A quick hat and a pillow

The first hat I made for Norris was as big as the amount of yarn I had (there was maybe a 5 inch tail when I  finished to tie it off) and it was really a bit small, so I knew I needed to make him a better one.  This one uses leftover yarn from the plaid throw I made last year.

Norris says he likes it even though it's a little colorful for his taste.  He does not smile for my camera, but he did agree to model at least:

The pattern was free on Ravely, called the "Strib Hat."  It was a very simple design with a changing rib and stripes for interest.  But I had the first stripe done and Norris said he really prefers his hat to turn back so there are two layers covering his years.  After the first stripe, I essentially knit everything else inside out.

The Strib pattern was designed as a fitted cap, but Norris also likes room at the top of his head for an air pocket as he thinks that provides better insulation.

I knitted that while this next project was being blocked on my quilt design wall.  You get two photos because there are two sides.

I did not intend to make the two sides different, but accidentally switched the yarns I was using as the second contrast color only a few rows into the first side.  The one above is made the way I intended them to show up.  I can't decide which I like better.

This pattern, Ponni Cushion, is by Hazel Tindall - one of the few women who has held the "World's Fastest Knitter" title.  She does not knit "continental" style - touted to be the faster method by many. Seeing her knit on video, it doesn't look very relaxing but listening to her talk while she works, I'm sure she enjoys her knitting.  I had no idea she also designed patterns.  I think they all use Shetland wool.  The yarns I used were a combination of wool and silk, with some colors made of wool and cashmere.  That sounds like it would be soft and comfortable, but the Shetland wool is hard and durable and seems to win in the combination.  I don't think I would use these yarns in something you wear next to the skin.

Back to my pillow, here it is in context on our foyer bench.

That project almost finishes my first level of decorating projects.

Love the cables!

I like cables in quilting, but they are difficult to do well by machine.  On the other hand, cables look wonderful in knitting and are not hard at all.

This sweater was finished at least 6 weeks ago - just didn't photograph and then when I did, I didn't post the pictures. 

This sweater was made from the top down, without any seams - first time I've done one of those.  It has a small applied I-cord to finish the neck, sleeve, and lower hem - first time I've used that technique on anything but my plaid afghan.   There were three varieties of cables, and the way they moved around on the front kept the knitting very interesting.  The pattern, Siesta, by Carol Feller, was free!

The yarn came from Diane's inventory after she closed her big business in Oregon.  I spent a little and got a lot of yarn for my money.  I have projects lined up now that will take me through the next couple of years.


Here's a fun photo only one of my friends seemed to notice on Facebook, combining a quilt and a knit: 

It was the last night of the Shindig when they finally gave the quilt to a ticket buyer from Maryland. Alice is the one behind the quilt and Ann is standing next to her.  Ann's husband Russ took the photo.  We have to plan next year's quilt now - no hand piecing this time!

Cable-collar Sweater, take 1

I finished this at the end of May - why did it take me so long to post photos?

The yarn and the collar is what makes this little sweater, by Norah Gaughan in Vogue Knitting Spring/Summer 2011. 

The yarn is a dyed cotton twisted with undyed linen.  The collor looks a little heavy in this next photo, but it's not.

This one is Take One because I'm making one just like it, except 3 inches longer, for Joyce.  I finished another sweater in between, but haven't photographed it yet.  I guess I'm just a lazy blogger these days. But I'm knitting as much as ever!

Catching up

It seems I never posted my last four knitting projects here.

Here they are, all at once.  First is a cotton lace sweater by Bonne Marie Burns, finished in January - I wore it a couple of times this spring.  I like it though the closure is not really practical and could have been skipped entirely.

The next one was this vest called "Pommier" by Hilary Smith Callis.  I loved the Malabrigo yarn in the store, and it's appropriately squishy, but it's a superwash and doesn't hold its shape as well as a normal wool would.  I finished it in March and wore it once before the winter was over - two photos to show the contrasting reversible collar.

 That collar is my first project with two-color brioche stitch, which makes a very thick, cozy fabric.

Then I finally finished my Hitofude, by Japanese designer Hiroku Fukatsu. The unusual construction gives it the name, which translates to "single brush stroke." I chose it to show off two skeins of a hand-dyed gradient I bought last fall at SAFF. 

 If you are wondering about my pose, we were letting the wind blow giant bubbles off the deck at Judy's house.

All the color work is done by the yarn which was dyed Olive, purple and teal.  I used the two skeins starting at opposite ends of the gradient - so the sweater started with the olive at the top, then was knit through the teal at the halfway point. I started the next skein with the teal so the sweater shades back to the olive at the lower edge. I started working on it January and didn't finish it till last month. I made it longer than the pattern required and it just seemed to take forever.  The yarn was thin and hard and made my fingers sore, so I always had the vest or this next project to spell me when I felt the irritation.

Last, I made the Ombre Cowl.  Mine is a little floppier than the designer intended because of the silk-wool blend yarn I used, but it's a workable cowl.

I should have styled myself better for the photo than to put it on over my teal sweatshirt.  It's made with two strands of three colors of yarn held together, which makes for a 5 step gradient. One of the colors was a slightly purplish pink - I overdyed it with some silk dyes which turned it peach colored.  The design then grades between the rust and the pink colors.

I have a couple of quilt photos to post too - saved for another day.

Another First - a lace shawl!

I have seen and admired lovely lace shawls made by other knitters and said "nope, can't do it."  Maybe I could make lace table wear, but if I wore a fluttering shawl, I would certainly catch the yarn on something and there would be pulls or tears the very first day, and that would be sad.

But then I had some lace weight yarn that didn't work out for what I bought it for, and one of my Vogue Knitting Magazines had a lovely shawl pictured on the model like a kerchief, so I was game to try it.

I thought it would take me months to knit - skinny yarn, skinny needles, complicated charts... I was wrong.  Three weeks and a day.  When it was off the needles and I laid it out on the towel for a photo it was (drum roll please) actually, awful - bunched up, the lace patterns don't show up, and it was really too small to wear.

But I know about this with lace - it has to be blocked.  Here ts is after a nice soak pinned onto the same towel (camera flash changed the color).

 

After it dried, for better contrast I took it to the sewing room dropped it on a yard of black doupioni silk.  Black Cat Moki came to check it out

 

 and without my having to beg, she immediately agreed to be the model.

Here's how I'll wear it - shown over a yoga t-shirt which is not very elegant.  All that fastidious lace work is fairly well obscured by the gathers around the neck ....

.... but my fellow knitters will know!

 

Should have been a quick knit....

This is my first cowl, but it may be an unusual shaping technique - you start by knitting back and forth to create an arc shape, then join and knit in the round to complete it once the inner edge of the arc is long enough to fit over your head.

 

The pattern is called "Appia" by Hilary Smith Callis. It is based on a traditional reversible striped lace pattern called Roman Stripe.  On my mannequin above, I have the fabric spread out so you can see the lace - in the photo below, I was trying to show off the picot edging - something else I did here for the first time.

In real life, it would be scrunched more around the neck.  They say these cowls keep you warm - we'll see.

I bought the yarn a couple of weeks ago at Southeast Animal Fiber Fair (SAFF).  It is a hand-dyed merino-cashmere-nylon blend sock yarn, and was delightful to knit with.

I don't know why it looks blue under the "daylight" fluorescents in my studio. 

 In reality it's a beautiful soft gray called "Seattle Sky"

Here's the unusual shape, doubled up on my bed.  The neck opening is the angle at the upper right, the center back seam is the short side on the right.

I probably knitted this entire project twice.  It's an easy pattern, I just made a lot of little mistakes and wouldn't see them for a couple of rows.  But I'm motivated to make a few more cowls, especially with a forgiving yarn like this one.  It did not give me any difficulty despite all my knitting and unknitting and reknitting.

More yoga socks

I need these once a week, year-around since the temperature in the room at the Y where I attend class is quite variable and my feet are almost always cold.

The pattern is by Shiri Mor, published in Vogue Knitting 2012. The pretty cable pattern goes up both the front and back of the sock. The heel opening is simply bound off one row and cast back on the next, then given a single crochet edge.

Now I have two pairs.  Maybe I'll no longer spend Sunday evenings hoping my stirrup socks will dry by class time on Monday (since I tend to forget to wash them all week.)

I knitted plaid!

Plaid blankets have always appealed to me.  Most knitting patterns for plaids have you knit horizontal stripes, then you have to do something special to get the verticals, like duplicate stitch, or a crocheted chain on top of the stripes, which is ok but seems like a lot of trouble for an approximation that doesn't quite have the tartan look.  Here's a link to a free vintage plaid scarf pattern done with a crocheted chain for the vertical stripes for comparison - you only get skinny vertical stripes.

Back in 2005, Vogue Knitting published a scarf pattern by designer Annie Modesitt with a clever construction that really gives the look of a tartan plaid.  I just repeated the design four times across to make my throw.

Tartan plaids are made with a twill weave, so you see the two colors crossing each other in little diagonal stripes - Here's an example of a twill-weave plaid from Wikipedia -

Annie's knitted version gives dots of knit stitches instead of diagonals, but the mix of colors works like the woven plaid.  (My closeup photo to show the knitting is upside down.)

Annie's method involves knitting the odd rows across in intarsia columns - with my 5 colors in 4 repeats, that's 20 ends of yarn.  I tried using large bobbins which was a failure - documented in my Ravelry project file.  In the end I used embroidery floss bobbins and had to work in a lot of ends since you can't put a lot of worsted weight wool on a bobbin designed for thread.  (I wove them in as I went.)  This is what the back of the knitting looked like with the bobbins across the top.

The horizontal stripes are worked by knitting each even row in the same direction as the previous odd row using just one color for those rows, alternating between knit and slipped stitches. 

When this project came off the knitting needles, it was curled up and lumpy, but that didn't stop Lu from testing it out as soon as I spread it on the floor to have a look.

Here are a couple more photos of the throw, on the bed in the guest room which is what I made it for.

The gray yarn I used has a hint of metallic sparkle that doesn't show in my photos.  The other yarns are plain wool.

 Although this took only about two and half months from start to finish, I'm glad to move on to smaller projects for a change.

Knitted Lace

My grandmothers and great grandmothers left us a lot of crocheted and tatted lace.  I've found I enjoy knitting lace, done with a slightly thicker thread and needles.

Lace doesn't make a practical sweater, just a pretty one.  Here I'm displaying the border, the way the shawl knitters do it.

I had Norris take photos when I was wearing sweat pants and a tank - if I wore a sweater like this around the house, I'd pull the threads and make holes in no time. I can't even walk out the door without snagging my purse strap on the handle some days.

I think it will be nice over a dark dress to wear to some fancy occasion. The yarn is a subtle variegated tencel in shades of aqua and off white.

Yoga socks

I was too sick to go to yoga class today, so I finished this pair of stirrup socks I hope will allow me to use my toes as directed, and stay warm.

I had fun with our new camera taking "selfie" photos of the sock.  Norris tells me there's an ap I could get that would allow me to remotely release the shutter. I'm still learning.  The bright colors in the above shot are closer to that of the yarn.  Don't know why these make it look so dull. The yarn has white, tan, bright turquoise and periwinkle in it.

I never thought I'd be knitting socks - I would not wear such colorful socks outside of a yoga setting, and besides, I like to go around in stocking feet.  Why would I hand knit something I'm going to abuse like that? Lastly, my feet are sensitive. I vastly prefer finer gauge commercial socks.

But if these open toe/open heel socks keep my feet warm in the studio, I could see making another pair of wool socks for class, if I stick with yoga practice. Appreciation of yoga has not been easy for me. 

Shifting colors

A few months ago, I custom ordered hand dyed yarn by Erica Heftmann, who calls her yarn, "Colorshift" - do check out the link to her Etsy shop for a real treat!

Here's my yarn -  Erica uses pure wool.

 

Erica sells her yarn in various steps of a color or a color bridge. This was my first time working with anything like this (in knitting - obviously I have done this with Vicki Welsh's hand dyed fabrics for my quilts!) so I chose her 6 step gradation, and asked her to make two extra skeins of the lightest color so make the design I had chosen come out the way I wanted it to.  I chose a very simple design so the color would be the star.  Here's my Corrina sweater front- 

... and back -

The two photos were taken seconds apart, but I think the color is more accurate in the second photo. 

You can see that the sleeves are longer than the body.  I wanted the last color change to come come out at the same place across the arm and body, and I wanted to use every bit of the darker colors.  It took a little experimenting with the first couple of colors to make that happen, and I'm very happy with the way it looks and there were literally only inches left of each color except the last.  (I had the equivalent of a full skein of that lovely pastel blue-violet color.  It's hard to find pastel yarns that aren't for babies so I'll have to turn it into something!)

Even though I finished this several weeks ago, I have yet to wear this sweater.  We've been indoors with the home improvement work, and mostly, this is light weight - perfect for our usual winters, but not this one (brr!!)  I'm sure I'll get to wear it as winter finally cedes to spring though!