Been a while, sorry

My husband was out of town at a conference. He's really blown away by Salt Lake City. If you as big a fan of hiking and a fan of traffic as he is, you'd get the appeal. His pictures were lovely - he hiked Lake Blanche and saw a Bees game. While he was gone, I didn't do as much knitting as you might expect. Rather I washed the siding (by hand) and stripped and repainted the bathroom ceiling and got some plant issues taken care of. It was a lot of work and I would have posted all kinds of before and after shots, but I was trying to surprise the spouse. As he was not surprised anyway, next time I'll just post. :)
But I'm having all these little knitting project bugs - I really want to try major loop socks and figure 8 casting on and here is my latest "little" thing. It's got baby Amelia, fingering cotton top down Aran.

That'll be the last thing I do in black for a while

Golly, I think I'm starting to need bifocals.  Here it is!  It's currently blocking on my playroom floor, I think the neck will look much better when that's all done.  Just in time for the coolish weather . . .yay.fin

Nearly there

I have ripped and redone half these seams and redone the neck twice. Which is even more fun when you're knitting in pitch black yarn. But I'm almost done and thank god for all the nice folks on Ravelry who were willing to part with some of this discontinued yarn - Alpaca Silk.

Fifteen inches

So I have another 5 to do before shaping the neck and shoulders for the back. Arans are a lot of fun once you get into them. Actually, everything is fun, you just have to mix it up with good timing.



Our oldest nephew is going to school in Canada. His birthday is in March. Maybe his birthday present will make the prototype for the men's version of this.

Back from the beach

We just got back from Hilton head. It was awesome.
















Oh yeah and I'm working on a new women's Aran sweater pattern.

Washed 'n sniff

Clean, and it passes the sniff test.

Nanna is done

He looks like a model here, doesn't he? And, I don't mean that in a good way, I mean in that very posed way; he's making me think of one of those black and white shots from a sweater book from the 80's, one of the Rowan theme issues, perhaps.
Actually, he was watching the cat play and about to start laughing.
Once again, I highly recommend this pattern, it's fun and fast (just under 1 month this time).
Back to Frost Flowers - if Indy will let me.
Hope everyone's holiday plans are shaping up.

Nanna just keeps on going

I've sewn together the front and back, and am a third done with the sleeves and this little sweater seems to be taking FOREVER.
But everything seems to be taking forever lately. Maybe I'm just tired and can't wait for winter break. Oh, and here's Indy pretending he's a pirate's parrot. Argh, me hearties!

Nanna

Man, kittens get big fast! Indy is probably doubled in size since coming home 9 days ago.
Here's Nanna - and here's Indy attacking it. And here's out Christmas tree, which he did NOT pull down on himself today while home alone with the tree. We're proud of that. Oh, and we have a pretty great tree stand.

Nanna! Again!

It suddenly occurred to me late last week - hey, I got that navy Encore Worsted last year to make the little one a sweater, and, well, it's unusually cold down here this fall.
So I'm doing Nanna again. It's a lovely little pattern and it's going pretty quickly. Hopefully he'll like it and it won't itch. But he's like his dad and they both run hot, not like me, so we'll see.
I've also had a breakthrough with Ravelry - they now let you load pictures directly from your own source, so I don't have to load the pictures to a Flickr account, then to Ravelry, which really kind of made that site more work than I was motivated to put in.
As a librarian, I deal with social networking software some (and have to listen to people discuss it far more [in fact, if you know certain things about me, stringtheory2.0 makes a lot of sense]) but for the most part it doesn't do much for me. Maybe it focuses too much on the social for me. I like Ravelry for all the combined brainpower; the way all kinds of patterns and yarns are cataloged in there. Anyway, they've made it easier for my lazy self to make use of it. Yay!

Meatsheep continues . . .

Maybe a little less than halfway up the back. The colors are really lovely. It has decent hand, too, though it will never be soft and cosy. The Mad Crocheter told me she's heard that people have some problems with Noro being hard and scratchy, maybe I'll write up this pattern and it can adapted to this.

Once the V splits, I have to use two balls of each color to work the pattern and that means 6-10 balls at once. So I carry the whole thing around in the 3'x3' box it was sent in. Not what you would call portable. :)

Finally, here's a snap of the Annabel Fox sweater on.

Finishing things

Well, here's the cable monstrosity. Here it is lying on the floor, which gives you an idea of the overall look. I really like the Encore, it's really soft and nice (I've made another set of Irish Hiking Wristwarmers, with it - Steph has an interesting point that she thinks that using an all acrylic yarn for wristwarmers isn't as enjoyable to do, or nor does it result in as nice a garment - wool has better memory and feel. I think Encore hits the right compromise, I hope these will be hardwearing as acrylic and soft and have memory like wool).

Here's the sweater on me (in a mirror). Really horrible picture, but gives you an idea how it fits. It's supposed to be cold again Wednesday, so I'm looking forward to wearing it.

The world's most complicated Dickie

Well, I've moved on to the sleeves, which are slow because they're done at the same time, but then, they're also completely done when they're done and they match, so it's worth it. I really hate going back and trying to make sleeves match, I can never do it, and non-matching sleeves are really stupid looking.
I also like to put fronts and backs together when they're complete and do the neck, I don't know why, maybe once the sleeves are on the whole things gets unwieldy to put the neck on easily (harder to pick up those neck stitches if the whole piece is being pulled around by it's own weight?). Anyway, the result?
The world's most complicated Dickie.
Another color idea for spinning - sandalwood?

Celtic florish pattern from early 90's.

Okay, kind of a slow weekend - and that's not a bad thing.
I'm making progress on the quilt, having finally figured out what I'm going to do with it. But it's slow, and taking a picture of it at this stage wouldn't be very interesting yet, and the green sweater with gigantic cables is still lovely, but the front looks like the back and that's not very interesting to show (again) so instead . . . .

Here is something I had charted probably back in 93 or 94? I did it in Bartlett, in a charcoal grey. It's a nice, flowing pattern, good for woman more than I man (MHO) and I'd like to redo it in black, I think. Maybe continue my new love affair with Encore Worsted.

Here's the standard shorthand pattern: Like all my charts, if you're interested in trying them out, they're all pretty much written for light worsted to worsted weight yarn - you could use anything from a wool blend to plain acrylic, I'm not sure 100% cotton would hold it's shape well against the weight of all the cables, but there's no reason not to try it - and I really like charts. But this one lacks full directions - it's just the chart (or about 2/3 of the chart) for the front and back - only I did this one as a raglan. I started with a crew neck with a cable ribbing, added 1/5th of the total number of stitches to increase for the body, and set the pattern at a 2/1/2/1 division of all the stitches. I then increased on each side of the raglans every other round until it was big enough, took off the sleeves, joined the body worked to desired length, then picked up the sleeves and did standard decreasing to the cuffs. Anyway, if anyone wants to take a stab, I can write up better directions that that.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. (If you make any interesting versions, I'd love to hear about them.)

I also need to look around and see if I can't find a pattern for socks knit from the toe up . . . .

Happy New Year

Well, we're kind of hemmed in today since we're waiting on the GE dude to come fix our fridge, which has died. Which is pretty annoying. But otherwise, it's been a great holiday.
I'm almost done with the back of that sweater - picture added later in the morning, still no GE dude, what is it with this 8am to noon window nonsense? - and I hope the Mad Crocheter has a good visit with the family. (Hey, MC, like the Pats or what???? How nuts is that?)
All my presents seemed to go over well this year, so that was nice. Go ahead, be the crazy relation that makes your presents. One day perhaps I'll be famous for my knitting and then all our nieces and nephews can sell that crap for big bucks.
Keep on dreaming, chickie.

Anyhoo, everyone take it easy and have a happy and safe New Years.

That Annabell Fox scribbling cat project

So, here's the start of the back of that big cable. As I started, well, call it 1.5 skeins in, I realized I'd made some major boo boos on my graph and had to rip out about 9 inches of work down to the ribbing. But I love it so much, it's worth it.
I've also taken a snap of the amended graph and have replaced it in that earlier post.
For some reason, I like the yarn in this color better than in the nephew's sweater - it's softer, I think. The color doesn't show well here, it's a sea green with flecks of red, green and cobalt in it. Very pretty and this knits up very evenly.
I've cut the size of the sweater down - the original pattern had a large and a medium size, this will be a small.

Women's cable chart, originally a raglan 1992(?)

Here goes my standard patter:
Like all my charts, if you're interested in trying them out, they're all pretty much written for light worsted to worsted weight yarn - you could use anything from a wool blend to plain acrylic, I'm not sure 100% cotton would hold it's shape well against the weight of all the cables, but there's no reason not to try it - and I really like charts. But this one lacks full directions - it's just the chart (or about 2/3 of the chart) for the front and back - only I did this one as a raglan. I started with a crew neck with a cable ribbing, added 1/5th of the total number of stitches to increase for the body, and set the pattern at a 2/1/2/1 division of all the stitches. I then increased on each side of the raglans every other round until it was big enough, took off the sleeves, joined the body worked to desired length, then picked up the sleeves and did standard decreasing to the cuffs. Anyway, if anyone wants to take a stab, I can write up better directions that that.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
(If you make any interesting versions, I'd love to hear about them.)

A nice, solid finished sweater

So, as it turns out Encore Worsted works pretty well for Lopi Lite patterns. The only adjustment seems to be that while the width gauge is okay, the row gauge is short, so you need to make some adjustments, but that's not that big of a deal.
Anyway, it came out pretty nicely, just needs to be washed.
In a machine! (clapping hands with glee).