Cross that off the list

Daisy mittens are done - need to be blocked, but done.
My patient coworker modeled them for me. Happily, she has normal sized hands. Mine are so freakishly dwarf-like it makes designing mittens challenging, they always come out too small. So when I though "oh no, I made purple oven mittens" I was wrong. Love to be wrong like that.
I really liked the Imagination to work with. If you like the pattern, it's available on Ravelry, or you can email me to request the pattern.

Neighbor, can you spare a cup of time?

Soccer season has started! Which is tons of fun. This is a great age.
And there goes any illusion of time.
So, I'm working on a written instruction version of the Peacock, which is slow going, and Putnam's shawl is lovely, but not quick. I'm nearly done with the mittens, and I find myself coming up with zillions of new things I want to do. Oh, and I have one or two friends I want to catch up to someday.
So here's why I started this blog in the first place, so I can use the internet as my external harddrive back up!
I want to design a shawl in Gloss Winter Night and design it in a water/wave pattern. I had thought blue beads, but maybe white or grey instead? Or would that look like lint? Such a fine line between clever and stupid, to quote Spinal Tap.
I want to design Adria, which will have raised leaves with just a few beads for sparkle, in dusty pink. Need to dye that yarn myself. Have yarn, not time.
I want to design the Posies shawl, shaped like the Peacock, but with small stylized flowers in it, inspired by Yarn Or Death's doodles. I have the YO pattern and everything.
I want to design a beaded cardigan, using the wave pattern I used in the peacock, only it would mostly be plain st. st. with edge beads and patterns - too much and it would be heavy (and so stretch out) and not comfortable.
I want to get busy with the Olympian pull over - I really love that yarn.
Most folks want more money, which, I admit would be great, but I really want more time. And I'm not one of those cool folks who sleep 3 hours a night.

Random

Happy Friday.

Done, and weaving in ends

I'll take an action picture of this one once it's got all the ends woven in and is blocked. I really love this pattern, and it looks pretty good on. More soon.

Doesn't look like much

Well, if you ever read this blog, you know that it's most long stretches of working on stuff that doesn't make for good pictures punctuated by tons a newly started projects. Anyhoo, I'm about to knit the arms onto the white sweater. I picked up the 45 sts. on each side on needles this evening and I'll knit them in place tonight, so maybe I'll have a picture of something remotely garment-y tomorrow.
High ho.
Hope everyone is enjoying their end of summer weeks.
Oh yeah, Halloween costume 2009 - Grover the Satyr from The Last Olympian books.
Can I make fur legs?

Update on Putnam's

Yeah, I pulled it out, it's just going to be a big rectangle, but a lovely one.
And I'm trying to update the Peacock pattern for a larger size and English directions on the charts.

Olympian pullover

Here are my test swatches for the Percy Pullover. After much hemming and hawing, I think I'll work it RS facing, stripy, but not too stripy. The wrong side is nice, but too muddy, methinks.

Not happy with it, not sure

Okay, Putnam's? I was designing it to have a hole for the head where I would then pick up for a collar. But will a big rectangular dickie with a collar look good, or like cr*p?
I'm kinda thinking I should tear it back and just do the big rectangle.
Any ideas?

Help I never knew I needed

Wrapping presents. :)

I've gotten a lot of really great feedback on Ravelry since posting the Peacock, which is really nice to hear.
I hope everybody has a wonderful day.

I did it

I finished and posted the pattern for the Peacock shawl. That took forever!
Teach me not to take good notes while I knit.
Right now it's on Ravelry, but I'll put a link up here too.

Dang, I'm blind

This not some piece of metaphysical wisdom -- rather, the results of taking pictures of one's off-white knitting in the summer sun of Georgia. In fact, there are 2 since I unearthed something that's been tabled since late spring.
Here's the first - some outside closeups of Putnam's shawl. I'm really fond of this, but it's been sidelined of late because I've gotten distracted. However, the eponymous friend wrote this week and described to me projects she's trying to get finished for decades. So now I'm inspired to clean out my knitting basket.






Remember this white pull over I started? It's coming together now, I started the neck this morning and these sleeves should go pretty quickly. It's really fun to knit and looks great on, sadly the pattern is a leaflet from the early 90's so I can't tell anyone where to get a copy. :(

And then of course there's Indy - we have siding being replaced today so he's prowling around being unhappy. He also hates the laptop as it vies with him for my attention. He thinks. Or I think that's what he thinks; for all I know he's coming up with uses for the cold fusion reactor he's designed.
Guess I'll never know.

The sea god and other thoughts

Mmmm, still thinking about City Tweed. We've been reading Rick Riordan's books about Percy Jackson (if you have a kid 7-12, they're pretty fun, and then you can go back and watch Clash of the Titans and the Sinbad movies and talk about mythology) and I was thinking of making a pretty simple pullover that used various City Tweed colors together so you would get gentle color movement throughout the sweater as a whole. Percy could be Porpoise, Poseidon and Orca mainly, with lesser amounts of Enchanted, Splash, and Morning Glory. I think Grover (browns and greens) and Thalya (wine, purple and blue (sp?) have colorways in there too. Anyway, occurred to me over the weekend.

Hmmmmm

Okay, the linen stitch pull over, I want to do it again, in wool, for fall. Inside out st. st. this time and I'm really taken with Knitpicks City Tweed.

But what color? Colors?
A bunch of the blues and greens or browns and greys? A V pattern with a march of colors up the body, or get 2 and work together into a marl?

Help!

Sackboy is done

And is a big hit.

A couple things that actually show progress

So I have one pattern on Ravelry without a demo of it, I'm fixing that:
Knitpicks Gloss in a lovely purple they're not making anymore and Imagination in Looking Glass. These two make a very nice fabric for mittens, soft and with a lovely silky hand.
And for my next project, SACKBOY from Little Big Planet. Pattern is here, in case you have fans around the house.

So slow

Okay, things were crazy and of course when you think "well, that has to be it" things go more off the rails.
I'm still, very slowly, putting together the peacock pattern. And the wedding stole, which right now looks like a very large, very elaborate dicky, is coming along. But slow.
So I decided to make a pair of mittens. I'm finally going to knit up a pair of the daisy mittens. Here's the start. I still mean to go back and design some gryphon mittens, I just don't have it together enough to find my way out of a paper bag these days.

It's this again

I've now decided to alternate between 2 projects that will take me forever to finish. Not content to work on a beaded project with lace weight yarn, I've picked up the Roses pullover again. I like the colors in this yarn and the patterns are coming out nicely, but once again I'm winging the pattern as I go.
I need some boring straight stitch in my life. Maybe some mittens. Maybe I should dust off that plain white thing I started in the early spring. Anything I can finish before I turn 50.

This is from last night

Here's a shot of the shawl from last night. I didn't post it last night because the keyboard wasn't working. Fat kitties sitting on your power strip tends to unplug things. You can see the beginnings of the center window. I think it will look pretty interesting once it's blocked and the patterns all sit the way they're supposed to.

Thoughts on technique

I don't have a picture to show - yet - lace weight yarn is making things slow, but . . . .
So I'm working on Putnam's shawl. Cruising along, the edges are a modified rose leaf pattern and the bottom is a diamond pattern with beads at the center. So this morning, I decided it that was going to be a heck of a lot of diamonds - both for me to knit and for anyone else to wear. It needed to be broken up, so I'm in the process of putting a window into the center of it. The frame is the rose leaf pattern again, don't know what I'll do in the middle of that. Maybe more diamonds, maybe something else. But it got me thinking about flexibility and technique. Traditional shawls start with a center rectangle or square and once that's done you pick up around the edges and work an edging or series of them until the shawl is the desired size. There's a really interesting post about different techniques here. Now, these techniques have never appealed to me, but why?
I love picking up sleeve and other edgings and knitting down because the joins look so nice and smooth. I'm not afraid of ratios. or even of mitres and corners. I guess I get freaked out by the sheer number of stitches. 500 plus and that's a HUGE investment before I can see if I like it, and I tend to work on the fly. So now, I'm realizing that I've made up my own, simpler way of having this kind of flexibility by seeing how it looks and dumping in more sort of faux Shetland panels into the middle.
Basically, I seem to be a never ending well of ways to cheat.
I'll post a picture of my big fake once I have more done and it photographs well.

Stuff

It's summer, and you just never have as much time for fun stuff as you think you will. Anyway, Putnam's wedding shawl is coming along - it's a metric TON of knitting, but it's so simple I'm quite taken with it.
As I found I was running out of yarn for the Glacier scarf, I ordered another skein. Wah wah wah, different dye lot. High ho. I figure out something for the scarf, but what to do with new random skein? It's lovely, and brighter, than the orginal skeins.
What about a new pair of mittens - I was think go insane and pair it with purple and chart up a gryphon. I like this one.
Whatcha think? Sorry that middle picture is blurry, the camera was running out of batteries.