Its Britney bitch… No, really, its just me – Yarn Day!!

Having lots of ideas about things and stuff to blog about and not having enough time to do it sucks ... Since I started my classes I hardly have any time to knit a few rows per day, I'm always tired (in fact yesterday I fell asleep while knitting, it was a bit depressing) ... Two days after starting classes I delivered Concordia to its rightful owner.... According to my sources, Concordia was an epic hit ... The truth be told, I was a bit wary of giving away the scarf, taking into account the titanic amount of curses and bad mojo that I put into it while I finished the scarf ... So far it hasn’t come alive and attempted to devour the souls of nearby humans or set fire to itself out of its own free will, so I dare to assume that everything is cool with the bloody scarf...

In other news, I bought yarn online! Nothing fancy, in fact I ordered at a national company that apart from selling skeins of yarn in varying weights, they also sell yarn in cones, mainly for machine knitting products, the minimum amount of yarn they sell is 250 grams ... While I have not a damn idea of what to do with them, I think they look pretty good as avant garde decoration, and I’m sure I'll think of something… Or not…

Now,  keeping up with  the “Yarn Porn” tradition  that  I’ve read in several blogs,  I’ll upload some pictures of the yarn I bought...

First we have a mysterious and sexy 260 grams/300 meters cone of something that could as well be acrylic or cotton, frankly I'm not sure, in a colorway Called "Caribe"/ “Caribbean” ...

The combination of colors is truly delicious ... while winding the yarn into cakes that I realized that is made of thin strands of yarn that are quite soft (a plus), but also note that there is a thin thread of silver plastic that adds a very luxurious touch to the yarn, but it’ll be a pain in the ass when working with it ...Because it came in a cone, this yarn doesn’t bring a recommended needle size, however, it appears that a 4mm needles (US 6), or perhaps A 4.5mm (US 7) will create a fairly consistent fabric ...

Secondly we have 3 skeins of a yarn called ”Caricia”/ "Caress", its an acrylic, thinner than the fingering weight that I have in my stash...

 it feels a little rustic on the skein, but once knitted, the yarn feels pretty smooth. I bought two skeins of magenta and one in brown, each one of them has 50 grams and 212 meters, recommended needle size is #3.5...

I don't know why I arranged them like that... probably I'm just weird...

Finally there is something I’ve wanted to play with since I started knitting, This something is fucking hard to get in my country, I mean, obviously, to wool :

I bought a cone of 250 grams/254 meters of "Italian wool". Now, as I have never knitted with wool I'm not really sure if it's really wool, fuck, did I got scammed? and I don’t have the slightest idea of what species of sheep it belongs this supposed wool…

This thing is pretty big... it was bigger than my cat lol

However it is quite warm, without making my hands sweat, what does happens with acrylics, its really soft, with some sort of whitish halo around all the strand of yarn, and apparently it seems to be a single of wool plied with a thin thread of unknown composition that appears to play mainly a structural function... As with the cone of “Caribe” yarn, it didn’t bring a recommended needle size, but it creates a pretty nice fabric with 5mm (US 8?) needles ....

This ball/cake took me nearly 3 hours to wind up ( by hand)... the final result is almost as big as a small pumpkin

As I said before, I have no idea what to do with some of this yarns (I’ve already used the brown yarn “Caricia” held double to crochet a part of and amigurumi, it looked pretty well, pics coming soon), however I have some ideas of what I could make: the mysterious "Italian Wool" could become a nice pair of  leg warmers for my mom (her knees don’t get along with cold weather) or maybe I could make a bag and then felt it… The “Caribe” yarn is practically screaming "I wanna be a scarf bitch!!" But right now I’m really sick of scarves (unless it a Seafoam scarf), so maybe I could knit it into a hat or a bunch of headbands ... decisions, decisions...

Me & My Scarf… A.k.a “Please just stop stinking so bad!!!!!”

 It all started earlier this year in March, when a friend asked me to knit a scarf for his mom, the only condition was that it had to be navy blue and white ... I started thinking about several options that would look good in those colors, maybe Vertigo? I've never done mosaic knitting (In those days I haven’t tried many things…) but didn't seem so difficult. While searching the Ravelry database for ideas I found Concordia. It was love at first sight, it looked so incredibly complex, so elegant, so exquisite that I knew I had to knit it no matter how complicated it were, I was going to knit that scarf even if I died in the process.

A glimpse at the instructions and cable charts and I knew I would probably die halfway, I was not used to reading charts and this one looked particularly difficult ... I got scared, I felt stupid for even thinking I could do something like that with virtually no experience, so I started to procratinate, until I felt embarrassed for taking so long with the scarf ... Even though I didn’t feel prepared for the epic magnificence that Concordia was, I had made ​​a promise and fulfill was the most appropriate thing to do. So I bought the yarn, the needles and printed the pattern ... After a few rows, I felt much more confident, and I could actually visualize the little bastard done ... Everything was beautiful, from the incredible braided cast on

 that oftroy explains here,

to the exquisite dark blue yarn ...

Everything was going well until it was time to change color, it was then that I realized the following:

• The white yarn was the personification of everything that anyone could hate on a yarn: it was rough, nothing soft or elastic and it squealed
• I had less white yarn than blue, and supposedly the white part would be the longest
• The white gets dirty very very easily ...

Due to the epic hate I proffesed to the white yarn my progress stopped, I didnt felt motivated to continue at all, even though I knew that the faster I got done the white section the scarf would be finished faster ... I started other projects , and only got 5 or 6 rows done per day ... at that pace it would be december and it wouldn’ be done yet ... But then, something amazing happened: I started this blog and I witnessed and what object of what I’ll call from now on "The Power of the Blog" ... My other entry related to Concordia was made on August 19, on August 24 the bitch was finished (with matching edges by the way), I just needed to give it a light wash and ironing to stretch the edges (I had given up trying to stretch it over 20 cm) and make a fringe ... This is what happened:

1-wash the scarf a first time, only with water, just in case that the soap would do something horrible to the scarf
2 - I do all the goddamn process of putting on a clean dry towel, roll up and step on it 3 times
3-I put the scarf on my ironing board and then go looking for a clean cloth to put over the scarf while ironing the edges
4 - Return with the cloth to discover that the ironing board has inexplicably stained the white part of Concordia with a nasty looking brown color.
5- I panic and I go back to washing the blasted scarf… the stains disappear ...
6 - I go looking for another dry towel to place between the ironing board and the scarf ... As I go lookin the towel I put the freshly washed scarf ON the ironing board.
7 - I curse miself with intensity
8- I managed to wash again the thing, put it on the clean towel and under the wet cloth and start ironing (it was like a sandwhich)
9-Once I’m done ironing the scarf is still slightly damp so I decide to put it out all night to dry.
10 - The next day I pick up the scarf, only to find that smells like rancid shit and that nothing would make me happier than burning it.
11-I go back to washing, this time with some disinfectant, and dry it with towels, leave outside, this time hanging it in a rather creative way and sit to knit for a while

Thats my balcony, and all of my clothes hanging thingies

12 - It's raining, raining as if the whole damn water of the Orinoco had decided to fall on my house

How could I not think it was going to rain... Look at the fucking sky!!
Its almost purple and its only 2:00pm

13 - Concordia gets wet (duh)
14 - repeat points 10 & 11 again, this time using detergent, bleach, hot water and drying it in the washer while I curse loudly
15 - The scarf dries successfully. I dance a little.
16 - I put the fringes and keep it in a bag so that nothing bad happens until the day that the delivery (September 12)




The End :P

Despite the disgusting amount of problems this project had, I'm really happy with the results ... and even happier to have dared to make this scarf ... Now I feel that all the other cables in the world are my bitches...

Ohh by the way in this pic, do you see those little red hairs in the lower edge? thats were I cast of with red yarn and hen grafted it together to have matching edges... I tried to do a two color sewn cast on... but it didn't look the way I wanted...

Again Dude??

Blogger keeps screwing with me ... I used the days between the times blogger let me in to think about the entries I had prepared ... I decided that several of them weren’t really relevant to the world, that is, who (if anyone reads this, which I doubt) might be interested in my personal story about the immense shit that Irene has been / was , although my country is in the opposite direction Irene were Irene is/was headed? Who is going to care that I’m running out of fucking vacations and that I have to start suffering again with classes, thus reducing the time I spend knitting? Most likely no one, so I decided to delete those entries, leaving only the entry that describes my unhealthy relationship with Concordia aka Messenger of Doom....

Dude, WTF??

I have tried to log-in to blogger around  70 million times since my last post .... I don’t know what the hell is going on with it, but between today and tomorrow I’ll start posting entries for those days... I never would have thought that  my life was as interesting for blog daily about it ....

P.S. I seriously love the way the google translator thingy fucks up everything I say…. 

A Bad Day...

This is one of those shitty days where you don’t feel like doing anything, where your are sleep deprved and is the only thing you manage to do is yawn like an idiot ...Also its one of those days where you sit at the computer making a stupid-looking face  thinking "I have to knit, I have to knit, I have to finish that damn scarf before next week, I have to finish, I must  finish it" and spend hours imagining how you lift the ass of the computer, walk across the living room, pick up the scarf and start knitting ... After what seemed like hours picturing myself knitting, I finally decided to pick up the scarf and started ... 5 minutes later I wanted to burn the scarf, the needles, the pattern, and chew my fingers until they no longer exist ... It s not flowing, I’m not feeling it and I'm not loving it ... every stitch that I knit seems to need titanic amounts of willpower and energy, the yarn squeals like an animal being butchered each time I slide the stitches through the needles, however I can’t stop, I really  really need to finish this scarf, as soon as possible! It was requested earlier this year, according to my knitting agenda on March 21, but I didn’t start working on it until June 17 (I'm a bastard, I know) and while knitting cables its a soul-consuming complex process, I feel guilty, guilty for having 5 WIPs at the same time, guilty for not  started earlier the scarf, guilty for having bought a yarns squeals and even more guilty about spending hours thinking about doing a seafoam scarf instead of this messenger of doom scarf ...

That's how the scarf looks at the moment:

The picture is crap. The colours was the only thing that the recipient requested, If it were up to me I would’ve used a single color .... Here, a cable close-up ‘cause, they're cute and I'm proud of them:

It measures exactly 1 mt (about a yard) .... When finished it should measure about 1.60 meters (1.75 yards), the funny thing is that if my assumptions are correct, I have only enough yarn for about 30 centimeters, 40 at best ... So by a somehow magical, dark and possibly dangerous way, I have to stretch it at least 30 cms more by blocking it ... Did I mention that the yarn is acrylic and that I don’t have a steam thingy at hand?

New Kid on The Block...

Its been a year since I began playing with the idea of knitting... Also I've been playing with the idea of having a blog... And write... Stuff... You know, stuff.... But everytime I said  "I'm gonna start a blog", a nasty voice in the back of my head replied "And your gonna say what, and about what?" Those two  questions where enough to stop me from doing anything... After all that voice (my conscience? an alternate personality? a brain melting parasite?) was right, I was just a kid, with nothing important to say about anything... For some reason I feel different now, I still think I have nothing important to talk about, but I don't care what that little voice in my head has to say (take that  brain melting parasite!!)
As stated above, I knit, therefore this will be a knitting blog, where I'll try to keep track of my ideas, where I'll curse heavily my knitting  write about my projects and possible modifications for future re-knits, and maybe, maybe, a place to post my crappy patterns when I decide to write them
Also, this blog might include:
-Swearing, depending of my frustration levels
-typos and misspellings. I speak spanish, I'm still learning and practicing my english
-anime/manga/japanese culture related comments
-deep and meaingfull anthropological reflections about why some patterns are so freaking difficult to read knitting and crocheting in general

Innocent bystanders, wandering bloggers or any other person bored enough to read my crap, you have been warned