She is done.  I bought some beads and attached them yesterday because I wanted to wear it to work this week.  Without further ado, I introduce Bella:



A close-up of the beads on the tie:



How does it fit?  Not too bad.  It's not as sexy as if I'd done the pullover and shaped it a lot...



I'm pretty happy with it!



If you want to see another lovely version of this, recently completed, check out Seltsame's Weyr.

Using Karmicknit's 20 questions:

1. Name of Project: Bella
2. Pattern Source: White Lies Designs
3. Yarn: wool-mohair from White Lies Designs
4. Fiber: wool-mohair
5. Color: rose, would you call it?
6. Where did I get the yarn: White Lies booth at Stitches West 2004 (or was it 2003?)
7. Is it the yarn called for: No. I'm glad I chose this yarn over a cotton yarn because it blocks well and I'm not a huge fan of cotton for knitting.  However, the mohair makes this a bit scratchy for next to the skin, which is why I opted for a cardi version.  
8. How long did it take to knit: Slightly over 2 months
9. Did I change anything: I lengthened the body and sleeves a bit.  I wanted full-length rather than 3/4 length sleeves.  
10. What would I have done differently: I wish I had chosen a pure merino or something I could wear next to the skin - I would have done the pullover version in that case.  I think I knit the sweater a bit too long - about 1 inch shorter would have been good.  The sleeves could use 1/2 inch more length.
11. Were the instructions clear: Yes.
12. What did I learn: I coudn't knit the bottom lace parts at knitting group because the conversation was too distracting!  Lace is fun.
13. Was it worth it: Absolutely.
14. Would I do it again: I want a pullover version, but not for a while.
15. What seaming methods were used: Mattress stitch.
16. Will I knit with the yarn again: No.
17. Do I think I’ll wear it: Yes. Just wore it today.
18. Process or Product: Both
19. Do I have shoes to match? Yes, I have cute burgundy slides!
20. Final Thoughts: After this I wanted a brain-dead project for about two days, and then started Embossed Leaves socks.  So much for brain-dead.

It was a productive weekend.

We have DH socks.



We have yarn for my dye-buddy.



I'm calling the yarn Lupine Meadows.

I also finished this, which I call Stormy Sunrise:



And this, which I call On the Rainbow, but Sudha thinks I should call it Jazz:



Fun stuff, and highly addictive!  

Sudha says if I bring a bunch into Nine Rubies, they would put it up for sale for me.  What do y'all think?  Should I dye more and try to sell it?  There is no way I can dye more and keep it, that's for sure.  this is a good way to make my stash grow exponentially!  But it is a lot of fun.

Coming soon, the finished Bella sweater.  Really.  I am crocheting the tie now, need beads, and an eyehook!

Last Wednesday (has it been a week already?), San Mateo Knitters met at Nine Rubies (known as 9R around here).



Spinnity showed off her crocheted starfish and the very cool ducky blanket she is finishing for a friend.



WizKnits showed off her Husband Sock and something else that I can't figure out in this photo!  (Hey, Wiz, update your blog!)



Laurie and Angela checked out the very cool sock yarns.  (Did you buy any?)



And Sudha was her wonderful, helpful self, working on a Debbie Bliss Silk sweater for Saloni.  (That yarn is awesome.)

When I got home I found this:



You'd think that Forrest and Xoyx have become friends or something!

Update on my knitting:  

I got the dye-o-rama yarn, so a little bird will indeed get some dyed yarn in the next few weeks!  I plan to dye this weekend.

I am up to row 60 or so on the Bella sleeves, so I have only about 45 rows to go.  Oh yeah, and blocking.  And seaming.  And crocheting the borders.  And hooks or buttons.  Never mind about the almost done thing.

So, say it with me now:

I WILL NOT CAST ON A CLAPOTIS FROM CHASING RAINBOWS WOOL-SILK IN DOVE.

I WILL NOT CAST ON EMBOSSED LEAVES SOCKS IN MAMA-E YARN.

I WILL NOT CAST ON ANYTHING UNTIL I FINISH ONE OF THE THINGS ON THE NEEDLES NOW!

Finally, some packages!

The sock yarn from Mama-E has arrived.  It is lovely, in green for the Project Spectrum crowd.  Pix later.

The Bella yarn has arrived.  It's a bit lighter than the rest of the yarn so I'm definitely alternating rows as I work up the sleeves.  I'm glad I stopped when I realized I was running out of yarn.

No sign of the yarn to dye, but I bought a few balls of Baby Ull to experiment with.  I also bought a really cheap Made-In-China steamer pot (stainless steel) from the downtown Chinese import store.

You can thank Lauren for pointing me to this quiz site - take my quiz to see how well you know me!

Today is the Baywood Kitchen Tour.  It's a PTA fundraiser and about 8 houses are open for it.  Four or five are a short walk for me, so that'll be my lunch break.  One of the houses was being remodeled for a good 9 months while the family lived in an apartment - I'm curious to see how it turned out for them!  I got to see the progress on the exterior every day since they live down the street.

Sometimes mail order is like getting Christmas presents. You get home from work and there's a package waiting... which item is it? Will I like it as much as I hope? Ooh, the excitement of opening boxes!

But sometimes mail order is the ultimate exercise in delayed gratification.

So here are my delays.

1) White Lies, more yarn for Bella. I'm about 1/2 way up the sleeves and don't want to work more because I might need to do the alternate-yarn-every-few-rows thing to blend in the new stuff. I mailed my yard of yarn on Monday and am waiting for a phone call about whether she could match it and how much it'll cost.  I really want to finish this sweater!  It is looking beautiful so far and the weather here in SF is perfect for something warm but not too warm.  The summer fog has set in...

2) Project Spectrum sock yarn from Mama-E.  I haven't been doing Project Spectrum - after the Knitting Olympics I can't take the pressure - but the yarn looks nice and it'll push me a bit on my sock-knitting.

3) Blank yarn to dye for the Dye-O-Rama!  I have a buddy to dye some yarn for, in the WTF Am I Doing category.  She's a newer blogger, and I'm trying to gauge from her blog what she likes to knit, and what colors.  So I gave up and asked her via my new anonymous Google email address.  I also heard from the person who is dyeing for me - she goofed and her full name was visible in the return email address, but that really doesn't tell me much... without finding her blog what do I really know???  I have the dye already, from Dharma Trading.  But I can't do a thing until I get myself a dyepot and that superwash yarn!

In the meantime, I'm knitting on the Butterfly Sweater, last seen here.  I'm loving the Island Cotton from White Lies.  I'm done with buttonholes and nearly ready to split for the sleeves.  I'm doing a simple bottom-up raglan, with the button band knit integrally into the design.  It's an experiment!

Wait!  Did I hear you say you want some photos???

Well, here are a few from our San Mateo Knitters meeting at Copenhagen Bakery last week.  Attendees were Jocelyn, Ada, Saloni, Rebecca, Laurie, and myself.

Laurie, working at the sleeve of the never-ending diagonal sweater (it's looking really good):


Jocelyn created a stir by dropping one of her toothpicks sock DPNs on the floor.  Or so we thought.  We dug around under everybody's chairs and then found it under a napkin on the table!



Rebecca was one of the four of us knitting socks!  It's all Ada's fault. Rebecca is showing off her Husband Sock here a swatch from TKGA.  She's farther along on the DH Sock than I am!



Next meeting:  Nine Rubies, Wednesday May 10, 7pm.  Be there!

This is the second time I've done this: come close to running out of yarn. I'm on the sleeves of Bella and I have enough to make them 3/4 length and do the crochet border in a contrast color. But I want full sleeves and matching border. I called White Lies and Joan said to send her a yard of the yarn and she'll try to match it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

In the meantime, I'm working on the DH sock. I'm realizing how much I like to knit for my SMALL feet!

This is the Bella sweater so far...



Needs sleeves (and better light).  Needs major blocking.  But so far so good!

1. Diversity Symposium at Cal State Sacramento on Friday. This resulted in a lot of sock progress.  The presentations were really interesting.



2. Baywood Auction on Saturday night. This resulted in a bit too much drinking, but no major impulse purchases.  They weren't selling any yarn.

3. Maker Faire in San Mateo. This resulted in much happiness, what a cool event!

This is CJ working on a clay animation figure.

These are BlinkyBugs which are totally cute and I want one!

4. Family dinner Sunday night, cooked Lamb with Green Garlic and got thumbs up from everybody.

5. Went to bed early to recover from #2-4.

This morning (Monday), I did the shoulder seams of Bella with a 3-needle bindoff. It's looking good! Now, for the sleeves...

We spent our morning making cascarones.  I began with a clean set of empty eggshells.



Then we dyed the eggs, with help from friends Kate and Kyle (and of course CJ and K did their share!).



Let them dry, and add confetti...



And then seal them with tissue paper, glued on with water-paste glue!



On Easter, we'll smash these on people's heads!  I think this will go well in Auntie Kit's hair.

Since finishing the fronts of Bella, I've made little progress.  But to make myself feel better, I got a photos of the fronts in the good light today.



I've done more work on that old Butterfly sweater.  Remember that one?  DH and I were watching Princess Mononoke and I just couldn't deal with the Bella pattern while watching that.  So, the Butterfly sweater got a few more rows.  I'm trying to do the button band as part of the knitting, to minimize finishing.  However, I'm not sure how to make it look good in a v-neck, particularly up at the top.  With Davis's sweater, it has a somewhat funny shape at the top, which is fine for a baby, but not fine for a picky pre-K girl.



Finally, I've made some progress on the brain-dead scarf, which will replace the one with bead fringe that was stolen from Jennifer.  The yarns are Skacel Antonia and Cascade Sierra.  The Antonia is a bit "sticky" so I'm adding the cotton to improve the drape.



Spring might be arriving here in Northern California, finally.  I attended a wedding on Sunday.



And our wisteria are finally nearing full bloom!



Oh yes, and the kids are on spring break, so I spent the morning with them.  I get a bit of work time now and tomorrow, and then we're off to Disneyland!  What project(s) should I bring with me?  Don't forget all that time I need to stand in lines...

How stunning.

I finished the fronts of the Bella sweater!  I was so excited, and then I realized...  The fronts were cast on with 49 stitches, 129 rows.  I still have 100 rows on the back to do (94 sts across).  And then the sleeves, which are cast on 49 stitches, and they will be at least 110 rows.  Thus... I'm barely over 1/3 done.  Yipes.  At least I was able to work on this with San Mateo Knitters at Nine Rubies, with Laurie and Rebecca, and we met a lovely woman named Toya whose first project is a ribbed cotton sweater.  How ambitious!

This project monogamy thing might not work out.  I'm thinking a bulky knit sounds really refreshing now, except the minute I get it done it'll finally be spring here.

But there's more progress.  I finally revised the survey we're supposed to field within a month or two, and I also didn't stay up too late last night getting my lecture notes done.  Whew!  Oh yes, and I made big headway on some other work things this week so far.

Living in California has a few drawbacks. The most significant of these is the ongoing risk of The Big One. Now that we're at the 100-year anniversary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake (1906), it's been on everyone's minds. I've been in small earthquakaes, but although living in California all my life except 4 years, I've never been in a Big One. Yep, I missed Loma Prieta. Yep, I missed Northridge. Yep, I've felt all those fun little rockers, and known they were centered 100+ miles away. But the knowledge that The Big One is coming... well, it does make one pause.

So we've decided to buy earthquake insurance. After Northridge, nobody would insure Californians, because state law required that any company that offered fire insurance had to offer earthquake insurance. So you couldn't even buy fire insurance in the state, especially anywhere near the San Andreas. So the state set up the lovely California Earthquake Authority to offer earthquake insurance. To put it bluntly, the CEA sucks. The coverage has a 15% deductible, only covers $5000 of the contents of your home, has almost no money for the cost of the apartment you have to rent while your house gets fixed, and the deductible is 15%. Oh yeah, and it's expensive too. (Some of you might wonder about the contents thing, because after all an earthquake won't damage my yarn stash, but fire insurance does not cover you if the fire was caused by the earthquake. So, when the earthquake breaks the gas line and the house and my yarn burn to the ground, then I have no coverage, or at least not much.)

But we hit a point where we think we can afford and really should get some earthquake insurance. It's estimated that 80-90% of Californians are without it. I searched the web. I found a few offerings other than the CEA. The best of these, and the only one that seemed to cover our region, was at http://www.eq-ins.com/. It's an insurance broker, and the product they offer is far better than the CEA. It's a 10% deductible, good coverage for contents of the property, money for that apartment you have to rent, and so on. And it's less expensive than CEA! Go figure. We're thinking the company must be based in Barbados and really suck, but its rating on AM Best is better than the CEA. So, time to buy it, right?

Well, you have to get a certification from a contractor or inspector that your house is bolted to the foundation and has plywood bracing on "cripple walls".  We did all this stuff in 1999 and 2001.  And then we did more, we put a steel frame support under our master bedroom around our garage door opening, and improved the beams in our rumpus room under our living room.  You'd think getting the inspection signed off would be easy.  But no... we had two contractors do the jobs, the documents in my files are spotty, one of the contractors was very flaky and wouldn't sign off an inspection (even though he spent an hour visiting here for free), and the other guy really wants better documentation on the first guy's work.  Now I have to go to the City Permit Department and get copies of the darn permits, which should have plot drawings and all that good stuff.  This has made me so cranky - I've spent about 3 hours on this so far - that I can't concentrate on work.  I'm off to get the permit copies in a minute.

But in the meantime, here's the Broadway scarf, using the pattern from the Artful Yarns Broadway tag:



That's Whisper the no-longer-radioactive cat.  The scarf is pretty and will be a gift for somebody - it's in the cabinet where I keep such things for emergencies or next holiday season.

And here's my progress on the Tilli Tomas scarf:



And, finally, I've finished the lower lace pattern on the fronts and back of Bella...



A close-up of the lace:



Lovely stuff.  I'm bringing my knitting to the Permit department...

Today is Knit for Peace Day. The last sentences of the manifesto says... "On March 21 every stitch that I knit will be dedicated to peace. I would like to invite everyone who knits to join me on that day. Will it stop people from hurting and threatening and frightening each other, the antithesis of peace? Who knows. When I knit on March 21 I will be saying with each stitch that peace is possible, that human intelligence and compassion can triumph over fear and greed, that terror and war can give way to discussion and peace."



Your votes, your purchases, your views can help bring peace to the world. 

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I finished the Broadway scarf last night, and then started on that yummy Tilli Tomas Ritz yarn I picked up at Stitches West.  I only have 2 rows of a scarf done, and will post some pictures when it's farther along.  

I also got my copy of Barbara Walker's Treasury (volume 1) today from Amazon.  That was a long wait (one month!) but so worth it.  I am enjoying looking through the lovely lace patterns a lot, and really really will try lace soon.  Maybe not the next project, but soon.  Of course, Bella has a lot of lace going on, but it's not the stuff with fingerling yarn and small needles!  

I also took some photos for Flash Your Stash.  Pretty scary, really.  I did find two more full balls of No Smoking yarn that I never touched - I guess the yardage called for in that pattern was too high?  Yeah, I think so!  I took a photo of the 3 full balls, one nearly full ball (short 1 g) and the 2/3 ball (short 7-8g) and plan to put them on e-bay.  It looks like the going rate is somewhere around $7 per ball.  If anybody wants this stuff (it's in color 141 - black) let me know asap!

I caught this meme, originally from Jen & La...

1. A blog which you think people have not discovered:  Sin Control (in Spanish) - even though I can't read most of it, the photos are beautiful
2. A blog whose author lives close to you physically. Just get as close as you can, it’s all relative: WizKnits (blocks away)
3. An unusual or weird animal picture: the bird and the shawl from Too Much Wool
4. An entry that made you laugh and got you strange looks from family or co-workers: Weenies by the Yarn Harlot
5. An idea you wish you’d thought of: Pattern generators from The Knitting Fiend
6. Something you’d like to knit: Pomatomus, on the sidebar of KnitAnon
7. A picture of something you consider beautiful: Snow on the East Bay Hills of San Francisco, from Bogie
8. A blog whose author you’d like to one day meet in person: the economist Lauren
9. A blog of someone you have already met in person: Hollis, owner of Full Thread Ahead

And, now, YOU have been tagged.

I'm one row short of being done with the first lace pattern of the bottom of the back of Bella. After reading a few blogs about problems with consistent gauge (see Seltsame's postings for an example), I've decided that once I finish the first lace pattern on the back, I'm going to immediately do the same part on the fronts.  With any luck, doing the same pattern in sequence will increase the odds of my using the same tension for that section.

We'll see how it goes!

I cast on Bella Wednesday night. My gauge swatch was right on, with #7 needles, even when washed. I'm using a wool-mohair I bought from the company at Stitches. I decided on the size that results in a 38" chest, because a really should have a 36" size but the next smallest in the pattern is 34". I figure when all is said and done I'll be glad to have it a bit bigger.

I also decided on the cardigan, after searching the web for any photos of a finished cardigan in this pattern.  The pattern booklet does not include a photo of the cardi version.  The wool-mohair is a bit brassy (just a tiny bit) and of course it's a lace pattern, so I'll always have to wear it with something underneath.  I'd prefer a cardi for this look.

So... I cast on the stitches, worked a couple of rows, and went to bed.  Thursday morning I did 2 rows, finishing the first pattern repeat, while CJ ate breakfast.  Thursday night, I worked on row 6 (counting cast-on as a row) and discovered that I had added a stitch somewhere, probably on row 3...  Rather than tink it, I just ripped it out and started over.  So now I'm back to 5 rows finished.  I think I'm going to need some lifelines for this, not because it's a hard pattern, but because I'm a distracted knitter!