cleaves and other things

I finally started working on Cleaves, the project from Knitty that I told Lisa I would make for her for her birthday. In February. This is what the finished item will look like. I, however, only have part of one sleeve.

Here is sleeve #1. No, that is not my hairy arm holding it up, that is Dr. Lorney's hairy arm.

Part of the reason I waited so long to start it was the whole wedding thing...planning a wedding obsessively took away from a lot of knitting time. But mainly I was afraid of knitting in the round. The tutorial I read about knitting in the round (ie, knitting with five short pointy sticks instead of two long ones) said that at first, it felt a lot like "knitting with an unruly hedgehog in your lap," but that after that you got used to it. Well, they were right about the first part. It totally felt like knitting with an unruly hedgehog in my lap. They lied about the whole "it gets better" thing. I'm going faster, but I still stab myself with the needles I'm not using repeatedly. It wasn't anything to be afraid of though. I'm considering trying to make a pair of socks after I'm done with this.

This, however, is my hairy arm.

I also decided that knitting some purses would be neat. I saw a bunch of cable knit purses on Craftster and thought they looked neat, but I'm not a huge fan of cables. So I knit up the fabric for a purse in this funky pattern.

The beginnings of a purse.

However, because I am a terrible photographer, you can't really see how neat the pattern is. This is what it looks like in real life:


I need to get something interesting to line it with and attach some handles, but it knit up pretty quickly and that pleases me. Both this and the thing for Lisa are knit with Lamb's Pride Bulky. I love Lamb's Pride Bulky. It's easy to knit with, it looks pretty, it's soft, it comes in millions of colors (okay, not millions, more like 30, but whatever), and it's readily available. Well, it was in Seattle. Only one store in San Diego sells it (Needlecraft Cottage, the only store worth visiting in Pacific Beach), which annoyed me, but two stores in Encinitas supposedly have it, which makes moving up there a little more attractive to me. But anyway, back to the crafting.

Lastly, here is a picture of the finished purse from the last post.


As you can see, I have attached the second handle and filled it with my junk. It fits my giant wallet, keys, checkbook, cell phone, requisite deck of cards, various lip moisturizers and colorants, and compact pretty well. I give myself two thumbs up.