Halloween 2007

HI.

I'm not a very holiday-craft oriented person, but I love carving pumpkins!

I'm very picky though. Here is my pumpkin philosophy:
1. Pumpkin carving tool sets are a waste of money. All you need is a thin, sharp, serrated blade.
2. Never follow a pre-packaged pattern, design your own!
3. A pumpkin should be a face, and not a photo-realistic portrait of a face. Not to say I didn't look at Bush designs.

I decided on a scary design this year to scare the children. I also wanted it to look natural, as if a pumpkin grew a scary face. So I used the vertical groves in the design. They separate teeth, the eyes seem to drip down into a grove.

For the final product, I omitted the inquisitive eyebrows.

I should have been clothed for this task!

I went over the carvings with a butter knife to round and scuff the edges.

That's Lacy's pumpkin on the right (above).

This was taken in near darkness with a long exposure.

Sweater WIP 2

Here's the sweater. It's going pretty slow because, most days, I only find the time to knit one or two rows during a lunch break or whatever. I just hit my 2nd ball-o-yarn mark a second ago. Pretty exciting.
It's 12" tall, which means I have about 16" to go for this piece to be done.

Last weekend, Lacy and I enjoyed our 1 year anniversary. We wanted to travel a short distance away, but decided just to be lazy and stay at home, which worked out fine.

And we took lots of pictures of our cats.

Finished Objects

I like to think I'm getting pretty good at knitting, but there is still so much I have to learn. I don't know how to knit in the round, cable, increase, or do the math to figure out gauges, etc. Up until now, I've pretty much only made utility/dish rags out of cotton, afraid to venture out past the square shape. Well those two years of dishrags were great practice because there is a lot you can do within that square. Each rag turned out different as I liked to improvise the pattern as I went. I like gifting them and it's such a joy to hear about how much use my friends get out of them.

Of course, each new rag became more ambitions. For my last rag, I decided to add the "feather and fan" stitch to the middle. It's a bit larger than a normal dish rag at 13" x 12". The pattern should be pretty easy to decipher. I used size 7 needles and casted on 60. The border is 5 sts (knit stitch), and the blocks are 1o sts and 10 rows tall. The feather and fan is a multiple of 3 and it starts either 6 rows in a square going up or 6 sts in a square left or right.

The feather and fan stitch was surprisingly very easy, although cotton may not be the best thread for the stitch. I had to learn how to yarn over (YO) and all it is is YOs and knit 2 togethers (k2tog). I don't know what I want to do with it. I'd sell it if I had a buyer (it's expensive), and I didn't have anyone in mind for a gift while making it. My dad is having a house warming party soon, I thought about giving it to him.

It makes a good kitty blanket, though. Observe:

"I like it!"

My current project is definitely beyond my current skill set. My wife Lacy and I are knitting sweaters. I want to start knitting my own clothes. More on that later.