The benefits to being on-call

So, it has been a lovely Memorial Day weekend here. The weather has been absolutely gorgeous and yet I have not been able to really enjoy the weekend. I am on-call for work for the week. Just my luck of the draw to be in the rotation and have my week fall on this holiday. So as of Friday morning until next Friday morning I have the pleasure of carrying the pager.

It seems silly to all my friends that I have to be "at the ready" to diagnose computer issues but carrying the pager is pretty serious and it goes off all the time. Random things can cause the pager to go off, disk space, high load, unreachable hosts and I have to be able to dial in or drive to the office/data center as needed. The silver lining is that I get to catch up on all my DVR shows and knit!

I have made quite the progress on the Tank's raglan as you can see here. I was able to get around four and a half inches done last night. Please excuse the horrid picture quality of these pics. I had left my battery charger for my digital camera in Greece this summer so I took these with my cell phone. Knitting in the round is pretty monotonous and I can knit and watch tv. So last night was Juno and the raglan.

I also ripped up the bootees that I created. I tried to undo the seaming as you can see here, its hard to see since my comforter and the yarn are almost the same color!! So as I am undoing the seaming the triangle piece came off without a hitch, but I ended up undoing the case of edge of the other piece that sort of looks like an envelope. It was a double knitted piece and was just a mess after I was done. I had two choices ahead of me : start over or just scrap the whole thing! I chose to scrap it. I wasn't in love with the bootees in the end. I think it was the bland color which wasn't my first choice but was some stash I was trying to get rid of. I started looking online because I had seen some really cute bootees online the other day. Now that was the fun part, trying to remember where I had seen them!!! Surprisingly, I found them after only a few minutes!!

http://www.saartjeknits.nl/ has a free link for the pattern and it was so easy to make. So far we have one bootee done and it only took me a few hours from start to finish with seaming and weaving in ends. One bootee is done! Yaay! I had this beautiful 100% silk hand painted yarn that I had used to knit a baby poncho. I weaved in the ends for the baby poncho too so the gift is almost ready to go. The benefits of being on-call is all the knitting I can get done!!

Tank and Baby Banana

I have 3 things currently on the needles. One is a sweater for my little nephew Tank. He is a little ball of energy and I don't know how my nifi handles running after him all day. I have already knit this sweater and thankfully had the sense to forgo the surprise aspect of the gift and have him try it on. The neck was perfect, the length was perfect, the sleeve length was perfect BUT it was too snug. He isn't a big guy, the nickname Tank doesn't come from that at all. He is just like a tank in the way he just puts his head down and rolls over everything in his sight. He is constantly bumping into things because he just isn't looking! Anyhoo, I want him to be able to wear this for at least a little bit in the fall, after all we do live in New England. So I frogged the whole thing and started over this time making everything a little bigger overall. I hope my guesstimation this time was right. Maybe it is because I am not a mom that I have no idea how to sightly guess kids clothes?

The bootees are for my friend Banana's baby due to arrive at the end of June I think? I loved the pattern and will be making a matching hat out of the Rowan yarn and adding little rosettes. The other pink hat is just some leftover yarn from awhile back (I lost the ball band -- I'll have to look for it online) that is SO SOFT. It is exactly what I think of when I think of knitted baby hats. Since Banana is one of my friends that took the knitting class with me and since she knits, she will appreciate this gift.

Which begs the question: when you give a knitted gift to someone who doesn't knit, do you think they appreciate it as much as someone who knits?

Greek Girl Knits is born!

Hello web world!
After a few years of reading knitting blogs like a fiend, I have decided to add my own ramblings to the blog-o-sphere. I am a relatively new knitter, took a knitting class with friends about 4 years ago when we decided to try something new.

Our office had a discount to a place called The Learning Connection which offered various classes and crafts. You could sign up for Yoga or Intro to Italian. I wanted to take knitting and belly dancing. The group wanted to go to see a "Medium" and check it out. We ended up going to see the Medium and also signed up to take a knitting class. (Now that I think about it I still want to take a belly dancing class -- still sounds like fun to me. The Medium wasn't that great. All my relatives who at the time would communicate with a Medium only spoke Greek so I didn't have my hopes up for this guy.)

Anyway, we took the class with a wonderful "Master Knitter" and after four weeks of two hour classes a new knitter was born! I loved it from the first moment I picked up my knitting needles. My good fiends and I would go to dinner after work and then to the class where our teacher taught us how to cast on, the knit stitch, the purl stitch, increasing, decreasing, how to cast off and finally (ta-da!) how to read a knitting pattern. She would serve tea and pastry and help us all with our basics. I learned more than a few good lessons in that class.
1. Do not have too much wine before knitting. My friend Banana almost took out my right eye when she overzealously was trying the increase M1 stitch.
2. Relax and enjoy the knitting!!

At the end of the class I decided to embark on my project of knitting a baby blanket for my niece. My brother and sister-in-law (or as in the Greek my "nifi") were expecting and I wanted to make something for my new little Squirt. I went to the LYS and bought a whole bunch of pink yarn. My favorite color is pink and since I knew the new baby was going to be a girl the blanket was going to be PINK. (To this day, it is still my favorite color yarn to knit with!) I settled on the baby blanket pattern from Stitch N' Bitch and had my trusty Knitting teacher help me with the pattern basics. Of course, as I have discovered in my knitting journey, I try to tweak things, I frog, I re-knit, I re-frog and on and on it goes. In the end, the blanket was lovingly knit for my Squirt. She loved it but not as much as her brother the Tank does now. It is funny to see one and a half year old nephew sleeping with a pink blanket!!

I have knit many things in my knitting journey since then. Every new baby I know gets a baby hat, each a little different but all made with love. I have found that I much prefer knitting a project and giving it away. I still don't have many things I have made that I have kept for myself. (isn't that funny?)

Currently on the needles: a top down roll neck sweater for the Tank. I have had to frog it and start over since I misjudged the size a bit and it was a little too snug around the waist.

Recent FO's:
Page 18 Elefante by Susan B. Anderson for the Squirt who requested a Red Elephant.
http://susanbanderson.blogspot.com/2007/04/page-18-elefante.html
Page 81 Booties by Susan B. Anderson for Banana's baby-to-be
http://www.knitterella.com/SusanBAnderson/Page81BootiesPattern.pdf