Finishitis

Usually this time of year I am suffering from Starteritis. This time, however, I have a rousing bout of Finishitis and that is a good thing.

For World Wide Knit in Public Day, several of the ladies in my knit group and I rode the DART rail and knit in public on trains, in a pub, on trolleys, at the Arts Fest, in the DMA, and just generally while walking about downtown and uptown Dallas. We also hit a yarn store I'd never been to before and found the "knitting lady" statue in downtown Dallas.

If you would like the full rundown of my day (up until the cab and the hooker..I was across the street waiting for the other trolley when Dawn and Tasha caught the cab), Dawn has done a much better recap than I could have. Melanie wrote another post that has some photos with me in them (I'm the one knitting in the turquoise shirt at the pub and on the trolley). She also has a photo of the knitting lady...we all had individual photos taken with her and found some good-natured folks to take a group pic.

Here is the knitting lady in all her glory. She is on Olive Street south of Ross. On the bench next to her are photos and a letter. It was hard to read the letter, what with the patina and all, but it appears that she is a grandma knitting for her latest grandchild. Her purse sits at her feet, a comb sticking out, her wallet visible. A knitting bag sits on the other side of her feet, with a cone of yarn protruding. I imagine the yarn used to reach her knitting, but that thin piece didn't survive.

When sitting next to her you can see that the knit stitches are not true to form. She does appear to be purling, but the stitches are not sculpted in the little V's and bumps familiar to knitters the world over. I wonder at that... someone cared enough about knitting to portray this pasttime, but did not portray the actual knitting correctly. It may have to do with how flexible the bronze strands were, since this appears to be done in bronze.

So anyway, I started a new project for the day because all of my current projects were either too big to lug around (sweaters and a shawl) or were on size 0 or 1 needles (socks). I didn't want to have to worry about dropping and picking up size 0 stitches while walking. So I cast on for the Dream Swatch Head Wrap with some leftover sock yarn. I think it will prove useful because I have a surprising number of shirts in these various colors. I knit about two feet of it on WWKIP Day, finished it that night (to about 30 inches) and blocked it today. It blocked out to about 45 inches long, which is much shorter than the original, but hopefully will still work.

I love it so much that I bought some yarn on WWKIP Day to do two more in different colors...in actual sport weight. I didn't have any variegated sport weight. Now I do. And the pattern is very easy to memorize and portable.

Also in the realm of finishing, I have finished the knitting on my Woodland Shawl. I just need to soak it and block it and I am betting it will be gorgeous. I hope so, anyway. But blocking will have to wait until I get some blocking wires because there is no way I am blocking this without them.

Two weekends ago, I decided to tackle the scrap/sew room. I had barely set foot in there for two months because the whole set-up wasn't working for me and it was a mess and it made me sad everytime I went in there. So I thought about it for a week and decided what needed to be moved where. It is wonderful now. I need to finish setting up the sewing area and take photos. I have been so excited, though, that I have been scrapping away and finish the Yellowstone 2005 album. I absolutely love this album...I love the photos. This was our first trip with our then brand-new digital Rebel XT. It's hard to choose pages to share out of the 34 pages I did, but here are a few of my favs (it stands to reason that most of my favorite photos got enlarged to 8x10):