Cat, no hat

With fish!

This is my first completed crochet project. I'm already making another one, and I have plans for a third.

I stitched up her little fish too.

I'm very pleased with myself. My cousin Laura taught me the basics more than a year ago when we were in London. I started two scarf/shawl type patterns, but never completed them.

I saw this pattern in a book (Hello My Name is Amineko) at Borders. The book was on a super sale, and the cat looked basic enough that I could figure it all out. It was a great first project. It's all single crochet, but you learn how to increase, decrease, and change colors. There is one fancy decrease on the mouth that I may not have done 100% correctly, but it looks ok to me.

The Infamous Hat

Last week I entered a design competition at a local yarn store, sponsored by a big yarn company. You had to use their yarn, so I designed a three color hat with a graphic olive branch pattern around the sides of the hat with a fancy "braided" edge and fancy two color decreases at the top.

Friday night I found out that I took third place, and that I was going to have my pattern published by the big yarn company!!!

Originally only first place was going to be published, but Mr. Charles liked our designs enough that he decided to publish the top three.

So I spent the rest of the evening feeling rather giddy (the whole weekend really, well, actually I'm still feeling giddy). Josh and I went to our favorite Thai place to celebrate.

So here's the side view. It looks better on a real head, this form is a bit small.

And the front view.

The card listing my info, I didn't realize that they wanted the title of the piece where it says "description". I would have put "Olive Branches" instead of "color work hat". Oh well.

And my Certificate.

Handspun!!!

This past Sunday Loopy Yarns held a spin in. It was great. They had a table of free fiber, two drum carders, and snacks. I made a crazy batt of stuff from the free table, and I carded up my alpaca fleece. And I spun like crazy. Look at all this yarn!

This is Peanut, partway through being plied up. Not sure how many yards of Peanut I've got. I plied it further and will wait until it's dry to try to figure it out.

This is the crazy skein made from all kinds of stuff from the free fiber table, about 30 yards. It has some merino, some tencel, several colors of angelina (the sparkle), some mohair (I think), and some mystery wool. Pretty random and pretty awesome.

This is a merino/tencel skein, about 140 yards. I bought the roving from Miss. Babs at Stitches last fall.

This is the skein of mostly alpaca, about 75 yards. Sandy's dad brought me a bunch of alpaca that I had no way to card. Luckily Loopy had those drum carders out. I threw in some dark brown wool, some purple wool, and some angelina (the sparkle).

The alpaca on the wheel.

Yay! So much fun.

Quick Update

I've been super busy, here are a few shots of what I'm doing right now.

Plain sock, knit with colorful yarn and contrasting heels and toes.

These were my train knitting, brainless and entertaining.

Now I'll have to come up with something else simple to work on while traveling.

I just started a swirl scarf, from the Swirl Shawl pattern that Mom gave me.

Knitting these little hexagons is probably not the best train knitting. They're easy enough, but don't seem like they'd be good for frequent stopping and starting.

Hat and more of the Mittens

I have decided that I need a hat that won't clash with my Bohus Mittens.
I started playing with excel, and have cast on for a Bohus inspired hat.


Knitting close up.
It will never be as delicate, or look as blended, as the true Bohus. This yarn is heavier (though still fine at 7 stitches to the inch) and doesn't contain any angora.



The yarn, the chart, the knitting.

I'm reworking my charted ideas as I go. Some things that looked great on paper just don't seem right in yarn. I was going to try a tam type of hat, but then I decided that I shouldn't mix colorwork and major shaping in my frist color design. So it's slated to be a basic beanie style hat, with colorwork going around the side, one color ribbing, one color top.


And, a mitten update.


Close up of pretty cuffs attatched to mitten hand.



Left hand progress, hand is done, thumb is almost done.



The two in-progress mittens together. Phase one is almost complete, just a little knitting to go on the left thumb. Next I knit the flip top part of each hand. Then I'll work on the lining.

Then I can wear them.

Secret Knitting

I have been doing a little secret knitting.

I designed a little cozy for the teapot that Sandy & Derrick wanted. Sandy liked a teapot with a little leaf detail that Derrick wasn't so into. They opted for a simpler teapot, I put leaves on the cozy.

Great little fabric buttons.

And their tea tray. You can barely see the tray because our table is almost as dark as the tray. That scone mix is my all time favorite, super easy and always delicious. I like to add things like dried cranberries or almonds, but it's great plain too.

Beauty Shots

The hand painted sock yarn that I took with me to knit a wrap while on vacation.  

The two colors of tweed yarn that I bought at This Is Knit in Dublin.  

The roving and drop spindle from the Handweavers Studio in London.  

Silk top also from Handweavers Studio.  

Eggplant colored wenslydale wool from I Knit in Waterloo.  

Hand painted roving, also from I Knit.  

Silk lace weight (yes it's from Habu, but I never see Habu here in Chicago), also from I Knit.  

Lovely soft merino cashmere blend that I bought at Loop in Islington.  

And lambswool, also from Loop, that I have now seen all over Chicago!  Oh well.  

One of my yarn buying goals was to try for things that I can't get here in the states.  

Hair Cut

Me, this morning.  (In our bathroom)

The ubiquitous cell phone mirror shot (Josh was asleep and couldn't be roped into helping).  

Shots from the front and side, showing just how long my hair had really gotten.  I've let it go unmolested for over a year.  

And now, me this afternoon.  All gone!  It is a lot shorter than I thought it would be.  I asked them to take off a foot of hair.  They took closer to 16 inches.  

I was in total shock for a good while.  I think I'm getting used to it though.  Josh said nice things about the new cut.  Mostly I'm just having to adjust because I had a very different notion of how it would look when it was done (3-4 inches longer).  

Welcome Eliot-Anne

The body of the blanket I knit up for TJ & Erica's baby Eliot. 

The shower was this weekend, I was down to the wire, or I'd have better pictures.  

A detail shot of the corner.  

Playing With My Wheel

I finished spinning the ball of brown roving I was working on.  I have another ball partly spun up on a drop spindle, and a ball of pink/purple to go with it.  

Then I started in on Peanut.  This photo is  a little deceiving because I transferred what was on the drop spindle to the bobbin and continued spinning.  But I did get a fair amount done tonight.  I'm almost out of cleaned Peanut.

More Spinning, and the Kureyon

I started working on the brown wool again. You can see I spun a lot more this time. I have to figure out what to do with the portion already on my drop spindle. This is so much faster, it's great!

Yesterday I also ripped out my Kureyon wrap and cast on for gloves. I wasn't sure that I had enough yarn to make a wrap the size and shape I wanted. And I had read that it wouldn't soften up as much as I was hoping. So I ordered another yarn from the same company that contains a hefty percentage of cashmere. I will make the wrap with that and I will make fingerless gloves from the Kureyon. I am calling them my iPhone gloves (you need your finger tips for iPhone manipulation).

The Kureyon wrap, before destruction.

The new Kureyon gloves, in progresss.


Sandy just said that these are very "Fame!"

And the Winner Is...

Not this one!

This is the drunken cable border with a pie crust cable center panel.  It still looks bunchy and sloppy to me.  I am not a fan.  

Next I tried a ribbed cable, something I'd seen in the Vogue Stitchionary but had never tried.  A commercial sweater that I have, with an oversized cable, utilizes this technique.  It also employs other cheater methods to give the appearance of a cable where there isn't one though, so I wasn't sold on the idea.  

I used the idea of the drunken cable, but instead of crossing 9 over 9, I crossed 9 ribbed over 9 ribbed.  It looks much much nicer.  The cables lay relatively flat and seem pretty defined.  

So the winner is this one.  

I tried different numbers of rows between the cables.  I think this distance works the best.  

And I think I will have to use three columns across instead of two.  

I'm currently working out how I want to make the increases/decreases for the sleeves.  I think I'm going to knit this from the top down.  I'm going to knit one more swatch to see how wide three repeats of the cable will be and to make sure I like how it looks worked upside down.  

I'm so close!

Another Debate, Another Swatch.

At the beginning of the debate I cast on for another brown sweater swatch.  And I really think this cable might be the winner.    

Anyway, I made one stitch every time McCain said "my friends", and look how far I got!

Ha ha.  

The cable doesn't show very well in this photo, I'll take better pictures once I've knit a few more repeats.  It's a ribbed version of the drunken cable idea.  Everyone cross your fingers.  

Palin makes my head hurt.

Knitting makes me feel better.  

I worked on another swatch for the brown sweater while Josh and I yelled at our TV.  I need to knit a bunch more and block it a little to see if I like the cables.  So far I like the drunken cables bordering the pie crust better than the pie crust cable itself.  We shall see how this plays out.  

Brown Sweater Update

This is all I've been knitting. I could be halfway done a sweater by now. But I'm picky and I want it to be just so, so I'm still swatching. These swatches are big, the smaller ones are about 4" square. They are for the sweater that will have a large cable down the front with ribbing for the rest of the body. I'm planning raglan sleeves, knit in the round, probably from the bottom up.


My first pick, the Drunken Cable.

My first swatch, the little one is the cable as written in the Vogue Stitchionary 2. The bigger one is my attempt at enlarging it. Not so good. To me it looks like a big messy blob of knitting.

See, a close up of the original, much nicer.

Attempt number two the Pie Crust Cable.

Again, the smaller is the cable as written, the larger, my attempt at rewriting on a bigger scale. I also tried out different needle sizes, as well as different amounts of rows between repeats of the cable. Not too fond of this swatch either. I don't seem to have taken a close up of the small swatch, but it's very nice, with clean looking cables crossing at regular intervals, and laying flat.

One of the things I like the least about my attempts is that they get really tight where I cable the stitches. Then the knitting between gets bunchy and the whole thing looks like a mess.

Try three, the Drunken Cable bordering Pie Crust.

So then I tried this. I enlarged the patterns a bit, but not as much as my original swatches. I also used both, figuring that it could give enough width to be the center panel of a design. I'm not sure which border cable I like best. The left one is composed of 12 stitches, the right one 8. I think I like the bigger one, especially since I want the pie crust segment to be bigger than it is in this swatch. Here there are only two repeats of the pattern (width wise). I'd probably do four to eight repeats.

Anyway, moral of the story is that I've a bunch more swatching to do.