CatsEye

73. Day 795

Yes, yes, of a 30 day tournament.  I'm such a slacker.  However, I have good news.

IT'S FINISHED!!!!!



The Knitting World Cup Throw is complete.  Started 10th June 2006, and taking a cone and a half of Debbie Bliss Cotton DK.  And 795 days, which is only a little bit over two years. 

What do I do with the remaining cone and a half of orange cotton though?  And no, I'll not be knitting a matching throw.  Very funny.

Day Seventy Four

of a thirty day tournament.  And still not done. 

Spookily enough, yet another 5 inches has been added between photographs.  (I must have some really weird internal sensor for this sort of thing.  Huh.)

KWC - Extra Time

Now that there's no deadline, I thought I'd post a throw pic (throw one out there, if you will) whenever the whim took me.  Turns out, bizarrely, that I got it into my head to take a picture on Saturday ... and since last blogging about it, I had knit yet another 5" inches.  This freaks me out.  I'm not counting rows or measuring every five minutes or anything.  Yet somehow, by some internal measure, I knit 5", and then feel the urge to photograph and blog about it. 

Looking at it in full layout, as it were, and with the realisation that the middle square is no longer ... square (24" x 27") I think that (and I can hardly believe I'm saying this) I will keep going with the pattern to 36" and then finish with the border.  Probably about 44" total, which is shorter than the book says but hey, so what?!  It's my throw and I'll stop when I want to.  And now there's no pressure, it's actually fun to knit again.  I'm so strange ...

KWC - The Final

Today, instead of sitting home, knitting frantically on my throw, I went to the BeadFair in Lingfield.  The weather was kinda overcast which was actually really nice ... the drive was pleasant and I arrived at my destination not a sweaty mess.  Always bodes well I find, to at least start the day calm and collected.  And then I got down to shopping. 

I may have mentioned it, but I have this goal of having every single delica bead colour they make.  Seemed reasonable when there was 400 of them.  Turns out I under-estimated a little.  Let's revise that to 800.  Yikes. 

I stopped by the Fine Lines stall.  They had their delicas in numeric order.  Which made it extra easier to look down my list of the colours I don't have, and pick out the missing ones.  The poor man behind the till had to enter each tube of beads into the cash register separately.  Each one was between £1.50 and maybe £3.00 say.  The total was nearly £200.  It took him a while.

Then after that splurge, I stopped at the organiser's stall.  And bought some storage boxes to put them all in.  Two Chrissy's boxes (plus the one I already have) - hopefully that should do it.  Except, that while getting the URL for Fine Lines, I have just noticed that there are actually 1300 delica bead colours.  Oh no!  I think I'm just going to stop counting.

Speaking of counting, I'm up to 30" of throw-ness.  I have accepted the fact that I will not finish in time.  I will not be able to leave a comment in the Winner's post at Yarn Monkey's blog.  I will still have to continue slogging through knitting this thing, with it getting larger and larger, and heavier and heavier, during these hot summer days.  It'll be beautiful when it's done.  Don't exactly know when that might be though ...

KWC - Semi Finals

This one's entitled "Thow on Bench with Weird Shadows".  (I have glass ornaments hanging from the main pergola beam.  They move in the breeze and send refractive rainbows round the garden.  It's pretty).  There are four days to go, and only 25" inches knit.  Not enough, I think, any way you look at it.

Moving swiftly onto the football, out of the four teams left, I think I'm gonna go for Italia.  I have the most in common, if such a thing could be said about a country/person.  My first cats' names were chosen after Italian Gods (well, Roman Godesses actually - sorry boys).  My "big sister" (ex-next-door-neighbour) married a Italian and lives in Rome.  I have attempted twice to teach my self the language (computer software and audio-book thing).  I love the Donna Leon books (crime series set in Venice).  I have a passion for Murano glass (small island off Venice) and beads from there in particular.  Italy it is.  (Glad that's sorted, it was keeping me awake at night ... not).

Well, can't stop and chat all day, must knit another 25" in 96 hours.  Yeah, right.

KWC - Quarter Finals

Oh well.  That's the dream over then.  (What dream?  Was I asleep?  In this heat?  If only ...). 

I'm amazed that some people seem to think that stamping on a man's balls during a football match is a harmless and trivial thing.  Not deserving of a red card at all.  What, did Rooney do it with his bad foot, as to cause the least amount of damage?  Hello! Stamping ... with football boots/studs on!  Brings tears to my eyes, and I'm a girl.   

Still, penalities eh?  Get us every time.  While I'm deciding which team to not support now, here's the throw.

Official measurements, 40 inches wide, 20 inches "the other way".  I vaguely recollect that the pattern might require 50 inches "up".  So, halfway done if it's a square.  On the bright side, I'm on HOLIDAY!!!! For two whole weeks.  So I can knit all day and night if I want to.  Need to.  Which I may ...

KWC - Second Round

England 1 v Ecuador 0.  The most boring football match ever (apparently).  A little girl visiting next door ran out to announce to the world that David Beckham had scored about 5:15 and then I heard no more.  No great jubilation or anything.  Speaking of boring ...

Using my non-standard, unofficial and wickedly short-term measuring system of "squares on my duvet", the throw is 9 squares wide, and almost 4 squares high (deep? long? whatever).  At least 5 (if not more) squares to go!

KWC - Game Three

It's a draw!  2-2.  And (although it will never last) we're top of our group.  Wow!  Next up, Ecuador on Sunday. 

The throw is officially the same size as my garden bench cushions, and my Pilates Performer (hidden underneath the cat blanket ... it gets sooo much use with all this junk stored on top of it).

The horizontal lines seem to be confusing the camera, there's a whole middle bit of garter stitch in there somewhere.  The biggest drawback I'm finding, is that the needle size is only the slightest bit bigger than the cable and so the knitting doesn't flow down it and off the needle.  I have to keep stopping and dragging all the to-be-knit loops closer to the end.  And smoothing them out on the other side. 

Still, too late now to frog and use the next size needle up.  Way too late.  Not gonna happen.  Trust me, I'm an IT professional.  I even made a Yahoo Avatar to prove it ... but I looked too much like a geek.  So you get a girlie version instead.  (New toy, new toy!  Spent hours last night making wildly unrealistic versions of "me").  Don't I look happy ...?!!!

KWC - Game Two

Ladles and Germs, I am proud to announce that we are beyond the bottom border and now sailing on the square sea of serenity.  Our journey may be a long one but promises to be uneventful.

I had the loveliest train ride home tonight.  I work until 6pm, and when I left the office the score (England v Trinidad&Tobago) was still 0-0.  Some forward thinking exec had booked out the meeting rooms on our floor (the ones with the removable partitions and the BIG TV screen) and muffled cheers and gasps could be heard now and then through the doors. 

The streets were deserted, and so was the train.  A handful of quiet people, an air-conditioned carriage and my sock.  Heaven.  Everyone had either already left London to get home for kickoff or was hemmed in at the bar, duing half time, in their pub of choice.  I felt like I was in a real-life "28 Days Later".  With no traffic on the road (even in the nightmarish one-way-system) I got home in record time.  And discovered two last (ten) minute goals.  Which was vaguely reassuring.  I mean, if we couldn't beat T&T, we might as well pack up and go home now.

Roll on Tueday (and Sweden).  It's funny, the rail unions threatened a strike (starting at 1pm on Tuesday) - just so all the train drivers could get home in time for the match!  It's not going ahead now, but I wonder what concessions they got out of those negotations ...

I'm melting

I'm up and blogging at this ungodly hour (7am ... what?!) because it's sooo much cooler in the garden than in my bedroom.  It appears that today will also be hot (29C or 84F if that makes more sense to you).  Luckily (and I never thought I'd say it) I'm going to work, where at least the main office is air-conditioned, if not the stairwells. 

The catboy will have to stay home though.  I'll shut the patio doors which separate the house from the south facing oven conservatory and keep him out of there.  I did this on Friday, when it was only 26C (hardly warm at all!) and well, I don't actually know how hot it got in there.  The thermometer is marked up to 120F and then it has a little blue stick which records the max temp.  I couldn't see it, and when I pressed the return button, it took its sweet time to float into view.  So lets just say "unbelievably hot" and not suitable for persons wearing unremovable fur coats.

He is a little strange though.  I woke up, sweltering under my 4.5 tog duvet, inwardly complaining that my ceiling fan is rubbish.  And Terra is lying on the windowsill in the hot bedroom.  Now there aren't really any places downstairs where I could alternatively sleep ... but the cat can.sleep.anywhere.  Apparently the cat brain is the size of a walnut, which must explain why they're all nuts.

KWC Update: Now I'm not going to torture you every day over the next 4 weeks with boring pictures of the orange throw with "two more ridges than yesterday".  Not every day.  But at least at weekends I can dedicate most of my time to knitting and show more progress, so here's where we're at.

I'm obviously not used to all that purling, my left thumb is kinda achy today.  I did learn continental purling (I knit English normally) which used different muscles but I was sooo slow and had to really concentrate.  If I can just make it to the centre square I think I'll be fine (cos I'm going to tweak the pattern to knit that and not purl it).

And here's a week's worth of my other preoccupation.  I got into bead-weaving about two months before I rediscovered knitting.  I haven't got very far in my long-term goal to have beaded swatches of every colour Delica bead they make. 

My reasoning behind this desire is that when I actually sit down to make an item (jewellery, beaded picture, whatever), I'll have a physical colour reference to choose from.  I've completed about 80 swatches (in roughly a year) and apparently there's over 400 different colours.  I've a ways to go yet I guess.  These are all coloured glass with a lining of silver which make the colours really zing!