Stitch & Pitch at the Blue Jays!!

Earlier this summer my brother had been complaining that he had never been to see a Jays game, my response? "I'll go with you but we have to go to the Stitch n Pitch game" (expecting really to be going by myself or with Mom who I've been able to drag along before), imagine my surprise when not only did he say sure, but my Dad piped up and said get 4 tickets, we'll all go. So Wednesday night found us working our way downtown Toronto to the Skydome (bite me Rogers, it will always be the Skydome!) to sit in the only sold out sections of the stadium, the Stitch n Pitch sections!!




Brother at the baseball game

Stitch n Pitch is an event organized by TNNA (The National Needlearts Association) with major and minor league baseball teams across the United States - and the Blue Jays!! (Find one near you!)



They stick the knitters up in the 200 level in the outfield where we can sit and knit (or crochet) without fear of being hit in the head with a ball. There were over 500 of us there! Even Ace (the mascot) came up to visit us, wearing a scarf knit by one of the knitters and presented to him on the field at the beginning of the game.



The game was great, they were playing the Seattle Mariners and we were sitting right behind Ichiro, who having lived in Japan for a year I think is really neat!! The Jays got 3 home runs and beat the Mariners 11-6.
Despite being brutally hot outside, once sitting in the dome in the shade with the roof open there was a lovely breeze and it was great to sit there, enjoy the baseball game and knit!


The sock at the game

One of the best parts of going to Stitch n Pitch are the goody bags & taking 3 non-knitters with me, I ended up with 4 of them!



They all had the same yarn, so now I have enough purple/white yarn to make someone a sweater :)



We also got samples of Eucalan wool wash and coupons to use at the stores that had sponsored the game.



Not only did they do goody bags this year, but there were prizes on various seats throughout our section & I scored 2 of them! This lovely BFL yarn from Two Sisters Stringworks and a copy of the Yarn Harlots book 'At Knit's End' which I have been meaning to buy, so bonus!




At the end of the day though, the game was awesome and I am totally looking forward to next year's Stitch n Pitch!!



And for the record, this is how much sock you can knit during a baseball game:

SNOW!!

Hey,

So I haven't been here for awhile, blame pneumonia, work, school, final exams and pneumonia again!

I'm DONE university!!! I wrote my last exam yesterday morning and am so thrilled to be finished, but am now packing up like mad since I'm moving home tomorrow....

But, this just had to be blogged about. Yesterday it was sunny, warm, 17*C outside. I went out to lunch with friends and we sat on the patio, I was worried about getting sun burnt and I even put on sunscreen. At 9:30 at night I walked home with just a sweater, no jacket, and I was fine!

Today however, today is a different story. This is the view out my window this morning:

... yeah... It's hovering around 0, and nothing's staying on the ground, but it has been steadily snowing for more than 6 hours now, on April 26th, after being 17*C out yesterday... Wow.

Drive-by blogging

- Sweater finished, Olympics finish line crossed, details/pics hopefully to follow next week

- no new projects yet, still working on ill-fated sock design, again... new sweater idea percolating

- midterm this afternoon in Financial Statement Analysis, probably not going to go all that well

- catching a train home tomorrow morning for Dad's retirement do on Friday then back to Montreal Friday night for Special Olympic Curling Provincials Sat-Sun

- so far behind on homework it's not funny

- wish I'd done some reading during reading week instead of just watching the Olympics, but man, weren't they awesome?!

Ok, off for last minute cramming and procrastination :)

Halfway...

Or not so much...

I was going to have a great post here tonight about how my sweater has been going pretty good (besides a misplaced set of side decreases we won't mention), however...

instead I tried on my sweater and came up with this:

Yep, for a sweater supposed to have 0 ease, it's looking pretty big, too big.

I remeasured gauge and my gauge is spot on which sucks, because in my swatch it was smaller, so I did the math and cast on a size bigger, now I need to readjust to about 2 sizes smaller. I was checking my gauge throughout and always got the same as I had when swatching so maybe I need to check my tape measure.

But AAUGGHHHHHH!?!?!? what a set back to have. I'm going to sit down with it tonight and see what I can fudge. I'm not going to rip out the hem (drama with that I don't want to talk about either, let's just say Olympics is not spelt Oylmpics...) because I can't bring myself to, and also the hips fit fairly well, but hopefully play around with the decreases to get a different size from the waist up. Going to take a glass of wine or two to bring myself to rip it out though...

But tomorrow I get on a train and am going home for reading week, so no classes, no work to interfere with knitting (just a midterm the week after I need to study for), so who knows? Maybe I can still pull this off!

Getting Close...

...to the Ravelympics / Knitting Olympics cast-on!! I'm so excited to start working on my Freyja sweater!!

I'm getting excited, also antsy, because I finished my latest big project on Saturday (more about that below) and bought enough yarn for a new sweater project at Ariadne Knits' knit night last Thursday, so I'm really itching to cast on!

I have been swatching though - enough to know that my gauge is off my 1/2 a st (drat, drat, drat) and I don't know anymore exactly what my colour combination is going to be. Here's a picture of my different combinations, I'm leaning towards the one on the right for now, the light blue just seems to pop too much for me I think.

Also I’ve been trying to decide whether to add a hem to the bottom with the interfacing in another colour (the darker green in this picture) or to stick with the seed stitch border which I like the look of… I don’t know what to do, but I’ll have to figure it out by Friday since this sweater starts at the bottom!

So you may not know, but last week was the Scotties' Tournament of Hearts in Canada, the women's national curling championship, and I spent a lot of time watching over the week, either over curlcast's live feed (which was new & awesome, thanks curlcast! It sometimes also had sound which made it even more fun!) and over TSN's video on demand which was posted after each draw had been over, so I usually knew how the game would go, but still worth watching. And most of the time I was watching I knit (when not doing homework or eating) and at the end of the week I cast off, making this my Scotties' project!

It's the Fern Fitted Shell, and though it had a few false starts (one all the way up to the underbust!) I did finish it and I'm very happy with it! It looks great as a tank or over top of a collared shirt so I could wear it in more business-y contexts, which is great. The only thing I'm slightly regretting is the yarn I made it with. I used Coolspun Cotton, which made this a really cheap project, but it's a dishcloth cotton and I foresee it getting really worn fairly quickly so I'm delaying blocking it but I should just dive in.

Anyways, I should head off to get ahead on homework so I'll be able to focus on the Ravelympics starting Friday!