front done, but that shouldn't take but a couple of days. Especially with Stitch & Bitch happening today.

Today I also hope to get together with a high school teacher friend of mine. She's asked me to come chat with her drama students about costuming! I'm pretty excited about the chance to influence young, malleable minds.

I need to vacuum today. The dogs are getting dirty rolling on the carpet. Speaking of which, I nearly forgot to give you your daily dose of gratuitous cuteness:

My stash practically doubled yesterday with the arrival of 8 skeins of Cacade 220 in a green heather color. I'll cast on with this for Rogue sometime this weekend. I had a helluva time swatching up Rogue. I started with the suggested size 8 needles, and my gauge was coming up just 1/4 of a stitch too much per inch. That doesn't sound like much, but when considering the entire circumference of a sweater, that small difference can turn into a 2 1/2 inch difference in the size of the garment. So I moved to a smaller size needle for my second swatch. Ahem. You knitters will quickly recognize that I should have moved to a *larger* needle to get fewer stitches per inch. I didn't catch on until my fairly large swatch was all knit up. Doh! I was dubious about knitting up the next swatch on larger needles because I don't want the stitches to be any looser than they are on the first one. So I was considering making a larger size sweater than I normally would to make up for the gauge difference. The good news is that after blocking, my original swatch came up with the perfect gauge. Saves me from one more swatch, and I'm ready to cast on for Rogue! With the tightening of the gauge, the stitches aren't nearly as loose, either. Hoorah for Cascade! Hoorah for Rogue!

I've also been messing around with the pink London Calling sweater. I started on the suggested size 9 needles, but the stitches were too tight for me. I want to wear this as a baggy sweater over a fitted tank top or cami top. I moved waaay up to size 13 needle, and it's just right now. Much more diaphanous, wouldn't you say? But these huge needles make me feel like I'm knitting with those fat first-grader pencils. I keep expecting my knitting to come out looking like that brown-ish paper with the wide blue lines on it. I was pondering getting some pink crystal beads to dangle along the cast on edge of the sweater, but I'm not sure if the kind of beads I have in mind would be heavy enough to keep the stockinette edge from curling up. If not, the beads would just be lost in the curl, and I'd have wasted my time and money. Any thoughts on that, knitting ladies?

Oh! And yesterday! Nandy and her mom and I went to the local yarn store to load the two of them up on goodies. Last weekend after S&B I went to Nandy's mom's house and taught them the basics of knitting. Well, I taught Nandy. Turns our Cris is an old school knitter (She's a total pit-knitter! Cool! Incidentally, no photos of pit knitters come up on a Google image search. Perhaps you can be the first, Cris! We'll make Google knitting history!) and really just needed someone to hand her a couple of sticks and some yarn. It's very hard for me to leave a yarn store empty handed, so I grabbed a couple of skeins of Jawoll self striping sock yarn. It's almost got sparklies in it. Almost.

Oh hell. If I get one, I might as well get a whole wall full.

Well, not exactly finished. Technically it's off the needles, but I still need to add the ribbon and zipper. Which it needs very badly to keep the stockinette front from curling under. This was my first cable project, and my first sweater as well. There are many things that I'm not happy with, but I'm not going to hound myself about it since I learned a lot from this project. I'm only really knitting on
Nautie right now, so I need to find something to work on until the Rogue yarn arrives. I'm not up for casting on Chris' second sock, aka the baby hat, even though it is listed an on my needles project on the sidebar. Sometimes I lie. That's not true. Anyhoo, I've got a ton of beautiful pink fuzzy not-entire-acrylic yarn that Susan gave me. I'm thinking of casting on an oversized, loose sweater, perhaps London Calling from _Stitch and Bitch Nation_. Hrm, it calls for big-ass straight needles, and I got some of those from Susan, too. Ok, I'm going to go try it! Yay!

'Tis been a lovely day so far, and it looks to continue in that vein. C&I got up, had some coffee and a bagel, and headed outside to start conquering the yardwork. Since we got the mower, and since I'm working for a landscaping firm, I've gotten excited about fixing our yard up. It will take years to get it to the point that I'd like to see it, but since we plan on being here for close to forever, we've got the time.

Chris installed patio stones to make an area for the grill that he got for his birthday. Then he mowed everything except the very back 1/2 acre or so. I started preparing the first of many flower beds and got my potted plants in order. Put a couple into the ground, and dumped out some that had died. I've also done several loads of laundry. C got a lot more done than I did, but I feel that I've taken a bite out of the huge pie that I have in front of me. The next step is to weed the sidewalk area, weed next to the trailer, and transplant ferns from the swamp to the front of the trailer.

One thing I didn't do at all today is knit. I'll be knitting for hours tomorrow, so I'm not too disappointed, but I really do want to put Samus to bed. I only have to do the applied i-cord around the sleeves. And really, how long will that take me? So I hope to finish that tonight. Then I'll block it a bit (It's acrylic, so it won't do much, but it will at least even out the stitches some.), and continue my search for matching ribbon and a zipper for the front. The yarn for Rogue should be here on Wednesday, and I'd really like to have Samus out of my WIP bag when I start on Rogue.

So I'm off to knit! I hope you are all having a lovely weekend!

So I was cruising around on the new mower this evening (Yes, we have a lot of mowing to catch up on. Shutup.), thinking my thoughts, and singing loudly, when I realized that many of you constant readers haven't seen my land. My property. My home base. My Satellite of Love! So here's a linkie for you to check it out. It's a huge file. Be patient. Or just go get a drink or something. Come back when you get just the right amount of gin mixed in with that grape juice (Y'all drink some wacky shit, I tell you what.), and it'll be all loaded up.
http://idyllicchick.com/SATELLITEOFLOVE.pdf

The big orange rectangle in the middle represents our 5.4 acres of fun. Mentally adjust the orange lines so that they follow the dirt roads and fence lines to get our true property boundary. All of the trees on the east side are growing in our very own Florida swamp. The tree line that runs north to south shows exactly where the swamp line runs. And the rest of the area? All that blankness? Mowable. That's our freaking yard. I'm calling it three acres worth. Three acres worth of mowable love.

Gotta go clean the mower now before dinner is on the table.

Thanks to Martijn ten Napel for the html for the new template. I just changed the picture that he used to one more appropriate for me. I have hopes of switching out the pic every now and then like The Mistress of Snark does with her header. We'll see if that actually happens.

The picture I'm using now is St. Andrews castle in St. Andrews, Scotland. This is one of the many ruinous castles that C&I visited on our honeymoon. Yes, this is my way of slowing producing my long overdue honeymoon photo album for you without having to add all of the commentary at once. :p

At the end of my journal entry for the day this photo was taken, Chris wrote down a toast that we saw in the pub we ate at: May the roof above us never fall in, and we friends below never fall out. Cheers!