There hasn't been much knitting since returning home -- having my luggage (and therefore all my projects), eh, misplaced for a few days broke my stride. (Air Canada took care of it pretty quickly, though. I'm impressed with how favorably the experience compared to the nightmares my mind immediately conjured up.)

Instead of knitting, I've been teaching myself to crochet! I've got the chain stitch and single crochet down. At least I hope so. I'll have to keep practicing to come out with a constant number of stitches every row. There's a lot I like about it, including how intricate-looking mere single crochet is.

Also, lots of stash enhancement. (Such a nice euphemism for unbridled consumption! I like.) Lots.

I made my first-ever trip to my actual Local Yarn Store, at least the one that's local when I'm home: Unwind. Very nice, friendly and knowledgeable owner and staff, and plenty of yarn on sale, including all Lily Chin yarn for $1 a ball. Yes, really. I nearly cleaned them out.

The trip taught a valuable lesson: My mother is an unexpectedly dangerous woman to shop for yarn with. She immediately gravitated toward the cashmere and silk, and finally decided on this for a simple black scarf and hat:



Finally, two sites brilliantly appeal to my love for tidiness and cataloging: LibraryThing and CraftMemo. Hours of soothing organizational enjoyment to be had!

To give myself a break from the temporary daunting nature of the lace-up gloves, I started the Mason-Dixon Knitting baby kimono for my pregnant aunt. (Well, for her baby. Ha.)


I'm about half-done now, and the pattern is so simple but ingenious that I'm learning a lot (casting on at the end of rows? binding off in the middle of rows? you can do that?) and gaining tons of confidence. It's great fun to watch it grow on the needles into something that actually looks like... a baby kimono.

The eyelet edging created by the yarnovers has me utterly charmed.

So after almost-finishing a third Caps to the Capital hat, I gave in and started on Ysolda's lace-up opera gloves. I'm at that tricky fifth row, with the picking-up-and-knitting, and I'm afraid I'm doing it wrong. Hopefully the fiddlyness and the crazy tightness just come with the territory and it will all turn out okay.

The Craftster thread about them has helped, especially since Ysolda herself has answered the most likely questions there! Such is the wonder of the internet.

Yesterday was a great day in my life: I learned how to ride a bike! Yes, at my ripe old age. I vaguely remember learning how when I was five (training wheels!), doing well for a month or so, and then moving somewhere (city-like, I assume) where I had no bike opportunities.

That suited me fine for another, oh, thirteen years or so, but my college's campus is enormous. This past year my dorm was a good ten or fifteen minutes away from most classes by foot, not to mention a very daunting twenty to thirty minutes away from the gym. I made it through, but with many envious looks at the students zipping by me.

This coming year I am living a few minutes further from the center of campus, so in the interest of my not wasting hours a week walking to class, Novio had given me a lesson (i.e., gotten me outside on my bike falling over a lot) during the school year a few months ago, and yesterday we had the follow-up.

"How long do you think it'll be until I can bike to class?" I asked him before we found an empty parking lot.

"Until you believe you can." Oh, Novio, you and your Marquez-like Latin wisdom.

What followed seemed like magical realism indeed -- there were only a few, eh, unplanned stops, and no real wipe-outs. I cheerfully wheeled around the curved lot, making sharper and sharper turns and even (almost) biking in a straight line. Then I fell and scraped my hands up and thought more handlebar-gripping might not be in the cards, so we headed home.

On the way I started biking again, up a hill even (!), and finally we had the option of taking a shortcut down an inviting hill or going longer down a flat road.

Obviously I made the intrepid choice.

And of course construction had apparently just begun on the hill, creating invisible-from-the-top but big-and-terrifying-and-painful-from-the-middle craters in it.

I wiped out, ending up on my back looking up the the hill, and the bike landed on top of me. Fortunately all my organs are intact, but I've got impressive-looking bruises all over my legs and scrapes on my hands and a particularly nasty half-moon scrape on my belly, where I think the end of a handle landed. Eesh.

But now I can finally ride a bike. The bruises are so worth it.

best. summer. ever.

Today's phrase you can be proud of yourself for saying only if you are a three-year-old or a foreign language-learner:
"He encontrado la billetera de Novio!"

I have several FO's to show off — all of them, actually, as none has ever been photographed and shown off to an adoring public. They include:

• my first project, a scarf in pimptastic purple eyelash yarn for my mother (I am repentant, but that's the yarn she asked for)
  
• the ballband dishcloth, the knitting of which was almost a spiritual experience
  
• the drawstring gift bag, to hold gift yarn and needles for my boyfriend's little sister, who is learning
  
• the first Caps to the Capital hat, complete with baby's (my) first (horrifically ugly) sewn seam
  
• and the second ballband dishcloth (lovely soothing airport-knitting, especially once I — much to my surprise — memorized the pattern)

I'm working on my second Caps to the Capital hat — an unqualified pleasure thanks in part to the yarn, which I'm completely in love with. It's superwash wool and it knits up into this almost cushy fabric... glorious. Altogether, this yarn (one ball Wisteria and one Deep Ocean) will make about four little hats (10" diameter, because third-world babies tend to have low birth weight... I can't even talk about it).

In the same KnitPicks order that brought the Cushy Superwash Yarn of Joy, I also got several sizes of double-pointed needles. Oh boy. I am attempting to muster up the courage and know-how to make my first full-sized hat (the Caps to the Capital hats are knit flat. In 1x1 ribbing and stockinette. Make one, you could do it in a catatonic state and finish it before you come to).