I’m attempting to smile with my eyes btw.

Although, to be fair, I do have pretty large hands for a woman. Man-hands, practically.

I made a necklace for my Screwdriver. :-)

Beautifully handmade by Trog at ecigscrewdriver.com. It’s a personal vaporizer, aka electronic cigarette. I’m not getting baked, just being a dork.

Hello from Posterous, by the way!

I got my new e-cig from Phil at e-smokeytreats.com. He’s a one-man three-person operation — slim selection but only the good stuff. Phenomenal customer service too, and super-speedy delivery.

Please sign this petition to keep e-cigs legal and available!

I used Patons Decor yarn in the Secret Garden variegated colorway. Mostly acrylic, but whatever.

Using Cascade Cash Vero DK yarn, in their Denim colorway.

One mitt completed.

‘Bout a third of the way through gauntlet #2.

I’m doing the pattern Pretty in Pink by Amanda Reed. Not in pink of course, hence the name “Pretty In Tank”. I know it looks like I twisted that join, but I didn’t, it’s just the yarn being unruly.

Only 13 inches of K3/P2 ribbing to go! Might take awhile… :-)

It just baffles me how they can dye the yarn to make these magical stripes. It would make more sense to me if they knew how wide the knitted item would be, but they don’t. It’s just plain magic.

Somebody (JJ?) please tell me this is getting bigger. Because I’m just knitting and knitting and knitting and I could swear the damn thing is maintaining exactly the same size no matter how much I knit. Stephanie Pearl-McPhee talks about this "knitter’s black hole" phenomenon in her Casts On book. She says you need to knit as fast as you can in order to reach escape velocity, to get out of that black hole. Like, "I think I can, I think I can…"

It is not getting bigger, my hand is shrinking! Okay, it’s bigger. 10 inches now… I’m going to do another inch or two and then start on the boobie section.

Finally cleared the ribbing section! Boobies ahead.

Finally bound off the neckline and started the first strap. I had to deviate from the pattern a lot… or rather the pattern had errors which caused me to screw up a long time ago, so I had to do some stuff later on to try and compensate. I have serious doubts that thing is going to be wearable, much less flattering. But it was a free pattern, whaddaya want.

I still have to sew the straps onto the back, but I’m done with the knitting! And it is wearable… although, you can’t really wear a bra with it, unless you have the kind with the see-through straps. But I’m going to skip the bra and think of it as a handmade thermal undershirt. :-) The whole point was to get over my trepidation about knitting a full-size garment, and I’ve definitely done that. Having a semi-wearable item now is uhh… probably mostly coincidence, ha ha.

I finished my first actual garment, yayyyy!!! It came out pretty alright… I mean it doesn’t NOT fit me, so I’m quite pleased. ;-) Not that I would wear a hoochie-mama top like this by itself — I’ll put some kind of shrug or shirt-jacket or something over it, but for a little under-top it’s not half bad!

I’m all hunched over trying to get the camera pointed at the mirror pointed at my back… but you get the idea. I just wanted you to see how I did the straps — slightly angled, not quite a V-shape but not straight up and down either.

Looks like I got my legs amputated. :-o Okay, enough with the self-portraits. Of me in my BRAND NEW EXPERTLY HAND-KNITTED TOP!! That is all.

There are a few flaws in my knitting that I’m well aware of, which I’m not going to discuss here. (Any more.) Experienced sock knitters may notice those flaws right away just looking at this picture… I’d appreciate it if they’d just shut it, for now, and notice the things that aren’t screwy-looking. And praise my mad newbie sockmaking skillz.

I’m calling them “Actual Socks” because this is my first REAL pair of socks — not teeny toddler socks, but actual adult socks for myself.

I started out thinking I was doing the "Berry Season" pattern out of the book "2-at-a-time Socks" by Melissa Morgan-Oakes. But I veered off from the get-go and now I think I’m just going to wing it.

The thing was, I learned a new cast-on method, Norwegian. And it makes for such a pretty border that I decided to go ahead and use it for this project. BUT, the pattern calls for a little curl of stockinette around the top. And if you have a pretty border you want it to lay flat, not curl around itself, right? So I have to do something else. Some ribbing I guess. Maybe it’ll turn into a crew sock instead of an anklet.

The yarn, btw, is absolutely yummy to work with. Pure merino, sooo soft and fluffy compared to anything else I’ve worked with. And the color, omg — my cameraphone won’t do it justice. It reminds me of that Brachs candy my grandma used to scoop up at the Walgreen’s when I was a kid… the 3-color rectangular chewies in pink (coconut?) caramel and "chocolate". She kept ‘em in a jar and we were allowed one or two maybe. :-)

Cuffs pretty much done. I had a couple scares there — wanted to fix a twisted stitch I’d noticed, messed it up, had to get out the DPNs and crochet hook.. Dropped the offending stitch down, like 4 rows down — I’m getting pretty good at fixing ONE stitch in the middle of the fabric without unraveling the whole thing! Not that I’m afraid of ripping back, but why do that if you don’t have to? But then of course you have to get everything reassembled in the proper order onto the one circular needle. It’s good times. But I know how to do that too, now. :-)

I haven’t worked on these for like a month. Messed them up using the Magic Loop 2-at-a-time method, frogged and restarted, then got super annoyed at the curly frogged yarn, and messed up again. But goddammit I really want these socks. So I’ve decided I need to at least get them started separately on DPNs — then when the cuffs are firmly established maybe I can think about switching over to Magic Loop. Although, I’m still not convinced it’s worth the trouble, dealing with two yarn-balls at once.

These are coming out ginormous even for me. (I have really big feet.) I might have to send them to my dad, who wears 13 double-E. Dunno if he’d wear red squooshy merino bed-socks though. Hee!

I think these might work out after all! That stitch pattern is really easy and fun to do ‘cuz a full quarter of the stitches are slipped. Pretty too.

As you can see I’m still on — or rather back to — the double-pointed needles. After the ribbing I tried a round or two on a 47" circular but immediately went running back to the DPs. Magic Loop is just not for me at this point. Anyway. Do you see two socks that hopefully look exactly alike? Well, the idea of Second Sock Syndrome is so frightening to me that I went out and bought another set of matching DPNs so I keep doing these "two at a time" — just the way I would using Magic Loop, one round on Sock A and one on Sock B, but without all the yarn-wrangling and cable-yanking. Works great as long as I keep track of where I’m at in the big "circle". That’s never a problem with Magic Loop.

Ready to start the heel flaps…

Halfway through the heel flap. Now THAT’S a chain selvage. I’m being ultra careful to keep it nice and neat this time. When I did the toddler socks before, and it came time to pick up stitches for the gusset, the edges were a total mess and I had to just eyeball it. But now I’ll know exactly where to stick it! ;-)

Heel flaps are done. I would say I’m halfway finished, but my feet are 65 inches long. ;-)

Gusset decreases are done, now I’m just filling out the instep & sole. I messed up the pattern a little, over the top of the foot at the point where the gusset starts. I guess I got the order wrong ‘cuz there’s a jog there on both socks. Hardly noticeable though.

Sock A is done! And I’m just past the heel on its mate. It fits really well, although I’m not crazy about a couple of things the pattern had me do… the toe is pointier than I’d like, and I’m not a fan of the loose-ish cuff. But I love how soft it is, and it really doesn’t need to be that snug anyway since it’s a bed/house sock.

I can’t believe they’re done. They took for-freakin’-ever… okay a month. Only a couple of weeks if you don’t count the times I frogged ‘em and started over.

I guess this is my first actual clothing item for myself… no, socks are more an accessory aren’t they? Like a hat or a scarf or a pair of mittens? So I guess Actual Garment is the next thing in the queue. Still, I’m pretty proud of myself. I hope this is the first pair of many many more. All of them from here on out, actually. Seriously, I never want to buy another sock now that I know how to make them to fit my very own humongous feet! :-)

Damn, these feel good. It’s Mission Falls 136 Merino Superwash yarn, in the "Wildflower" colorway. The pattern is called Berry Season, out of the book "2-at-a-Time Socks" by Melissa Morgan-Oakes. I didn’t do these on Magic Loop though, I used DPNs.

Another Elizabeth Zimmermann practice cap, this time as a gauge swatch for this yarn I have a ton of, Lion Brand Fishermen’s Wool. It’s just brown, so it’s kinda like knitting with my own hair. I have some cream-colored yarn of the same variety to use for the color-pattern work.

Chuggin’ along…

That last pattern was an accident. I was trying to make just a zigzag line but the top row got offset. I guess it doesn’t matter what you do, it’ll make SOME kind of pattern as long as you keep repeating it!

If this looks exactly the same as the last picture, GOOD. Because I found a mistake I couldn’t live with, and had to rip it back about an inch. I thought about fixing the zigzag I messed up before, but I kinda liked it so I just did it again.

Normally I wouldn’t have to rip out a whole section just to fix one twisted stitch or whatever, but this was worse than that. I had some, uh… unintentional short rows in there. You can’t fix that by dropping a stitch or two down. But who cares, it only took a half-hour to fix.

The completed hat.

Yep, I felted it. Kind of on purpose and kind of not… I was experimenting with how much abuse it would take, and it immediately failed the washing-machine test. Oh well, at least I learned a lesson about this yarn! I can’t really have fabric items in my house that aren’t machine-washable at the very least. They just don’t belong here. They need to march themselves next door, or anyplace but here.

What do you think. Do I look smarter? More likely I look like I’ve been miserable with a cold lately, because I have.

My band: Greg Walker (electric guitar), Ryan Hembrey (electric bass)

Photo by Ryan Hembrey

At Sala Apolo
Nou de la Rambla 113, Barcelona 08004, Spain

Photos by Dani

Photo by Andy Aldridge

Pictures by magnetic magpie…

Photo by Bob Stuart