I Hate Spam and Changes are Coming

I know that none of the spammers actually read my blog, but on the off chance one of them does, and because I really need to vent, I say to you spammers - GIVE IT UP! You are not going to be able to post your crap in my comments or as a track back ping. I am blocking you, and will continue to block you. None of my readers are interested in your casinos, your enlarging products, your pharmaceuticals, your weight loss products or your ceramics! Yes, dear readers, today I got spammed by someone trying to sell ceramics.

Ok, enough ranting. I'm done yelling at the spammers (who will have a special circle of hell all to themselves) and I'm ready to return to my originally intended post of the day (which got side tracked by my rant). I am going to be making a few changes to my blog to enhance the knitting side of it. I've decided it's time to get off my butt and start writing, and posting, my patterns. I also want to post my WIPs and recent FOs. I was inspired by Sara's site.

I know my patterns are horribly basic, certainly not ones you couldn't figure out for yourselves, but I'm considering them practice patterns. The more I knit, the more I realize I really want to design my own stuff. Plus, I love all the free patterns out in our community and I'd like to contribute to them. Besides, if I get really good at designing and writing patterns, maybe one day I can do it for a living, and quit my glamorous engineering job. So, dear readers, if you could peruse my patterns (once they're posted) and let me know what you think of them I'd appreciate it.

Until the FOs and WIPs are posted on the sidebar, here's a little update. FOs 13 and 14 are the Knitty X-backs, one for Alyssa and one for me. Jen and Sara assured me that the pooling on mine looks good, so I'm not going frog the bottom and graft it back in, which makes it a FO after all.

Mariah is in the last 5" of hood knitting, then it's sew the seams and add the zipper. Tempting (started for an easy Tahoe project) has about 70% of the body knit, but no sleeves yet. I'm on to skein 2 of the Silk Garden scarf for my sister, so it's just over half done (it will be as long as the 2 skeins allow). I worked a whopping 2 rows on the beaded scarf, so at this rate it will be done in about 10 years.

I'm more or less convinced the striped sweater for my niece from SnB using the ancient Jiffy I had is dead (made it 3" and got bored), so I no longer consider it a UFO, the yarn is now back to being stash yarn and I'm done with the project. If anyone has any good ideas of what to do with 6 skeins of Jiffy in teal, silver and purple (yes, I bought them in 1990 and have had them ever since) I'm all ears.

I also learned, while at Jimmy Beans last weekend, that I am a project knitter. Though there were many lovely yarns there, I did not purchase any. I didn't have any projects for the yarns I liked, and couldn't just buy 'some' and wait to see what turned up. I get this horrible feeling of, how much should I buy? Too much, leftovers. Not enough, can't finish the project you want. So I buy none. This makes me a project knitter, I only buy for projects and my stash only consists of leftovers and projects waiting to go on the needles (though as you can see from my WIP list, they don't wait long to get started, just finished).

There is on exception to the project rule, and that's sale yarn that only has limited quantities. Then I don't have to decide how much to buy. I'm up to 4 balls of Merino Frappe thanks to this practice. Creative Hands keeps putting pairs of them in the oddball clearance basket, so they follow me home. I'm hoping this continues with enough balls, in complementary colors, to create a really nice striped sweater. Thus far I've got mossy green and chocolate, both colors I really like, so we're good.

Ok, I hope this extra long post makes up for being missing!