Make new knits/but keep the old...

So I've begun a new/old project. I'm doing a variation of the Picovoli Tee. I'm adding garter ribbing, a slit front, and a shorter span across the front and back of the shirt, and some short row shaping. I'm also considering adding some cap sleeves, or if I have enough yarn, 3/4 length sleeves. I have to knit fast because November is fast approaching and soon NaNoWriMo begins and my feverish knitting pace will be replaced by a feverish writing pace.

So you can look forward to pictures of knits being replaced by excerpts of my writing.

Updates of the "new" picovoli tee to come as soon as its photographable.

YAY!

Guess what I finished already? Yup...one beautiful Picovoli T! And I love it! I can't wait to do another. I think I'll be using up some of my stash on this one!

And here are the pics (yes, I'm at work, and yes, I cut my head off on purpose...I have a cold and after a long day of work it shows.)


Yarn: Knit Picks Shine
Pattern: Piovoli/Tivoli (I did not do Picot edging)by Grumperina- on MagKnits (see Links)
Needles: Bamboo Size 4s, 19" & 29" circs
Completion time: Wednesday to Monday!
Alterations: Continued Waist increases in back until bottom edge to accomodate the booty.

Picovoli moves FAST!!!

Pictures from Day 3





I finished the waist decreases on Day 3...this thing is so speedy I'm thinking I might have to make a couple more. I'm absolutely loving it, and already thinking of how I might easily alter it to suit me even better (although honestly I love the way it fits right now.)

So exciting, I should have a finished shirt in just another day or two (or maybe today if I get the time to knit at work) YAY!

Picovoli

soon to be

I started on Wednesday afternoon, and I'm already almost halfway done! Woohoo!

Mmmm....Ball winding

I admit: up until this point I've thought of knitting as a hobby, and something that I might eventually tire of and quit (although probably to return to from time to time). Last night I learned how wrong I was. After Stich-n-Bitch, my tuesday night knitting group, I begged a favor of one of my fellow knitters and returned to their place to wind down some skeins of yarn into balls. Not having a swift and ball winder I had plenty of skeins waiting, and had been delaying several projects while waiting to do this.

I arrived and emptied out a large lingerie bag full of yarn (mostly Cascade 220, and some laceweight alpaca from KnitPicks). I started with a lovely blue/green Cascade on one ball winder while Rachel started on the alpaca on a second ball winder. Winding big hanks of yarn into perfect, amazing center pull balls is incredible! When I pulled off the first ball and looked at it I gasped and got goosebumps. It was like the wonderment one feels when they look at a newborn. My friend looked at me and went "Oh yeah, SHE's a knitter"

Yeah, so I'm definitely a knitter, and I'll definitely be getting my own ball winder and swift at some point. And now I can use all my beautiful perfect balls to make beautiful (if not exactly perfect) knitted objects. Ahhhh....good times.

Humanity

Okay, nothing to do with knitting today, mostly because I haven't picked up my needles in two weeks.

But every now and then I read something that I want to keep and read again and remember better. I found something like that today.

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

Camp

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and childen collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity

Source: Imperial War museum

And as much as it's a touching story and kind of gives insight into humanity, somehow it also just gives me that determination to really be an individual, to focus on who I am outside of society, and outside of what everyone sees me as.

Works in Progress

So I received a lovely package of yarns from Knit Picks, and am getting ready to start the Picovoli Tee from Mag Knits, and a lacy Alpaca scarf or two. In the meantime I'm working on finishing a little fluffy yellow thing for a friend's baby-to-be (Jill Waltman-Brown). It is shaping up to be baby chick like, but it may have a few odd suprises as well. I haven't taken any pictures of it, but I will soon. I need to finish right away, as baby Brown will be here soon.

I'm busy working on all the stuff for the Windy City Lindy Exchange which will be going on next weekend, and don't have much time for anything else right now, but should be back to my normal life in a week and a half.