Oh my goodness, it is almost the middle of July and I haven’t started on the New Year’s Resolution socks for the month yet. I’m still working on the seat for the swinging lawn chair and my Clove Hitch Tee from the last post, but when did the thought of having another project on the needles ever slow me down? I mean, seriously, if I’m juggling less than a dozen different UFOs I’m good. There’s only two more weeks left to the month, so this is sort of an emergency!!!
Off to the knitting book stack I sent. I have a couple of books on top that I’ve marked with socks that I like, so it was pretty easy to select a pattern. The sock pattern that I picked has a busy lace pattern, so I dug through the yarn stash to find a sock yarn with little color variation and settled on a cashmere blend with the colorway of Fire Dragon. July, fire works, fire dragon. It was a fit. So, with no further ado, here are the socks for the month:
Isn’t this the best lace pattern? It looks like cables but there aren’t any lumpy twists; the texture is created by the lace pattern. This yarn is Opulent Fingering from MJ Yarns. Here are the project notes on Ravelry.The pattern is Lacy Cable Socks from the book by Veronik Avery, Knitting 24/7. The heels and toes are done in garter stitch. That will be new…
I cast on yesterday and started knitting these babies while sitting out in the shade on my deck. It was kind of a breezy day and a little overcast, so it wasn’t too hot to knit. I really like knitting outside with the flowers and visiting wildlife. Check out this visitor.
I still have lots of bees visiting the plants, but this week there has been an invasion of these Swallowtail butterflies. The cats are in heaven chasing along on the ground under these guys!
The year is more than half gone and for once I haven’t fallen off the resolutions. Of course, when it is socks it is a little easier to keep on track. Hot weather returns Thursday so I have one more day of outdoor knitting. Yeah! With some luck I’ll be done with the first sock by then. Of course, if I had the crocheted seat done for the the swinging garden seat it would be even nicer to knit outside. Sigh. So many projects, so little time. 🙂
I’ve been gardening and reading more lately (I have finished three of the “Bee Books” and am pondering what I should write about them…) so my knitting projects have been languishing a little bit. Nothing is finished. Nothing. Not even halfway done. I have been busy enough to get some things started, however!
I have made some progress on my Clover HItch Tee by Courtney Cedarholm. The very wide neck keeps worrying me, but when I check the picture with the pattern I am reassured to see that the original has a large neck opening too. The yarn is one that I found in my stash that is a rayon/linen blend knitted tape. It’s a little crisp and is working up “heavy”. I continue to be hopeful that all will be well as I knit. Here are my project notes on Ravelry.
I finally got started on an outdoor project this week too. Check out my very bare and exceedingly lonely garden swing.
Look at this. So sad. Poor naked swinging lawn chair. The original fabric seat rotted away and I just hate to give up on this perfectly good frame. Time to make a new seat!The local hardware store had some jute garden twine in this nice green. I looked at it and thought… crocheted seat for the garden swing! I bought the entire box.Off I headed to Hobby Lobby to find the largest crochet hook that they had. OK, this is the second largest, but it’s pretty big. 🙂 You can see the fabric of the seat that I am making in the picture. I decided on single crochet using two of the twines held together as I was worried about weak spots in the twine. The width of the piece of fabric that I’m making is a few inches narrower than the actual chair.I had some issues with handling the stiff jute and keeping enough tension on the yarn so it wouldn’t twist and flip around. This is why we have toes, right?The other difficulty with the project is fending off helping cats. Sigh. I’m trying to work on the seat each morning in the cool outdoors while drinking my morning latte. That’s also the prime time for cat friskiness and general misbehavior.
I’m working steadily on both projects at the same time. The crocheted swing seat is making progress in the mornings as that is a good time to work outside with it, and the Clover HItch Tee is growing every evening while I indulge in a little binge television. Right now I’m watching the series Fargo on DVD. Wow! What a good production. A little dark (OK, really dark at times…), but still excellent. And the way those people talk? I’m Swedish-American, and the social norms and speech of the Fargo characters is the language of my childhood. By the time these projects are done and I’m finished with Fargo I’ll be in my swing in the garden and talking in the language I used to hear while sitting in my Grandmother’s kitchen learning how to crochet. The circle is unbroken after all. How cool is that?
Without a doubt, I am in a mood. I have been feeling poorly for a couple of days now (I took my methotrexate on Monday, and this week it made me sicker than last. Hope this gets better as I continue…), but I needed to pick up prescriptions from the pharmacy and to run some essential errands (the cats expect to be fed on a regular basis; obviously they are out of control!!), so I dragged myself out of bed and feeling a little dizzy and wobbly I headed out.
Here’s the deal. The Kaiser facility where I pick up my prescriptions is right across the street from the Century 16 theater where a gunman (who will remain unnamed in this post) opened fire in a packed theater of moviegoers watching a popular movie on opening night. It was almost 3 years ago today when I woke up to discover that once again Colorado was in the news for a mass shooting, and once again it was happening in my home town. (Sadly I was a resident of Littleton, Colorado at the time of the Columbine shooting). This time the theater is in the heart of my shopping district, and today as I made my rounds to pick up a library book, buy cat food and made a quick stop at the book store to check (what else) the knitting magazines I was almost always in sight of the theater.
This what the theater looks like today after an extensive remodel. I still haven’t gone there to watch a movie since the shooting.
It is pretty heart-rending if you think about it. The police drove up the lawn and over landscaping behind the theater that night to transport victims to local hospitals. They drove on the street that I used to go to Kaiser in patrol cars carrying as many wounded as they could fit into their cars. It’s hard to not think of this as the shooter’s trial is now wrapping up after 45 days, and it’s impossible to avoid the day-to-day details of the events in the courtroom. As I entered the Barnes and Noble bookstore in the shopping center I wondered if that man had come here to also check magazines.
Here’s the knitting magazines on an upper shelf mixed in with other fiber-arts crafting magazines. I counted 12 knitting magazines.Here are the gun magazines. These slick and menacing productions are located on the lowest shelf where kids can sit and go through them, and I counted 30 magazines. I ignored the obvious hunting and gun collecting ones.
So, I am in a mood. I don’t feel well. I spend a lot of time knitting to cope with my altered future due to some serious illnesses. I don’t want to start a debate about gun control, Second Amendment rights, mental illness, the death penalty, the available of military grade armaments through the internet, or the value of explosive rounds. I don’t want to hear that we need more guns to stay safe and that teachers should be packing in their classrooms. Don’t do it!!
I’m just wondering if the world wouldn’t be a better place if bookstores carried a dozen hard to find gun magazines on their shelves, and there were 30 knitting magazines located at the level of children for them to look through. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all felt safe and dreamed of creating nice cushy scarfs, sweaters and mittens that would be beautiful and useful. That knitting was seen as an important meditative activity as wonderful as yoga, jogging, or any of the other stress-busters out there. That the economic power of knitting and other crafting venues drove a huge industry of creative pursuits valued by a large part of the population.
What does this say about us as a people that this isn’t the case?
It’s July! The garden is blooming, it’s a wonderful time to hit the great outdoors, and the warm afternoons are prime knitting and reading windows of opportunity. I have been spending the this week working on a fun shawlette from Bijou Basin called Culebra.
I loved this yarn when I first found it at the Interweave Yarn Fest. It’s 85% Yak and 15% Nylon. As soon as I wound the yarn my enthusiasm waned a little. It didn’t look very nice anymore. Once I started knitting it I was in love with the yarn again. I had to cast on three times to get the correct number of stitches (long tail cast-on issue; somehow I never learn…) and the yarn really bloomed and softened as I worked with it.Here’s a close-up of the lace design on the shawl. Fun, huh. The yarn is Tibetan Dream yarn by Bijou Basin. Here’s my project notes on Ravelry.
I finally finished the lace portion of the shawl this afternoon and now the rest will be garter stitch short rows from the middle of the shawl out which will create a shallow crescent shape. The shawl is knitted from the lace edge up towards the top. Lots of stitches to cast on, but then the knitting was easy. Now that I am out of the lace I am definitely in the knitting home stretch on this one.
My garden is blooming and looking much better than it did a couple of weeks ago, but it is absolutely lacking in humming. I haven’t seen very many bees hanging around even though I have lots of flowers that they like. Look at what is happening in my strawberry patch:
See all those luscious baby strawberries? Right. Neither do I. These plants have bloomed like crazy, but no berries. Dang it!
I miss the bees this year. I used to show a NOVA video to my biology classes about bees that they really liked a lot called Tales from the Hive. Bees are just amazing; a few years ago I entered a drawing for a bee hive for my classroom and was just crushed when I didn’t win. (Sounds strange, but this is a thing. The hive would have been set up in my room’s greenhouse and the bees would have traveled outside through a Plexiglas tube.) Years ago I had a bumblebee nest in the garden and they were the cutest things… Ok, there was one little incident with the cat, but other then that it was all peaceful. 🙂
Bee Books! I am behind in my reading resolution for the year. It’s the first of July, and I am now on book #44. I should be done with book #50, so I need to pick up the pace a little. As it turns out I have a stash of books (almost as big as the yarn stash) that includes a number of titles that involve bees. Hey. That’s the ticket. I’ll read bee books. Here’s the list.
This is the book that I’m reading right now. It’s about bumblebees. the kind of bee that used to live in an underground nest in my garden. I hadn’t really thought about them as being different from honey bees, but they are.
This is actually an eclectic mix of genres in this little collection of bee books. Some are informative non-fiction books, one is a mystery, a couple look to be great little novels. Perfect reading for the high days of summer.
I’ve been working out in the garden all week except for when the afternoon thunderstorms roll in. Then it is knitting time! I worked on the June 2015 socks all week and got them done yesterday with a few days to spare.
Ta-daa!!. These are the Petal Socks by Rachel Coopey. Here are the project notes on Ravelry. The colorway of this yarn is called “Thunder”. That turned out to be really appropriate as I knitted the socks to the sounds of thunder, rain, and even the tornado sirens one afternoon.
I am really happy with these socks. The pattern come with complete charts for three different sizes. I made the medium size (66 stitches on size 1.5 needles) and they fit really well (which is something that I always worry a little about in a lace sock). I used double pointed needles in the leg portion of the sock, but switched to two 16″ cable needles as soon as the sock divided to make the heel and that made the lace panel on the top of the foot much easier to manage. The yarn (Becoming Art Cielo) was kind of elastic which I think helped.
I’ve also been making some progress on my second Joker and the Thief shawl. I was not happy with the colors at one point, but I am liking it a little more now that the color pattern is easier to see.
It is about at the halfway point now. That bright blue doesn’t stand out that much in the actual shawl. 🙂
Look what happened in the garden with all of the rain this week! My Princess Alexandra of Kent rose is blooming! I just love this one.
This rose sometimes struggles in the dry air of Colorado, but not this year!
That it for the week. The clouds are really rolling in again for our afternoon soaking, so I think it’s time for me to fire up the knitting needles for the afternoon. Orange is the New Black, here I come!
My spinning wheel has been sitting around feeling bored. Actually, it has been moping and sulking in a corner of my office for months now. (I only dropped it that one time. Really. Only a few parts popped off. I totally think that it has been over-reacting about the whole thing…) Hoping to score some fabulous fiber that I could use to tease it back into good humor I headed off to THE YEAR’S BIG EVENT: the Estes Park Wool Market which is held every year in the mountains of Colorado in Estes Park, a wonderful mountain town near Rocky Mountain National Park. I have a lot of yarn in my stash. The wool market is where I find those special yarns and fibers that I can’t easily obtain and petting the animals that produce them is a special bonus!
I planned my outing for early Saturday so that I could arrive in the cool of the morning with the plan of racing through all the vendors, visiting the animals and then shopping for fiber. Thunderstorms are a given this time of year so I wanted to get out of the mountains before 3pm. It was a plan, anyway.
Isn’t this alpaca a great color? He’s not his usual fluff muffin self as his fiber has already been clipped off.Yep. You guessed it. I have acquired a fleece from one of the animals grown locally. The fleece has several colors in it from cream to dark caramel and is really clean. This fleece is so nice I had to get it into the car fast to protect it from my fellow fiber addicted friends. 🙂Check out this lock!! It has a slight crimp, is extremely soft and the 4 inch length is going to allow me to spin this baby into lace weight yarn without a problem. (I hope. The spinning wheel will need to snap out of its sulky mood…)I also got a Big Batt from The Natural Twist that I hope to spin a gradient light worsted weight yarn to make a Yowza Weigh-It Shawl 4. This baby is 8 ounces of Romney wool and I can get a whole shawl from it, I’m sure. Doesn’t the spinning wheel look happier already?
This year I was moving fast so I didn’t watch the sheep dogs show or visit the llama events. I did check out lots of alpacas, sheep, bunnies, and goats while I was there. I always have a problem leaving them all there. Surely the neighbors wouldn’t notice one little goat or sheep. Right?
This Jacob sheep really, really wanted to come home with me. Look at that face! This cashmere buck was on sale. For just a few hundred dollars he could have been mine. Those horns, though. I don’t know if the cats would want to play with this guy!
When I was done with the animals and spinning fiber/fleeces for sale I hit the vendor area to see what else I could find.
Yak yarn!! You know I needed to add some of this to my shopping bag. I also bought a great pattern for a lace and garter stitch shawlette called the Culebra Shawlette that will display the handpainted yarn well.
That was it. I could see the clouds were rolling in fast. I only had enough time to buy a bag of cinnamon roasted almonds, make one more chatty stop with friends to compare notes and show off the finds and then I was back in the car heading down the mountain ahead of the storm.
Half an hour later I received a text from a friend. You guessed it. It was raining too hard for her to drive and she was waiting it out up in Estes Park by grabbing a yummy early dinner of grilled lamb kabobs. Darn! I should have been a little slower on the drive after all…
My spinning wheel perked right up when I showed it that huge batt. I’m hoping for a little spell of cooler weather so the wheel and I can get going on making something wonderful together. What do you know? I think that we are friends again.
Summer heat has arrived, I’m feeling better, and it is definitely past time to attend to the needs of the garden. Yesterday I weeded out front in the shade of the morning and then mowed that lawn in the evening (well, I actually mowed only half of the lawn. A neighbor then arrived and took the mower away from me to finish things up. I love my neighbors!!) Look at what has been happening out front while I was engaged in an indoor scleroderma-induced slug-fest.
My new roses (Hot Cocoa) that I planted a couple of months ago burst into bloom!This is what the blooms look like as they open. I bought these roses as they are recommended for my location (Colorado, USA) even though I wasn’t completely sure about the color. I’m really pleased with the dusty orange color now.. Look how healthy those leaves look! Let’s hope the grasshoppers don’t notice…The ice plant that I planted along the front walk has also gone into overdrive. The color made me so happy I didn’t even mind pulling the weeds!
This morning I moved into the back yard with the cats to see what I could accomplish in a couple hours of coolness and shade before the afternoon heats up. Oh dear, it is somewhat of a jungle, and the cats have been running wild.
Guess I need to mow this lawn too. See how intently MacKenzie is looking upward? He’s watching the squirrel the cats had treed earlier this morning after chasing it all over the yard.Yellow Boy has been busy building nests in several locations in the yard and the garden.The yarrow he’s nesting in is all over the garden and I need to rip most of it out. He was so cute I just let him have it today. Wait a minute… I think yarrow can be used to dye wool. Maybe I shouldn’t rip this out yet…My pincushion plants have spread like crazy and the blooms are looking good! Please ignore the grass in the photo. That’s what I did and I feel much better for it. 🙂MacKenzie has also staked out a nice shady location to nap in near the cat mint. He is my good boy: he’s sleeping on dirt and not in the middle of a plant. 🙂
Things are looking much better than I thought they would. I weeded like crazy, filled up two garbage sacks, and then planted some new flower seeds in one garden where a rose died over the winter. By then the day was heating up and I was starting to feel a little dizzy again. Time to head back into the house to rest up for afternoon knitting and lawn mowing later.
The best part of the morning? I didn’t see a single slug!!
Gosh. Life has really been clobbering me lately. My systemic sclerosis (a type of scleroderma) has become more active this month, and as a result I have been laying around like a slug thinking about the slugs in my garden and posts that I should be writing. (As a special type of irony this is Scleroderma Awareness Month. I’m encouraged to take a pledge to explain about scleroderma to at least one other person. Fabulous. When I feel better I will do that! Post to follow in the near future, or at least before the end of the month.) Predictably I haven’t done anything about the slugs, but I have been collecting pictures and notes for posts. As soon as I start to feel better I will be posting like crazy. 🙂
I am not, however, feeling too poorly to knit. I mean, let’s be serious here! Knitting is Life!! Since I have been carefully rationing my energy expenditures the last couple of weeks I devoted some time to shopping the yarn stash and getting going on some great projects. Say hello to my new companions while binge watching Netflix (how is it possible that I never watched Orange is the New Black before? If I was incarcerated would they still let me knit? If I sent Piper some cute fingerless mitts would she wear them while fixing electrical equipment? See where my mind goes while I’m living the life of a slug? OK, enough of this. Back to the topic at hand…)
I got started on the June 2015 sock (Petal Socks by Rachel Coopey). Here are the project notes on Ravelry if you would like more details.I finished the first June Sock last night. This is the right sock; the left will have the lace details on the instep reversed so that the finished socks mirror each other.
What can I say about this sock? It was pretty easy to knit. The lace for the legs divided evenly on three needles and the chart had a 6 row repeat, so the pattern was easy to manage. When I got the heel turned I switched to two cable needles which worked really well and kept the lace on the instep (which has more stitches at this point) easy to manage. This sock fits my foot well and is nice and high on my leg which will be welcome warmth this winter. 🙂 The lace pattern doesn’t show well with this yarn, but it is so cute I’m over it.
Yarn to knit the second The Joker and the Thief shawl.
When I originally put together the yarns to knit The Joker and the Thief shawl by Melanie Berg I struggled to make up my mind. I ended up packaging together two sets of yarn. I already finished the first shawl a few weeks ago and am really happy with it. This week I also cast on and started the second Joker so I could see how the colors look together. What do you guys think?
The start of the second Joker.
Some of my knitting friends are turning out summer tops like crazy. Every time I go to knitting group on Wednesdays at my favorite yarn shop there is a new top being shown off. I am inspired! I am motivated! I am drowning in knitting projects, but since when did that ever stop me? I found a cute tee in the current Interweave Knits Magazine, located 10 skeins of Linen Jeans yarn by Borroco in my stash, and cast on.
This is the start of the Clove Hitch Tee by Courtney Cedarholm.
I may not have enough yardage for the sweater as shown, but since it is knit from the top down I figure I can knit until I run out and then cast off. Hey, it’s a plan.
Time to go lay down again. Have a good week knitting everyone.
Fasten your seat belts: here comes cute! I struggle to understand how this happened, but I guess one thing just led to another and before I knew it I had spent a week wallowing in, stitching and knitting the cutest little projects ever. It was a great break from my usual production knitting and the perfect counterbalance to a week of rain, hail and tornado warnings. So, with no further ado, here is the week of saccharine on my needles.
The last time I went to my favorite yarn store there was a display of these darling kids hats. How could I resist? Hats for all the grandkids and grandcousins!! The kits are from DMC and only cost me 9 dollars each and knitted up in a flash. ! I have one more giraffe hat to still make for a grandnephew…
While I was knitting hat cuteness I also worked on the parts for a knitted cat for my cousin during odd moments. I knit the cat pretty tightly so the little hats were nice breaks from the finger crushing tension of the cat. 🙂 Finally last Thursday I finished knitting all the cat pieces, steamed them flat and considered sewing them together. Gee, there were an awful lot of loose ends connected to the pieces… Obviously I needed a thread catcher!!
Here is the thread catcher in its opened state: a nice little fabric cup waiting to catch cut ends of yarn.When you are done sewing (and catching threads) the cup collapses into this showy twisted disk that is only a centimeter tall. Pretty slick! Did you notice the cute cat fabric?
This only took me an hour to make once I had assembled all of the materials. The best part? This cost me nothing as I already had everything that I needed on hand. I first saw this on Sharon’s blog called Creativity and Family and was struck by how useful it was. (OK, thread catcher envy definitely occurred and I was helpless in its grip. I mean, look at how cute it is!!) This excellent video really made it easy to make my own.
Well, once I had the thread catcher made I had no excuse to put off stitching together the cat. I worked on him all weekend during odd moments, and by this morning he was done. Ta-daa!
Here he is already getting into trouble. To be frank, I had promised him to my cousin Ruth Ann last February, but he decided he was a spring kitty. Later this week I’m driving him up into Colorado’s mountains to meet her. This cat thankfully won’t meow the whole trip up there. 🙂
This is the third cat that I have made from this pattern which is Four Knitted Cats by Kath Dalmeny. I’m thinking that this is the last one as it is really hard on my hands to do the hand-stitching. Good thing he is soooo (do I need to say it?) CUTE!
Yesterday I stopped by the bookstore to check out the new knitting books, and what do I find but this gem.
MacKenzie just can’t wait for me to get started on this. Doesn’t he look like he’s thinking, “Wow! I just can’t wait to get one of these on my noggin!!” <Not! He’s actually hoping that I torture Yellow Boy with these babies!>
I was helpless in the face of the book by Sara Thomas. I mean, isn’t this the poster child for the word of the week? Yep. It is dripping in cuteness. There is a kitty hat with reindeer antlers. A hat with a Mohawk. A hat shaped like a pumpkin and a Santa Claws (see what I did there?) hat.
I did put this book on the bookshelf to incubate for awhile. It is time for me to bid cuteness goodbye and to move on to some more serious knitting. This afternoon I kitted up the yarn, needles and directions for a couple of shawls that I am just chomping to get going on, and of course there are the June socks. Productions knitting, here I come.
Still, it was fun to take a detour into cuteness for the week. Hope you all find a way to channel some cuteness for yourself this week. 🙂
I am really trying to keep up on my New Year’s resolutions this year. If you’re not keeping track of them (what, you have a life?), one of the big resolutions this year was to knit a pair of socks each month using a pattern from one of my (many, many) sock books and stash yarn. Sadly the end of May came and I only had one sock done for the month and the start of another. It’s not my fault. There are so many cute patterns and yarns out there that I keep getting distracted by a shawl or knitted hat. I guess I could stay off Ravelry and out of the yarn stores, but that is so not going to happen. Let’s be realistic here!
So I have a few projects lined up. I seem to be spending time in the craft room playing with yarn, beads, fabric, and organizing different projects. Lots of ideas; not enough time to get them done. Yesterday I ignored the craft room, settled down by the television and binge knitted on the May socks for most of the afternoon. I was approaching the toe when I ran out of steam, so this morning it was pretty easy to get them done before lunch. Here they are!
Here is the sock the day that I started it. The pattern is Milfoil by Rachel Coopey from her book CoopKnits Socks. The yarn is Madelinetosh Sock in the colorway Grenadine.Ta-daa! The finished socks.. The lace pattern on the ankle and foot are switched between the two socks, and it is also different on the ankle portion of the sock (the front is one lace, the back the other). I used two 16″ cable needles to keep the patterns separate while knitting. The color changed a little as I knitted the second sock, but they are still cute!
So, I went into overtime a little on this one, but I am ready to dive into the June socks. I thought the Rachel Coopey sock was so cute that I selected another pattern by her (from a different book!) and matched it with a blue-ish yarn. Here it is.
It’s the end of spring. Obviously “Petal Socks” (found in the book knitting wizardry by Amy Clarke Moore) are appropriate to knit this month. The yarn that I am using is Becoming Art Yarns Cielo fingering in the colorway “Thunder”. Perfect color: there is a thunderstorm almost every afternoon this time of the year. 🙂
I have several little (excessively cute) projects to get done before I start on these socks. More knitting!! Must knit faster!!
Yarn, Books & Roses 