This week, I finished off four — count ‘em, four — UFO’s in the stack.  Not only that, I have a good shot at finishing off a fifth.
I’m as shocked as you are.  Probably more so.
Admittedly, none of them was a great deal of work.  (That part is somewhat more shocking, actually.  This project has [...]

One of the cold hard truths I learned when I quit the engineering job and started setting my own schedule was this:

You can’t get anything done on the days when DH is home.

It was surprising to me — after all, why on earth should it matter if he is upstairs in bed sick with a [...]

Wow!  Here we are at the end of the UFOlympics, and the decathlon results are in…
… and I made it!

0.  Brioche st hat:  shop sample for class.
1.  Bear mittens:  one left to finish; then it’s time to take ‘em to the zoo.
2.  Bunny slippers:  make ears, felt, attach, and add eyes and tails.
3.  Glam rock vest:  [...]

Over at the [Knitting Daily->] blog, they’ve been discussing the design process used by Michelle Rose Orne in her book, Inspired to Knit.  I haven’t gotten the book yet, but Michelle’s description of her design process intrigues me:

As a designer for the garment industry for many years, I used … mood or “story boards” when [...]

Yes, you may well have been questioning why there is a total of 12 UFO’s on my UFOlympic "decathlon" list.  (Actually, there are 13, because I had to add one UFO #0 that I forgot about when making the original list.)  But it’s a good thing.
Truthfully, I could probably do at least two decathlons with [...]

Hey, are you getting as sick of the UFOlympics as I am?
It was fun to begin with — it was great to get a couple of projects out of the way and all that — but I’m getting a definite feeling of stuck-in-a-rut now.  Maybe this is why the real Olympics only last a couple of weeks, [...]

Well, it’s nearly halfway through the timeframe I set for my personal UFOlympics.  (In fact, it’s only about 40% of the way through, if you don’t count that "vacation" time I spent with strep.)
And while I’ve been waiting for you guys to decide what I’m supposed to do about the bunny eyes on the slippers, I haven’t [...]

UFO #1, the fifth bear mitten:  FINISHED 07/09/08.
Final time:  2 days!
Yarn:  donated acrylic stuff.
Pattern:  from Twisted.
announcer’s voiceover:  She’s certainly maintaining a very competitive pace thus far, but can she possibly keep it up throughout the whole event?  We’ll have to wait and see.
I threw a 6-inch ruler into this picture for scale, so you can see that a single bear mitten [...]

Ummm… I have good news, and bad news.
First, the good news:  UFO #0, Brioche st hat:  FINISHED 07/07/08.
Final time (offical Swiss, of course):  2 days.
The crowd goes wild!
Yarn:  Manos del Uruguay silk & wool.
Pattern:  my own Polar Bear Pattern.
Shameless plug:  this is a sample for a class I’ll teach at the Knitting Bee in Sept. 
 

OK, the bad news:
#1:  I [...]

Well:  I’ve been seriously winnowing out the UFO pile in preparation for the Games of Summer.  I’ve had to revise my rule a bit, and I think I’ve got a goal now.

Original rule:  Finish all current UFO’s by the end of the Summer Games.

OK — perhaps you’ve already figured this out, but this is sheer lunacy.
After taking a [...]

OK, I got game.  (Whatever that means.)
I also still got plenty of UFO’s.
So, here goes:  I’m officially entering the 2008 Summer UFOlympic Games.
Welllll, kind of officially.  There’s some wiggle room there, I think.
Background:  As far as I can tell after a whole 5 minutes of online research, the UFOlympics concept started in 2006 with this blogger’s [...]

Over the weekend, I had a touch of  "the depression" *.
Specifically, I had the knitting depression.
I didn’t have a single decent current project, the UFOs were one big pile o’ crap, I hated everything in my hotlist **.

I HAD NOTHING TO KNIT.

If this sounds to you a bit like closet angst (I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR), you [...]

Both my sister and a college friend recently sent me copies of this Wall Street Journal article about knitting.
More specifically, it’s about "Sock Wars", where the idea is that everyone playing the game is an "assassin" and has an assigned  "target".  You are supposed to "assassinate" that person by knitting them a pair of socks, and then you send [...]

This past summer, I learned a term from my woodworking brother that I think deserves wider attention in the knitting world.
He was reading an article on “pine", I think — and just what kind of a nut would read an article about “pine", I ask you – give me an article about “MOHAIR” any day [...]