Craptina: It's been busy around here

Chez Craptina has been anything but slow lately. The Spiders game over last Saturday for our first annual Summer Gala, and I think everyone had a great time. I had secretly been working on a quiz game that was revealed after the yearn swap- let me tell you, it is TOUGH coming up with 30 different knitting trivia questions. There were some silly questions and some hard ones, but the girls enjoyed them all.Check out Veronique's most recent post to see some sample questions. I'd post them all, but I'm too tired......

My family is Really Into Playing Games, and my mother always had fun things like this planned for us. My mom also gave me the idea to put a goody in a handful of the cupcakes; if you got a dime in your cupcake you win a prize! Every christmas my mom makes a lazagna and after it's done she'll put a couple uncooked kidney beans in it. If you get a bean in your piece of lazagna you win a prize. A little candy bar or something, it's cute.

The whole tiara thing started out as a joke, but the ladies kept teasing about it, so Jess and I decided to actually buy some tiaras!

Let me tell you about my kick ass neighbor Lachlan: not ony did he make the hummus from scratch, he washed the dishes, brought the grill up from the courtyard, carried chairs and the beer, lent chairs from his apt, got the grill going, AND wore a tiara. Lach- you rock.

we also had a yarn swap! I ended up with some sweet sock yarn, and some light green alpaca.

And in the knitting sector of the world, I had a bomb drop on a tank top I haven't bloged about yet. I started and finished a tank top in 8 days. Sweet, right? Well it was also in brioche stitch, which I'd never tried before. It was definitly a bitch to get started, but with help from my homegirls, I got it down. Using some Jo Sharpe Desert Garden Aran Cotton, which is nice and bulky at 6 stitches per inch. I swatched my gauge and cast on for the Brioch Bodice from the Fall 06 IK. This bad boy worked up so quickly I didn't notice how wide it had gotten in the body. Dammit. I gave it a good blocking, and pinned it exactly to the measurements I wanted, but the g.d. cotton went right back to it's shape as soon as it was unpinned. Sigh.

Amen for ravelry. I looked up this yarn to see what other projects people had made with it and LO AND BEHOLD it kind of sucks for garments. It tends to split, stretch, and gets very heavy. So the Brioche stitch added to the stretch, which is why this garment rocked on the swatch, but casting on additional stitches encouraged the stretch. Oh well. Look for this yarn in an upcoming stockinette piece.

In responce, I started a new non-garment project: My Big Gay Log Cabin

Turns out, all this acrylic I've been hiding under my bed is all colors of the rainbow. Perfect baby blanket crap material and uses up the stash. sweet.