It has been crazy weather time in Colorado. While the news is full of the huge snowstorm that hit New England, I have been outside in the sunshine with the cats reading and knitting. Yesterday we almost set a new record when we hit 75 degrees! Today is not as warm, but it was nice enough to give one of my cats a bath.
Within minutes of being released from the drying towels Morgan was at the food bowl. Little did he know that the hair dryer was next…
Here he is tanking up on cat food after his traumatic ordeal. 🙂 Morgan is a (bob-tail) Maine Coon, which meant that a serious blow-dry and brush-out procedure was next in store for him. He actually likes the hair dryer, so it wasn’t as bad as it could be.
Look at these colors!
Still, what with one thing and another I didn’t settle down to knit until late this afternoon. I’m working on another Hitchhiker, this time in Noro Taiyo sock yarn (which is cotton, wool, nylon and silk). The colors are cool, but it isn’t as squishy as the last Hitchhiker that I made out of wool. It will be nice for summer. I keep thinking of ways to make a Hitchhiker-shaped scarf with gathered lace along one edge instead of points. Hmmm…
Yep. No thumb. This yarn is Baah! La Jolla sock yarn in the colorway “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
I’m also making some vine lace mitts that still don’t have their thumbs knitted on. As usual, I’m going to have a little stack of thumb-less mitts piled up before I force myself to finish them. Then there is the matter of the pattern for these mitts which I need to write out a little better before I forget what I’m doing. Here’s the project page on Ravelry for the mitts with kind of a half pattern.
Maybe I’ll save the mitt thumbs for the snow day that is bound to come. March and April are the big snow-makers here. You never know. 🙂
The sun is out today and the meltdown is in full swing. Yeah! Sunshine! It is supposed to be fairly warm for the rest of the week and I am rocking the knitting because my hands are so much happier when they don’t have to deal with single digit weather.
So, I got a lot done, but nothing is finished. I’m still working on three projects (and am resisting casting on another pair of socks. Darn it, there is a pink cashmere blend yarn that is calling to me…) Here’s where I am.
Knitting this sock is quite a production. I’m following the pattern chart, tracking the decreases for the pattern and fighting with the cats for space at the same time.
The January sock is still just chugging along, a few rows at a time. The problem is that I need to use the chart to do the pattern, and the cats have decided that they want to sit in on my legs while I knit. They dislike cold snowy days even more than I do! Today I threw them outside because it was warm and I got through the heel on the first sock and am now working my way down the gusset. Looking good!
I have made it through the heel. I like the pattern, but it is a little harder to make out then I thought it would be. Still, with colors like this who cares about the pattern?
The cashmere blend 3S Shawl is almost done! I have only another 20g left on the ball. This is easy knitting and I am doing it while watching television in the evenings. Maybe, maybe, maybe it will be done Friday. 🙂
It’s starting to look like a shawl! I’m using an online random number generator to determine how many rows of garter to put between the eyelet rows. Geeks are Us!
Finally, I am working on the little lace mitt using 2 small cable needles. I have finally adjusted to the cables (instead of using double pointed needles) and really like how I can carry this small project in my purse without the danger of stitches coming off the needles. Looks like this project is the one that is coming in last as I’m spending most of my time working on the other two.
Knitting on 2 cable needles. Why has it taken me so long to try this?
Project Information
Sock: Riot of Color from Around the World in Knitted Socks by Stephanie van der Linden. The yarn is Baah! Yarn La Jolla
Shawl: 3S Shawl by Amy Meade. Yarn is Serenity 20 from Zen Yarn Garden.
MItt: I heavily modified the pattern for the Sweat Pea MItts that I found in Lace One-Skein Wonders.
It’s the day after Christmas! I know that it is Boxing Day, but in my house it is “Recover From Knitting Day”. It came right down to the wire (again), but I got all of the gifts done on time and into the mail or under the tree. The most fun for me is getting the feedback from recipients after my little knitted gifts arrive at their new destination. So, from the yarn stash to the Christmas Tree, here are the knitted items of 2014.
For my cat loving cousin I made a black and white kitty,Here he is in his new home on Christmas morning. Happy landings little guy!I was knitting lace mitts like crazy as we got closer to the big day…and here are the same mitts this morning on their new owner’s hands. 🙂The mitts that I made for my sister arrived in time for Christmas…and the socks for my daughter-in-law got done early Christmas Eve a couple of hours before I handed over the wrapped package
Ta-daa! Christmas gift success.
OK, there were some things that I planned and bought stuff for but didn’t make, but I have a head start for next year. Right?
This is the time of year when my Christmas knitting plans are waaay too big for the time left before the big event. I always knit or plan to knit presents for everyone. As the days creep closer to the date I begin to triage and start presents that need to go into the mail first while holding local presents on the back burner. That’s how I ended up with soooo many works in progress this year. Here they are:
I already have three pairs of lace mitts finished, and these are the ones that I worked on over the weekend. When I get the third pair done I’ll sit down and do all the thumbs at once.
This Hitchhiker (exactly half done!) went on hold before I started the mitts as it is going to someone local. I’m getting a little nervous about this one’s chances of making it to full Hitchhiker status. 🙂
My cat MacKenzie has been hanging out today as I worked on the pieces to create a black and white stuffed cat. This is one of two cats I need to get done and into the mail by next week.
I still have to get another stuffed cat and a pair of alpaca half-finger gloves done too.
I hope to have some finished objects to show off by Friday.
Patterns:
Fingerless lace mitts are modified from the Sweet Pea Mitts pattern by Lisa Swanson
It started for me one blustery winter day about 5 years ago. I made a quick trip in the car without wearing gloves and arrived at my destination with one finger dead white and numb. How bizarre, I thought. I went into the building, rubbed my finger until the circulation returned, and idly thought that I should mention it to my doctor the next time I saw her. I knew that it was Reynaud’s disease.
Over the years the Reynaud’s progressed to all of the fingers of my hands, and last year my toes joined the party. Instead of white my fingers now turn purple within seconds when exposed to cold. Pain is involved. As it turned out, Reynaud’s was the harbinger of things to come; three months ago I was diagnosed with scleroderma (systemic sclerosis), but that is another story. Today’s story is one of blue fingers, cold weather, and the world’s cutest mitt pattern.
I made this scarf using Dream in Color Smooshy with Cashmere. I had about three quarters of a skein left over. What better excure do I need for mitt knitting?
Yep, just as cute as the scarf. Since hand circulation is a problem for me I started the thumb lower on the mitt (starting at my wrist) so it wouldn’t pull across my hand. This mitt is nice because the I-cord bind-off keeps the stitches at the top of the mitt firmly in place across my knuckles. Because they are light in weight I can wear them indoors while reading, knitting, and working in the house. Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to have some more of these…?
Look at what I’ve been making from leftover sock yarn, 🙂
It was stunningly cold this November in Colorado. I went crazy with the mitt knitting. I now have three more pairs to match other shawls and tops in my wardrobe, and I am even sleeping in them. I wore them inside my mittens while shoveling snow, and they protect me from the cold steering wheel in the car. I can even wear them on top of light gloves. Take that Reynaud’s!!
Oh yeah. Maybe some Christmas presents were also produced.
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.
For the second week of rescue knitting I picked up a shawl that I had started last fall. It fell to the wayside when the weather got colder and I started working on Christmas presents and socks for the winter. Ignored and forgotten (and wearing some of my favorite stitch markers!) it ended up getting stuffed into the back of the yarn stash closet.
UFO shawl and pattern the day I pulled it back out of the bag.
Poor thing! Hard to remember why it was abandoned in the first place. It’s kind of a cool pattern, the lace was pretty easy to learn once I was past the edging, and I like that hand-painted pink yarn (Malabrigo Arroyo). I only had about a foot of the shawl knitted, so this was a little bigger project than the ones I did last week, but still not too bad. I thought I should be able to make a lot of progress on it in a week.
Princess Alexandra of Kent rose in my garden.
I took the shawl out to work on in the garden, and there it was. One of my new roses was blooming, and the color was close to that of the shawl. The name of the rose is “Princess Alexandra of Kent”, and the colorway of the shawl yarn is “English rose”. Wow! Synchronicity! Obviously this UFO was meant to be rescued at exactly this moment.
The finished shawl in my garden. I just love how international it is. The pattern is Norwegian, the yarn is from Uruguay, the yarn colorway is “English rose”, and I’ll be wearing it here in Colorado.
I named the shawl project “Princess Alexandra of Kent Shawl” on Ravelry and got to work. I knit like crazy all week, and the shawl was finished today. Time to prune the rose and to dive back into the UFO pile to find a project for the rest of the week. I think that I’ll do a sock next…
It’s the end of June. The weather is always interesting in Colorado, and I’ve spent the month working outside on landscaping projects and gardening in the late morning and early afternoons. As the afternoon wears on I usually need to move inside to escape thunderstorms, and if they are bad enough I end up watching weather updates on the television while knitting.
Early in the month I saw a June Beetle in the garden. I haven’t seen one of these guys since I was a kid in Southern California when we would catch them, tie threads to their little upper bodies, and then fly them around like little pets. I was still thinking about the beetle when I cast on this yarn to make some new socks.
This yarn is mostly blue, but it has some green in it too which reminded me of the beetle. The yarn is from Hedgehog Fibers, which is an independent yarn studio located in Ireland. I decided to knit a sock pattern called “Origami” which uses a lace pattern that is Japanese in origin. The pattern comes from the book Knitted Socks East and West by Judy Sumner.
The pattern makes the leg of the sock fold into a strange shape.The lace opens up once the sock is on.
As I knitted the socks and watched the thunderstorms bloom and thunder across Colorado on the weather radar I pondered the international connections open to me and other knitters. How fun this is! I made socks of Irish wool in a Japanese pattern to fit my fat little Swedish-American feet while watching thunderstorms in Colorado in a color that reminds me of my childhood in California. What a time to be alive.
Socks made with Irish wool in a Japanese pattern on my Swedish-American feet.
June is almost gone, the weather is beautiful and summery outside, and my socks are done. Time to go back into the garden to show them off to that June Beetle.
For some inexplicable reason I have suddenly gotten stuck on cowls. Never mind it is already spring and summer is on the way. I seem to only be interested in cowls, scarfs and socks. I put the socks onto the back burner last week and dived into cowls.
I have had this nice pink yarn for a few months now, and couldn’t seem to find the right project. Dream in Color“Perfectly Posh” yarn: it is made of merino wool, mohair, silk, and cashmere not that I’m letting that intimidate me. Then while poking around the patterns at my local yarn store I discovered a nice pattern for a lace cowl that looks a little like a scarf with the back point tied to the front. That’s a look that I really like, so I bought the pattern Zuzu’s Petals. Here’s the finished product.
Finished cowl made from Dream in Color “Perfectly Posh” yarn.
See, it looks just like a little scarf, but it is a cowl with a narrow back. Perfect to wear over tops with a cardigan or jacket.
Detail of the cowl. I added a picot bind-off to the original pattern.
Well, it was hard to not notice that the original cowl pattern was designed to display yarn that changed colors gradually, so I just had to buy a couple of cakes of Freia Handpaint Yarn even though I have more yarn in my stash than I can knit in my lifetime. I ended up with the colorways Conchinilla and Blue Velvet .
I think that the cowl really shines with the color changes. I was running out of cowl just as I arrived at the brightest magenta yarn so I added a picot bind-off again.
I just love the way the colors change in the cowl.
I plan to wear this with a navy cardigan next fall.
I can’t help but wonder what the cowl will look like with beads added, so tonight I started another version of the same cowl in the Blue Velvet colorway of the Freia yarn. Hey, it is a cowl study. I’m just surrendering to this thing without giving it too much thought. I wonder what I can find in my yarn stash for the next cowl after the beaded one? I think that I have some silk/wool yarn that I got on sale a couple of years ago…
Yarn, Books & Roses 