Maia Spins

Busy, busy, busy

Life has been busy around the homefront.  We are cleaning up the old laundry shack (small room attached to the back of the house) for a storage area.  Our little 2 bedroom house needs to make space for our twenteen (more on her later).  The bedroom I am trying to free up is the larger one and it is full of stuff, all kinds of stuff, mostly my stuff.  All that stuff needs to get paired down and moved to the shack or another location inside the house.  Oy!

All that is my way of saying I won't have as much time for posting in the next couple of weeks.  And, I don't want to think about how far behind I am in reading my bloglines feeds.

I do have a little (little being the operative word) to show:
My first Elizabeth Zimmermann project, her baby surprise jacket.  The surprising part is how I can be a knitter for over 30 years without making an EZ pattern.  It is a simple pattern which is very good right now.  I'm using the Knit Picks Wool of the Andes I got from Becca with some left over cascade 220 (red) and ashford tekapo (green).

I will leave you with a cautionary tale about being a Dodger fan.  See, being a Dodger fan is hazardous to your health.

Big Bag Pattern

I have posted a free pattern for the Stitch-N-Pitch fulled bag I made in lovely San Francisco Giants colors.  There is now a link to this pattern on the left.  I plan on adding more patterns.  The next one will probably be the item I made for my One Skein pal.  I am waiting until it arrives at her door before I post about it.

Let me know what you think, especially if you find a mistake.

Errata:
10/31/06 Janice caught an error in the number of stitches picked up for the second short side.  The pattern is corrected now.  Thank you Janice.

Actual knitting content, imagine that . . .

It has been an age since I posted my knitting.  I have several things to show you today.  All the images should be clickable for a larger version.

First is the bag I started at the San Francisco Giants Stitch-N-Pitch (I promise not to go off on another baseball rant, really).  It is made with Giants colors: orange, black, cream, and a darker orange thrown in for good measure.  The yarn is Harrisville Highland; I love this yarn for felting.  It is a big bag, hence the name "Big Bag" (I do have imagination, really I do, but usually not when it comes to naming things).  I will felt it to make it nice and sturdy.  The size will be suitable for groceries or going to the farmers' market.  I'll post the pattern shortly.

This is the start of a blanket for our new nephew, Hen3ry (the 3 is silent), born a few weeks ago.  He lives out of state; we hope to meet him this fall.  I am using Baby Star in a variegated blue and Baby Ull in yellow.  The blanket will be circular.  After a bad start, I have a flat disk and I am very pleased with how it is coming along.

This is the item I am making for my One Skein Pal.  I am using stripey handspun.  The pattern is intended to accentuate the stripeyness.  I like this project too.  I need to be careful not to get too distracted by Henry's blanket because I am supposed to have a finished item in her hands in August.  Yes, a mild panic is starting to seep in around the edges.   It is not that I don't have enough time; it is my natural inclination to procrastinate.

Oddities
Sometimes people do strange things.  There is a marketing trend these days that completely baffles me.  It is the tiny flyer in a plastic bag weighted with rocks.  I get these fairly regularly.  I think it is so the "marketer" can drive slowly and fling the missiles (missives?) out the window. 

Here we see an ad for weight loss employing the one large rock method (left) and a solicitation for landscaping services with the bag-o-gravel approach.

The question is: why would anyone think this is a good idea?

A long weekend in LA.

We went to Los Angeles for 4 days and I have to say that I like it more than I thought I would. Not that this was my first time there, but it was the first time I had a chance to get the flavor of it outside of the tourist traps.

There are a lot of good things there. LA is built on a street grid. There is always another way to get somewhere and it is easy to get around on surface streets. The traffic is not bad unless you get on the freeways, which always seem to be bad. We won’t discuss LA drivers except to say that they like to speed up to close any gap between them and the car ahead of them, only to brake hard, very hard, at the absolute last second. As a whole they must lose at least several miles per gallon driving this way and cause many accidents.

There is lots of good food. LA has a large Armenian population, so we ate kebobs, stuffed grape leaves, olives, etc. Yumm-O-rama! We also had some great Salvadoran food. I lurve me some papusas! For those of you that haven’t had them, they are two homemade tortillas with yummy fillings sandwiched between them and then grilled. Usually the fillings consist of cheese or cheese with meat or vegetables. I am always excited by melty cheese. I also love Salvadoran fried plantains. The flavor of cooked bananas always gets me.

There is so much to do! LA is a large sprawling city. It seems that property values never get so great (relatively speaking) in any one spot that businesses get pushed out. There are lots of old diners for instance. And, one of the craziest things I saw was a concrete plant in an area of mostly offices and retail. Things like that never happen in the Bay Area. Our friends said that neighborhoods fall in and out of favor and it is trend based. One area was off the radar until Swingers was filmed there. Now it is popular. Sooo LA.

The La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Blvd. This is a really fun and interesting place with lots of fossils and live excavations, all in downtown LA. Definitely check it out if you are ever in the area. The funny thing is that much of LA is built on tar pits. Periodically it just bubbles up to the surface and erupts. We walked over a small eruption in Wilshire Blvd.

A bit of a baseball rant.

While we were there was saw the Giants play the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, something I have wanted to do for a while. Dodger fans love to boo the Giants, but they don’t seem to have any clue about who is worthy of their distain.  Barry Bonds is an obvious choice and he gets a lot of negative attention.

To say that Dodger fans have a clue about baseball would be an overstatement. They seem to be more interested in the beach balls bouncing around the stadium than the game on the field. They will stand to get a better view of beach balls even when there is a pivotal play on the field. At one point there were 2 or 3 Dodgers on base with no outs. A fly ball was hit to the warning track for an out. Everybody booed until they realized that it was a sacrifice and the go-ahead run came in on that sacrifice. This was after several innings of a tied game. I don’t get how they can be so clueless.

It seemed like the point of going to a game was to see and be seen, and to drink beer. What a restless bunch they are too. There was so much getting up and sitting down I found myself regretting that we had aisle seats. There were people still arriving in the middle of the 5^th inning and they started leaving in the 6^th or 7^th while it was still a tie game! Oy, I really don’t get it. I found the whole experience very disappointing.

Finally, some knitting content.

I stumbled into a cute yarn store, Hissy Knits on Verdugo (off Colorado) in Glendale.  It can be hard to spot, but it is worth it. The owner, Annie, is very nice and quite creative. She has lots of fabulous original creations to inspire you and a nice selection of yarns.  She has also fixed up the back yard to make it very comfortable for hanging out and classes. Stop by and see her if you are in the area.

I have a couple of knitting projects to show.  I'll post pictures soon.