Flowers in Bloom

I promised knitting, and knitting you shall see, my pets, but first Harold would like to tell you something.

Curly ribbon off someone else's presents makes a great toy.


Thank you.

Now, let me show you sock knitting progress. This photo was taken Saturday, so I've made slightly more progress since then, but essentially, here's where we are:


They're getting there, if slowly. I'm ready to move on, frankly, but after the last episode, I want a pair of finished socks already, so I soldier on. (Those socks are still in time out, but at stitch and bitch we discussed having a finish-it session where we bring in projects that are sooo close to being done and work on them, so perhaps I am almost ready to let them out again.) (Maybe.)

(By the way, see the DVD case in the lower left of the picture? Season 2 of The Muppet Show? The cover, Miss Piggy's face, is fuzzy. Fantastic.)

Meanwhile, there has been other knitting happening here, and unlike a certain Christmas-knitting-secret-secret project (motto: it's small, but it's secret!), I'm going to blog about it before presenting it. This is because I am quite certain that my 94-year-old grandmother, though she loves me dearly, couldn't find my blog if she had written instructions, and I'm sure if my aunt reads this, she can keep a secret for a week (right?).

It started when my grandmother broke her knee last month. From the hospital she had to go into a nursing home to recuperate and learn to move with the cast on, but as of today she's happily home again. When her release date was announced last week, I thought about sending her flowers, but then I had a better idea. Could one, perhaps, knit flowers? Hello, Ravelry?

The answer is yes.


They even look rather like tulips, the flowers I most often bring to Grandma.

I loved how clearly the pattern is written, and with step-by-step photos (and bilingual!). Knitters are awesome.

The picture above has one design modification from the pattern: I hadn't put pipe cleaners in the stems. At first, I wasn't planning to bother, since I'm putting the flowers in a little vase, but they flopped a bit, and I decided to try the pipe cleaners.

Or, as the label calls them, chenille stems. WTF?


(And why did the damned photo un-rotate? Is that Blogger or Picasa to blame? Either way, it pisses me off big-time.)

After pipe cleaners, the flowers stood up better, and it wasn't as fiddly to put them in as I had feared it would be. (I did choose the 3mm size, not 6mm, which I thought might be harder to thread through the I-cord.)

I found it surprisingly hard to make the camera understand where to focus, but you get the idea:


I think they're rather cute.


I finished another today, and I think one more will fill the space well.


I was originally going to mail them, but as I'll be there in person myself next week, I believe I will hand-deliver.

Perhaps I can finish it tonight, watching the debate. I don't know, do you think I can knit while playing Sarah Palin Bingo? Because that's really the only thing making me look forward to the debate, so knitting might have to take a rare back seat.