AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

Getting back in the swing of things

People never tell you when you have kids that your thoughts of having a schedule mostly go out the window.

There are lots of things they don't tell you, and because every family is different sometimes it is because they didn't know either. Only in the past month or two as Q has gotten more interested in play (crawling and cruising) have I gotten back in the swing of knitting.

I had this idea that I would be able to make 14 things in 2014, and it is true. I might be able to do that. As long as they are small.

Small like these.

These leggings are just simple tubes with some ribbing made out of yarn that I bought for a shrug (the three color one from Loop-D-Loop). They need a bit of elastic to hold them up, but otherwise they work.

Now, I need to figure out what other things I've finished so far this year, and see if I can get all the way to 14 items!

a blanket for baby M

So, gifts for babies. I know it is tempting to make sweaters or other clothes, but after my first experience making clothes that fit for about 6 hours I now make blankets, hats (aiming for year size), or toys. For my friends in DC, I made a baby hat and barely got it done in time. For my brother and his wife? I made a blanket. The knitting was done for over a month before I actually finished it. Yeah, a blanket with both lots of ends to weave in and a seam.

Why did I make a blanket with a seam?

Because it is awesome. I love the bold lines, and because it is high contrast it is supposed to be very good for poor newborn vision.

I used this yarn from Three Irish Girls. It was bold and very saturated. Sadly the red leaked a tiny amount, so the white wasn't quite as crisp as I wanted. Still a beautiful blanket.

This is a modular knit. Very easy and perfect for someone who can only knit in drips and drabs around baby needs. I wanted to make the Sweet William blanket, but it was clear after a single knitting session that I would never be able to concentrate on the blanket enough to finish it in a timely fashion. 

Like many projects, this one also got a little too big to knit on during my commute. Too big to fit in the lap.

After making this blanket, I need to want to buy those little clips to line up the seam. I used removable stitch markers and yarn needles to line up the seam, so I wouldn't have a lot of extra length to ease in at the end. I need to remember to put those on my knitting notions wish list.

One more picture, because I love this thing!

AKC - Hat!

Today is 10 for Tuesday, and while I do have 10 items that make me feel like a grown up (and I might pepper them in here), I really wanted to share a hat.

My best friend has two children, and I wasn't quite as much into knitting when they were born. Part of me feels bad that I didn't make them a cross-stitch project or knit something, but I was just getting into knitting and cross-stitch can take nearly forever. Now, more of my friends are having children, and many of them are getting knitted gifts. Last year it was a sweater set that did not fit longer than a sneeze and a baby blanket.

Baby blankets are my new go to project, because they don't need to be a specific size to be useful. However, one of our friends is having a girl and her "Internet name" is a bit Viking. Thus the hat.

I made this pattern (well, the boy version of it) years ago, before I was active on Ravelry. This time I made the girl version and, well, made the hair red for the red-headed step child of it all. Q was a terrific model!

I made the one year size and used Cascade Pacific in white, gray and orange. I used scrap yarn from a partial skein to make the ties at the ends of the braids.

My husband mailed the hat on Tuesday for the shower, because we just couldn't justify a long trek to Boston, and it was apparently one of the hits of the shower.

So, the pattern is Viking Girl Hat by Sarah Fama, and this is the second time I have bought the pattern (I couldn't find my original purchase or the file). The pattern is great because it includes two separate variants and sizes from newborn to adult. 

However, the pattern sadly references a few things, like embroidery, which are not shown in the pattern. The designer also did not indicate the best way to affix the wings and braids to the hat and just said to sew them on.

I sewed the braids on at the top of the bobble section. The wings I sewed along the front edge and top of the stockinette sections, so the wings would be able to flair out.

And my 10/Tuesday?

1. Seeing my friends build families makes me feel like we are all collectively moving into adulthood.

2. Paying bills, always.

3. Caring for our little boy.

4. Doing things I don't like on a daily basis. Right now, that is the dishes, at least once a day.

5. The day job as much as I love it makes me feel like a grown up.

6. Menu planning. Definitely this, because it is so much more grown up then scavenging from the freezer.

7. My coffee habit. It is bad enough that I need to find time to make more coffee concentrate, so I can save a few pennies making my own.

8. Learning to drive. 

9. Owning a house and all of the requisite maintenance that entails.

10. Having friends scattered all over the place, because it makes getting together and maintaining ties more of an exercise in being thoughtful and taking time in a way that didn't feel as true when we were so close together.

 

Craft mathematics

I don't know about you, but I definitely have too many projects that I want to get done. Christmas is only a couple of short months away, but most of the projects I want to do aren't even gifts. They are projects that I either started shortly before starting maternity leave or they are projects from the way back machine.

My husband made a cross-stitch project for me using chocobo sprites. It's for an iPhone case, and I started it a month or so before going on leave. At the time I last worked on it, I had figured out that I would be able to finish it in a month if I did at least 45 stitches a day. Needless to say, I haven't worked on it since then. Definitely not 45 stitches a day.

I started Spectra, and would theoretically need about 20 more days if I got two repeats done each day. That's not happening either. Whoops!

And then there is this cross-stitch I started way before moving to Kentucky. It is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: To laugh often and much. I made the mistake of calculating how long it would take me to finish if I could complete 6 letters (or blocks, etc.) each day. The number of letters was pretty arbitrary, based on how many I actually got done today. As Q gets a little older, he is moving slightly away from needing a feeding every 1.5 hours, which allows me to get a few more things done. Of course, that includes some cleaning, making ice cream, and occasionally cooking dinner (thank goodness for the slow cooker).

The sad thing is even if I was making Christmas gifts, I would still be doing stupid math like that. Do you do that when you are working on projects (for deadline or not)?

because a rainbow won't make a baby gay

This is the Little Sister's Dress by Tora Frøseth. She is one of my favorite clothing designers for little people (babies, toddlers and small children). I love her pattern, Angle, and will be hopefully finishing that in the next couple of weeks.

This dress is one of her free pattern offerings. It features a familiar welting motif around the bodice before joining in the round and starting the stockinette body. I really wanted to make at least one rainbow themed thing for our baby.

Rainbows. I like them, but I also like how some ultra-conservatives seem to think that rainbows and rainbow patterned things turn people gay. If that was all it took, then the human race would have died out a long time ago.

I figured that if I was going to do a rainbow-striped dress that I needed cloud buttons. I bought these buttons from Etsy seller, Pieceful Design. Shipping was super fast, but it took me a day or two to get around to sewing them on.

All and all, this is a wonderful project. It is super quick. It took me only a week to do all of the knitting, weaving in the ends and blocking. If I had buttons I wanted to use on hand, then I would have finished that same day.

The angle is a little funny, but I wanted a close up of the buttons. The toggles are done with just a little bit of crochet. Nothing to worry about there. I just did the vertical opening for the neck with a bit of single crochet and then made a pair of chain loops. It doesn't really show up with the buttons there, so it doesn't have to be good crochet. Just adequate.

Oh, and this is the 12 month size. We'll see if it will fit our baby (who is currently Schrödinger's gender) at some point close to 12 months or if it will be more like one of my friends whose baby blew past the newborn sizes so fast that the baby clothes I made were put on once and then no more.

Yeah, I'm knitting out in sizes, because I don't believe a lot of it will fit for very long otherwise. Those with children can tell me if I am being sensible or not.

Next time, I hope to have a complete set of baby clothes OR a blanket done. We'll see!

A big wide hello!

To everybody who is here from Honey Cowl-land (aka, Mason Dixcon Knitting) a big huge hello. I am not super humorous, but I have knitting and ice cream and cake, so feel free to stay a while and rummage through my stash sale (I'm adding more as soon as I get past my "must nap all the time" phase).

Here is the my Honey Cowl, gifted to a fabulous sister-in-law. And from the far back machine, I knit a One Skein Wonder out of Malabrigo, back when we were still in first awe over its soft scrumptiousness!

I want to talk about my current knitting, but despite the holidays being over I am still gift knitting. I don't know when it will stop! Thankfully, I will finish one of them tonight (hey, if my commute had been longer, then I would have finished it this morning) and get to go back to my stitching. Happy reading and thanks for visiting!

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after holiday reveals

I fell down.

Yesterday, I had a yarn emergency, and despite my best intentions to not buy any new craft materials (except notions needed to finish projects) I had an accident at Gather Here's Pints & Purls and I bought 6 skeins of yarn.

Sadly, this isn't the end of the depravity. I have looked at what I bought them for, and I am pretty sure that I should have bought the 7th skein when I was there.

Pathetic.

So, does anyone know of a 12 step program for yarn addicts? The only way I can get better is by admitting I have a problem. Of course, first I should identify the problem. Is it just yarn or are all craft supplies like delicious, delicious crack to me? What is it that makes it so I cannot resist? Is it color, fiber, texture?

And what is worse is that this isn't even yarn to finish something like the 4+ sweaters I have on the needles that I intend to finish this year, for reals!

It isn't the gloves that I started on Christmas to use my new fancy dpns that I put aside when the weather got warm, rather than finishing them so I could use them today when it was below freezing.

It isn't even the pair of socks I was going to start from my stash to do for the Loopy Ewe quarterly challenge (a one skein project using cables).

Heck, this yarn isn't even in wool, my favorite fiber, so what fumes affected me to buy so much cotton? Isn't winter the wrong season to be knitting that fiber?

And lastly, this isn't me finishing a hat for charity, which would be a better use of my time and karma points. I hope I get better soon, because there is no point to a stash sale if I am just going to replace the yarn before I have gotten rid of any yarn!

other than knitting

I have a lot of goals for 2013. I want to knit multiple sweaters (there are babies to knit for, plus I, ahem, have outgrown a couple of my sweaters). I am moving, so I want to knit down my stash. I want to rediscover crafts I used to love, and do crafts that I bought the materials for and never got around to. I want to bake cakes and cookies and create delicious ice creams.

I want to make every moment I'm not at work.

Unfortunately, the moving thing puts a damper on some of those items. I have to spend some of my crafting hours being an adult. Cleaning mostly, but also weeding. I am going to Pints & Purls tonight and I have a small pile of roving in tow for one of the people who knits and spins. I hope it can find a loving home.

So, that said, I'm going to have a stash sale starting probably Monday (if I can be an adult long enough to take pictures of things). I have both sweaters lots of yarn as well as individual skeins of sock yarn. If anyone has a request (aka, a category of product that they would love to see - like are people interested in magazines), feel free to let me know. While I love my stash, I'm not super duper tied to nearly any of yarns and I have a wide range including some bulky weight and some scary fine laceweight.

Meanwhile, I am working on cross-stitch again. I stopped working on cross-stitch after we got Saru-chan. She snagged a piece I'd been working on for months, and while she was as rough on my knitting as she was on my stitching the repair time on the stitching was so much more that I balked. In the time since then, she has mellowed out a lot. She isn't allowed in my craft room, but when she gets in anyway, she doesn't do any scary rearranging of the stash.

Now that she isn't as interested in my crafting, I feel like I can go back to cross-stitch. This piece, a Mirabilia, is a gift from a friend, and I started it shortly after Christmas. I know cross-stitch is a slow process, but right now I'm enjoying the rhythm.

Of course, that might also be because the alternative is a sweater with unending raglan increases. Though I want that done too. So, has anyone finished that cloning machine. I obviously need 10 extra hours a day to get everything done!

more holiday reveals

Yup. I made socks.

It shouldn't be a surprise, but it took me forever to knit these. They aren't hard, but I put them aside and when I started working on them again I couldn't find the second skein, so I had to buy another one.

The yarn: Shibui Sock in Roppongi

Basic socks, no pattern, twisted stitch cuffs. I have a tendency to pull out and start basic socks like these when I need something to do with my hands. It keeps me out of trouble, like eating all of the chocolate in the house!

I actually have sock blockers and as much as I sometimes feel silly using them, they are great for photographs. They make it much easier to see the patterning on a sock even though in this case it is just the pretty patterns of the pooling. I have a new pair for myself in Jitterbug in progress, but they only come out when I need a small project that doesn't involve needing to refer to a pattern. Though in that case, I have Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's book in the bag with its instructions for generic socks.

These were for my mom, and I made something for her dog. Of course, whether he'll like it now that the temperatures are dipping well below freezing I have no idea.

Yup. Untouched (and uncropped, because I am lazy) photo of Pito's dog sweater.

A year or two ago, I picked up a knitting book/kit. You know, the random books at the store that come with a yoga mat or knitting needles or stones for hot stone massages or whatever the flavor of the month is? Well, this one had straight knitting needles with little dogs on the tops. I think they were 8s, but because I rarely knit with such a big needle (that's what she said, I know) I've never used the book. This sweater is inspired by one in the book, but I used ribbing and nixed the crochet and did some decoration on the back.

Theoretically my mom is going to bribe Pito into wearing it long enough for pictures. It would be good to know if it fits well, because I've never made something like this before.

I only have one project left to reveal, but that will have to wait.

after holiday reveals

Well, today is just one reveal: the Honey Cowl.

If you follow Mason-Dixon Knitting, then you've seen the Honey Cowl. It is an easy peasy pattern that has a range of sizes and can be worked with a variety of yarns even though the pattern calls for a thicker yarn than I used. That shouldn't be a surprise. I could probably knit my entire life with just sock and laceweight yarn. Yeah!

The Loopy Ewe did their 4th Quarter Challenge as knitting with two strands of yarn together, and I bought these two lovely shades of yellow. The thicker yarn is Hand Maiden Mini Maiden, a 100% silk yarn, in Amber. The second yarn is JulieSpins (100%) Merino Lace in Kumquat. The Kumquat has this lovely variegation to it that is tamed slightly by the the more solid amber of the silk yarn. It is luxurious and beautiful.

I could have kept it for myself, but as I was knitting it I decided it was a great color for my sister-in-law, who is expecting her first baby next year. It would be nice for her to have something pretty for herself before all attention is devoted to her baby, right?

So, off it went. I hope it was well received, but I don't think we've heard from them at all.

Some project details:

Name: Honey Cowl
Yarns: JulieSpins Merino Lace in Kumquat, Hand Maiden Mini Maiden in Amber held together
Needle: US 5

I used the directions for the largest size, but my slightly tighter gauge and smaller needle makes for a still drapy fabric and the smaller size cowl. I'm wearing it above doubled up, so it is still a good size. My SIL is definitely a thinner woman than I am, so it should fit her fine. Not bad for a project that took 10 days from cast on to cast off.