Strap yourself in

I’m excited about this post! So lets get to it already.

First off, have you seen this picture? It was drawn by Morning Toast, who is 1/2 of CaveRadio, a weekly internet radio show. (There’s another 1/2 who is equally amazing although she didn’t draw me a picture.) Was that too much exposition? We could avoid that if you’d just follow me on twitter.

If you listen you’ll probably win a PartyBot 6000. Tempted now? I really hope tiny robots are tempting to you, otherwise this might be the wrong blog to be reading. Speaking of blogs, have you read this one? (I like his yearly music review.) It’s pretty neat. It’s this guy who beat a world record involving tube stations in London… so I guess now he’s traveling through the U.S. and visiting (in each contiguous state) places with tube station names. It’s cooler than that description. Anyways, Betty B has been reading his blog for a while and she somehow managed to trick get him to stop by our knitting group while he was here in town.

Elaine, Molly, Betty, Geoff, me. (In case you were curious or something.)

Betty got him to sign her tube station map. Then he called us a bunch of nerds. Because apparently knitters are a bunch of nerds. (Screw that noise, my cats think I’m cool.) He also apologized for his language when he swore, which cracked me up. What do people think a knitting group is- a nunnery? If I were ever in a group where it was inappropriate to swear I hope one of you would call for a deprogrammer. But seriously, he was a cool guy and I’m enjoying watching his road trip.

I’ve been kind of bummed lately because it’s hard to knit when it’s so hot. However now that I’m done making a baby blanket for my stepsister I can lay off the big hot sweaty projects. Example of a big hot sweaty project:

Isn’t that one big pimpin’ crib? I mean, she seriously got some sweet ass crap at her baby shower.

The pattern is the Chromium Star Blanket. Which, if you’ll notice, is actually crocheted. Yikes. This is the biggest crochet project I’ve done yet and I see why people like to crochet blankets instead of knit them. I also see why I will never enjoy big projects: I have the attention span of a goldfish.

Don’t worry though, crochet will never capture my heart the way that knitting has. Speaking of knitting- not much of it has been going on. However I did knit some washcloths for my friend and I guess they aren’t going to help the stereotype that knitters are nerds…

Exfoliate! Which now gets you a clip of the cybermen/dalek bitch off:

na-nick nick nick, nickelodeon.

Because I wanted to stress myself out, I signed up for a swap on Craftster. The theme was old school Nickelodeon shows. I got the package from my partner today, here’s what she made me:

I’m all like, ‘hey y’all this here’s my loot’. My favorite thing is definitely the water bottle holder, which I will use for hiking… when I get around to hiking. Heh. The book thing is a journal, which I asked for. She kept the original books pages in it too, which is sweet because it has a lot of Rowlf love and Rowlf is the man. (dog baby thing) I love Rowlf. I want to start a fan club for him.

This is what I sent her and can actually take credit for:

(see more pictures here.)

The shirt says Camp Anawanna, which is from Salute Your Shorts (a show that was amazing and about a summer camp where there were like ten kids per one irresponsible adult). The only thing she wanted was that shirt, so I learned how to stencil for it. Which was intense! I don’t know how people do it but I’m impressed with them.

I also stenciled the tote bag to say Are You Afraid Of The Dark- another great show and was totally on my list as a fave. It’s a show where a bunch of kids sneak out and tell scary stories around a campfire. It was like horror movie baby formula.

I also made a bunch of Doug stickers for her and two magnets, which were pretty fun to make and led me to making…

Yeah! Apocaknits stickers. I made them, you want them- I want to give them to you. Don’t think “but what am I going to do with that?” Just stick it on your $2,000 laptop and never look back.

If I see you, I’ll probably force them on you. However I know there are people out there reading that I’ve never met. I’m not going to make you post a comment if you don’t want to- that would defeat the purpose of lurking. You can shoot me a cryptic or even cute and cuddly email at apocaknits [at] gmail so on and you know the rest.

Yay!!

Sheepish

Okay, I feel pretty bad for pulling a Houdini and disappearing from the internet abyss. I hope someone felt the impact of my absence and lit a candle somewhere.

This time I’ve been gone I’ve done some navel gazing and came up with an answer for why I haven’t blogged for over a month. The answer is: New Years Resolutions. Something I’ve learned about myself this year is that if I don’t go all the way for a resolution, I apparently go the completely opposite direction. So when I stop taking pictures every day, it’s not enough to just stop, I have to never take another picture again. Or something less dramatic.

Anyways, I did go on a vacation. I didn’t take that many pictures though, at least for me. That’s when I realized, ohhh yeah, I should have all kinds of crap to blog about. I’ve been down on the blog.

So, vacation:

We went to Savannah, GA: home of big ass trees.

John seemed to have a good time, despite the Universe conspiring against him. He got one wicked sunburn that blistered and itched him to death. Then as his back was healing we were getting out of the ocean and it started to hail! So it was like tiny little whips hitting his healing back. Still, he took it all like a champ.

While he was suffering I spent a lot of time hanging out watching the ocean be magical.

Plus I spent some time looking down at the water with my mom.

Yeah, I like to party on vacation with my mom. Only that’s kind of an ironic statement since she loves to party way more than I do.

The nicest thing was when we went on a garden tour.

This garden belongs to the tour guides friend and is her backyard. So it was neat to see what the backyards of these crazy nice houses looked like.

Here we are pretending we own the place. Which made me dream of some day owning a house that people tour parts of. Anyways, it was a really relaxing vacation and what I needed. I felt much more energized when I came home. Well, except that the day after we got back some punk kid prank called me all day, which gave me a twitch.

Still, I’m starting to feel a lot better about things. I might even start taking some more pictures soon.

If you want to see the few pictures I did take of our vacation, you can view them here.

Hah! Good one Granma.

After consulting with several people I’ve come to an undeniable conclusion: both of my Granma’s are awesome. They’re totally wicked.

However, most of you know of the one in Minnesota because she taught me how to knit and she often shows up here because she either sends me sweet projects or sends pictures of her projects for me to “put on the computer.” She loves when she gets comments on her Ravelry projects or little hearts. Sometimes we chat on gmail and she says nice things like this:

Phyllis: Yes, I keep up with you on ravelry pretty often–you far out do me. I like the looks of your project and especially the color yarn and how neat it looked when you had it spread out. I also keep up with your cats–they seem content.

I far outdo her? Hah! Until she unleashes the fury on me. Which, it’s really too much fury for one person to handle, so I’m unleashing it on you now.

At first she made a sweater for Louie, however it was a little too big. It’s almost like a dog Snuggie. (Wow, I was unaware there were so many sites devoted to the Snuggie.) So she made this instead:

Look at how happy he is! He knows he looks good. Now before you get all testy and like “wait, I come here for the CATS, not the dogs.” Well dang.

The most camwhoreish of all our family members. I pull out the camera and everybody runs but she just plops right down on whatever I want to take a picture of. Also, the little nail caps match the rug since they’re green. Creepy? Coincidence?

Granma crocheted some rugs for John for his birthday:

I wish I could crochet. Then I could use up all my acrylic. Which I sorted through all of my yarn this weekend and got everything in really good order. Which is nice to look at but it also told me just how much acrylic yarn I have. It’s quite a bit. Here are some after shots:

Also, sorry if you were spammed by me on Ravelry since I was getting my stash page whipped into shape. I know you didn’t want to see so many generic pictures of yarn but I needed to make it happen for my own sanity. Anyways, Granma also sent me a scarf to go with my blue coat:

Plus a delicate angel/lady thing that has a bell in it, which I have riding my piggy bank now:

So what exactly do I outdo her in? Because it’s looking pretty much like the opposite here.

Mostly amazing

For every winner… do you ever feel like you get more than your share of duds? I mean, even when you’re making a winner something has probably gone wrong with it, or is about to go wrong. It’s like, dang, can’t catch a break here. Well that’s definitely how I feel about painting pottery. A hobby I should seriously consider giving up. Because before it goes in the kiln it looks cool:

Then when it comes out you can see every streaky brush stroke… well unless you know what you’re doing. Then grats, you’re a better person than me. Still, at least this one came out kind of cool with the flaming yarn ball. Everything else is a hot mess.

Also, it was my second time around on the mystery sock “Cablicious” and it wasn’t feeling good. At least, I wasn’t feeling good about it, although the instructor says I’m too hard on my own work and need to chill out. Which is funny because they’re usually telling me the opposite at that store (rip out). So I frogged my second Cablicious attempt and I’m going to say my final attempt. Usually I don’t even give things a second shot, so you know I must like the stuff that’s coming out of the mystery sock class.

With all of this failing, you’d think things would be looking down… but they’re not really. As long as you have a pug in your life nothing is really as bad as it seems:

Oh majestic pug stallion.

P.S. Sax wants to wish you guys a happy Easter. She’s all about it.

Win!

I hope you all want to see a smug ass face.

Yes, I finally have my very own Clapotis! Sure, everyone and their mother has knit one. But did they knit theirs with their very own yarn baby? Speaking of said baby, it really is beautiful. I’m not going to lie- I wasn’t 100% sold on it when I bought it. There was some buying peer pressure happening. Once it was rolled up into a beautiful cake I saw the allure of Briar Rose. The colors are freaking eye popping gorgeous. Plus when you feel it, well, it certainly doesn’t feel like wool. (Which may be a good or bad thing depending on who you are.) So all of this combined is enough to get a big old smug face from me. Plus there’s just something about dropped stitches that beg to have their picture taken from every angle imaginable.

It was such a satisfying knit! The pattern called for size 8’s but I went with what the yarn recommended because I figured since the dropped stitches were going to be huge, no sense in having big crazy stitches. While I like the stitches and the way the fabric feels, it made the scarf very wide and not very long. (More a shawl or “stole” than a scarf.) Plus at the end I thought I would run out of yarn so I didn’t do one repeat… and of course I had more than enough yarn left. It was deceptively dense in the middle. I need to stop winding stuff so there’s like a fist of yarn in the middle. Although I don’t think I wound this one, so I’m going to pass the buck on that.

Which reminds me of this quote that my friend liked from that movie Closer: “Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.”

This picture is pretty goofy but I figured, what the heck? I’m so excited about this project. I’ve pretty much knit it for a month solid to get it done. Everything was jiving, the yarn was great, the pattern amazing, the needles were making stereotypical clicking noises. I just kept losing steam and wouldn’t touch it for a day or two because I’ve had some severe attention problems lately. Watch movies? Read? Listen to music? Go outside since the chance of it being nice is 50/50- so much awesome stuff to do.

Wait- I mean, crap. Now they’re going to revoke my blogging license. Did I just say that I’ve not been knitting because there’s just too much awesome stuff to do in life? My life is just so freaking great all the time that it’s hard to focus on anything for any extended period of time. I’m thinking if this blog attests to anything it’s that I have craft project ADD. I started thinking about all of the projects I’ve started lately that I don’t even talk about. Like, for a foolish month I thought I’d try my moms craft and cross stitch something. The cats stopped that. Then my friend Miranda helped me get fabric to sew up an apron and a dress. When she asks about my progress all I can do is look sheepish.

Have you missed pictures of my cats? Because this one has definitely missed being in front of the camera.

I’m older!

I guess birthdays are supposed to get lamer as you get older, so I’m not looking forward to all that noise… because this one I just had was a good time. My dad took me to see a movie, which we do every year as a tradition. His birthday is the day before mine so it’s pretty cute.

This is him modeling the bug vacuum, which boasts that “you can play with bugs without ever touching them.” All of the obsessively clean kids out there- rejoice!

My boss is pretty great too-

Although I maintain that working on my birthday (which was a Saturday!) merited a cake. He went above and beyond and got it from some fancy pants French bakery. After work I went to a roller derby:

The Ohio Roller Girls vs. the Northstar Roller Girls (from Minnesota). If you haven’t checked out a roller derby you should because they’re a lot of fun. It’s good to go with someone who knows what’s going on though. Otherwise you have to get a little creepy and listen in on knowledgable people. The derby also rocked because I went with Jessica.

Aren’t her teeth like perfectly straight and white? I’m always amazed the pictures she takes.

So yeah, I got to see people, got to eat good food, got some sweet ass presents. My mom got me a swift and ball winder:

I guess that means I can’t give up on knitting. That’s the big time, right? Oh man, now I’ll probably never knit again. Crap.

Get out!

I’ve been trying to be more active this year… I could and should probably be doing more but compared to last year I’m kicking some major ass. I think last year for the first four months my body was actually taken hostage by a slug.

Part of my get out and get moving attitude is fueled by my hike and knit group. Yeah, not two things I’d necessarily put together myself or at least on my own but it seems to work. The people who have been going this winter are freaking awesome.

Yesterday we went to Slate Run and hiked and hiked and really just hiked it up. I took some pictures but of course nothing is really looking too hot since it’s still winter and it’s still yucky. I’m not just talking nature when I say that though, there’s a reason there haven’t been too many pictures of me up here lately. So I’m really feeling where the outdoors are coming from: you can’t be beautiful all the time.

I’ve been making improvements around the house lately but nothing worth taking a photo of or boring you about. When I was in a Target haze I grabbed some of those fold up chairs to sit in outside. It made me start thinking about stuff to do this summer that would involve using those chairs. So far all I’ve come up with is 4th of July and Play in the Park. Which are things we did last year. So I should probably start thinking outside the box.

Anyways, I’m ready for summer, I’ve already gotten some Jeni’s ice cream:

Besides that I’m super pumped for movies that are coming out this year. This is where this post contradicts itself. On one hand I want to get out… on the other hand I want to sit in a movie theater. Yep. Here’s a list that links to the trailers because if I put them in the post it would take a million miles to scroll down. Although I really want to know what movies everyone else is interested in.

Tokyo!

500 Days of Summer (could be awful but I’m willing to give anything that Tommy from 3rd Rock from the Sun is in.)

Funny People

Public Enemies

Awful Action:

Fast and Furious (trust me, this trailer is way better than the first with the remixed Soulja Boy song.)

Crank 2 (holy crap, I didn’t know Bai Ling was in this!)

Already hyped/blockbusters:

Wolverine

Terminator

Transformers

G.I. Joe

Harry Potter (I haven’t seen the last few but I want to see this one for some reason.)

Maybe…?

Star Trek (the internet’s buzzing about this… but it’s from the same guy who brought us Mission Impossible 3 and Cloverfield so I’m not so sure about this one.)

Inglorious Basterds (surprisingly I’m not a huge Tarantino fan, didn’t dig Kill Bill… but I kind of want to see this just to hear Brad Pitt say Nazi’s over and over.)

Then there are the movies that there’s not much info on yet: Where the Wild Things Are (I heard they were having some legal or studio issues who knows), New Moon (lol, why can’t I stop myself from watching awful crap?), Scott Pilgrim and Sherlock Holmes, which looked cool from the Oscar credits/previews thing.

Yep. All those movies = lots of knitting time.  Although I’ve pretty much just wasted all of my afternoon looking at the trailers. Maybe I should go clean…? Psht.

50 Cent goes to Iraq

Have you guys seen the ads for this game? We don’t see too many ads these days but it feels like the internet is actually targeting this household for the new 50 Cent game. Are we their target audience? Definitely. However all of the ads are ridiculous and amazing. I mean, from what I’ve gathered this game has got to be like National Lampoon’s Family Vacation. Only instead of Wally World they go to Iraq. And instead of Chevy Chase it’s 50 Cent. I might be wrong but I certainly hope I’m right.

So I finally finished the first cubee I started. That’s right, it’s the cradle of cubee life. The cubee Mesopotamia for me if you will (which I don’t blame you if you won’t.) I give you Ramona Flowers:

She’s got some spark in her. Hopefully not too much or she’ll be gone in less than two seconds but you know, a little spark.

I haven’t been up to too much I guess, at least knitting wise. I did paint some pottery though because there was a special on Lincoln’s bday, the painting fee was only a penny! Way better than on Washington’s bday where they upped it to a quarter. I mean, which President are you going to like more with those prices? I decided to paint a bowl for my ungrateful asshole cats.

It says “Saxy Cat.” Because that’s what I call her and I do call the other one Shmoobot. It came out pretty crappy in my opinion. The green for the Saxy Cat part came out way lighter than I thought it would and the blue background paint came out super streaky which I don’t really like. Plus you can see what a train wreck I ended up making Sax’s face. Live and learn I guess. I’m exciting to go back and paint a mug. I’m thinking either something knitting themed or a Mickey mouse themed mug for my mom.

I got my hair cut last week and because I need to share every detail of everything I do with you, here’s a picture:

Which I kind of like this picture because it makes me think that’s what I’d look like if I were a cyborg and had a crazy cyborg eye. You know, a cyborg who can turn the world on with her smile. Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

Sorry 2D, you’re too square for me

Okay, so let’s pretend Valentine’s day just happened. I mean, in the grand scheme of time it’s not that much of a stretch. Anyways, this Valentine’s day and just lately has been all about sticking it to the second dimension. While it was adequate before it is now pretty much useless since this is the future we’re living in. Also, I can’t stop myself from cutting stuff out of paper and giving it some… dimension.

Wouldn’t you like to go to work and find a TARDIS waiting for you? BAM!

Pretty swanky right?

Me and John went out on Valentine’s day and saw Coraline in 3D, which was pretty neat. While it wasn’t ‘creepy’ it did creep me out in some parts, if that makes any sense. There were a lot of scenes that I thought were great in 3D but I felt like I would have been really bored if I were just watching it normally. Maybe they did something different for the different screenings? I don’t know. Here’s the trailer if you have no idea what Coraline is.

Of course I had to make a paper doll for John for Valentine’s day so I made him his very own pipboy:

I also got him a shirt. Although he got me something a bajillion times better because he’s always doing sweet and frustrating things like that. One of these days I will get him a better present and then I’m sure everything will reverse like in Dogma, you know, black will become white, happy will become sad, cats and dogs will start living together. However Chris Rock will still be a wise acre because you just can’t keep him down.

Hey, remember knitting? Yeah, neither do I. But since we’re on the topic, I’ve been slowly manufacturing a Clapotis. I won’t even link it because I’m sure you’ve all either seen it or made it and if you have to see another one your eyes will start bleeding. Well look away:

This was before I dropped any stitches and I wish you could feel this fabric! I’m loving this yarn and while the pattern is keeping my attention the sheer enormity of it and that fact that it’s going to take the whole year to make is a little daunting. At my LYS they always talk about customers in terms of how ‘prolific’ they are. Oh you know Susan, she’s such a prolific knitter, she knit a whole wardrobe for her little granddaughter. Sometimes I wonder how they would describe me, would they say, oh you know Lindsey, she’s so antiprolific that she started knitting something and somehow ended up unraveling her shirt.

Actually I know what they would say about me: she needs to quit her bitchin. I started a new Mystery sock, which you all have seen around here before. However into the second repeat I started noticing that Shi Bui pools. Noticeably. I did not know this about Shi Bui. I took it in and said what’s going on here ladies and one of them told me that oh yeah, Shi Bui does that, she knit a pair of socks with cables in the same colorway I was using and it did the random pooling and she just loved it.

Are you noticing how I’m talking in past tense here? Because I frogged those suckers. FROGGED. You hear me? Even though they tried to tell me I was crazy, the owner agreed with me: yes that is some skanky pooling. Also yes it is my time and money. And while we’re at it, it’s not like they spun and dyed the yarn themselves so why take it as a personal offense? She told me I could bring the yarn back and get whatever I wanted. How awesome of a store is that?

Before I go, my friend decided that she was ready to break out of the land of garter stitch scarves and start playing for keepsies. I told her she should knit a hat. Well that’s exactly what she did. In a day. Because she pretended like she needed some hand holding but she really just needed a cheerleader.

See how happy she is? Next thing I knew she was at the LYS buying some llama yarn to make Felicity. This girl’s a pro y’all, give her some props.