Revving up for the Ravelympics

Wow! Less than a week to go until the Ravelympics. I bought the rest of the yarn I needed yesterday, including enough to work on a practice piece for the intarsia event. As you can see, I'm doing the Professor McGonagall chart. The practice piece has turned out to be an even better idea than I thought it would; I've already learned some things that will make my "real" piece go more smoothly. For example, you can never have too many bobbins made up in advance; weave in the ends frequently so they don't tangle with the bobbins; and even if one color takes up a very large area, use a bobbin rather than the full skein.

I also learned that a pattern holder with place marker is vital for these charts. The craft store I went to didn't have any so we improvised. We bought a magnetic dry-erase board and a magnetic place-bar. Unfortunately I didn't like the place-bar at all; it was too short, plus it magnifies which makes it hard to focus on the prior row to make sure everything is lining up properly. Luckily, though, we former Faire Folk are a creative lot. I used the place-bar to hold the pattern to the page, cut a strip off the plastic packaging it had been in, and used the two magnets that came with the board to hold the strip on the pattern, thus marking the row quite well. This morning Ralph took a red Sharpie & ran it along the edge of the strip, making it even easier to track the row.



Had kind of an interesting thought at work the other day. I was wearing one of my Utilikilts, which are actually designed for men, and one of Ralph's shirts since we needed to do laundry. About halfway through the day, I realized that *technically* I was cross-dressing. :-) It amused me very much--and also the co-workers to whom I pointed it out.

Gosh. I always think I'm going to have a lot to write about, and of course I can never remember anything interesting when I'm here at the computer. Oh, well, guess I'll start another load of laundry & get back to knitting.