Now, I'm finally able to dedicate time to sit down and update because I feel like I'm coming down with something. So rather than spending the Sunday afternoon just sitting on the couch all day and watching Doctor Who episodes recorded from the BBC America's New Years marathon, I'm allowing myself to be smug knowing that I'm making progress with doing something rather than nothing productive at all....though, it doesn't help get my house cleaned nor the laundry done.....
Anyways, The Knitting:
I've been knitting my tail off the past few months. Let's review: in September, my friend, Carrie, gave birth to her second daughter. As a gift, I returned my favorite baby blanket pattern: the Rippled Baby Blanket. I already had two hanks of Dream In Color; I've knitted a blanket using the two before with beautiful results. Unfortunately for me, I relied mostly on memory and thought that two hanks was plenty of yarn. What was I thinking?!? With finished and blocked measurements of 30"x 30", the blanket ended up being a bit smaller than I would have liked and the LYS in Ohio where I had purchased the yarn has since closed up.
So, I decided to try my hand a crocheting a toy to go along with the blanket and use the left-over yarn for the toy's sweater. As you can see, the remainder from the blanket only ended up being enough to serve as trim for the sweater. It was my first attempt at making a crocheting a toy and I had the bright idea that I could do this as Christmas presents (yeah, keep in mind that this was in September; and it didn't work out like I had hoped, but more on that later). The pattern I used was from a Leisure Arts pamphlet called "Cute Little Animals" and the yarn was a mish-mash of stash yarn: Brown Sheep and Cascade.In late September, we were stuck with a conundrum: Sylvain was preparing for a 10-day trip to Germany in November with his school orchestra and we had no idea what to send with him as gifts for his host family. Neither of us liked the suggestions we received from his chaperones -- to send school sweatshirts for the whole host family. Not only would that be expensive, it would also be incredibly bulky for Sylvain to pack. We came up with the perfect solution: knitted hats for the whole family! Oh, did I mention that the trip was in November? I needed to get moving.
I knew going into it that I would fall back to my favorite hats to make: Norwegian-style ski hats. (Is there such a thing as German-style ski hats? It didn't occur to me to search that out until now....) So, I pulled out my favorite Dale of Norway pattern books and a newly purchased pattern book called "Knit a Hat" by Ruth Sørense. Next, Sylvain requested that I use yarn in the colorway of his school colors: a red-maroon, baby blue, white, and black. The maroon was killer; none of my LYSs had anything that 
captured it -- all of the colors were either too red or too purple. Before long, I found the perfect wool: DKW from Shelridge Farm in the "wine" colorway. The DKW yarn was the perfect stand-in for Heilo, so much so that I didn't bother to knit a swatch. Yeah, you know where this is heading.....So, all of October and the first week of November was spent knitting hats for Sylvain's trip. Sylvain even attempted to try his hand a designing a pattern for me to use, but he really didn't get the concept when I tried to explain to him that his design was more of an intarsia hat (US and German flags on each side along with other patterns). Even I know my limits, so the best I could do was to modify a Dale design to replace the large snowflakes in the pattern with "O", "H", and "S" for his school.
And, now: the swatch thing. My goal had been to knit five hats; I had two finished and a third well on its way by the date of my knit-in. While showing the hats off to the other knitters, it was pointed out that they all looked quite small. I was so caught up in getting them knitted that I didn't really step back and look at each of the completed hats. We called Sylvain to join us in the living room and model each of the hats for us. Sure enough, they
didn't fit. I used size 4s and 6s to knit them, so obviously I needed to use larger needles. Using the small hats has glorified swatches, it worked out that I would need to switch to size 6s and 8s for standard men's and women's sizes.So, unfortunately, I did.
And as you can see, the resulting hats ended up being too large.
All of the photos are of the hats post-blocking. Technically, I needed only four hats for gifts, but I had planned on giving one to Sylvain and having a couple of extras that Sylvain could give to friends that were also going on the trip.
I tried to squeak out a sixth hat, using the same pattern as the hat shown in the first picture. Still using sizes 6s and 8s, I kept this hat and didn't send it with Sylvain as a gift. I was curious about how the Shelridge Farm would felt and, since the hat was too big anyways, decided to toss it into the washing machine with a few towels. Thankfully for me, I made a last minute decision to place the hat into a lingerie bag first.
I've felted with great success before, so was very surprised
to find that the hat completely fell apart in the washer. Trust me, this hat was finished, ends sewn in and everything, so I have absolutely no idea why (or how) this happened. To top it all off, the hat didn't felt at all. Not a stitch. Sadly, I haven't had time to repair the top, so its sitting in the yarn room as a UFO....Needless to say, Sylvain had a fine time in Germany. It wasn't perfect, but is anything with a teenager?
With the hats more or less completed, I next needed to focus attention on Christmas presents. This year, I had planned to go for easy projects: fingerless mittens, scarves, hats, and crocheted toys.
First, the fingerless mittens: knowing that I was short on time and long on projects that needed to be completed, I didn't really wing it with a pattern for these. I used a pattern by Chris de Longpré with slight modifications for adding ribbing to the cuffs.Even though I really hate Noro, I still used it for
both of these projects and was surprised to find that I didn't get totally screwed over by some crazy color inserted into the center of the ball. And, yes, your eyes aren't deceiving you -- I cheapened up my own gift by adding a pair of $3 for 2 gloves to each of the mitts.
Next, in the midst summer vacation, knitting Carrie's presents, and Sylvain's hats, I had undertaken a repair job that I probably really shouldn't have since I so obviously am so short on time. Occasionally, the knitting guild is contacted by non-knitters seeking help with items that they've received that are in need of repair. I was particularly intrigued by one request that came our way this past May. Marilyn, a local author, had in her possession a lace afghan knitted in cotton that her grandmother had knitted in the late-1940s to early-1950s. The afghan had started to fall apart and had about 20 holes similar to the two shown in the picture. It took quite a while, but using fringe that lined two sides of the afghan, I was able to repair each of the holes to the point where, unless you looked extremely close and knew where to look, one couldn't tell where the holes were. I'm still kicking myself for not taking any post-repair photos. Since I am not a professional knitter, I didn't ask for any type of payment, but did receive two gifts for my efforts: a signed copy of Marilyn's latest book and a binder of knitting patterns designed by a relative (by marriage) of hers.So, where was I going with all of that? The next pair of Christmas projects were knitted using one of the patterns I had received: the Falling Leaves scarf.
The scarf shown on the left was knitted using Berroco Vintage Chunky and the one on the right was made using Misti Alpaca Chunky. The pattern was incredibly easy; my only issue was with the gauge. The pattern called for size 11s, but to make gauge, I needed to knit using size 15s. However, when I tried 15s, the fabric was just too floppy. So, I ignored the gauge altogether and reverted back to 11s. The resulting scarves were just the size I had hoped for and the fabric was nice a firm and held up the leaf pattern nicely.
The last Christmas presents I made were a pair of hats for my sister-in-law Jaime and niece Payton. When asked what type of hats they wanted, I received a text message containing pictures of the hats that they were hoping I could recreate. How'd I do?
The first hat was for (and modeled by Jaime). I used the "Lemon Grass Slouchy Hat" pattern by Ali Tong and knitted it in Cascade 128 Chunky. Jaime picked the color; I picked the accent buttons. Sure, I didn't match the photo exactly since it looked like I needed needles larger than the 11s that I used, but Jaime didn't seem to mind.
The second hat (modeled by Payton) is knitted using Noro and is a very simple pattern. There wasn't much to say about this one except that Payton seemed to like it.
So, with the Christmas presents out of the way, I was able to focus on other knitting projects on my plate: a gift for a coworker who was expecting her first baby, three chemo caps for Knit Michigan, and more hats (similar to the ones I made for Sylvain's trip) for an auction to benefit the OHS Athletic Boosters.
My coworker, Stephanie, was due to have her baby in mid-January, so thinking I had "plenty of time", I put my gift to her out of mind until the Christmas presents were completed. As expected, she ended up giving birth to her son on Dec. 26th. So, as soon as I had the last Christmas present off of the needles, I immediately casted on for her present: the Baby's First Entrelac bunting from "Entree to Entrelac" by Gwen Bortner. I guess I shouldn't say that I had put the project completely out of mind since, prior to this (and while I was supposed to be working on Christmas presents), I knitted two of the swatches presented in the beginning of the book (sorry, no photos....yet), so felt somewhat comfortable with the technique but wasn't sure if I could complete the project in a "reasonable" amount of time. I really didn't want this project drag on for too long, but it is my first entrelac project and I didn't know going into it just what to expect. I'm knitting this project using Berroco Comfort DK. I'm on Tier 11 of 26 for the body and started only one of the sleeves (after being tripped up a little on part of the initial left-leaning base triangles). To save my sanity, I'm sewing in ends every fifth rectangle. I *hope* to have this completed by the end of next weekend.Yesterday, I attended the Met's Live in HD live-casting of Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" [The Golden Girl of the West] and needed something easy that I could work on in a dark theater. The entrelac project was not it. So, I casted on the first of the three chemo caps as my project of choice. The hat is being knitted using Berroco Comfort and the pattern is the Purple Delight Hat, currently a free Ravelry download. I'm using the suggested needle size (6s) and following the pattern exactly. The hat is a little smaller than I'd like, but figure that (sadly) even kids need decent chemo caps, so am continuing with it. If I were to knit this again, I would cast on more stitches -- I like the feel of the fabric.
So, now you're up to date on the various knitting projects I've been working on. Next up: books and movies.....
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