Finished!

I finished Terea's monkey socks! I'm so glad that they're done, because it's always so satisfying to finish a project, but they were fun and quick to knit, and I miss the project already! This is me modeling them, just because.

I was going to make a pair of monkeys for myself, but then I saw another pair of socks by Cookie A, Hedera, and I knew I had to make those! She's such an amazing designer. I have this lovely sea green yarn by Brooklyn Handspun, and I think it's perfect for this project. I opened my Magic Loop book and tried it out, and I really get this method! I'm sure, though, that I'll find a way to eff up these socks using this method. To make things really interesting, I'm going to try them toe up.

Success

I finished Satanski's mittens, and am really pleased with how they came out. Mittens are great! Here's the final product:

And here are the mittens with the scarf that I made.



I've enjoyed this yarn so much (and I still have so much left) that I'm going to make Satanski a hat, too.

Halfway home

I finished my first mitten! I'm very proud of myself. I nearly messed up when I got to the thumb, where I didn't pick up stitches tight enough and had left a rather noticeable hole, but I found the mistake in time to go back and fix it. This pattern is pretty much idiotproof, since I'm sure I made a bunch of boo boos that are completely invisible by this point. I love how knitting this in the round means that I get to knit the whole time (after I finish the ribbing), but that I can then turn the mitten inside out when I'm finished and see a darling knit pattern. When I finished the mitten, I picked it up to photograph it. I thought it would be fun to take pictures of the mitten at the same time as the scarf, so I finally wove in the ends on the scarf. It only took a week.

I feel like I understand mittens now, and am looking forward to starting the other hand tomorrow. Because a lot of patterns say that kid mittens can be interchangeable, I will make the next one as identical as I can to the one I finish today (might be a little better looking, now that I know what I'm doing), but the next set of mittens I do will differentiate between left and right.

Odds and Ends

I finished blocking Satanski's scarf, so all I need to do now is take a few minutes and weave in the ends. It came out really really well, and although it's not terribly hard to impress a three-year-old, I'm happy that he likes it so much. I also started on what will be the matching mittens. This is my first pair of mittens, and I'm kind of cobbling together several patterns, so we'll see how those turn out. Here are pictures of the finished scarf (undone ends and all) and the beginning of the mittens.

Today, the knitting Meetup group that I belong to had a trial yarn swap. I didn't prepare well for it at all; I brought 300 yards of a brown striped sock wool, 300 yards of a sunny yellow sock wool, and 600 yards of blue alpaca. I probably shouldn't have been so obvious about bringing things that interested me not at all! Anyway, I ended up trading the alpaca for some gorgeous light blue bamboo (cannot believe I got that), and the brown wool for some really cool blue cotton. I was also given about 200 yards of a cool white wool with flecks of yellow and orange (it's cute; definitely for babies/kids). I couldn't find any takers for the yellow wool, and although I may regret it later, since I still have several balls here and I have no idea what I'm going to do with those, I gave it away for a yarn drop. I hope that somebody can put it to good use!

All finished!

I finished Satanski's scarf, and it came out great! I love this yarn (Malabrigo Worsted, in Oceanus), and Satanski loves his scarf. That picture to the left shows what the scarf looked like last night, when I was about 60% of the way finished. I'm going to get started on matching mittens tomorrow, with a hat to follow soon thereafter. I need to block the scarf, as right now all it wants to do is roll itself back into a ball, but that means that I might as well block all the other stuff I've been ignoring for a while. Block party tomorrow!

Sorry, I'm groaning over here, too.
















This is what the OpArt blanket is looking like these days. That kid is due nigh on two months from now and I still don't know when we'll be having his dad's baby shower at work, so I should definitely get the lead out and start doing a lot of work on this again. Even after I'm done knitting, I'm going to be weaving in ends forever, so I should just do it already.

Jaywalkers the second

So I finished my second pair of Jaywalkers, and I couldn't be happier. I am getting much quicker at this sock-knitting thing. And this time I did not in any way screw up the Kitchener stitch! I think that using the Youtube video to get myself started is a good idea, but that I need to turn it off once I'm on my way. Probably going back and forth between my knitting and the woman's instructions was confusing me.

Here are my finished Jaywalkers:


I tried them on and they fit, but then I stupidly took them off before pulling out my camera. So I think I'll take a picture of them actually on my tootsies sometime soon and add them to this post at a later date. I just noticed that I have my red and white socks on my red computer, which is on my pink bedspread. This sudden habit I have of possessing red items is starting to worry me. I must be stopped.

I've found the next pair that I want to make: monkeys! I've heard good things about this pattern, and I like the way that the completed so looks. I'm encouraged by all the n00bs who burst their sock cherries on this pattern. Now I just need to find out where in the world I can find some 1.5 dpns. I'm not necessarily ready to start a new pair of socks at 11:30 at night, but maybe I 1) do a swatch to test my gauge (which I almost never do) and 2) see if I can find some mods to this pattern to fit what will almost certainly be a foot larger than the one this pattern was designed for.

So I finally finished my first pair of Jaywalker socks. As you can see, they're pretty cute, even though one foot is about 1/8 of an inch longer than the other. Oh well. I need to find somebody with narrow, but long feet. Maybe I'll have to try them on the feet of all of my tall, skinny friends. It could be like Cinderella, with socks, and a lesbian subtext!
Seriously, though, I really love this yarn. It's Lorna's Laces and it is self-striping, which is the greatest thing ever! I think that the stress of the last month gave me the motivation to finish the first sock and start/finish the second one, so let's hear it for silver linings. I realized pretty early on (but not too early to do anything about it) that these socks wouldn't fit my feet, so now I am making a second pair in the larger size given, and I hope that they'll fit me! This pair is going to be magenta and white striped, which will look adorable on me!

Here are the beginnings of my new socks. I really like the way the first pair turned out, so I'll stop being so lazy and do more work on these.

Holy Hiatus, Batman!

It's been a while since I last posted anything, but I have actually been knitting stuff. I made more booties (and then didn't photograph them, but more on that later), but the big project was the scarf that I made for The Boy. It was a broken rib scarf, and if I'd had any idea how much work that was going to be, I probably wouldn't have slacked off until late-mid December. I started it when I bought the yarn in October, but then got bored with how slow it was coming. Fast forward to the week before Christmas, when I realized that I had a problem on my hands.

How to finish without my fingers falling off? It wasn't easy. I stopped hating the pattern so much and became an automaton, and fell in love with the cashmerino yarn, which also helped a lot. I watched a whole lot of Buffy dvds until the wee hours of the morning, but I finished a whole 20-some odd hours before Christmas, so GO ME. Below, the finished product:
Wow. I just realized how horribly blurry this picture is (this may be why you're not supposed to take pictures of FOs at 3 am, after 7 hours of marathon knitting and cursing).

I finally sent out four pairs of booties that I'd been holding hostage longer than was decent. I stupidly forgot to take pictures of them (more for color variety, since they were all made from the same pattern), but one of my friends was kind enough to send me a picture of her son wearing them. This is the first time that I've seen my booties on a human. Cute! She said that he usually hates socks, but kept these on for a few hours, which tickled me to no end. I'm honored. The kid lives in the South, and it wasn't that cold there on Christmas, so I salute the trooper. The pattern is made for a baby of about six months, so they're kind of huge on him right now, but at least they'll last for a while.

Satanski's hat

After I finished the hat for EJ's dolly, I had to make one for him. I measured his head first, and the thing is 20 inches around, which is kind of nuts, but whatever. He was pretty stoked that I decided to make him a hat. He's really fascinated by my knitting, so I think I'll teach him next year when he has better motor skills. He's pretty bright.

I used the same Paton's Classic Wool Merino that I'd used for the doll's hat, but I cast on 48 stitches this time. Maybe it's overkill, but I don't know for sure until EJ tries on the hat. Sammy graciously agreed to try it on again (she's a great gal, that Sammy). I think the width is correct, but it might be too long.

I'm really proud because I finally (after two days, I know) figured out how to do the mattress stitch properly. I really liked the finished product on the hat, but now I wonder, how would the mattress stitch seam work on hats that are flipped back up on the bottom? What seam is used then? Or haven't I figured out mattress stitch to the degree I think I have? Oy. I will keep looking around and see if I can figure this out.

My second hat

So, I had such a good time making the first 1 hour hat that I decided to make one for my nephew, Satanski. I didn't want to use the crappy acrylic from the first hat, so I got some wool out of my stash. I held two strands of Paton's Classic Merino Wool together and cast on 16 stitches, since Satanski is only 2.

That was a pretty horrible idea. I could see pretty much straight away that this thing was not going to be nearly big enough, but since I'd already started, I decided to continue and make a hat for the baby doll that Satanski alternately nurtures and bludgeons, according to his mood.


Obviously, this tiny hat took next to no time to make (although it did take a minute or so of wrestling to fit it on the doll's surprisingly massive head).

My first hat

I made Allison Blevins' 1 hour hat. It took me a little longer than an hour, but all in all, not horrible for my first hat. What WAS horrible was the fabric I was using, Schoeller + Stahl's Big Ball. I originally bought it for use in a baby blanket, which I actually did make and finish. I got the yarn for the LYS, and showed the very helpful owner the pattern that I wanted to make. She suggested that I modify it to make better use of the yarn, and gave me a pattern based on the blanket I wanted to make. Unfortunately, though, my lack of spatial ability came back to bite me in the butt, because I followed the instructions exactly -- never wondering why I only had to cast on 64 stitches -- and ended up with a blanket more appropriate for a doll than a human infant. SO! I decided to make another one, and though I found more appropriate lengths for the blanket, but for some reason or another, kept ballsing it up before I'd ever gotten to a decent length.

But that was a while ago, so I forgot 1) that I had a boatload of that yarn left and 2) that I kind of hated the feel of it, because it was actually really pretty, foreign, acrylic (ugh). So I bought more, and now I have 2.5 balls of that stuff left, which, no. Not cool at all. So I used it to make a hat, which came out pretty cute, despite the cheap acrylic it was made from.

So. My first hat, as modeled by Sammy, teddy bear extraordinaire!