Dang it

Sigh.  Not the sweater, I really like that.  I'm running out of beads because I didn't use my head at all and only ordered one 10 gram bag.  I'm going to get hung up waiting on the rest of the beads to come - and we have 4 games this weekend.  Bugger.

Pretty though - I really hope this one works out - for the lovely purple yarn's sake, if nothing else!

Cecily jacket

I've been wanting to try a beaded cardigan for ages now and I stumbled onto this http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/cecily-jacket
I have enough KP Gloss in concord grape OR pumpkin to make it in my size. Both discontinued colors.
SQEEEE!
Not sure these are the exact beads I want so I ordered a bunch today. Love the seed beads, buy everything you think you might want and still spend $8.00. More soon!

Dinah test drive

 You can see the fiber better in the first, but the colors look more like real life in the second.  Still playing with colors and placement of beads, but the Gloss DK is knit on 7's and the Aloft on 5's.  If you start with the bottom portion, when you want to switch yarns it looks like the ratio will be k3, k2tog . . .

Fish

Finally getting a chance to take a decent picture of this stole and post it.  The center back panel will have 2 fish, facing opposite ways, when it's done.
I also got some feedback from folks who knit here at work.  The backing, it needs to be something soft, and dark, so like dark green or black velvet.
Sadly, you can bearly see the beads in these pictures.  Once it's done, I'll take pictures outside.

1/4 done

The last picture is the least photogenic as my husband points out, but it gives you the best sense of what the patterns actually look like.  These first two are more like glam shots, I guess.
Jury is still out on whether I'll work this one straight across or join in the center - any votes?

Progress for that Knitpicks thing

Okay this might seem like decent progress given it is beaded knitting, but actually it is a very easy pattern I've devised.  And I couldn't tell if I liked it or not all weekend.  I'd work on it, hate the bead placement, rip it out, redo, work for 2 hours one night, get up the next morning convinced I was going to trash it.  Somehow it survived my basically having something like KMT (knitting-menstrual-tension) all over it until today when I could take it to work to get coworker feedback.  They made me feel better about it, that the multiple motions meant to give the idea of small waves lapping a beach were working, one even had the brilliant idea to take it outside to see if natural light brought out the sea glass-ness of the beads.  Thanks guys! So, I'll take an outdoor shot once I get a bit more done.  I also want to do it in gray with grey green beads as a scarf  . . .   Here's what we have thus far, plus my hand for scale (sorry if the light nail polish makes me look like an alien - [see number 6 in that link, I first saw this as a teenager back in the 80's]):

And, lucky me, I needed vacuum bags and what do you know, Amazon to the rescue.  So, I went for the extra that got me free shipping - it's LOVELY, totally worth the 19 bucks!

Oh yes, and finally, on the fate of the Lion Hat.  The nice people who commissioned that totally random piece of baby-ware?  Apparently they loved it - honestly.  I was totally prepared to have to do a re-do (they wanted the background in white or something) as one needs to be prepared to do when designing for folks who don't knit or do any of this stuff, but no need I guess.  Now I have leftovers.  Maybe I'll make a baby sweater . . .
Oh, got another idea - an intarsia shawl, lined with silk, with a fish pattern on a black ground . . .

Have beads, just doesn't look like a lot yet

You can't see the beads very well, and you'll probably look at the colors and go "what were you thinking?" but just trust me right now - the matte glass is really nice, subtle, but nice, and the blue has purple in it and the purple has blue in it, I think this will work . . .

I think I have waves

I've adapted a pattern called traveling vines to give the gentle movement of waves.  I'm not sure I'll use beads quite this way, I may use them more in patches, staggered, and vary from dark to light to give the feeling of movement, but I like the pattern.  If you open the image, you can see it larger, that will help.
The one down at the bottom is something called fishtail lace, I think that would make for a suitable border.

More swatching

I got a nice comment here about my swatch, and some really helpful feedback at the weekly knitting gang at work (there was a lot of love for the clear and light blue beads, the darker were seen to be too purple, perhaps).  I've decided that while my swatch had some things I liked about it, it was more angular than I wanted.  The pattern I came up with is nice, but it didn't look enough like waves, I wanted something more gentle, less corner-y.  So I have some more ideas to play with and I ordered some matte beads, I want to give those a try too.  Basically, right now I have a lot of variables to nail down, so there will be a lot more swatches coming..
I also want the design to have motion, I want to capture the idea of small breaking waves, but also open the design up to other colorways, like a soft green that would look like marsh grass:
For yarns I was thinking Eucalyptus maybe paired with Cattail for depth and for the beads some combination  of these:

 http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27642/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27663/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27560/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27641/
I also want to make the design so it can be scaled down, so there's a scarf version.  So, lots of swatches coming soon.  Free shipping = slow shipping.  Sigh.
I'm sure that so many options freaks some people out.  I find it totally invigorating - not in every aspect of my life, but I sure do love to design stuff.
Thanks for the help and input, pictures soon!

Swatches and muffins

In case you hadn't noticed, I love to bake.
I'm making buttermilk dried cherry muffins right now.
I'm also thinking I  like my pattern, but maybe these aren't the right beads:

The sample is very small, I know.  I'm thinking maybe I want to use matte beads, so they look like sea glass.
I need votes . . . .
What about these? http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27565/
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27625/
and these
http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27500/

I'm not dead

Just stalled.  I need to take a snap of the finished hat (with tassels!) before mailing it and finally figure out a lace and beads pattern that looks like water for my Ravelry shawl.  I can see it in my mind, but so far my test swatches aren't much too look at.
And I've been going to 1.5 hours of soccer clinics every night after work.  Kids, what a time sink!
:)

While I'm at it - River Stole

Flash on, flash off, you get a slightly more developed sense of the colors with the flash off.

Designing a new thing with beads

So I have some Gloss in Winter Night and I've been thinking I want to make something with beads.  Maybe a wave motif.  But I'm kind of sick of shawls and scarves.  I'm having this itch to design a real piece of clothing with beads, maybe a cardigan?  I only have 4 skeins, though.
A vest perhaps?  Sigh.  I grew up in the 70's so I'm bell-bottom and vest averse, but maybe I can make it work.

Gloves need only 2 more fingers!

Hope everyone's having nice holidays

It gets hard to keep up with lots of normal life stuff during the holidays (not eating like a pig, exercising, bathing) so my posting gets sporadic.  But my knitting doesn't - in fact, I get time to do more of it, which makes me very happy.  (And, for fun, my spouse and I have decided to try breaking into Mastering the art of French Cooking which is totally awesome and yes, we only stumbled on the idea of this because we watched Julie and Julia.  Love that Meryl Strep.  The Julia parts of the movie made me want to go to France and drink about a 8 gallons of wine.  The other parts of the movie made me want to drink even more wine, but for different reasons.)  So, here are two things I'd love to finish over the break, along with the wristers.  And I've been playing more with making jewelry.  Fusionbeads.com takes Paypal, so if you ever buy anything from me, you can be assured the money goes either to yarn, or to these nice people out on the West coast.
I hope everyone out there gets some time off and to see/talk to the people they love.

It's done

Sadly, it's a rainy crappy day and these pictures didn't come out as well as I'd like.

Blocking

The black shows off the pattern more here, but the colors won't really show until I can wrangle some live models.
Tune in tomorrow!

PSA!

It's been unusually cold here, which I love.  Lots of folks I've known in my life deal with seasonal depression - I have the opposite.  I love it dark and cold.  I know, I'm kind of weird.  I have a hard time down here, it's too bright and too green all year, I out of touch with the natural rhythms - not because there aren't any, but because I don't know them.  Dark and cold is good for knitting and candle light.
And as the holidays approach, I'm going to do something I really never do - here's a PSA for knitters out there.  A co-knitter has mentioned the need for knitters to make hospital knitwear.  Specifically, stoma covers - in fact one of our local hospitals is in such short supply, the patient's families routinely recycle them.  We have an informal group of folks who knit at my work, we get together every couple weeks to knit and next week we're going to see if we can't pool cotton yarn and patterns and do some holiday hospital knitting.  'Tis the season, don't you think?  They're quick, usually quite simple, a great way to try out new stitches or use up odds and ends of yarn and there are certainly folks who would really appreciate your art.  I'll bring the camera next week so maybe we can get some snaps.
And finally, Persephone's Winter Peacock is back on the move - I ran out of beads, but more have arrived.

it's been a while

So, a couple things:

I got feedback on the Daisy Mittens - they could be smaller.  True, I was probably overcompensating for making most things freakishly small because I'm kind of small.   I'll do another pair (I send test stuff to my mom to put into a craft's cooperative since down here I have little or no use for mittens and things) or maybe another design.  I have a book full of them, I just need to put them down on paper.

I started my Kauni.  Not much to take pictures of yet, but soon.  It's sort of rough feeling, but it will make a lovely, cuttable steek, methinks.  I need to finish some things, my knitting basket looks like, well nothing poetic springs to mind, so how about a horrible mess?

Finally, it's finals season where I work.  Stressed out law students, not pretty.  I've spent my day:

• helping people use staplers; sometimes with a multi-person audience (no, really, I'm not kidding)
  
• explaining print server problems which aren't actually problems
  
• calling Facilities to have someone fish our most popular study room key out of the elevator shaft (someone dropped in there over the weekend)
• handing out Advil
  

Cat in the Hat scarf

So, when I was a kid, the book The Cat in the Hat really bothered me.  The chaos, the mess, the lack of calming parents . . . . but most of all, the fact that he turned all that snow pink.  Just seemed wrong to me.  Growing to adulthood has taught me not to hate pink.
So here's my CitH scarf - light on beads (I used both size 6 and 8 here) and using doubled Alpaca Cloud on size 3 needles.  Now honestly, I've always found pure alpaca to be a pain to knit with -- too slick, no resilience, too easy to drop stitches.  This isn't so bad, but the doubling does mean you need to watch what you're doing.  But it's kind of pretty I guess, it's an accessory scarf: the kind you wear inside with an outfit rather than something you wind around the neck for warmth.  I can see doing it in green or red for the holidays, very quick and not hard as a gift or something.

Some stuff

Well, it's been a crazy week. Here are the soccer mittens - some of the food colored silk and wool and palette. Watching U8 soccer seems to be my single unalloyed pleasure these days. I'm going to use a design out of The Mitten Book, one of my all time favorites.

And believe it or not, I'm more than half done with skein 3 of 4 of the black peacock. In progress pictures of these things don't look nearly as interesting as I find them. Percy's sweater kind of had a stall out when I started a sleeve and didn't like the decrease intervals, so I have to redo that.

I thought I had more to say, maybe I'll remember over night.