Today I found out just how badly I sing

Usually while doing chores, I'm known to don my MP3 player and sing along (mainly to Madonna, but there's an eclectic mix of other music on there too). This afternoon was spent cleaning my house, and as I was picking up the living room, I came across Sylvain's tuner for his bass. I took it into the spare bedroom where we keep his instruments and decided to turn it on to see what happens while I sang along to "Ray of Light". Yikes! There's a real reason that I go by "geoknitter" and not "geocrooner". Let's just say that I was out of tune far more than in tune.

Have you ever lost a ball or two of yarn? I'm completely bothered over the loss of two balls of Comfort yarn. Last weekend, Erin and I went to the Detroit-area Shop Hop. I was very good and only picked up two balls of Comfort (one green and one brown) with the thought of using them with two balls of black Comfort that I already had to make several chemo caps for a friend. However, I can't seem to find the black skeins anywhere. I'm quite embarrassed to say that the photo you see is my yarn stash. Thankfully, we have a 4-bedroom house, so the yarn stash can hide in a spare room that isn't used for much else. So, if you're bored and feel like playing a little "I spy", please let me know if you happen to notice any balls of Comfort in the photo...

Needless to say, I couldn't wait for those two balls to surface, and have decided to make as many hats as I can in brown with green stripe and green with brown stripe, etc. The pattern I'm using is called "The Boyfriend Hat" (though, in this case, it's for a friend of Chuck's). I saw someone on Ravelry had knit this hat and ended up decreasing the CO number from 100 to 90; I totally agree with her b/c I started out following the pattern, but ended up having to start over with fewer stitches too since it was very wide. I followed the rest of the pattern to the T, and ended up with a hat that was far too short. Oh well. The Guild's hat drive is coming up in a few weeks anyways, so this hat'll go towards that event. But damn! Now, I'm rushed to see how many hats I can squeeze out over the next four days. Why, oh why do I have these good ideas, but not enough time to pull them off? At any rate, I started a second hat with the intent of knitting it for 6.5" before beginning to decrease, rather than for 5.5" as the pattern instructs, but I wanted to try out the invisible cast-on method from the Fall 2008 issue of Interweave Knits. I failed twice at this, then decided to stop by Schuler's for the third Sunday Charity Knitting the Guild informally holds in the cafe there for help. Sarah helped me figure out how many stitches I really needed [36] (b/c I mis-calculated since the instructions were for single- or double-rib and the hat is worked in K3, P2 rib; Thanks Sarah!). At any rate, I forced the third pick-up in between the two that were supposed to be worked and that resulted in a really taught-feeling CO row. Yuck! I'm not giving up on it though b/c I think it would give this hat a cool look and make those in the know wonder "how did she do that?" if they looked closely at it. I think the problem is that I used the project needle size (#8) and should use a larger needle. So, I'm going to try again tonight and, hopefully, will be able to report back some success!



I'm nearly done with shawl #3 (Evening in Eden) and put shawl #2 (Clapotis) on the blocking board. Also, I couldn't find my pair of Pop-up Paws from last winter and am working on a new pair for this winter, but that's going slower than ever. Naturally, this project was just too plain and needed to be made as complicated as possible, so I decided to mix in some color using scrap yarn from my last fair isle sweater. I had one glove well on its way a while ago, but quit working on it by the time I got to the pop-over top. So, I finished that part up and started the second glove. While I was working on that, I got a little fed up with the tangled mess that my colors were quickly becoming and decided to sew-in ends that were left from the first glove's top, but found a large loop of orange just hanging out in the top (!). So, I ended up tearing that part back, but then couldn't find my size 6 double points (b/c the circulars were tied up with the second glove). Why doesn't it seem as though I have enough pairs of needles?!?