Finally

Wow - it has been such a long time since I posted. There are lots of good reasons for it, but mostly, I just haven't had the energy.

The craft show is finally over. Actually it was the weekend before Thanksgiving and I am just now recovered. All in all, I did well. I made slightly more than last year, but had hoped for much better than I actually did. Given the economy, I'm not complaining. I took a couple of custom orders as well during the show and have finished up about half of them. I just need to get boxes from the post office and off they will go.

DH is finally into interview season. He has spent all of November and will spend the remainder of December preparing for board exams (blech) and interviewing for residency positions. Some have gone well, some not so much. I will be glad when it is all over. Living until March 19th has become the only main a big goal. That is the day that we find out where we will be living for the next 4 years.

DS is doing well and his prognosis continues to be good. I don't know that we will see any further improvement in his status, but where he is at will not hinder him tremendously, so I can't complain.

Baby Girl is active and, well, a night owl. We are down to 10 weeks and counting. Now that the craft show is over, I can finally get down to doing what I have been itching to do for months. Knit for this little one.

The last few nights have been spent swatching. And swatching. And swatching. I loathe swatching. I must have tried 4 different yarns from my stash before I finally found one that matched the gauge I wanted for the BSJ (Ravel it). Knowing that I am probably the last knitter on Ravely to try it, it has has been preying on my mind for quite a while. Normally garter stitch is not my favorite stitch, but when paired with a hand-painted yarn, I think the results are stunning.

This is Claudia's Handpaint in Fingering - Passion Fruit Colorway.

Yum!

There has been a slight bit of pooling, but it is better than I expected because the stitch count changes on just about every row. I will try to post a picture shortly, but I am stealth blogging at work

Hey you over there

Yes we are all still alive over here. No one has died, but we have had a close call and well, my husband, the med student, is either going to drive me to a slow, painful death or I will kill him myself.

Quickly.

As is normal around here, all of the knitting of late has been for sale. The ultimate in boring. No fun pictures to post, no good stories to tell. Just lots and lots of hats.

I have been sewing like crazy lately too, trying to crank out as many purses as possible in the next few weeks. I had to spend more than $100.00 this weekend because I was out of my favorite handles. I do have a new bag to post and I lovelovelove it. I almost hope it doesn't sell because I want it for myself!

Life has been particularly haried this last month. The pregnancy is progressing as it ought, no complications. I have my diabetes test this week which I'm not too worried about. Other than a lingering cold and some insomnia, I am doing okay. Tired, but okay.

DH is plugging along at school and October has had great hours during his radiology rotation. Today he started the interview marathon for residencies. This one is just a couple of hours away, so he will be back home by bedtime. Before long though, he will be making treks out to various parts of the mid-Atlantic and northeastern regions of the US. Yippeee! Thankfully, most of the programs are paying for the hotel stays, but we still have to come up with all of the airfare.

DS was horribly sick last month and ended up spending a week in the hospital, some of which was in the ICU. He is getting better, but there is a good chance he will never be 100% again. Or rather, his new 100% will be about 95% of his old self. On one hand, we are extremely thankful that he is doing so well and that we have access to an academic children's hospital locally. On the other, I am plagued by doubts and fears about his future. Most kids do recover fully, but it can take 3-6 months for all of the symptoms to resolve. The waiting is more stressful than I would have thought possible.

At Long Last

The other day, I took a day off of work to do some things that required that I sit around and wait and wait and wait. I managed to underestimate the amount of time that I would be spending do absolutely nothing and quickly ran out of things to keep Caleb and myself entertained. He was able to watch Star Wars Episode IV from start to finish and could have watched another, but the battery died in the portable DVD player.


I didn't pack nearly enough knitting, but did grab my Monkeys, figuring it would be the perfect opportunity to finish them off. And it was. I still love the pattern and will definately knit it again.




Yarn: Sundara's sock yarn. A gift from Shan at Half Soled Boots.
Pattern: Monkey by Cookie A.
Mods: I added a stitch to each side of the repeat to accomodate my wide ankles.


These socks didn't really take that long to make, but they suffered from a long hiatus. Until about a week or two ago, I had no energy to do anything. And my house shows it.


Lately, most of my knitting has been focused on stuff for sale which has been somewhat tedious, but fun. I am working steadily, but as always, I wonder if I will have enough inventory to fill my part of the booth. If I can keep up the pace, I should be okay.

Rain, rain go away

Please don't come again another day. It seems that the weather hasn't gotten much better now that the temperatures are a bit warmer. On Thursday we got 2 inches of rain. I shudder to think of how much snow that would have been.

Yesterday, I nearly gagged walking into work because of the smell of worms all over the parking lot. It was a hugely powerful smell. I won't describe it. Normally, it doesn't bother me at all. I wonder if it is just because it is the umpteenth day in a row without sun that I want to crawl into a cave and never come out. Or run away to Burmuda. Hmmm, or Brazil, or anywhere that has sunshine.

Today they are forecasting a rain/snow mix. Yipee.

I have actually done a wee bit of knitting for myself this week. I've been working on the Hedgerow Socks (ravelry link - sorry) in Regia Silk 4 ply in Red. It is really a tomato red and I love the color. The stitch pattern is deceptively simple, just a 4x2 ribbing where the center 2 stitches of the knit section are replaced with seed stitch. So, a 2 row repeat. But DAMN is it hard to remember that I need do the oppositite of what I see in that section. It is not TV knitting by any means, not if I want to actually look at the TV. My camera is MIA, so if I locate it, I will come back and drop in a picture.

Knitting a top down sock still makes me nervous, what if I don't have enough yarn, I sure as Hades don't want to have to rip back, nor do I want to pick up another ball of yarn. I have lots of sock yarn and don't need another partial ball laying around staring at me. I don't have anything that would coordinate that nicely either for heels and toes.

I've also been sewing. The sucess, however modest, at the show last weekend energized me to keep moving forward. I've finshed off four bags that went over really well at the show as well as the only custom order that I took. I'm just waiting for the check to arrive and it will go out in the mail.

Again, if I can find the camera, I will post pictures.

A very good day

I am so excited today. I met up with a local woman who makes handmade soaps and took 26 bars on consigment to sell with my washcloths. I am pretty excited, they smell great and are reasonably priced. I think I will make up a couple of quick drawstring sacks that can accomodate both and sell the sets for $10 bucks. To me it seems like a great end of school year gift for teachers.

And, today I love the mailman (or at least the service he provides) because this arrived at my door bringing yarny p0rn to my home. Thank you Carrie! She custom dyed this lovelyness and I don't think she could have gotten the colors any more perfectly. There is enough variation to provide interest, but not so much that it will obscure a pattern. Now, I just need to find the right pattern!

Winner and hiatus

Honestly, I do have one more contest winner to announce. For all 3 of my readers who have been around a while will remember (or not , it was a while ago) I offered up a prize to the 500th commentor. The 2 year anniversary contest pushed the comment counts sky high, at least for me. The luck lady is Wendy. Send me your address and a small prize will be winging its way to you. kmhanson74 at yahoo dot com

I will be taking a short break from blogging to focus on a few things that I need to acomplish in the next 5 weeks. I have a booth at a craft fair the first weekend in April and I need to prepare for it. Since most of the goodies are sewn, I won't bore you with the details. After the show I will do a large shop update with all of the product left from the shows.

Wish me luck!

And the Winner Is...

I haven't worked much more on the shawl, so you won't be getting a picture of that. Or really if you want one, just scroll down a bit. Sorry, I'm more than a bit lazy...


Sorry for not posting results yesterday. You know. Life. Got busy. Crummy lighting for picture taking, blahblahblah. However, SE Wisconsin is getting a tremendous snowfall today. So much so that at 4pm yesterday, they closed the factory for today. Whoo Hoo, it isn't often that you get a snow day as a grown up (unlike someone else I could mention).

So, without further delay, Elaine - send me your address (kmhanson74atyahoodotcom) and I will get your prize off to you. It is 2 skeins of Shelridge Farm sock yarn in a colorway that makes me think of spring with the color of new leaves budding on trees and the pretty pink of blossoms. I hope you like it!

I want to know where she works because I got several repeat commentors saying that they forgot to mention that Elaine, from their office, told them to enter the contest. Um - knitting friends at work - sign me up. Heck, we will be moving in a year and a half, and I get to influence that choice (at least a little)... I would so love to work someplace where people don't think I'm weird for knitting.

More prizes to come, so stop back again to see if you won anything.

I finished the first prototype and well there were a few bugs that I needed to work out. I will be trying a second one today. Once I get the final version made, I will put up a few pictures. I am hoping that someone might be interested in it.

95% Perspiration

I've been knitting a fair bit lately (at least for me) but I really need to shift my focus back to bagatelle.

I have some "what was I thinking" fabric in my stash that I'm planning on using to create some really simple totes to sell for under $10.00. Nothing fancy - I really just need to use up the fabric and not lose money at it. My thought is to market them as reusable grocery bags, something sturdy that can be machine washed and reused. Some may get a small zippered pocket depending on what I have that matches, but most probably won't in an effort to keep the price low.

A couple of new ideas are floating around my head and I am looking forward to creating a few prototypes. (Probably with the "what was I thinking" fabric.) At least one of them is knitting related and I would hope that I can sell them at one of the local yarn shops. It would be nice to have some steady income coming in.

I'm hoping to get the kinks worked out the the new design and then post them up on the shop site. I plan on doing an update as soon as I get a few more items finished.

The change to sewing will probably do me some good as the tendonitis in my wrist has been acting up lately. I think the weight of the shawl is the main culprit. Not that I will stop knitting it.

The contest winner will be posted soon!

Fronts 2.0

Finally. I reached the armhole shaping on the fronts. Again. I managed to slog through the tedium and have come out victorious. (Knock on wood – I wouldn’t want to incur the wrath of the knitting gods and get smacked down. Again.)





I’m really looking forward to getting to the sleeves. If nothing else, the change in color will be good.

But to be completely honest, this project will contain a whole bunch of firsts for me. I’ve never knit a sweater with a zipper before, so sewing one in will be, um, interesting. I’ve also never seamed a sweater before. I know, I know. I've knit at least 6 sweaters or vests. It’s crazy that I’ve always managed to get around it by working the piece in the round. But this time, I decided to bite the bullet and actually knit the dang thing as it was written.



I also finished the garterlac dishcloth and I love it. I think it will be great for using up some of the odds and ends that I have left over from various balls of cotton.



I think I'm hooked!

Coming up for air

This week has been so busy. I finished off 4 purses and 2 felted hats (which currently just need felting). I have been knitting the hats in the flat up to the decreases so that I can use my knitting machine to do the long stockinette portion of the hats. It does leave a seam but it seems to come out okay once it is felted.

I am loving these new bags. I had originally purchased the striped fabric as an exterior, but never really felt the love. It seems to be working perfectly as the lining for these suede-like bags (which, honestly, are too boring otherwise)

I'm really happy with how well the stripes line up on the slip pocket!

So far so good

I stopped to check out the sale at the Grainery this weekend and as of noonish on Saturday I had sold four bags from the main building. I’m not sure what sold from the other buildings because it wasn’t tied to their computer inventory. My sister had sold some aprons and my mom sold a Flying Geese pattern quilt for $250.00. Not to bad considering that there had only been a day and a half of sales. There are still 4 more days, so I am hoping to get at least $500.00 gross sales. I am being very good and resisting the urge to call up every hour to see if anything else has sold! I am guessing that this would be in very bad form and that she might not invite me back next year.

I also took a bunch of stuff up to LaCrosse for the Holiday Fair Sale in November. I had 18 hats ready and over 35 wash cloths. The woman who runs the Grainery should have some hand made soaps left over from the sale and she is willing to let me have them at cost. I think it would be a great pairing to have the cloths and the soaps in an old-fashioned washbasin. I think my mom even has an antique washboard… hmm. I am also planning on hanging a rope and pinning sample cloths to it. Now I am on the home stretch of finishing off some more bags and just a couple more hats.

I am officially declaring Bloglines Amnesty. If something momentous has happened and I haven’t commented, please accept my sincere apologies. In a generic, blanket statement, congrats on all FO, new babies (which I guess is the ultimate FO), pregnancies and birthdays. My condolences for all tinking and frogging that may have occurred as well as any illnesses.

Melancholy

Have you ever had the experience of having to go through something truly awful to get to something worth having?

One of my dearest friends is going through one of the stickiest things I can image; yet, I know that she will come out the other side happier than she has been in 10 years. I am so torn that she has this bad situation, but am relieved that she will be at peace again. I wish I could take a portion of her burden from her and make the upcoming weeks and months less painful. I am elated for her on one hand because the end result will be so positive, but my heart aches for the current moment she is in.

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I dropped off my bags this weekend for the sale that will be running for the next three weekends. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

So that's what happened

Apparently one can catch all sorts of nasty things on the internets from Rabbits and Sheeps. The scratchy throat that was discovered when I woke up this morning has blossomed into the glowing embers from depths of hell and I can tell that I am next to take up the baton in the relay race of Universal Snot Dispenser. Yipee freakin' Skippy. Just as I am about the head to my parents for the weekend.



Unfortunately this is a business trip to drop off my handbags before the start of a show next weekend. And I get to go again next weekend. At least the mileage will be deductible.



I know that I won't be around much (as if I had been here much recently anyway...). The boutique will be selling my bags for the next 3 weeks. Then there is a show in the middle of November. Then we are off to the races for the rest of the year with Caleb's 5th birthday, Thanksgiving in the same week and the mad dash for Christmas. (I can guarantee that I won't me making handmade items this year!)



I will post as regularly as I can. I am planning on hanging on for dear life until January when I will finally be able to catch my breath and do some knitting of my very own.

The deed is done

I must apologize to my faithful reader(s?). I have not died in a forgotten corner somewhere. Nor have I decided to stop blogging. Rather, life has bitten me in the ass yet again.

We finally made the decision to buy a new car. Normally, this would mean a different car that is somewhat newer than what we currently own. This time we decided to bite the bullet and get a brand-spankin' new vehicle. We drove a couple of different ones and decided on the Kia Rio. It's not fancy, but the price is right and the safety features and warranty are great for the price point. We got the silver one with the dark grey interior. I'm really happy with it so far.

Let's just say that the new car buying process sucked the will to live from me. Thankfully, I received a pick me up in my inbox today at lunch. My invite to Ravelry finally came. I fully expect that what little free time I have available between now and Christmas will evaporate before I know it. My username is HouseofWool.

I leave tomorrow to take a load of purses up to the first of 2 shows I have this fall. This one is in a boutique and runs 3 consecutive weekends. The woman who owns it is a friend of my mom's and she is trying to get the local paper to do a story on the sale focusing on my family because my mom and my sister are also selling items there as well.

I will try not to disappear for too long. Ciao for now.

Back Home

Basking in the California sun.

The boys came home on Friday and I surprised them at the airport. They had a great time.

I didn't think that this was allowed post 9/11.

Tomorrow morning we leave for a quick overnight camping expedition at a local state recreation area (I think this means it is like a state park, only smaller {and probably more poorly funded}). We picked this location specifically because it is close to home and should the mid-night heebee-jeebees require that we hightail it for home, then at least it is close by. It should be interesting as I don't camp. Hopefully the bottle of wine that we are bringing will help with that. I also plan on bringing some portable knitting to do while the boys fish.

I keep hoping that I will have an opportunity to get some knitting photographed. I have 15 knitted hats done up for the show in November and have about 30 bags that I am sending to the show in October. I will need to work on more so my inventory levels don't fall too much because I am also going to have my very first purse party in October as well.

First Day of School

What a week – Caleb started 4K on Tuesday and I took a vacation day so hubbo and I could see him off together. He seems to be settling in well. Look at the proud look on his face! I can hardly believe that he is old enough to be in the public school system already.

I also wanted to share this link that I found in the comments of another knit blog. Go ahead - I'll wait, it's worth it.

In other exciting (non-knitting) news, I will be selling bagatelle bags at an event with lots of local artisans near my hometown. My mom has sold quilts here before and has pretty good success. This will definitely be a good thing so that I can afford the supplies I need to ramp up inventory for the craft show in November. The two events are only a month apart, so there won’t be a lot of time to recover between them. Wish me lots of luck!

I am hoping this weekend to photograph all of my bags again so that I can post them the website with the new labels affixed. It takes so much time to get it all done... I find the worst part to be the color correction of the file. I am having a hard time finding an inexpensive light source that doesn't leave a noticeable cast in the photos.

I'm too stupid for my knitting

bonus points if you can identify the reference...


Lately, every project I touch seems to turn to crap. I have been trying to knit this bag and while the pattern in painfully simple, it would seem that I am not up to the challenge.


First, I cast on the wrong number of stitches. **rip**

Then, I knit about 3 inches and realized that I had knit a row with the incorrect decrease, so instead of a lovely zigzag meandering up the bag, I had a bit more zig than zag. **rip**

The third attempt was apparently not charmed either. I started again and got about 6 inches into it when I stopped and looked at it again. I realized that the bag was written for a much finer yarn than what I was using. It should have been about 8 inches wide or so, but I was coming in at nearly double that. **rip**


Needless to say, I put that project aside for a bit and finished up a dishcloth. A generally painless project.

#####

I had ordered some garment labels for my handbags a few weeks ago and they arrived late last week. I am now in the process of opening up a seam in each bag so that I can stitch on the labels. This depresses me more than you can guess. I have over 30 bags in inventory and the thought of having to redo something on each one of them makes me want to weep.


I am hoping that I can get something accomplished over the long weekend. As a bonus, Caleb and Eric are heading to California to visit my FIL and I get my very own vacation here at home! (This is infinitely more appealing than spending 4 days traveling.) They will be gone the weekend of the 15th, so I can actually accomplish something. No dinners to prepare, no games to play with clingy 4 year olds, nada!


I am also hoping to nail down a date for a purse party at a friend's home later this month. It will bring in a new influx of cash so I can afford a new digital camera.


What do you use to photograph your knitting? Do you use a macro function to capture stitch details? I would really prefer a point and shoot type (not SLR) digital camera at about $200 bucks. Recommendations anyone, or a good place to look online?

Contest time again

I've been thinking of running another contest to disguise my blatant trolling for comments. There will be yarny goodness for the 500th commenter.

I have updated the bagatelle website so that some of the bags I have in inventory can be purchased directly. I need to photograph more of them and put them up on the site. New fabrics are coming for fall as soon as I can put down the knitting to finish them up.

contests and bags

First - there are a plethora of contests being run out there right now. I am linking to a few of them (Thanks Heddy). Stop by and enter for a chance to win some scrumptous prizes!

1. Stop over to the Knitting Sutra. The prize is out of this world. I'm tempted not to send you, but if you tell her that you came from my blog, then I get an additional entry - yes, I am very self-serving thank you. She is looking for a sock pattern that will defy pooling. Check it out.

2. The ADD Knitter has a contest. Stop over and tell her about your charmed life.

3. Adrienne is running a contest asking for what you dislike most about knitting.




In other non-knitting news, I have updated my website. Let me know what you think. I realize that not all of the photographs are the greatest, but as of yet, I haven't got the extra cash to buy a new camera. I am always looking for ways to improve the site. At this point, I don't anticipate setting up e-commerce because it is a huge headache.

Once I have a bit more inventory, I will probably set up a page to buy the individual bags but have the transactions take place on etsy. As a consumer, how does this seem to you?

Thanks for the feedback.

New bags available

Yes, yes. I know with the name House of Wool, in theory at least, this is a knitting blog, but lately my fabric stash has grown at an astonishing rate. Sadly, I have not bought myself any yarn since last year. I have purchased some for bagatelle, but that's it...

Anyway - I have a couple of new bag designs available. As always, they are fully lined with a coordinating fabric. Both designs have a slip pocket and a zipper closure.

I still haven't finished the fix on the hippopotumus* socks. It turns out that there was one broken strand and the strand below that was just about to break also. I decided to fix both rows (genius, I know) so there wouldn't be further problems down the road. I clipped the strand that was nearly broken and slipped the stitches from the row below onto a dpn. With a short piece of yarn, I reknit about 8 stitches on the first of the rows. All that awaits me now is grafting the row where the strand had actually broken.

For some reason, I am not quite up to doing this. If it were just plain stockinette, it would be a snap. Cables, bring 'em on. Twisted stitches, ribbing and K2togtbl, however, leaves me a twittering mess. I've done the first stitch or two and while not great, it is better than I had expected. But then my liquid courage ran out and adding more to the mix did not seem prudent given the difficulty of the task ahead.

Until I get up the cajones to work on this, I am studiously ignoring the offending sock sitting next to the couch.

*Yes, I know that isn't the name, but it is what I call them in my head.