The community sweater is born!

When I meet up with the knitwits I always bring more than one project to work on as my attention span sometimes dwindles with certain monotonous projects.

Over the last few weeks, my purple lopi sweater has been my "spare" project in my knitting bag. It's a perfect knitting circle sweater - it's easy to knit the project and talk to my friends at the same time.

The best part of the sweater - it's practically done without a lot of effort on my part. I can't claim I'm a fast knitter or an experienced knitter but I can claim to have great friends. To date, I have only knit a few inches on it. Every time I meet up with my friends, someone knits it for a long while. To date, 4 different knitters have graciously helped me make this sweater.

I'm guessing some knitters would gasp at the concept of 4 different people knitting on the same sweater - gauge would be different, technique different, etc. The reality - you can barely tell where one knitter left off and the next one started. The sweater looks fabulous.

The sweater has been a great source of seeing how Lopi will wear and tear as three of us are making a colorful lopi sweater sometime soon. It definitely shows wear and tear plus the yarn is very scratchy to work with. Those cons do not defeat my fondness for the yarn as lopi has colors I haven't seen in other yarns. I have lots of lopi in my stash and am excited about my upcoming lopi projects. This lopi sweater, in a wonderful deep purple, is going to be a holiday gift.

To my mom, with lots of love, from the Knitwits.

My pirate name is:

Iron Anne Flint

A pirate's life isn't easy; it takes a tough person. That's okay with you, though, since you a tough person. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

and life takes over...

It's been almost a month since my last posting - life sometimes just gets busy.

On the knitting front - one failure after another but my confidence isn't shattered. I finished my shirt/poncho using Noro Silk Garden. Even with lengthening the pattern by 3 inches, the shirt came out about 2 inches short. The knitwits assisted in ideas for lengthening and voula my shirt was finished.

I have officially given up on the Mariah sweater from knitty and am using the yarn in a top down hooded sweatshirt for my very good friend, long time knitting buddy and fellow grad school dropout, Dianne. She owns a fantastic shop in Greer, SC called Yarns Forever.

In an effort to create a fast yet classic sweater, I'm making a deep purple basic cardigan out of Reynold's Lopi. Depending on how it turns out it may become a holiday gift for my mom. The yarn is uber scratchy and with my dislike of layering clothes, she will get a lot more use of it than I will.

I'm trying hard with my knitting monogamy to just work on these two projects until they are done. This was working great until last week when out of nowhere my hands started cramping up. I decided to try a new craft that was less hands intensive, which i now feel is debateable. I purchased a latch hook kit, smiley face and was able to complete about half of it over the weekend. I love it - love the colors, love the look and love that my hands can move this week. All of my friends made sure I knew that latch hook was something they all did as kids. I chalk it up to yet another thing I missed out on as a child (the #1 missed childhood experience was a trip to Dairy Queen).

On the home front - Gilmour and Zoey may possibly becoming parents. Zoey went into heat last week and the first of two artificial inseminations was done yesterday. Hopefully this will distract Zoey from her hunting ways as she has now captured a squirrel and a rabbit. Gilmour, as always, just goes with the flow and waits for momma to come home.

Life is starting to calm down a bit and everything is returning to some type of normal. I'm still a Starbucks addict, still a knitting addict, still an ipod addict and soon to be working on the exercise addict yet to be found in me.