Fourthborn texted me right after I got to work: ♥ we have our shipping notice on Cuprit ♥. She should be here by Thursday, and if the weather cooperates, we should have her faceup (makeup; I am slowly learning the lingo) and body blushing (not necessarily blushing, but subtle accents to knees, etc.) done shortly after opening the box. I have seen Cuprit’s back from other folks’ box-opening pictures. Her shoulder blades are amazing! I wonder if she will have sacral dimples, too? [I forgot to look, before.]
I may very well have my own doll with me when (Fourthborn and?) I go meet the local doll collectors at Le Peep next Friday night.
As you can see, I have finished the raglan decreases on her sweater. That hole is at the underarm and will be grafted together after I have completed the button bands. The white markers show where the buttons (6° beads) will go. I have strung them onto yarn and will spit-splice that strand to my working thread, once I get the rest of the beads. Yes; I had eight beads of this type left and will need to buy another tube of mixed green beads to get enough to finish the sweater.
This is what I get for making those two necklaces before completing the sweater, but it doesn’t exactly break my heart to have to hit the bead store this afternoon. I’ll do that on the way home from visiting the Bittiest member of the tribe. [No rumblies in my tumblies since Thursday afternoon, so it must have been excitement over the new baby rather than a pathogen.]
I will probably also stop at JoAnn’s with the mostly-done sweater and the skirt fabric and pick up a quarter-yard of coordinating silk duppionni to make a blouse to go under the sweater. If I like working with the fabric, I’ll pick up more to make a blouse for me.
I sent off my second layaway payment on Jessica and will give Fourthborn the second payment on Beyla, next payday. And I have $45 in savings for Arie, for next year. Eventually I want to have a couple grand in my doll fund, so that when SOOM comes out with a monthly doll that calls my name, I won’t have to do layaway. I am going to be just fine while paying off these two layaways, *and* I don’t want to do this again.
A note on picking up stitches for the button bands: since I slipped the first stitch on each row, it was easy to pick up the stitches. I have found from experience that if I pick up four stitches for every three slipped stitches, and if I work a garter stitch band, the tension works out perfectly, and I do not have to spend half an hour tweaking a ribbing pattern. I just slip the first stitch on each row and knit until the band is deep enough, and then I bind off.
How do I pick up that fourth stitch? Well, most of the stitches are picked up under both loops of the slipped stitch; i.e., slipped selvage stitch is on one side of the picked-up stitch, and body of sweater is on the other side. It makes for a very neat finish. For the fourth stitch, I bring up a loop between the two halves of the selvage stitch. It is slightly noticeable from the front of the fabric, but because it occurs regularly, it looks like a design feature [which it is] instead of a mistake.
If I am doing a V-neck sweater, then I pick up along one front, across the neck, and down the other front. Garter stitch is amazingly flexible, so even though you really could use a few more stitches where the V ends at the front and a few less stitches around the back of the neck, everything shifts a little, and the band is tidy and looks like you knew what you were doing.
Time to get dressed and have a bite to tide me over until BestFriend and I go up to Chef Point to see if she likes the lobster bisque there as well as she does at Lucille’s.
I had the jalapeno cream soup at Rockfish with Brother Sushi last night and a small side Caesar salad. And for dessert I just knitted and scribbled while we talked and waited for the rain to abate, so we wouldn’t have to swim out to our cars. Thankfully, he is not the type to get upset when I say “Hang on a sec. I need to count stitches and then write it down.” He said it was kinda cool to watch me design something and transcribe it into symbols that make sense to me [if not to him] so I can create a pattern that might be worth offering for sale, someday.
I am also having dinner out with one of the sisters I visit teach, tonight, and three meals out in 24 hours will equal way too much salt for this middle-aged body. I foresee a lot of semi-bland home cooking for the rest of the weekend and into next week, plus gallons and gallons of water down the hatch, to keep my ankles from emulating blowfish.
But I needed to spend time with all three of them, and this is how the timing worked out.
Oh, and I need to make cookies and freeze them for next weekend’s young single adult conference. Food, friends, family, and knitting, with a side order of cooking; does it get any better than that?
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