SNB.

You’ll have to forgive me for my lack of posts. I was doing so well with NaBloPoMo, until my work life exploded in my face. So…sorry!

Sunday night I met with my Stitch n’ Bitch group, and it occurred to me that my SNB girls deserve their very own entry. We meet once a month, most months. The thing I’ve noticed is that these meetings do two things:

• They keep me interested and motivated in my current projects.
• They are good for my soul.

There are just the three of us that have met once a month over the last year and a half. What is great about our get togethers is that the SNB gals are far enough removed from my everyday life that I feel pretty free - if I need to talk about my family or my job, it’s not like they know the people I’m talking about really well. They also do a great job of giving me some perspective. We are all in different life spots, too, so a fresh approach or a veteran one does me wonders.

From a knitting perspective, I’ve noticed that I want to show progress on my projects every month. I want to learn new techniques. I want to share. This keeps me motivated. We compare notes, patterns and knitting books. I think our collective skills have improved because we muddle through tricky patterns together. Projects that would have been set aside have new life.

The knitting pushed our relationships along at the beginning. Now the knitting gives us a constant reason to take time out to see each other. People giggle when I tell them I get together with some friends to knit. Maybe it sounds funny, but you’d be amazed at how social it is..the bitching, asking for help, laughing, talking about whatever we need to…all with some knitting needles in our hands.

Like I said, it’s good for my soul.

-dk

Loopy.

I made a lot of progress on the washcloth over the weekend. The boys played with Play*Doh for about an hour. I heart Play*Doh. Not just because of its squishy goodness, but because they are actually engaged for more than 27 seconds. I sat at the table and worked on Mister Lion:

The loops take a loooooooooooong time. Long time. To create them, you have to knit the same stitch twice, create a loop, make a new stitch and pull the loops over the new stitches you created. Are you exhausted yet? Because I am.

-dk

You messed up. So who cares?

I make mistakes all the time in my knitting. All. The. Time. Purling when I should have knit, losing track of the number of rows…There are people out there that might lose their shit over this. I am not one of them.

I read on another blog or in a knitting book to just “knit through it.” I love this concept. If you make a mistake that will not be noticed by anyone but yourself, knit through it. Make some adjustments in the next few rows. Just keep moving. Those little flaws will be seen by no one. In fact, most people will still marvel at your skillzzz. They don’t care if you have a tiny little hole where you did a yarn over when you weren’t supposed to or there’s a purl bump in your stockinette. Only you see it and pick at it, stress about it…so just let it go, Grasshopper. It is an insignificant thing.

On the flip side of knitting through something, I think it takes awhile to be confident enough in your knitting to frog it back to fix a mistake. PURPOSELY drop a stitch to fix something you missed a few rows before. I remember the first time I did this - I was slightly terrified of dropping the stitch and ruining hours upon hours of work. Then I realized that it was JUST KNITTING. Just knitting. And almost everything could be fixed, even if it meant starting from scratch.

I think I need to apply these two concepts to my life a little more often. I have a tendency to stress over small mistakes made, particularly at work, to the point of obsessiveness. I disagreed with my boss today and felt like it wasn’t received well (I wasn’t disrespectful, we just disagreed). I replayed the moment over and over and over again…by the end of the day I felt pretty confident I would be fired. Because I disagreed that all sentences in web copy should be short. Because that is a thing to be fired over. Um, I’m thinking I just need to knit through it…you know, it was a little bump. We disagreed. The reality is that I am the only one participant that remembered or cared about that conversation even 20 minutes after it was over. My boss saw it as a difference of opinion. But *I* have to get to the point where I realize that these are tiny things - that my contributions to my company far outweigh anything else. And that hopefully people are more dazzled by rights than grumbling about my wrongs.

Or maybe I get fired tomorrow over sentence length. Eh, at least I’ll have more time to knit. And holy crap, watch Beverly Hills, 9010 (Soap Net! Every day!)

-dk

Want to touch my monkey?

You know you want to….

Sewed the eyes on this little beee-yotch tonight. He looks spectacular. The boys both want one, so looks like I’m going to be working on some more monkeys.

He turned out pretty well. I had to improvise sewing up his hiney, because the pattern wasn’t too specific about it. It also took more than one skein of yarn for me. I went with 5/8 buttons, too, instead of 3/4 buttons. No reason…I just liked ‘em that way.

I’m still trying to decide if he needs a scarf. I’m not sure it’s worth the extra effort, but we’ll see. I’m thinking about ordering some monkey wrapping paper for him. I’d like to cover a box with this wrapping paper. I think is funky and fun…plus my coworker says she has a thing for monkeys. Well really. who doesn’t?

-dk

PS - If you don’t recognize Dieter from SNL up there, well, you probably just shouldn’t be here. That’s how I like to think of Mike Meyers…pre-Shrek, pre guru of love or whatever the hell that schlock is that he’s in right now…c’mon Mike! You’re better than that!

Edited: I fiddled a bit with the pictures. The lighting was pretty poor when I took these…

That just about sums me up.

Someone came to my blog today through the search engine terms “x-rated knitting needles.” Do you even understand how that made me feel?

PROUD, people. PROUD.

-dk