Prairie Bliss on the Stands!

It's not the hat pattern. That's coming. Really.

I do have another new design, however!

Limestone Landscape is a simple stole, knit from Rowan Panama. It's worked on the bias, and it features a fun fringe which might feel familiar to the weavers out there. Bonus: Rowan Panama is Rayon/cotton/linen, meaning it really is cool enough for Texas.

The stole appears in the collection Prairie Bliss from Hill Country Weavers. The collection also includes a re-release of my sweater design Rockabilly Soft.

Take a look, and check out the beautiful designs from the other ladies involved in this collection, too!

Summer Update

This blog has resided in a corner of my mind patiently for some months now, occasionally clearing its throat and wondering if I would ever return to continue our conversation. Then, a thoughtful reader contacted me on Ravelry to ask if my blog had moved or what.

Turns out, in the intervening months between my last post and, well, now, there was "suspicious activity" on my account, which resulted in a shutdown of this blog.

Oops.

No idea what the suspicious activity was, but my password has been updated and hopefully that takes care of that.

As to my extended absence... It is a challenging time in the life of Mr. MGY and myself. "Sandblasted" is perhaps the best way to describe how I have been feeling in recent months.

For fear of alarming anybody, please know that our marriage is solid, and neither of us is in any danger. However, and I hate to be coy, but this blog is not the place to talk in detail about what's happening. We have family, friends, and coworkers who read my posts on occasion, and in each case we'll need to choose if, when, and how we reveal our personal information to them.

I hope someday that I can use this space to share the whole story. But first, we need to see how it ends.

In the meantime, I do hope to post a bit more here. I have a hat pattern that's been test-knitted and everything by a lovely friend halfway around the world. I have only to incorporate her feedback and post the pattern here, for free. You are welcome to bug me on Ravelry (I'm "MightyGoodYarn") if I don't do that in the near future, yes?

Thanks for reading.

Happy Valentine's!

Stuffed with leftover yarn scraps and dried lavender from my garden, which worked great. A great gift for my Valentine's swap buddy at work.

The pattern is from Mochimochi. Only a few mods.

Welcome 2012

Isn't the world supposed to end in 2012, according to the Mayans?

Good thing I finished my sweater vest in time for the apocalypse:

Pattern: Academia

Funny thing: my gauge didn't change one iota between the stockinette and the colorwork. The pattern uses pretty specific numbers with the assumption that your gauge will change. Imagine my surprise when I tried on the vest-in-progress and it looked like this:

I had to rework several inches. The colorwork here is a bit different than what's in the pattern. I changed the design a bit so that there are only two contrast colors, which only switch a couple times. I'm pleased with the colors I picked; the FOs I've seen suggest that getting colors that are close to one another will end up looking better than if there is a larger contrast between them.

Happy New Year!

Ever noticed how sometimes you'll be knitting in public, and you have one of those conversations with a non-knitter that goes something like...

Them: Oh! Are you knitting?
You: Yes.
Them: That's so neat. What is that, a ----- ?

But then the ----- bears no relation to what you're actually making. Like, you might be making a scarf, and they ask if you're knitting a sock. Or maybe you're making a sock monkey, and they ask if it's an afghan.

The other day at work, during a group lunch, I was working on my Academia, and my very nice coworker asked if I was making a hat. This is about what it looked like at the time of her asking (tape measure for visual reference):

I'm not sure whose head that might have fit, but whoever it is, I don't want to meet that person in a dark alley.

By the by, that pattern totally snookered me with its clever photo shoot: pretty model with a nice haircut playing a banjo with her band in Golden Gate Park. How can you lose? I have nothing but good memories of my time in Golden Gate Park. (Well, once you get west of the junkies. And not counting that one Saturday morning tai chi class that was interrupted by a couple homeless guys who got into it with each other by their tent first thing in the morning before they came staggering out from their enclave and through the oddly unaffected group of tai chi students... and I so wish somebody would put that in a movie so I could see it the way it must have looked to a bystander.)

Anyway. The pattern is seriously cute, and so far so good with the Cascade 200 Sport I'm using. Progress shots to come.

(Culinary) Mushroom Adventures

Not long ago I happened across this nifty thing, a Back to the Roots Mushroom Kit. I didn't get any freebies from them - I saw the kit online, decided I'd take a chance and try it out. So far, it's pretty dang cool.

Day 5 Growth

These guys take used coffee grounds from a local (to them) coffeeshop and prepare them for growing mushrooms. They ship you the kit, you soak it, you spritz it with water, and blammo: you get oyster mushrooms blasting out overnight.

If you are reading this and you happen to know my father, don't tell him about it. I want to give a kit to him for his next birthday. :)

Vineyard Rows, from Hill Country Weavers

As it happens, the recent Prairie Bliss collection from Hill Country Weavers included not just one but two of my original patterns. The first was Rockabilly Soft, and the second is Vineyard Rows: so named for the textured horizontal stripes, and because that's exactly the sort of luxurious thing you might wear while touring the vineyards of the Texas Hill Country.

Thanks, Hill Country Weavers!

On a more serious note, those of you keeping one eye on the news will know that the greater Austin area spent much of Labor Day weekend burning. Fortunately, the fires have thus far spared Austin itself, but the surrounding communities have suffered immensely, especially Bastrop. Over 600 homes have been lost.

If you have spare change, please consider donating to the Red Cross of Central Texas - or barring that, your local Red Cross. These are the people who come to help those who find themselves in a terrible place without warning. We should all be good neighbors and help now, when we can.