TrashCan: I tried. Really, I tried hard.

Trash Towers Dictionary

a/c - art crap. CK's fond term for the means of assuaging my addictions.

BSD - Been Seen Done. Devised while travelling the Great Ocean Road on CK's first Australian trip. Every lookout point was as fabulous as the previous and we got a little bit magnificenced out so rather than pull in we would shout BSD and keep driving.

Now general usage for when a situation is over or beyond repair.

bob - noun. Princess Curly- Wurly's word meaning all sweets, chocolate and yummy things.

blurry - (pr. to rhyme with hurry) Sth African/Zimbabwean term and my favourite polite swearword. Means kind of like bloody but usuable in mixed company. See 'Feck' & 'Eejit'

eejit - Irish term meaning 'idiot'. Suitable for use in polite company. Used by my Aunt Marion.

feck - Irish term used by my Aunt Marion so it cannot be rude!

ho-ho -(pr. with a short o). Zimbabwean word for bugs.

lani - (sp?) Sthn African word - means posh, expensive, elegant, stylish.

La Villa de Lamaca - (translates from Ital. as The houseof snails. My 'green' house out in the garden with all my a/c (ref: above) stuff in it. Built by CK and Babyman for me. CK lost his fingerprints over it. I cannot actually get in there at the moment!

lubbard - derived from 'beloved'. Devised by my then two y.o. son b/c unlike his sister he could not say 'Mother Beloved'. Usually prefaced by a noun.

OfStEd - Office for Standards in Education. Bossy civil servants who would like to see every child in formal, full-time education from birth.

Q.I. - Quite interesting.

terence - sobriquet applicable to all small children. Originated with one 'borrowed' child who could not pronounce ' terrorist' .

TG - exclamation. Thank God! An interesting choice for the dictionary of a recovering Catholic but is a phrase used by my Irish family and is now deeply fixed in my conversational repetoire. (reference also PG - Please God).

TGTH - The Great Trip Home. Alt. known as 'How I spent Christmas and N.Y 2008.

Wednesday, 27 February 2008

I tried. Really, I tried hard.

Have you heard of the chippie (crisp to you Brits) scarf? WKM has a picture posted here and I was so entranced by her fabulous work that I thought I would give it a go.

My plan was to make it for a friend's birthday (beg. Feb since you ask) and even splashed out on some NORO in a colourway I thought may suit her. This in itself makes me saintly as I have never really got the appeal of Noro.

WMK very kindly supplied me with the pattern and I set about casting on. The trick with the chippie scarf is that although this first stage may take several years and wear out either your fingers or your needles the actual knitting is only nine rows worth.

This being Britain I first had to juggle the needle size conversion then realised that I couldn't be ar*ed to actually go buy the right ones and so began by using 9mm rather than 10mm figuring this wouldn't make much difference. I'm sure it didn't.

What may well have been an issue in my increasing concern with this project was this obsession the Americans have about knitting with sticks. Or not. Nearly every recipe I see from the U.S. is knit in the round , either dpns or circular needles. I only possess one set of ea. of these and even together they wouldn't come close to 10mm so I started with straights.

No seriously. And I was okay for the first few rows. But then when the increases meant there was over 300 stitches on the stick things began to get a little tricky.

I sent out a distress call and WMK came dashing to my rescue with not just one but TWO circular needles. Figuring this was a bit excessive I carefully put one set away and kept on going. A few more rows of increasing and I was up to over 600 stitches!! AND they were stretched over BOTH sets of WMK's needles.

By the time I got to the end of the eighth row my fingers were starting to cry real tears and the wool was never going to last through to casting off so I let it sit in one of the increasing number of knitting bags to ~~fester~~ develop for a little while.

But last weekend I had had enough. This chippie scarf, much as I loved it, was going nowhere. So I dedicated Saturday night in front of the telly to restructuring my scarf-in-progress.

This is the result.

But I am hoping I have a new home for waiting for it.

8 comments:

Lesley said...: Oh dear Trashy - that's a very sad tale!! Doesn;t it just kill you to have to unravel something you've made a good bit of progress on?

I'm nearly half way through a gorgeous cabled jacket for Minx and
1)can't find the pattern or copious notes I'd made that go with it
2) can't be a**sed to turn the house upside down to look for it 3) have gone off the idea of knitting it anyway
4) she's probably outgrown it by now!!!
I now have to muster up the courage to get 'frogging' as they say in knitland :(

xxx; 27 February 2008 10:23 pm
Monkee Maker said...: Oh God, I'm sorry to giggle, but that picture of the 300 stitches on one needle? Brilliant!

That WMK was a star to come up with the goods, sorry it didn't work out for you.

:); 28 February 2008 6:38 am
Kitty said...: Well now I know how WMK knitted me that bag for the Valentine's Swap anyway!

Sorry to hear about your having to frog - but sometimes it just has to be done, doesn't it? :-(

x; 28 February 2008 8:04 am
trashalou said...: Actually I was pretty happy 're-structuring'. It felt good!

Hmmm... does this indicate psychopathic tendencies? fingers crosssed not, heh!; 28 February 2008 8:43 am
Lucy Locket-Pocket said...: Ahhhhh! But those two balls of Noro look so very pretty just like that!

P.S. Word verif today is "qifqfzl" is that the swear word you said as you "frogged"????; 28 February 2008 12:21 pm
Working Mom Knits said...: You are SO funny!

And I'd love to have the yarn for my friendship-blankie.

ps: you can stop crying in your beer - I'd already made a chippy for you before I sent the needles but haven't gotten round to wrapping it in a super-special manner just yet. Promise to send it in time for wearing as you sun yourself : ); 28 February 2008 3:21 pm
Genevieve said...: oh no! I haven't tried to make this scarf (my mom did make one though) but I think you have scared me off of it...; 28 February 2008 4:49 pm
Katie twinkles said...: But Trash, it's no wonder about that scarf-it's the name of that virus I had NORO. The best new home for that is in a bottle of dettol...; 1 March 2008 5:07 pm