Get Yer Knit On!

I have two knitting events for all you knitters out there.  One is here in Cambridge, MA and the other is back in LA.

Pints N Purls
Pints N Purls happens every other Thursday at gather here on Broadway St. in Cambridge, MA.  What is it exactly?  Well, you bring your knitting, a beer, and you join other folks in drinkin' and knittin'.  Two Howe girls will be making a guest appearance there next Thursday.


Stitch N Pitch
This Friday, June 13, the Dodgers are hosting a Stitch N Pitch Night. (Read more here as well.)  Basically, you buy a baseball ticket to the Dodgers/Padres game this Friday, bring yarn and knitting needles, try and make something.  You don't have to know how to knit, you just have to look like you are trying.  If you aren't sure what to make, Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier have been on the DL and could use something cozy to make them feel better. There is word they may be back tomorrow to play but they could still use some stitched up love!

kiss me, im irish

or at least as much as everyone else is on st. patrick's day. and for some reason, i looooooove st. patty's day. i honestly have no idea where it came from. love of guinness? preference for green? day drinking? who knows. but what i do know is that for the past couple of years, it has played a significant role in my life.

first attempt

my first "big" st patty's celebration was a couple years ago. and friend and i decided to drive to boston, stay in a hostel and celebrate with the locals. lessons learned that year? 1. there is no such thing as too much green. 2. cute welsh doctors like older women. (oh snap!) 3. breathalyzers in a bar are amazing, and said friend will be above the legal limit before she drinks half a beer. 4. when someone offers you use of their house in southern california DON'T LOSE THEIR EMAIL.
fast forward many years, and here i am. gearing up for another festive holiday. the list of rules has grown, but one thing remains the same. i'm still a fool for st. patrick's day.
so what is a girl to do without any green accessories and no money to head to the store? knit, of course!! it wasn't that hard to decide what to make- i HATE condensation on my hands from holding a cold beer and i HATE my hands getting cold from holding said beer. so beer coozies were on.
it took a bit of experimentation, holding the koozie to see if it needed to be longer, if the coozie was too loose etc., but after i made the first one i was hooked. for some reason, i thought yellow was a st patty's day color. i was quickly corrected. so after switching up my yarns, i was off. i made a couple versions with shamrocks and got a bit annoyed with knitting the shamrocks. so i decided to make one based on the flag of Ireland. This one was my favorite, the only thing i would change would be to add a bottom to the coozie.

I also learned a new binding off technique while working on the flag version. I finished knitting the coozie flat, but when i tried to sew it together, it was too short. i was annoyed. i didn't know what to do. i had previously learned to pick up stitches when i made something too short, so i decided that was what i had to do. i picked up stitches on each end of the flag and increased the amount that i decided was correct. for some reason the green side worked out perfectly, while the orange side has some weird twisting stitches thing going on. who knows. either way, when i finished adding rows, i was at a loss for how to sew the two edges together without taking a ton more time. my first option was to bind off each side and then sew them together. but in my head that would have added to much extra room and the coozie would have been too loose for the beer. so i turned to google. "how to knit two needles together." fail. "how to knit two ends together separate needles."  bingo. this magically lead me to find out that what i was actually looking for was a 3 needle bind off. which i must say is amazing. who knew this was out there? it was awesome! 

after knitting the coozies, i realized that my buffalo sabres st. patty's day shirt would not be enough to wear out. i decided i needed something orange to complete my ensemble. did you know that icords are an actual thing?? and that its not crocheted? because that's what i thought it was. and i don't crochet, so i thought i couldn't do it. but i was wrong. after about 45 minutes, i had this super cute headband all ready to go. boy i love knitting! (yes. i know. you can make fun of me.) after i finished up my last minute knitting, i headed downtown with my coozie for a st. patty's day bar crawl. below are some action shots of the koozies being used in action. so while i sit here and knit some more coozies, i hope you all have a great st. patrick's day!!! so raise your glass...

"Saint Patrick was a gentleman,
Who through strategy and stealth,
Drove all the snakes from Ireland,
Here’s a toasting to his health.
But not too many toastings
Lest you lose yourself and then
Forget the good Saint Patrick
And see all those snakes again."

btw. is it cooizie or kooize???

CORRECTION: All She Does is Knit, Knit, Knit, Knit, Knit

I was very excited to see that Meg liked her etch-a-sketch laptop case. When she first asked me to make one, I wasn't sure what to do so it was a nice little ego boost to hear that. I was even more excited when she left me a voice mail telling me that a friend of hers wanted one as well!! woo hoo!! I was hanging my mission accomplished banner above the kitchen table. Alas, it was not meant to be. Her jiggy little Irish friend really just wanted something to keep his beer cold. In other words...game on.



I still don't consider myself a very accomplished knitter, but I have definitely been liking the challenges it has been giving me. The laptop case alone was a trip, as I didn't have a pattern, just a number of stitches that others had cast on to make cases that size.  It was much harder, as the picture below shows. My main problem was that i didn't have 2 balls of red yarn, so I decided to carry the red behind the entire screen. Had I placed a quick call to mom i would have found out that, no, that was not going to work. Lesson learned.

busted original laptop case

 

Anyways.  When I found out he didn't actually want a laptop case I was kind of bummed. i was also in the early stages of knitting a cable scarf that was taking a while. So I decided to take a "quick" break and knit up a beer coozie. Well, at least I thought it would be quick. After frogging a couple of times and wanting to drink my model, I finally finished the coozie. I will be the first to admit that its not the best and definitely needs some changes to the pattern, but I'm still proud of my lil etch-a-sketch coozie!!

So while I might be "win, win, winning," I'm also "knit, knit, knitting!" (I'm not even going to get into the 4 pairs of mittens I've made this week or the quilt I started!!!)