Wednesday, September 29, 2010

FO: Budgie


Budgie

About 10 days ago I turned in a final, full draft of my dissertation to my advisor. While I haven't received any formal feedback from him yet, he did assure me that I will be done this semester. It will take some time to schedule a defense date, but would I be overly optimistic to think that I could have this whole thing wrapped up by Thanksgiving? Maybe. But that won't stop me from trying. At a minimum it will be another week until I get some feedback from my advisor, and once he approves the document my committee members get at least 3 weeks to review it before we meet for my final oral defense. So...I am in the final stretch, but there is still more work to do.

Of course once I turned in that copy my body shut down and I came down with a bad head cold that I can't seem to shake. While annoying, I don't mind. It has helped me slow down, really pay attention to my immediate needs and get back into the groove of relaxing and sleeping again.

While I was putting the finishing touches on my dissertation, I knit up this adorable sweater. In my never-ending quest to find creative ways to use up my one-skein yarns I happened across this pattern. I used some left-over Cascade (from this project), and my one remaining skein of a silk-blend Manos del Uruguay. The final sweater requires a zipper, but I have yet to find the perfect one. Eight-and-a-half inches is a tricky size to locate at our local stores. I'm thinking a nice cream-color zipper would be perfect...

I love how this sweater turned out, and I literally used every last bit of the Manos - I actually ran out with about two inches of the i-cord left to go and had to finish it off with some blue scraps I had laying around. The shaping of the sweater is beautiful and the stripes are too cute - I can see one or two more of these in my future as baby gifts.



Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Hello!

Just a quick post to say hello again. I'm not quite finished with my dissertation writing, but my analysis is complete, my results are in and I've one chapter left to write. My girls have started at their respective schools and I've got some days each week to focus again - the transition out of summer childcare to kindergarten and preschool was intense, but we made it to the other side.

It was a productive blog break too. I did some knitting, but mostly my head has been elsewhere; mostly inside SPSS and Microsoft Word. It will take me some time to get back up to speed on my crafting/knitting again. Truth be told I'm not sure that I will really jump back into things until after my final defense, but I am ready to be back in this space again: sharing, writing and a bit of show-and-tell.

And who am I kidding afterall? It's fall weather around here again and that just plain makes me wanna knit!

To get things started again here is a hat I made awhile back. In my year-long quest to work solely from my stash, I was looking for a project to use up my one ball of Malabrigo. The Star Crossed beret by Natalie Larson was perfect. You can see my project notes on ravelry, but it was portable and quick (two of my favorite qualities in a knitting project). It involves some light cable work too, which used up just a smidgen of my left over brain power. I did fiddle around with the needle sizes to make sure the hat wouldn't stretch out too much and I'm pretty happy with the final result. The color really is lovely and it will look great with my black coat this winter. I didn't block it yet, and the photo was tough to take - how do you photograph your own head?! - but I highly recommend this project as a quick fall knit for those one skein yarns you have floating around.