Right now I'm fair-isling away on a sweater that I'm not ready to publish pictures of yet, so I thought I'd show off my workspace.  As a bit of background, when Steve and I first bought our house, we didn't have enough furniture to fill it, so we left the large living room mostly empty and used the smaller dining room as our living room.  But during the winter my grandparents graciously gave us some beautiful furniture, antiques and things my grandfather had made, so we rearranged the house to use the living room and dining room for their intended purposes.  Of course we never used the dining room for anything, and gradually my knitting stuff and yarn stash overtook the room until it eventually became known as the knitting room.  I love it in all its mess and chaos.  

Keep watching for my fancy stranded sweater, which I'll hopefully finish by this weekend!

...

I finished a major project today, the birthday present I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks.  It’s always a bit strange to knit the last stitch of a sweater that has been my companion for weeks or months.  It’s a victory of sorts to knit a sweater, to see it through to the end through all those thousands of stitches.  Most of the projects I’ve made, including this one, were by and large a pleasure to make.  I have done a few that were really difficult to motivate myself to finish, however – most notably a cardigan knit on size 1 and 3 needles and featuring a steek (where you slice up the middle of a piece of knitted fabric – terrifying!), seamless set-in sleeves, and a great deal of stranded colorwork, as well as a lot of my least favorite thing to do in knitting, picking up and knitting stitches from a finished edge.  Anyway, I was incredibly relieved to be done with that one after working on it obsessively...

Since early August I have been on Weight Watchers.  I was a bit skeptical at first, but I am here to tell you people that it flippin' WORKS!  Yes, I have been hungry at times, but not terribly so for the most part.  Anyway, I reached a major goal - a ten pound weight loss!  As a reward to myself for this milestone I went shopping this morning for a pair of fancy new Citizens of Humanity jeans.  I was elated to fit into a size 27 - two full sizes smaller than I've been wearing for at least a year.  Yippee!!

On a related and rather amusing note, while I was trying on the jeans, a small child walked right into the dressing room.  He was a little boy, maybe one or two years old - I always have trouble guessing the ages of children - but old enough to walk.  Fortunately he did not burst into tears at the sight of me in my underwear so I was not compelled to commit hara kiri right there in the...

To those into the world of knitting forums, blogs, and Ravelry, the term “frogging” will be recognizable, but for those who aren’t, let me fill you in – it’s a word used by knitters to describe ripping out knitting (rip it, rip it – get it?).  This is what happens when you make a mistake that can’t be fudged, covered up, or otherwise concealed.  Such as when the mistake relates to size. 

Of vital importance to any knitter who makes wearable items is the concept of stitch and row gauge, which is how many stitches or rows there are to the inch.   Generally stitch and row gauge is measured in 4” increments,...