Somebody go wake up Billie Joe!

Hey folks!  It's almost October! how exciting!

Well, only because the kids have a few weeks off starting next week and I'm so looking forward to having all the sleep ins.  Zac's got a few days off this weekend, too, and I'm looking forward to those especially.  His schedule has evened out, but he still has more overtime than he ever used to.

I... well, I took a week off to play final fantasy 10.  I was thoroughly enjoying it, but now I'm just about to the final part of the final bosses and I kind of don't want to.  I probably would have to go get some of the ultimate weapons and it just looks like a lot of work.

Before I got thoroughly wrapped up in new game, I was working quite diligently on the cross stitch, so we'll start there.

Last I wrote, I was getting through the hair on Garnet/Dagger.  Well, I ended up having to rip it all out because I miscounted where she went next to Freya.  In fact I think I mentioned here that I should have made an extra pattern of this most difficult transition.  After ripping about a thousand cross stitches out, I did just that, and she's all done:

I then moved on to Zidane!

And here's where I left it while I went and got distracted by new final fantasy.  I have 3 more characters after this, plus a moogle, should be fun.  I am definitely planning on getting back into it now.

Meanwhile, I finished my socks:

And rather than doing more socks, I decided to cast on to a sweater with yarn I got for my birthday in March.  The yarn is Nightshades, a lovely woolen spun cormo yarn out of New Hampshire.  It's spun so that the yarn looks black, but has the impression of colors-- the one I chose was purple, but there are other colors to choose from.

Getting to this point involved doing a swatch, and it was a little more complicated than you might be thinking.  In order to accurately measure the gauge of my knitting in the round, I either have to knit in the round, or I have to mimic it.  You might be asking, why not just knit a small sample flat? Well, when you knit flat, you purl back on the wrong side, and when you knit in the round it's all knits, since there is no wrong side. Well, purling generally has a different gauge than knitting-- the way the yarn travels around the needle has a little bit to do with it, as does the way one tensions the yarn, it's all a lot of little things that can add up to issues when translating flat knitting to the round.  It could be half a stitch difference one way or the other and in a sweater circumference, that can add or subtract inches to the fabric.

I also wanted to avoid magic looping with my needles to get the in the round gauge too, despite it being a fine method of knitting smaller circumferences in the round, that, too can affect gauge.  Unless I knit the entire sweater using magic loop, which I was not planning for.  It is a good idea to use the same methods and materials for finding your gauge as you do for knitting the final object.  (It's also a good idea to wash the swatch and let it dry before you measure the gauge as knitting can change once it hits water)

What I actually did was knit in the round, flat.  I casted on 30 some odd stitches, knit across the first row and then slid the stitches back to the same needle I started with and knit the stitches in the same orientation again, leaving the line of yarn long enough not to pull tight on the swatch.  I knit about 5-6 rows each with a few different size needles and then bound off.  Then I simply cut the lines that were connecting the ends of the rows to the beginnings, that way it would lay flat, and I washed and dried the swatch.

And that's how I found my gauge!

I hope it works out.  I don't always do the whole thing, generally I can predict what yarn will do and how to get a good fabric that I like, but this yarn is woolen spun and non-superwash, which both can have effects I'm not used to.

I have quite a bit of knitting evenly to go before the interesting bits of the sweater.  The pattern is Hearthstone by Ysolda Teague.  The sweater is knit from the bottom up, the sleeves are knit to the armpits and then the entire thing is joined in the round for the yoke.  The yoke has a raglan style sleeve, which I find flattering, and there's a nice cable detail in the decreases along the raglan lines.  I'm looking forward to getting there, but I'm enjoying the vanilla knitting while I do.  It's perfect for watching shows, waiting at kid pick up, and generally picking up and putting down at will.

Anyway.  I got a few more pictures of the house for you!

This is the last two weeks of progress.  We have flooring in the kitchen!  A driveway! And the facade on the outside is looking great!  Very exciting!

I'm not sure when closing will be, our contact said something about the tilers being delayed, but I'm not sure how long or if it will affect the finishing schedule.

We'll be getting a final walk through date soon though!

In the next few weeks I hope to get more knitting done, and more cross stitching, too.  I'm thinking about thinking about spinning, I may find some time to pull out one of my wheels and make progress on the crochet sweater yarn, or the thing on my wheel that I briefly mentioned about a month ago, but didn't get a picture for.  It's feeling sort of stagnant, my spinning mojo.

Speaking of mojo, I did pick up a little drawing notebook for doodlings, and I started with drawing my wheel!

I'm considering taking part of inktober, which is a challenge through the month of october to draw everyday, but I may not.  These things are for fun, I don't need to force it.

I hope you all are well and that you have a lovely transition into Fall!