Clear to Close!

 Why hello there!

As the title suggests, we are clear to close on the house! This doesn't move up the walk through or the move-in date, unfortunately, but it does offset quite a bit of stress about the paperwork and the background stuff.

It's weird, because last time I moved it was a big stressful event, and this time it's a bit stressful, but it's not a big event.  No flights. No movers. And I haven't even started packing.  Me!? haven't started packing? I know, it's crazy!

To be fair, most of our books and other things we don't need every day/week are already in boxes and have been since the last move.

I do have an update on the exterior of the house:

And the kitchen:

These pictures are about a week and a half old at this point.  I know it can get a bit tired seeing the same shots, but that's all that I've been getting.  On the plus side, there were a few shots from around the house in the appraisal, but it's all the way over there.  And I'm pretty sure it would only interest me anyway.  Although, the bathroom is looking pretty good, I'm looking forward to a long soak in my new soaker tub.

In crafting news (this is a crafting blog after all!) I have been knitting a lot of fingerless mitts.  And I finished Vivi.

I suppose I'll talk about Vivi first.

I finished him!

As you can see, he now lives next to Tom Servo on my crafting desk.  ^^

I learned a lot crocheting this little guy.  I actually ripped back the body to the beginning of the black.  I got some better instruction on the joined rounds, and implemented the new technique.  It looks a lot better!

The jacket had an interesting construction, it involves "intarsia" in crochet.  Intarsia is a knitting technique where there are larger blocks of different colors and you use separate lengths of each color in the row so you don't have to strand them in between the color blocks.  Now, I didn't actually use separate lengths of the colors in the jacket.  Crochet is a lot easier to hide contrasting lengths of yarn, but I still would classify this as intarsia since the color blocking was so wide.  If it were knitting, and I wanted the jacket to look nice on the inside as well, I would have used intarsia.

Anyway!  The hat was simple enough, too.  I used joined rounds again, and this time the work is not hidden under a jacket, so I better have gotten the technique right!  It went a lot smoother than the black, I tell you what.

There was a small amount of drama involving the jacket. I ended up ordering two skeins of blue from knit picks in their cotton/linen blend, and not using either one.  The coloring on their website is absolute trash.    Pro-tip!  Go on to ravelry (if you aren't affected by the website aversely!) and take a look at people's stashes.  The people who use the stash function are more likely to take pictures in differing lights to get a more accurate idea of the actual color of skeins.

Here are the two skeins I ordered (Each of the skeins pictured below looked like a match for Vivi's coat when I looked on the website.):

So, two skeins of not the right color in hand, what is a crafter to do?  Well, I remembered I had a few mini skeins from my Tiffany Lamp shawl I knit last year.  I got a 5-pack of shades of blue in order to use one of them-- this only sounds wasteful and ridiculous, but I didn't need more than 20 grams of the blue I needed, and mini skeins don't count as stash.  It is known.

I only wish I had remembered this blue before I made two separate purchases from knitpicks. Either way, lesson learned.  I had a blue that would work and now Vivi has a coat!

The second bit of drama involved the pattern itself and that little cross connecting the fronts of his coat.  The designer completely dropped the ball when writing down these instructions.  They were completely nonsensical.  Now, I wouldn't call myself an advanced crocheter, but I'm not a beginner either.  The advanced crocheters in my circle had no fucking clue what was meant by the pattern.

So, it wasn't just me.

Fortunately, we live in the future.  And I personally live in the internet.  I found the designer quite active in her etsy shop, and I decided to reach out and ask her personally.  And she wrote back!  Despite it being literally years since she wrote the Vivi pattern, she took another look at it and made a video for me.  How nice.  I was able to follow her oral instructions and follow along with the video and now I'm done!

Go me!

Finishing Vivi, I resisted the urge to start another go of FFIX. I instead pored myself back into my spoopy mitts!  It's spoopy season after all!

And look at that! finished!

I had been showing them to friends as I was working on them, because I loved working on them so much and loved how they were turning out.  One of my friends immediately said that she would pay me to make some for her.  This was not exactly something I was excited about doing.  Besides the whole buying the yarn and hoping it arrives before the move, modifying the pattern to fit her, and knitting another item on DPNs, I don't really get excited about knitting the same thing four times in a row. To be fair, she did say she didn't expect them right away, and she understands moving takes precedence.

I decided to just jump into it and get them done as quickly as possible.

This was a feat of ingenuity, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately the pattern is only offered in one size, and that's not very inclusive. I wanted to modify them in the spirit of the original pattern.  So, I did!  Took a bit of thinking and measuring and crossing appendages. But they fit and they are done!  And I am getting paid for it! woohoo!

There's some other crafting going on.  In the last few days I made a secret craft for a swap I'm doing with my friends, and I started some MOAR fingerless mitts for my mother-in-law.  These ones are only in one color, so not only will they fly, I can knit them with my usual magic loop.  yay!  I didn't think I'd ever knit three pairs of fingerless mitts in a row, but here we are.

I don't have a picture of the mitts, and I'm hesitant to share the picture of the thing I made because I don't want the recipient to see it.

I have been working on the birthday sweater in the background, but that is mindless knitting and it's only a boring mass of black fabric at this point.  I'll get more pictures as I progress through the rest of it. I have actually worked on spinning a little bit on Ariel, my EEW, but it's also mostly black, and progress is slow going.  I have a whole rolag left to spin before plying.  If I work on it a little bit every day, I could probably finish within a few days, but I'm trying to get some other crafting done and spinning is sort of low priority with moving in the works.  I couldn't tell you why, but it's how my mind is working. I have not worked on the FFIX cross stitch in a number of weeks. 

And that, my friends, is all that's fit to be shared.  I will probably not be back here until after the move, unless I make a cheeky post between the walk-through, closing, and moving.  It might happen, we'll see.

Have a Happy and Safe Halloween!