alisonknits

A Smattering of Good Things

It was a long week, culminating in going to bed at 9pm on Saturday completely exhausted, but today I feel completely invigorated.  Here are some good things in my life:

• I have a new job!  I'm now the Guest Services Coordinator at Rolling Ridge retreat & conference center in North Andover.  It's a beautiful place, situated on 38 acres of land on Lake Cochichewick.  I worked a lot of hours last week and think I'm going to really enjoy my work.
• A couple months ago, I started attending services at North Parish, also, coincidentally, in North Andover (right down the road from my new job, in fact).  The first day I was there, they announced that they were starting a new beginner bell choir.  I've always been fascinated by bell choirs, and joined up right away.  It's a lovely way to be spending my Sunday afternoons.  If you've never seen (or heard) a bell choir, basically, each member of the choir is responsible for just a couple of bells, and everyone has to ring their bells at the right moment in the music.  Our set of bells spans 3 octaves.  I'm playing A and B above middle C.  On Palm Sunday, we're playing "Morning Has Broken," and I even get a few notes of the melody.  Woo hoo!
• I just finished my first professional graphic design assignment - an ad for J. Knits that will appear in Interweave Knits.  I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I enjoyed working on it and learning more about Photoshop, Quark, and what makes a good layout. 
• My little gift to myself to congratulate myself on my new job:

This lovely little teapot from Special Teas, along with some decadently flavored black teas: Chocolate with Chocolate Pieces, and Caramel with Caramel Pieces.  Mmmmmm....

Deja Knit

I'm in the middle of not one, not two but three projects that I have knit before.

First, I started another pair of Bird in Hand mittens.  When I knit a pair for my sister last December, I knew I had to have a pair of my own.  However, since I'm really trying to focus on my professional knitting, and not spend a lot of time knitting just for fun (not that knitting my own designs isn't fun too), I decided to teach a class on the mittens.  I asked for and received Kate's blessing to use her pattern for the class (with the students purchasing their own patterns, of course), and last month I knit the first mitten as a sample to advertise the class.  I reserved knitting the second mitten for demonstrating techniques during the class.  It was in three sessions, and the final session is tomorrow.  It's going great!  We even got Betsy, the shop owner, to take the class.  I'm going to try and get a photo of everyone's mittens at the end of the class.

I'll be embarrassed to admit to the class tomorrow that I've not been modeling good homework-doing.  I want to have the thumb done for class tomorrow so that I can demo the embroidery, but there's no way I'll finish the whole thing.  My revised plan is to get past the thumb gusset, then put the hand stitches on a holder, then knit the thumb.  But even that is a bit ambitious, since I have some other non-knitting work to do today as well.

Anyway, next we have my Rapunzel sweater.  This will be the next design I publish, and I have to say, I think this is my favorite thing I've ever designed.  I knit the prototype for myself last year, and now I'm knitting a sample to photograph, which will live at A Loom with a View when I'm done with it.  Betsy picked the color, and while it's not a color that I would have chosen myself, I actually really like how the pattern looks in this shade.

Sorry for the crappy photo (actually, all my photos for this post are kinda crappy, but I took them at 11pm last night and did the best I could).

The sizes are all worked out (that's the 8 sizes I mentioned in my last post), and the pattern is partially written out.  I still have to knit another sleeve, knit the top edge, sew it all together, finish writing the pattern, photograph the sweater, get the pattern edited, and layout the pattern.  Wow, when I say it like that it sounds like a lot, but hopefully I can get it all done within a couple weeks.

The third re-knit is a version of my Artemis Stole.  I want to teach a lace class this spring, and I've finally learned my lesson that people like a project-based class (rather than just practicing the techniques), so I'm knitting up a scarf version of my stole pattern and will use that to teach lace techniques. 

I'll keep the scarf when it's done, so I'm knitting it out of lovely, soft Malabrigo Lace yarn in a favorite shade of blue.  They call it "jewel blue," but I don't think it's a jewel tone at all, it's more of a sky blue.  In fact, it's the same color I painted my bedroom as a teenager, my office when I worked at NYU, and I'm thinking of painting my current office/study in my home.  I did my best with Photoshop to approximate the color, but in reality it's a much softer color than what appears on my screen in this photo.

So... maybe after all these are done I'll actually invent something new to knit!  A girl can dream.

Almost, but not quite

I have been hanging around the house for the last couple weeks (2? 3? I don't even know anymore...) I'm in between temp assignments. I interviewed for a p/t job that would have gotten me out of the house 3 days a week, leaving me time to work on my knit design business and all that other good stuff. It went very well, they checked my (apparently excellent) references, I had a 2nd interview, which (I thought) went very well, but I don't think I got the job, because I was supposed to hear by now. Poop.

Well, it wasn't meant to be, I suppose.

Also, I recently submitted a very sweet little baby sweater I designed to a popular venue for knitting patterns. I heard back yesterday that they like it, but don't have any room left in issue I submitted for, and would like to hold it for possible publication in the next issue, or the one after that.

I guess that's okay.

My own website is so close to being ready to go live that I can taste it! (It tastes like raspberries.) But I have a little more content to put up, and my hubbo web designer has a few more things to do on the functionality end of things.

We hope to put in more work on it this weekend.

(BTW, I'm thinking about a contest to celebrate once we finally get it up for all the world to see. Stay tuned.)

So, what do I have to show for two (or 3?) weeks without work outside my house? (Not counting all those times I've brought my laptop to Starbucks or my favorite tea house because I'm getting stir crazy.)

Bupkis.

Not exactly true. I put my Christmas decorations away, finally, on January 28. I knit the back & front of a sample for a sweater pattern that I'm hoping will take the knitting world by storm in a few weeks, and I calculated all 8 (8!) sizes. I did a little freelance tech editing, and started along the steep learning curve of using Adobe Illustrator. Look what I made yesterday:

Yes, my heart is a little bit blue.

Almost.