January 1, 1976
January 1, 2007 By
Happy New Year!
December 31, 2006 By
We have winners!
Stephanie
Michelle
Rachel
I’ve emailed all the winners – so if your name is up there and you think you might be a winner, check your email (and your spam filters!) Email me your address and I’ll get the prize out to you as soon I receive the yarn from Blue Moon.
There really were only six possible socks to choose from: the Trekking Walking on Sunshine Sock, the STR Hot Flash Jaywalker, STR Panzanite Jaywalker, the Koigu Embossed Leaves Sock and the Koigu Purple Knee High. And the last pair of socks knit in 2006 were…
My new shoes and my new socks!
Dansko Camilla in Black Oiled Leather
That’s right – who knew I was so predictable? I started the year knitting jaywalkers and I ended the year knitting jaywalkers. Nothing like completing the circle.
Jaywalkers in STR Hot Flash, picot edge variation. I forgot how much I like to knit this sock – it goes SO quickly. This is my 10th finished pair of Jaywalkers. I still have a pair to finish – and maybe I’ll make another pair, you know, to even things out. But not quite yet. I’ve started two new pairs of socks:
Simple stockinette socks, two at a time, G-Rocks and January One. Perfect together.
I hope you all have a happy, safe, wonderful New Year. Thank you so much for spending some of your time here. I really appreciate it and enjoy you and the blog and the larger knitting community so much. It’s given great richness to my life. Here’s to 2007! Bring it on!
EXCLUSIVE! EXCLUSIVE! EXCLUSIVE!
December 28, 2006 By
That is until you see it somewhere else. Just remember where you saw it FIRST. (I joke! I’m joking my friends!)
Today is La’s Birthday, so I thought I’d give some stuff away!!!
Introducing….drumroll please….
Two BRAND NEW COLORWAYS from Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks That Rock. THEY ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR SALE until sometime in the New Year so please don’t bother the Blue Moon folks. As soon are they are available, I will let you know. And the best part? Part of the proceeds from the sale of G-Rocks will go to fight Skin Cancer!!! [Ed note: this was my error. $2.00 per skein will go to fight Skin Cancer.] THANK YOU BLUE MOON! You know I love you! Again, these colors are not available to the public yet – when they are I will certainly let you know.
BUT!!
You can win them here. (You knew that was coming….)
You didn’t think I was going to let the birthday pass without a giveaway did you? Silly, silly! Winners will receive one skein each of G-Rocks and January One (Lightweight Socks That Rock), one of my beloved Orange Chibis (god I love these needles so much!), a box of my Yarn Cards and three Mini-Soaks. I’m a complete Soak convert, so I thought I’d pass on the love.
How do you win? Here we go.
I’m currently knitting what will most likely be the last sock I knit this year. I want you to guess which sock I’m knitting. Here are the clues:
1) It is a MATE to a single sock already knit.
2) I may or may not have knit the first sock sometime this year.
3) It may or may not be a pattern I have knit before.
4) It may or may not be knit out of Socks That Rock.
5) All of the first socks have been featured on the blog, on my foot.
6) There are SIX possible socks that it could be.
But only one is the right answer. TELL ME THE PATTERN, YARN & COLORWAY IF APPLICABLE. Leave your guess in the comments. Comments will close on December 31, 10 AM EST. One guess per person. There will be SIX winners – the first three people to get the correct answer will win. Then three winners will be chosen at random. Winners will be announced at (or close to) December 31, 11:59 PM EST.
Happy Birthday TO ME!
Turnabout is Fair Play
December 27, 2006 By
Recently I received a letter from some kind lawyers asking me to take down some words on my website that infringed upon their client’s trademark. Even though we all got a HUGE laugh out of it and talked about the ridiculousness of lawyers and putting words together seemingly erroneously, it IS serious business and I complied with their request ASAP. The words they asked me to remove have indeed been removed.
Imagine my surprise to find that the same thing has happened to ME! Someone has copied some of my words, written here on this blog, and used them as their own. Not only didn’t they give me credit for the words, but they didn’t ask my permission. So just in case anyone forgot:
Copyright 2004-2006 Cara Davis and januaryone.com.
All rights reserved.
DO NOT COPY OR REPRODUCE ANYTHING
ON THIS SITE WITHOUT PERMISSION!
As we all know, mistakes can happen. I didn’t know that putting two words together would get me a letter from a lawyer, and once I found out, I fixed my mistake. Maybe this person doesn’t understand that copying a post from my blog, or taking pictures without permission is wrong. Maybe YOU don’t know that. And that’s okay. Not everyone can know everything all of the time. But I’m telling you now that it’s wrong. If you have any doubts at all, err on the side of caution and ASK the owner of said material. They may say yes, use it – they may say yes with certain qualifications or they may say no. Every answer is appropriate because THEY OWN IT.
I’m not going to say what it is I found or where I found it because I’m going to give this person the benefit of the doubt for a little bit. So don’t go looking around trying to defend my honor or anything – thank you for having my back – but I’ll let you know when I need you.
Thanks for listening and reading and not stealing, as always. 😉
FYI: Linking to someone is FINE. That’s what blogs are supposed to do – you link to another site. Do it ALL THE TIME. Even quoting a part of a post is fine, in my book, as long as you link back to the original and SAY where you got it from. In this case, someone copied an ENTIRE post of mine and published it AS THEIR OWN on their blog without any credit or permission or anything. That is BLATANTLY WRONG. Please don’t go all paranoid on me. 😉 You can use brand names too, by the way. I was joking in this post when I wrote out Mac and Apple and Xerox and Kleenex with asterisks. You don’t have to do that. And as to the question as to how I found the post, I happened to link back to myself in my own post, so it came up in one of the links to this site. HAHAHAHAHA! I caught myself! 😉
Oh and It’s NOT YOU! I have attempted to contact this person in various ways, so if you haven’t received an email from me asking you to take down the offending material, then DON’T WORRY! It’s ALL GOOD!
UPDATE! All over folks. The content has been removed and peace has been restored to this little part of the kingdom. Thank you all for playing.
When in doubt…
December 27, 2006 By
KNIT SOCKS!
As you all know, I was crazy trying to find something to knit after Ariann. It was killing me – ask G. I was in a surly mood, flitting from needle to needle, book to book, trying to get my monkey mind onto something, ANYTHING to calm me down. I seem to be having a bout of AFTER anxiety. Know what I mean? You get through the awful thing and you’re in survival mode and then, when everything calms down, you’re like WTF?! Now it’s safe to get all anxious and crap and I needed something to knit.
calf shaping
heel detail
If I told you how many times I went through every knit magazine/book I own – every stitch dictionary, every leaflet – how I scoured the internet for patterns – it would make your eyes bleed and honestly you’d never want to knit again. There was even an early morning Saturday (two days before CHRISTMAS) run into the city for yarn. An impulse buy like I haven’t done in ages. More to come on that because I still need to block the humongous swatch I knit for a sweater I will probably never make out of yarn I’m not sure I even like. THAT’S how desperate I had become.
It wasn’t until I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out Am Kamin (I couldn’t even figure out how to start the freaking SWATCH) that I had an epiphany! There, sitting on the couch next to me, patient, non-judgemental, dare I say it…EASY, were the legs of my NOLA Knee Highs. Quietly, without whining, without begging, without hurt feelings for having left them shamelessly to knit other things, they whispered knit me. Knit me. Knit me. So I did.
Stockinette knee highs, knit using this pattern. Koigu, P852 (variegated) and 2340 (semi-solid). I used two separate skeins for each leg, then split a skein for the feet. There’s a bit left over of each skein. One skein of the semi-solid and there’s probably a little less than half a skein left over from that. So over all I dipped into four skeins of Koigu. Knit on Addi Turbos US#1s. Two circulars, as I knit all my socks. I bought this yarn in New Orleans, so they’re my NOLA knee highs and I love them.
I hope everyone had a good Christmas. It was pretty low key around here which is what we like best. Not too much gift giving (that’s reserved for birthdays) but Georgie scored BIG TIME!
Dr Pepper? FOR CHRISTMAS!? Don’t feel bad for good ol’ Georgie because this isn’t your ordinary run of the mill supermarket Dr Pepper. This Dr Pepper is SPECIAL!
This Dr Pepper is CAFFEINE FREE!!! WHOO HOO!!!! As someone (me, well, and Georgie too) who can’t, won’t, absolutely doesn’t drink caffeine, but LOVES Dr Pepper this is a Christmas BONANZA! The mythical Caffeine Free Dr Pepper DOES EXIST! I haven’t had caffeine deliberately (okay – a sip here and there of G’s Dr Pepper because I love me some spicy cherry) for almost 20 years. I found out the hard way that it makes me feel like I’m having an anxiety attack and when you sort of ARE having an anxiety attack why add to it? Caffeine makes me sick. Nuff said. (For those interested, I purchased my caffeine free Dr Pepper from the source, The Dublin Dr Pepper Bottling Company. I also got a case of the original made with pure cane sugar. G likes the caffeine every now and again and I figured we had to taste if it’s different.)
I’m a Pepper! He’s a Pepper! Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too?
PS – Tune in tomorrow for an extra special EXCLUSIVE birthday giveaway only available at JanuaryOne!
December 25, 2006 By
The Knit that Ruined Me For All Other Knits
December 22, 2006 By
I am so screwed. I love Ariann so much I can’t knit anything else. I’ve got tons of half finished socks laying around – not interested. A beautiful shawl which I’m knitting in beautiful yarn – nah. I printed out a couple new patterns yesterday – Eunny’s Anemoi Mittens and The Mason Dixon Perfect Sweater and neither one does it for me. It’s like when you finish a fantastic book and you want to be reading another book RIGHT AWAY but really what you want is to be STILL reading that fantastic book. That’s how I feel. I want to STILL be knitting Ariann, but also wearing the Ariann I finished. And that doesn’t mean I want to just start knitting another one – you know? I think this also has something to do with what G & I just went through this whirlwind last month. I mean talk about highs and low! My gosh! I don’t want the lows back but Ariann has reached mythical proportions. I finished it – was WEARING it – when I found out G was okay. You can’t get any more special than that. This sweater is IN me now.
So my question to you is to help me find something new to knit. I want to knit another sweater. Last night I went through every freaking magazine and book I have and I didn’t find anytihng. I thought I wanted to knit it from stash but the only yarn I have enough of in stash is Jo Sharp DK Silkroad Tweed and Aran Silkroad Tweed and Aran Silkroad and for some reason I can’t find anything to knit with that. I decided, out of desperation, that I will buy new yarn if I need to – after all – I have a birthday coming up. I don’t really feel like designing my own sweater, per se, but I will if that’s my only option. Which I can’t believe it is with all the talent out there. I think I’d like a cardigan again, but it doesn’t have to be. If it’s a pullover I need to make it a v-neck because I don’t like crew necks. (Besides, the girls look better with a bit of skin showing.) And I want it to be INTERESTING. No plain stockinette thank you very much. Maybe some cables. Or lace. Or both. Something infectious. What’s your favorite sweater pattern? The one that made you want to knit it all over again as soon as you were finished? PLEASE help me. I’m desperate here.
I was tagged again for the weird things meme – so I’ll do it. (First by Wendy and now by Jeanne.) But I’m not sure about this whole weird thing. I mean, I’ve always thought of myself as a little bit different or weird, however you might like to slice it, but I’m not sure there are specific things that make me weird. I asked G what was weird about me and he said, didn’t you just ask me this? So maybe it’s weird that I keep asking what’s weird about me?
THE RULES: Each player of this game starts with the ‘6 weird things about you.’ People who get tagged need to write a blog post of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says ‘you are tagged’ in their comments and tell them to read your blog.
1. I am currently seeing two therapists. This may not actually make me weird, just insane. But seriously, one I’ve been seeing for FOREVER (actually off and on since the incident I spoke about in this post) and the other one I recently started seeing in attempts to figure out what to do with my fertility or lack thereof. It’s been working pretty well (and NO I am not pregnant.) Obviously I believe in therapy. Which either makes me very weird or Woody Allen. Probably like one and the same.
2. I’ve got lots and lots of phobias. For instance, currently I’m not driving certain distances on highways alone. Put someone else in the car with me and I’ll drive forever. Alone, not so much. I think I can go about 1/2 hour away. I used to be worse, then better, then worse. Maybe I should address this in therapy? Hmmmm…. I also hate to fly and won’t get on a plane without Xanax in my system. And no amount of Xanax would get me on a propellar plane. Or a helicopter. Or a hot air balloon.
3. I know you all probably know this one, but it’s still kind of sort of strange: I still sleep with my baby blanket. Every night. Recently I left it at my sister’s house (where my nephew slept with it to keep it safe) and I was leaving for vacation the next day and I refused to have it FedEx’d to me lest it get lost in the mail so I had to go away without it. I slept with a t-shirt of G’s every night because I needed something between my chest and my chin – you know – in that crook? Or else I couldn’t sleep.
4. I have a Bachelors Degree in Religious Studies and Philosophy, a Masters in Library Science, and a Masters in Fine Arts with a concentration in Creative Writing (Fiction) and yet my current profession is Photographer – for which I have never taken a class. Ever.
5. I bite my fingernails. But only for grooming purposes not for nervous purposes. For some reason I can’t cut them with a fingernail clipper. Which, by the way, I can’t watch other people do – like on the subway or some other public place. TOTALLY grosses me out. For nervous purposes I pick anything and everything on my skin. I’m a scab’s worst enemy. Zits? Watch out! And oh my god the ingrown hair. It’s like orgasmic to me. Gross, but orgasmic.
6. I will NOT eat chicken on a bone. It completely and utterly grosses me out. I will eat chicken breast to my hearts content. I’m a red meat girl ALL THE WAY. Ribs? Send them my way. Lambchops? YUMMMMM! But put a drumstick or a wing or some other sinewy gross foul fowl thing in from of me and I will puke. So don’t invite me out for wings okay? God I can’t even think about it without feeling ill….
So there’s my weirdness. I’m sure there’s TONS I forgot. If you feel like talking about how weird you are, go to it. And don’t forget to leave me your favorite sweater pattern! I’m not kidding! I NEED HELP!
If I don’t get a chance to tell you before the weekend – have a GREAT HOLIDAY – whatever you’re celebrating!
Cease and Desist!
December 21, 2006 By
Oh my! Santa brought me another present yesterday! I must have been a VERY good girl this year!
Yesterday I received a FedEx (almost didn’t open it because I thought it was a work thing for G) and inside was a letter from some fancy schmancy lawyers in our nation’s capital telling me I made a big big boo boo on my blog. Apparently I put two completely innocent words together in a blog title and once these words were together: KABOOOM! I set off alarms all around the trademark world.
Not to worry, I fixed the offensive pairing and will offend no more. I learned my lesson. You won’t see Kle*nex here. Or X*rox. Or M*c. Or Ap*le. Or any other word that’s going to get some lawyers on my ass. No siree bob.
The kind folks down there in Washington want me to send them a letter back letting them know I’ve complied with their demands. My good friend Ann drafted it out for me and I found my best purple pen to write it:
Seriously, though, I understand that according to the strict letter of the law I MAY have done wrong. MAYBE. The letter states I used the words together in a promotional capacity, which I think is arguable since I never made a cent on what I was “promoting” and in the end helped raise $19,000 for charity. That’s neither here nor there. I immediately removed the words from my blog as per their request. And I’ll be sending them a real letter stating as such. Honestly, this was a nice wake up call. I’m not sure I realized how important the blog is to me until it was “threatened.” All in all, I’m just glad I’ve made some kid super happy on Xmas by helping their lawyer parent bill out $1000 to send a letter to ME, a completely unassuming KNITBLOGGER. (They printed out and sent me a copy of the blog post where I made my fatal mistake – did they bother to read it? I really have to wonder….)
And my Solstice present to you is a hearty laugh. Because I’ll be guffawing over this one for QUITE a while and I hope you will too! THANK YOU PCH! And Merry Christmas one and all!
The Knit That Saved My Life
December 19, 2006 By
First of all: STOP! We don’t want to cry ANYMORE. And all you nice people keep making us cry harder with all the freaking LOVE you’re sending our way. ENOUGH! Really, though, I don’t know what to say, I’m all kinds of touched. You start this blog thing because, you know, maybe you’ll talk about your knits and maybe you’ll meet some people who also like to knit and next thing you know this awful thing happens and you’ve got good vibes and thoughts and karma and hopes and prayers coming out the wazoo. I never expected it – I’m not really even sure I wanted this – but oh my god I’m so freaking grateful it hurts. ALL RIGHT. I said no more tears and I MEANT IT. NO MORE. It’s party time at this here blog – it’s coming up to the day we wait ALL YEAR for so no more. I’m going say THANK YOU from the depths of our hearts and that’s that.
Let’s talk knits.
On November 28, five days after we found out Georgie had cancer (did I mention he doesn’t have it anymore? No? Well, HE DOESN’T HAVE IT ANYMORE!!!) I became obsessed with Ariann after seeing it over at Margene’s. I bought the pattern and immediately began swatching. The next day I went and bought some yarn. Twenty days later, I’ve got this:
It’s not perfect, technically, but it’s freaking perfect. I have barely taken it off since I finished it. I LOVE THIS SWEATER. I knit it while I worried about my husband and our life together and basically everything under the sun and it calmed me down and distracted me and made me happy at a time when I was probably the least happy I’ve ever been. Happy, hell, I was scared shitless. But the knitting made me feel better.
I knit this sweater while I waited for G to get out of surgery – possibly the worst day of my life – and the sweater kept me sane when I was full of panic. Xanax schmanax. Ariann was my drug of choice.
The pattern is pretty much perfect as written because, well, Bonne Marie is a MASTER, but I did tweak it some. I made the body longer and I’m very happy with the jacket look. And I made the sleeves longer – although they turned out much longer than I intended. I turn the edges under and it looks fine and I don’t care because I love every inch of this sweater. I can pretty much guarantee that it will never be buttoned and I won’t be making the belt.
Sure I ripped it back a few times. Sure I messed up the sleeves a few times. Sure I knit more than I needed to a few times. Ask me if I care. Go ahead. Ask me.
I’ll tell you – I don’t care. Because anything that can make me feel like this at any time in my life, let alone the worst time in my life, is PERFECT in my book!
Ariann
Pattern: designed by the GENIUS that is Bonne Marie Burns at ChicKnits. (I made the 43″ size – I would recommend sizing up – a lot of people have been coming up small.)
Yarn: Cascade 220, The Heathers, Color #9460 – Dune Heath (I used six skeins just about.)
Needles: Addi Turbo, US size 6 (4.0mm) and 7 (4.5mm)
Buttons: Purchased at Tender Buttons in NYC.
Pictures: Jen stepped up once again. She of the supermodel post – man she can work that shutter, baybee.
If I had the yarn, right here right now, I’d start this sweater all over again. Did I mention how much I love it? Just a little bit?
I love this sweater.
Yes, Georgie, THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS!!!!!
December 18, 2006 By
I’m ready to celebrate my fucking birthday because today we got THE BEST NEWS EVER!!!!! NO MORE CANCER!!!! The pound of flesh they cut out of my beloved’s body is cancer free and so are his lymph nodes. So tonight, we’ve got a little bit of this:
And a little bit of this:
And a whole lot of THIS!!! (Make sure you click the link – you will NOT be disappointed.)
We can’t thank you all enough for your good wishes and prayers. It’s meant the world to us. And to celebrate, look for a BONANZA BIRTHDAY GIVE AWAY coming soon.
LOVE LOVE LOVE!
Cara and George
