It’s been a crazy holiday week here with more snow, deep cold and bored, house-bound kitties. We spent the week getting another bit of Christmas sewing done and continued with the mitt making. Well, I sewed and knitted; the kitties chased, chomped and shed fur over everything. Still, it was a productive week. Here’s everything: sorry about the dim light but I haven’t seen the sun for a few days and I finally decided it was best to take pictures inside under the grow light in the sewing room.
I finished up all six of the place mats that I started last year and found again when I cleaned out the craft room. I originally had planned to make them as a gift, but now that they are done I realize that they do look pretty nice with my Christmas dishes… The pattern is one that my aunt made for me years ago and no one in the family now knows the original source. Remember these purple Sugared Maple mitts (by Melissa Schaschwary) that I had just started in the Mitt Madness post? They are done! OK, I am still in the grip of mitt madness: I made them a pair of friends that coordinate in a matching handpaint. These guys are joining the Christmas Makes pile as they are presents for sure. The yarn is Zen Yarn Garden Serenity DK which has 10% cashmere and is big on the yummy scale. Here are the notes on Ravelry.I can’t help it. I have one more skein of the Serenity DK in this red mix, so I just cast on ANOTHER pair. 🙂 See how the edge looks a little rounded? The CO for this pattern is one that I had to learn using an online tutorial (by Isolda Teague) called long-tail tubular cast on. It is crazy to learn, but nice and stretchy and allows the mitt cuffs to be knit on size 3 (3.25mm) needles while the body of the mitt is done with size 5 (3.75mm) needles. Now that I understand it I may make it my go-to ribbing CO.Here are the 4 original skeins of the Serenity DK that became a collection of Sugared Maple mitts. I couldn’t help myself; it’s kind of a study in color and texture as I made each of the mitts. It’s madness, I tell you, Mitt Madness. I highly recommend this pattern if you a feeling a similar urge to produce mitts. I think that I have enough yarn left in each color to make one more (shorter) pair of mitts to add to the mitt bin for sale/gift down the road. I mean, look at those colors. How can I not keep turning out mitts with this yarn??As if the Sugared Maple mitts weren’t enough I also started another pair of mitts like the ones I made for my sister with the thumbs moved underneath. I wanted to see what the design would look like with a wider rib at the top and the bottom of the mitt. I kind of like it, but I wonder if I should try the long-tail tubular cast on in this K2,P2 rib… The yarn is Malabrigo Rios from the stash. I love my stash!! It is a source of instant gratification when these mitt making urges hit me.
It is still snowing here and won’t get above freezing until sometime next week. Guess you all know what I’ll be doing…
I just couldn’t wait for the new season of House of Cards. Frank and Claire, it has been just too long without you! Luckily for me Netflix posted the new season just in time for me to cast on my New Year’s resolution March 2015 socks. Yeah! I knitted through all of the episodes over the last week and last night I finished off the toe of the last sock with some Kitchener stitch, put them on my feet and watched the end of the season (and all the big reveals) with about 30 minutes to spare. I don’t want to be a spoiler, so I’m not going to say anything about the show other than to say that Claire definitively needs some knitwear. Good grief, don’t you think that it would be nice to let the First Lady wear a nice cardigan or even a pair of knitted socks on occasion? Isn’t she entitled to some cushy joy in the breaks between campaign stops? Just saying…
Here are my socks. These are definitely cushy joy on the hoof. 🙂
Look at those cables. These are socks that you can love for a long time.and here’s the flat view. I wasn’t sure I would like the cables on my foot, but they are really comfy in my shoes. There is a lot of stretch and give in the socks which makes them really non-restrictive.
It’s March! It’s March! That means that if I’m going to remain true to my New Year’s resolution I need to pick a new book out of my stack of sock knitting books, select a yarn from my stash, and cast on. Yesterday was the 1st of March, and I did exactly that.
This yarn is Shibui Sock in the colorway Peony. Doesn’t it look yummy?
February was the snowiest month on record this year, and since March in Colorado can usually be counted on to deliver several snow storms (starting with the one coming tomorrow that the weather lady says will ruin my rush hour drive…), I was looking for a sock that would be fast, easy, comfy and warm. I decided to make Cookie A’s sock called “BFF” from the book knit. sock. love. Here’s how far I got with the sock after knitting on it yesterday and today while binge watching House of Cards and Downton Abbey.
As usual my cat MacKenzie is thrilled to model a knitted item for me.Here’s the sock on me. Don’t those cables look cute?
This sock is fast and easy, but the details are great. The increases and decreases are hidden in the cables using a technique that I’ve never seen before. The heel was turned using a different stitch number from the one I usually see: the heel fits great! The decreases at the gusset are set up so that they fit right into the pattern. The pattern is written for four different sizes of sock; the one that I’m modeling is the small size. I’m really liking the sock, and may make another pair out of a raspberry colored cashmere blend that was the runner-up when I was making my yarn selection. The way the snow keeps falling here, I bet that they will get some use too.
Well, back to knitting. Snow is coming tomorrow after all.
My grandniece Elly suffered a medical misadventure a couple of weeks ago that landed her in the ER with a badly cut and mangled finger. Wouldn’t you know it, not only was it badly cut, but the bone was also broken. The next morning she was taken into surgery for the repair and ended up with a purple cast. Sad, sad day.
Here she is heading into surgery…and here she is afterwards. See the purple cast?
The cast comes off in about a week, and I decided to make her some little purple fingerless mitts to wear as a little padding for that hand. She is into owls in a big way, so of course the mitts had to feature knitted owls.
Here they are, ready to fly to California. Hope they bring a little TLC to that finger!
These were a fast knit. I cast on 28 stitches and got started Friday and finished today. I used a bulky single ply yarn from Crystal Palace and size 7 and 9 needles. They go into the mail Monday, and I hope that she will like them. 🙂
Elly discovering her mitts in the blog this morning. Look Mom! I’m in a blog!!
Morning update. I texted Elly’s mom this morning to let her know about the finished mitts and the blog posting. She likes them!
OK, this was hell week. I took these cute, cute, cute lace socks out of their storage bag and decided that I would finish them up this week. The needles in the sock are a set of my new square double-pointed ones, and I really kind of wanted them back. I had the first sock worked all the way through the heel, and it seemed like it wouldn’t take that long to get them done.
Here is the UFO as I took it out of the bag. Once I had figured out where I was in the pattern I was ready to start knitting.
These socks are the Twisted Flower pattern in Cookie A’s book knit.sock.love. I loved the socks as soon as I saw them in the book. The pattern is really interesting, and the design is cleverly laid out to make the pattern flow onto the heel and down the foot. The chart and directions are extremely clear. Fun! I couldn’t wait to get started on these socks again.
Oh, boy. It wasn’t long before I remembered why these socks went UFO in the first place. The problem was the yarn. I had bought this hand-dyed Bluefaced Leicester yarn at a local shop as I thought that the color was really nice. Once I got into the pattern, however, it displayed some truly unsavory yarn qualities. It was a 4-ply fingering weight yarn, and should have been round enough to show off the pattern well. Well, the yarn was round, but something ugly had occurred in the dyeing process (I think) and it had the sullen personality of garden twine. There was absolutely no bounce in this yarn at all! It was stiff and slippery; at every opportunity a stitch slipped off a needle and unraveled down three rows in the blink of an eye. The individual plies of the yarn kept springing apart from one another and I kept splitting the yarn with my needle.
This sock pattern has tons of personality and detail.
Then there was the beautiful pattern designed by Cookie A. This pattern involves lace on every knitted row, cables, twisted stitches and a partridge in a pear tree. You need to read the chart forwards and backwards while manipulating the (slippery) little stitches. There was no way I could watch television while knitting; every bit of my attention needed to be focused on the chart and the sock. Normally this isn’t an issue as this type of knitting has a zen-Iike meditative quality, but things weren’t working out for me with the demon yarn. I had to use five double-pointed needles and a cable needle while working; I tried four different cable needles trying to find one that wouldn’t slip out. Yeah, right. The cable needle that I needed doesn’t exist. I began to pull on my hair and refer to socks as THE HELL SOCKS. More than once they came very close to entering orbit and becoming true UFOs!
Too cool for shoes. These babies will be my reading buddies next winter.
Beautiful socks. Wrong yarn. I’m thinking now that I should have washed this yarn before using it to help it recover some of its life before I started knitting. Oh well, lesson learned.
Tomorrow I am washing these socks to see what will happen. They are beautiful, but I am never putting these babies into shoes. They will grace my feet with their beautiful lace on cold nights while I am reading and remind me that art never shows how long it took, only how good a job you did.
Yarn, Books & Roses 