progress and a book

Check out my office at my internship:

right of the door

left of the door

It’s the catch-all room for old kids toys and games, as well as old office equipment and documents nobody needs anymore.  For some reason, none of this can be thrown away.  There are two more desks in the corner from which I was taking the pictures, covered in more junk.  This office is at the end of the hall, so nobody really calls me to come and do anything anymore since I’m so far away (last semester my office was in the middle of the building).  This means I can just chill and do whatever in my spare time:

That’s what I had done at my internship (I’ve since added a few more rows but it’s still garter stitch).  It’s the beginnings of this cardigan.  I’m about to switch to stockinette, divide the body and sleeves, and start the stripe pattern, so it’ll be interesting from here on out.  Check out my carefully marked pattern:

Do you mark up your printed patterns like this?  Sometimes I even write straight into books (if they’re my books).

And speaking of books, look what I got:

I found it used on Amazon, and it was recommended on The Sweaty Knitter‘s blog some days ago.  I’d love to be able to just make something without having a complicated written pattern, and this book tells you how.  The percentage system is easy enough, but the sweater blueprints provided definitely assume that you have some skills (like how to make an underarm gusset).  It does tell you how to steek, however, which is something I’d been wondering about.  Overall a very useful book with tons of information on how to design your own sweater and what yarns to use, and it has lots of colorwork charts from all over the world.  Pretty neat!

So that’s all for today.  Sorry I’ve been focusing on knitting more or less exclusively — I’m definitely in a crochet slump.  I have yarn but I just do not know what I want to crochet!  I’ve found some cute patterns on Ravelry, but nothing that jumps out and says “HANNAH, MAKE ME NOW!!!”  Or if it does say that, I don’t have enough yarn.  I love me some big projects…

Thanks for stopping by!