Needles on fire!

I’m in my groove, now. You can’t stop me! No! You just can’t stop!

Sorry. Monday morning. Loads of caffeine. AND I had a most productive weekend. :)

Trees get cold, too.

The Goethe Collar
Pattern: the Scholar Collar, from brooklyn tweed
Yarn: Morehouse Farm Merino, bulky in burgundy, 1 skein (overdyed with red)
Needles: 11, I think. It may have been a 13
Begun: November 10th
Finished: December 14th, 2007
For: FIL
Mods: none, since I didn’t actually have a pattern.

Remember this? If you don’t go back and read about my saga here.

All caught up? So you remember all that crap about the buttons? Well, CHECK. THIS. OUT.

Yup, that’s the button. Does it not KICK ASS? Sorry for all the yelling, but I’m SO very excited about this. It’s friggin PERFECT! Can you see around the edges? That’s sterling silver. The story of how this came to be is very long and drawn out, but I will try to summarize: Soldering was discussed, between the blub and this very nice friend of his that is quite crafty. Wes (the friend) took it to a Soldering Master that he knows, and they determined that it couldn’t be safely soldered, because the heat might transfer through to the front of the coin, which they had determined to be aluminum. So Wes decided he would try to make a silver “frame” for it, and he and the blub met one day at a jewelry store downtown to buy the materials for it. Short aside: Wes and the blub went to high school together, and collectively they know about every single person in town. End of aside. So they went in the store, and the guy behind the counter is a friend of theirs. So this guy looks at the coin and says, “Oh yeah, I can slap something together,” grabs his stuff, and assembles this button in approximately ten minutes. He then attempts to just GIVE it to the blub. The blub insists on giving him ten bucks, which he finally takes. Wes then took it home and polished it up, and the blub handed it to me with a big grin on Friday afternoon. And then I said, “HOLY CRAP!”

End of story.

The jeweler in my story is Tim Terry, of Tim Terry Jewelers. If you live in Bloomington, by all means get thee to his shop and buy stuff. He’s a really nice guy.

Look at this thing! It’s beautiful! Here’s the side:

It’s so shiny and spectacular! My FIL will go APESHIT. This is the best thing ever.

The only thing a wee bit wrong, is that the scarf stretched a bit after blocking. So I think the button sits a bit low, now. I may have to go back and add another (plain!) button along the side edge of the scarf, to keep it shut better. But I decided to wait and see what my FIL thinks before doing that.

So are we counting? That’s Christmas present #6 finished! First five are: blub’s hat, delicato mitts, Odessa, Elijah, and kitties.

Ha!

I also finished some monsters on Saturday.

Sorry for el crappo picture. My batteries died in my nice camera, so I had to use my old one. Aren’t these cute? The purple one with the green sparkly eye and the bows is for my niece, and the strange alien licky rabbit/crab is for my nephew. That one didn’t quite turn out how I planned, but it has since grown on me. I followed the schematic (for Estelle, for those interested), but the arms kind of ended up on the front instead of on the sides. I don’t know how that happened, but I can’t look at this sockie monster without laughing, which I think is a good thing. Nephew E is very silly (it’s so great!), and I think he’ll really love this. Especially the tongue. Slurp!

And this is what I did on Sunday:

Again, crappy picture. Sorry.

So this is the Christmas stocking as of Sunday afternoon. I’m a bit farther on it now, I’ve finished the heel and gusset, and I’m into the foot. Another inch and I can start decreasing for the toe. To be fair, I did knit some of this on Saturday, about 1/3 of the snowflake section. It was slow going for a bit, but then I figured out how to hold the yarn in my left hand for picking (I was doing the two-handed colorwork thing) and BAM! It started going really fast. I think I’ll finish it tonight. I hope anyway.

So I’m leaving for Chicago tomorrow. I’m taking A LOT of yarn with me. Get those bets in now, people! I’m SO winning this one.