13 November, 2011

Ravelry KAL Groups

End of term is always challenging, and even more challenging when you aren't feeling well. I'm happy to say my cold went fairly quickly—I felt much better on Tuesday—but tests, quizzes, and assignments had piled pretty high, and with grades due this Friday, I had to hunker down and spend my time this week with red pen in hand. Grades are done. One term down, three left.

Then the annual "winterizing" began yesterday. A big shout out to my BFF (as the kids would say) Carol for coming over to help me. We worked for a solid three hours, which would have been six had I been alone. Who am I kidding? It would have been eight had I been alone. The garage is cleaned out except for some trash which needs to be hauled away. The hoses are in, the water to the outside is turned off, the storage shed is organized. The front lawn has had its final mow—the back, not so much, because these little buggers don't seem to want to fall down this year.



But there has been a little bit of knitting. I wanted to highlight some Ravelry groups that I am quite enjoying right now by showing some projects I've been working on for those groups.

Stash Down A to Z
Whoa, Nellie. I cannot believe the success of this group that I started a few weeks ago. We already have 140 members and 9 finished "A" projects. For my "A" project, I have picked back up the Aquaphobia socks I began in March. I am now just past the heel on the first sock, so I need to get cracking on these!



Self-Imposed Sock Club
I dropped out of the Plunge. It was a tough decision. I wanted to gut it out just to see how many socks I could make before the year's time was up, but after churning out three pairs of socks on schedule, I was so burned out that knitting Carol's birthday socks was darn near impossible. And I don't want to feel that way about knitting socks! So the way I am going to deal with this is to go back to the self-imposed sock club à la the Yarn Harlot. I will churn out a pair of socks a month, which will leave me time to knit other things and will keep me much happier, I think. Since my "A" project is a pair of socks, I am killing two birds with one stone this month.

Three-Country Shawl KAL
This group is tons of fun! In the forums, there is a thread titled "Drunk and Disorderly." What more could you want? The goal of this group, which consists of American, British, and Canadian knitters, is to knit a shawl based on a theme of the moderators' choosing every three months. And from what I can tell, scarves and cowls also count! The theme for Fall 2011 (October-December) is "That's Heavy, Doc." We are working on shawls/scarves/cowls that made out of DK or heavier yarn. I started a Guernsey Wrap by Jared Flood in October...



... but it is not holding my attention. I think the yarn is going to become Purl Soho's Big Herringbone Cowl instead. One of the girls in the group is urging me not to frog it, so right now, it's on hold.

Village Hopelessly Overcommitted
The first sentence of this group's description is "Got a WIP to FO ratio of 9-1?" Uhhh, yep. That's me. So of course, I joined. This group began as a team for the 2008 Ravelympics, but they had so much fun they decided to stay an active group. This month's challenge is WIP Wrestling, trying to finish as many WIPs as possible. I've decided to focus on two (in addition to the Aquaphobias).


GAP-tastic Cowl



Magic Mirror Mittens

So what are you working on these days? And what are your favorite Ravelry KAL groups?

2 comments:

meg said...

Not to be an evil enabler, but RIP IT! Start the Herringbone Cowl. I *might* be working on it right now.

And today I spent all morning raking, and now I am watching my uncollected leaf piles blow around my yard. Futility!

Andi said...

Look all those amazing projects. I secretly do not want want you to RIP the Guernsey wrap, for purely selfish reasons, but the Herringbone Cowl is quite fantastic.
Good for you for dropping out of the plunge. You never want to feel bad about knitting socks!
Thank you for the list of group. They look great.