The Hurrier I Go . . .

You know the rest.  Spring is a madhouse in my world and I have, as you may have noticed, begun to neglect certain things.  Which is about all I'm going to say to explain the three month gap in blog posts around here.

Also, tonight is one of the first nights I've had without something on the schedule, and you can bet your buttons that I'm not about to spend it futzing around with a long and newsy blog post. No Sir, not me.  Instead, I will spend it working, which I failed entirely to do during normal work hours, hence the unfortunate schedule.

Before I go, though, I have to let you know that I am now a world famous knitter of hats.

Hat,  really, not hats.

And I suppose that, strictly speaking, I'm not actually world famous.  Or any kind of famous, if you insist on using the word in it's traditional, dictionary-definition sense.

But I did get to knit a hat for a book that is about to take the knitting world by storm, which is just about the same and totally counts as a way cool experience, right?

Here is my hat:

I got the gig two years ago through the lovely people at my local yarn shop, which sponsored a weekend  get-together for members of the Ravelry group associated with its on-line persona, Dizzy Sheep (check out my bumper-crop of links-- I am so tech-savvy!).  Master knitter Anne Berk joined us at the weekend and gave an introductory seminar on her technique for knitting intarsia motifs in the round.  This blew our minds.  Those of us who managed to recover from the shock of what she was teaching us (I almost didn't make it--I'm pretty sure I spent a while unable to do anything other than shake my head and blibber "that is sooooo cool") got to choose a pattern and some yarn and knit a project that would -- get this -- BE INCLUDED IN THE BOOK.  An actual real printed book with pages and everything. This doesn't happen to me very often, so I hopped on the yarnwagon and now my little hat, along with a number of other items knit by real live regular knitters, is going to make an appearance in  Annetarsia Knits (that's the Amazon link; if you really want to have fun, try this one, which goes to Ravelry and lets you take a peek at the different patterns).

Years ago I had an unfortunate experience with intarsia in the form of an afghan featuring little scottie dogs. I thought it had ruined intarsia for me, but it turns out there is a lot to be done with the technique that doesn't involve excessively cute animals and a bajillion bobbins of yarn tangling up your needles.  Such as a multi-color lace hat that does not need to be seamed and involves no gauge-restricting stranding.  In addition to the hat and the instructions for the techniques, the book contains patterns for socks, shawls, and a host of other goodies. Not all the patterns in the book are worked in the round and they range in size from coaster-sized things to --no lie-- an entire skirt/top affair.

And now I had better get back to work.  To tide you over until the next post, I'll leave you with a picture of my almost-but-not-quite finished Color Affection.



When people tell you that the end of this shawl takes forever, you should believe them and possibly choose a different project and save yourself years of garter stitch.  Saturday morning I owed 2.5 repeats (30 rows) and two inches of border on this shawl.  15 hours of knitting later, I still owe 3 rows and a bind-off.  I can only hope to have this finished by the end of the week, in which case I might just celebrate by writing a second blog post for this month.  Wahoo.

fyi:  these are not my pictures.  You can tell from the clarity and beauty of them-- and also from the fact that they are labeled with the book name and feature a person I have never before seen in my life, but who is clearly a real live model--that they were professionally taken for the purpose of the book. The photographer is Bill Berk, and I'm pretty sure that he didn't just pop a hat on one of his kids and fire away with his iPhone, as some of us are wont to do.