and one more, makes three

I finally got around to making chunky grey wrist warmers to match my stashbusting beret and scarf from a few weeks back.

I don’t usually go for wristwarmers, I am more of a glove gal.  I prefer the elegant to, well, the chunky.  But this is a chunky set, so chunky wrist warmers seemed like the thing to do.  Well, that and I have been giving thought to constructing things from simple rectangles lately.  I wanted to try something I knew would work (I have seen these done before), before trying to design a beret that way.  I have been trying to design different berets of late, all without success.  Meh!

So there ya go.  I completed that set, busted six balls worth of stash and now I am warm.  Yeah for me.

I made a start on the first of two baby hats that will be knitted from my hand dyed yarn.  The spring and autumn colourways from a few posts back.  I still haven’t decided what to do with the Incredible Hulk yarn and it may well slip into oblivion (stash).  Now because baby hats knit up so quickly you’ll only get one lot of progress shots out of me.  Well, one for each hat that is, if that.  Here is what I have been calling the royal pixie hat, in my spring greens.

Modeled – as you can well see – by my good pal Starlight Foundation Balloon.  As I had no babes at hand.  You will have to excuse all the loose ends still hanging out.  Well I did tell you they were progress shots!

I like this one, it shows off the mitred top and you can just make out the little knob I added in the centre.  This is also the best view of the pointed brim at this stage.  I just love the way this colourway knits up.

There will be much weaving of ends and some serious blocking before this looks anywhere near as handsome as the image in my head is.  Not bad though, and this was my first time at using a provisional cast-on.  I can see why folks like the technique and we will be firm friends from here on out.  🙂

The finer details, just for reference.  I used less than ball of Spotlight Basics Dashing (it was cream, before I got at it with Kool-Aid and Easter egg dyes), it is about a double knit or perhaps light worsted weight.  It is my hope that I have enough left for socks, but there is probably only enough for toes and heels.  I knit it up on 5mm circular needles, sadly they were metal, I hope I find my bamboos soon as this yarn is pretty smooth.  The pattern is from The Domestic Sphere http://home.pacbell.net/kapleo/blog/domesticspherepatterns.html they have heaps of funky patterns on there, especially for little ones.  It is written to be knitted flat, but is super easy to convert for knitting in the round, it is practically done for you.  I think I’ll experiment with other ways of working the pointed cuff on the next hat though.  I figure there has to be a way to do it without all that breaking and re-joining of yarn.  Maybe short rows, or some kind of entrelac technique.  I think I’ll shape the top of the head differently too.  I love the shape as is, but I love variety just a little more.

 Last FO for this update is this…

This hat is for baby McDonnald (I won’t mention her by name in case her folks don’t approve), I hope they all like it.  This is the last of the yarn in this colourway, never to be repeated.  In fact, there are only two other hats in the whole world that share these colours.  🙂  What sets this one appart?  The crown…

The others had umbillical tops, but this one has a neat swirl.  Props again to Mr Starlight Foundation Balloon.  He is a little big for Ms McDonnald’s new hat, but didn’t grumble once.  🙂  I am one row of Kitchener stitch away from completing her a pair of socks too, so keep your eyes peeled for those.

I’m so lucky :-)

I found goodies in my mailbox yesterday when  got home.  Dontcha just love that?

There was never any doubt in my mind as to Whiskey’s Queen-of-dishcloths credentials, not for a moment.  So when I found out she was to be my partner in Craftster.org’s Very Dishalicious Dishcloth/Washcloth Swap, I knew I would receive some cool stuff.  I would never have guessed though, that she would send me one each of my two most favourite ever dishcloth designs.  This lady has obviously done her research!  Thanks Whiskey 🙂  Here they are, snapped getting to know they locals…

What a bunch of posers they all are! 🙂  The guy in the middle is one I knitted for Whiskey, but was deemed unfit because it is too small.  Well, that and when I showed it to folks they thought it was a teapot doyley.  So he lives in my sink at home and I knitted something else for the swap.

Here is a close up or two, so you can all marvel at Whickey’s superior dishcloth skills…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The slip stitch one above and the garterlac one below.  They look like candy.

Both of these designs I had a go at knitting up for Whiskey as well, even though design choices were not discussed and was to be a surprise.  Sadly my garterlac cloth was very unattractive so I did not send it, again I made another.  I expected that my first attempt at this new design would not be very neat (I was right) and I would have been OK with that, but my chosen variegated yarn was a poor choice.  That is why it was so unattractive, the colour repeat was far too long.  So be sure to choose cotton with a short colour repeat like Whiskey has.  Oh, and if you are interested, the pattern can be found here …  http://criminyjickets.blogspot.com/2006/07/garterlac-dishcloth.html at Criminy Jickets.  This is a great blog, he always has yummy socks to show off so it is worth a look even if you are not a cloth fan.  This is where you can find the pattern for the slip stitch one… http://www.knittingknonsense.com/DW_cloth.html 

One other thing about the cloths I received.  They are huge!  Well, they seem huge to me, which means that mine are actually too small, I think.  I had been quite unsusre about how big they are meant to be, Sorry about that Whiskey.  Thanks again for making this one such a lovely swap experience, and taking the time to be so thoughtful as to really figure out what my faves would be.

Want to see more?  Check out the Gallery on Craftster, you may just catch the bug (bet you never imagined dish cloths could be fun) and end up joining the next round.

The Gallery:  http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=172662.0

Swap Discussion:  http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=169455.0

 Before I sing off for today, I’d like to give a shout out to the lovely ladies at Transit Centre News on Roma Street (Brisbane).  They have been looking after my crafty magazine and geeky periodical needs for a few years now.  They are the coolest!  How cool?  Well, as well as a newsagency they have a cafe on George Street (Kiss My Coffee) that has super cute yummy cupcakes for only a fews bucks.  Yeah, that is cool.  And it just got even sweeter.  See, this is the other reason I feel so lucky today, this was waiting for me when I got to the store today…

To some of you, this is no big deal.  But IK is a rare find on an Australian newsagancy shelf indeed.  Some of my local knitting pals had the good sense to subscribe a long time ago.   But I keep hearing whispers of them having trouble receiving their books on time, especially the first issue.  This scared me a little, so I decided to see if I could get it through my newsagency, oh and I am incredibly lazy about such things.  In the end it was a lot of trouble for the newsagency to get a hold of, it was was not on offer from their usual supplier and I know they had to make a lot of calls to make it happen.  I got a little excited about two weeks ago when I spied a copy of Interweave Crochet on the rack.  I didn’t know they had ordered that too, and surely this could be taken as a sign that IK was not far behind.  It is my hope that now that everything is in place, all will be hunky dory from here on in.  I just hope they end up selling a few extra copies, so it was worth their while.  Thanks again guys, you rock!

Mmmmm!

Dry yarn

The yarn I dyed a few days ago was nice and dry yesterday so I took it out for a photo session.

I think I love it even more now.  Both the orange and green on green one are incredibly squishy despite being bargain basement yarns (Dashing, part of Spotlight’s Basics range).  The pic above is not quite colour accurate, reality lies somewhere between it and the pic below.

I snapped my reclaimed silk mini skeins too, they lost a lot of colour when it came time to rinse but are all pretty shades.  Check them out…

I don’t know what to do with the silk yet, I only dyed these bits to see how well it took up dye.  These are probably only enough for the smallest of projects.  Lace headbands or crocheted flowers maybe, if I am lucky, maybe.  I have much more of it, in progressively bigger hanks.  These little bits were from the bands of an old knitted tee.  It had been knitted at a very small guage, too small actually, it had no drape, it was practically a silk box.  The sleeves and body will yeild quantities that will allow for much bigger projects.  Especially since I intend to knit it into lace and will use a much larger guage.  🙂

Another FO!  Yeah 🙂  Last night at my regular S’n’B I finished off my extreme tea cosy and had time left over to crochet a mat to match.

It is kinda hard to see the mat (with matching edging, of course) and bobble ended ties.  The Three Monkeys Coffee and Tea House, has mood lighting at best.  The main part of the mat and the ties are crocheted in Filatura De Crosa’s Sympathie, it is 35% mohair, 45% Wool and 20% Acrylic.  Hey, only the best for my tea cosy.  The tea cosy itself is knitted out of To The Extreme, a handspun I received from RecycleMicol.  She has been waiting far to long (but quietly and patiently) to see her baby knitting into an FO.  Here is another pic, to do justice to both my stitching and RMs spinning…

This one is colour accurate too.

I don’t yet have a decent picture of the matching mat, but lets face it, the mat is an aslo ran anyhow.  Heck, my brown betty teapot is just an accessory now.  🙂

Just one last thing, it is not craft related, but it has been bugging me today.  So I’ll share.

What on earth is up with this?  I took this pic today in my lunch hour, when I was on my way to pick up crafty supplies in the Myer Centre.  Now, I know they are just manequinns, but there is some really odd imagery going on here.  I am certain I am overreacting, well I hope I am.  Possibly there is an add campaign that accompanies this, and perhaps it would make sense if I had seen it.  Could be that chicks in cages suspended from the ceiling (and a good floor and a half above the food court), is only weird when taken out of context.  Hmmm…

picture obese

OK, I promised pictures.  Here goes…

Wanna see what I was up to this weekend?  Well last night I dyed, a lot.  Above, that is all of it.  Wool and silk.  Yummy.  Please excuse my poor excuse for a front yard, we are in the middle of a drought here.  I should drape yarn about more often, it makes the place look a lot nicer.  😉

This close up is of the double knit weight wool I dyed for baby hat making purposes.  I know the colours are not baby typical, but you know I hate typical.  Just trust me, it will work well with the design I have picked out.  The orange and brown share a skein with a little red that this pic doesn’t show, the orange is from tangerine Kool-Aid and the brown is from tamarillo Kool-Aid.  Yup, you can get a nice brown from Kool-Aid, without mixing colours, you just need to get your hands on some of the Mexican stuff.    Both of the greens share a skein too, the lighter shade is Lemon-Lime Kool-Aid and the darker shade is green easter egg colour.  I tell ya, that easter egg dye packs a real whallop.  I did not use much at all, only about two thirds of the packet.  I had enough left over for a few projects I think.

The skein in the middle above, is fingering weight wool, in grape Kool-Aid and left over Easter egg dye.  To the right is a small skein of reclaimed silk, I dropped into the green dye, still left over, it did not take up dye as well as the wool, and came out much more of a teal.  I have heard of different colours taking up at different rates and as you will see this is definately happening with my green stuff.

Above is another skein of teal silk (left), a super mini sized skein (middle) again in the same green dye, I expected it to be lighter but it is also much more of a yellowy shade and not at all teal.  On the right is reclaimed silk again.  This red was a bit experimental, I wanted to see how well I’d go using the red food colouring from my pantry.  It is the expensive powdered stuff and I wasn’t all that impressed.  It did not disolve well, and I just could not get the yarn to take much of the pigment up.  I will definately stick with red Kool-Aid or egg dye in the future.  Still, I got a nice shade here, just not a very intense one.

I also did a bit of a make-over on a jumper Saturday.  I don’t have an after shot for you all yet, I wanted to wash it first.  But here is the before pic. 

Not bad really, but I bought this years ago before I was a knitter.  This means it is acrylic, it is soft though, I am lucky there.  I bought this because I thought it was interesting the way your shoulders poke out.  But I really don’t like turtle necks, there is really no need for them in Queensland so I don’t see the point in looking so chubby in the neck.  Besides, I’d rather wear a scarf.  So I decided to remove the neck altogether, I just wasn’t wearing it so I had nothing to loose.  It didn’t turn out to be constructed in such a way that made it easy to remove the turtleneck, but I hacked into it anyhow, determined.  Some neck stitches were dropped and I had to unseam the shoulders to make it all happen.  No problem, I picked up the stitches, cast off the stitches and re-seamed the shoulders.  No problem.  By now I had been at it a lot longer than I thought it would all take, I got lazy and just finished the neck with a round of crochet (I was cold and wanted to wear it right away, everything else was in the wash).

 

See anything else missing?  🙂  I love cables but I don’t much like bobbles.  Sometimes they are OK, but I didn’t like ’em on this jumper.  And I noticed something odd about them while I was working on the neck.  See below, from the inside…

They aren’t ‘real’ bobbles at all.  The are little crocheted blobs that are tied on, the little tuft in the above pic are the ends they were tied on with.  So I cut those babies out, I expect the little holes where they were attached to dissapear in the wash.  I don’t really have a problem with this afterthought bobble technique, I guess.  I’ll certainly remember it, no doubt I’ll need it one day to jazz up a jumper that is boring and have not been wearing for just that reason.

Last Friday, I made a chunky scarf.  Miss Jane from Brisbane S’n’B would be proud of me I think.  She is our chunky scarf queen.

I knit this for my sister in law.  It was her birthday last week and I put this in with the rest of her goodies.  I got the idea Thursday night when I was cruising the isles at Spotlight checking out the yarn sale.  Because dinner was to be Friday night, it had to be super chunky.  This baby is six stranded, heh heh heh, it is in her fave colour combo and half the chosen yarns are a bit on the novelty side.  I know she likes a bit of pouf and glam now and again.  They go something like this…

• Black boucle cotton
• Charcol/black cotton blend
• Black superwash wool
• Black polyester eyelash yarn
• Pale pink mohair blend with thin sparkly thread
• Pink mohair blend

I knit it up on 15mm needles and got it done on time.  I think the eyelash and mohair yarns helped add a lot of bulk and help it keep it’s shape.  It was a hit.

 I made a chunky scarf for me too, a little earlier on in the week though, wednesday perhaps.  This one was knitted up on the 25mm needles I am so proud to have in my collection, but never seem to use.  Here ’tis

Yummo!  This is a six stranded stashbuster, it has all sorts in it, most of the yarns are blends of some sort.  It is about 30% synthetic, 30% wool and the rest falls under the ‘other’ category.  Linen, mohair and alpaca are all in there, a little bitty bit of cotton too.  🙂  Why did a colour loving gal such as myself have so much grey to stashbust in the first place?  I had been collecting it up to make stuff for my car, yawn!

I had so much miscellaneous grey yarn, that I had enough over to make a hat to match.  It is only four stranded and not a slouchy as I wanted on account of using 8mm needles which were a bit small for the job (I knew I had a 10mm circluar somewhere, but I couldn’t find it that day, it was in the back of my car, duh!).  But I love it and I look cute in it, so there. 😛

My own design too.   I really like the silhouette created by the knit stitch ridges, an unexpected design feature.

Gotta go, this post is crazy huge, sorry folks.  I’ll just have to catch you all up on the rest later and/or elsewhere.  Tootles.

Please bear with me…

… I am working my way through a mountain of pictures at the moment.  I have a lot to share from the exploits of the past week or so.  I have FOs, snortles, chuckles, new WIPs and outgoing swap items too.  I have so much I’ll have to try to spread it around a bit so I don’t clog things up too much, some here, some on the Brisbane S’n’B blog and some over at Craftster should do it.  I think I’ll keep some for ‘ron too.

So why so many pics to crop, colour balance and compress?  Last weekend was a long weekend, so I had an extra knitting day and more importantly, one less work day.  Saturday was World Wide Knit in Public Day, I got a fair bit done then.  A fair bit of knitting, a fair bit of gas-bagging, a fair bit of eating.  Heh, special occasions are an easy mark for someone like me, always looking for an excuse to feed myself something yummo.  So I managed to work my way through, Canadian pancakes, a hot choik, a white choc filled banana and a lot of double chocolate chip cookies.  Whoops!  After we were done with WWKIPD some of us hit the LifelineBookfest, seeing as we were in the neighbourhood.  I did well this year, which means more pictures you see.  I picked up literary classics, sewing guides, knitting books, crafty periodicals and a good many knitting patterns.  This year I limited myself to knitting patterns only fitting one of three criteria (crochet patterns are that rare a find at Bookfest that I’d use very little discretion there); contains something I would really like to make sometime, features a celeb (no matter how small) as a model; contains amusing photography, especially utilising odd props.  I scored some from all three categories, mostly of the last two interestingly enough, no crochet patterns this year.  I went back for more books the very next day, but did not do as well.  My advice for those who wish to attend the next LifelineBookfest, wear overly sensible shoes, take a trolley of some sort and drive in and park close or get someone to pick you up.  I always advocate the use of public transport, but it is awkward with the number of books you’ll will be lugging home in flimsy plastic bags and so don’t plan to catch the bus home that day.  Try to opt for a train, much more room for that trolley you need to cope with all that weight.  🙂

Back to normal?

Well, I disappeared for a while there.  I won’t bore you all with why, well not the long version anyhow.  Sadly, I wasn’t swamped with swapping duties.  No, I was working.  Unusual I know!  Basically I have been doing two jobs, and neither of them very well, because – well it just seems to work that way.   One of my work colleagues went and got herself a ‘real’ job a few weeks ago.  I have been trying to hold the fort since, as she has not yet been replaced.  It could be a few more weeks yet, that is the worst part.  So I have been stressed out of my brain and it is not quite over yet, I am hopeful though and things are begining to ease up.  At least by the end of this I’ll have someone I can ‘do lunch’ with, away from the office.  Soon, I hope, things will be back to something resembling normalacy.

Now, I have been knitting all this time, although not as much as normal.  I just haven’t had time to advertise the fact.  In fact I had to cut out a lot of stuff, exercise was the first thing to go.  Basically I have been working, knitting, eating, sleeping and nothing else.  I did make it to S’n’B last Tuesday though – speaking of which…

Lookee what I did!  I got so excited about tomorrow being World Wide Knit in Public Day tomorrow that I decided yesterday that I’d need a comemorative tee to wear.  Well, I didn’t mess around folks (this time), it is done.  I worked out the design at morning tea, bought a plain red singlet at lunch and I drew the design on this morning.  I went with a singlet so I can layer it up easily and ‘cos I am a cheap ass.  🙂  I am going to add a bit of a line about WWKIP day under the design this evening.  Hopefully I’ll have action shots to show off after the weekend.

A quick rundown of what is on the needles (STILL!). 

• Diagonal rib stitch scarf, camel coloured alpaca blend.  To match my aviator cap.  https://missvicki.wordpress.com/2007/03/06/another-aviator-cap/
• Cotton dishcloths for a Craftster swap with Whiskey.  Details must remain a secret untill Whiskey has received (I am posting the package of today), I hate to spoil surprises.
• Rock ‘n Roll scarf for Dale who kindly gave me a very large stash of knitting books that belonged to his Mum.  How nice is that?  Well, it deserves a scarf I reckon.  Thickly striped red, grey and black alpaca blend.
• To the extreeme tea cosy, handspun yarn from RecycleMicol.  Yeah, I know I suck for not finishing this already.
• Merino red/multi coloured socks for Lady Llanalla’s baby.
• Crochet braid to edge picnic blanket.  Red, black and white acrylic.
• Triple stranded crocheted/knitted umbrella cosy to match blanket braid, also red, black and white acrylic.
• Grey beret attempt number 5 (#4 is a good lookin’ beret but not poofy/slouchy enough, # 3 is the infamous thunder chunky in last post), handspun wool/soy silk.
• Cushion cover for my car, various grey yarns.
• Cotton Betty Boop half apron for Sarah’s birthday.  OK, it isn’t on the needles as such, but if I put it on the list, I may just finish it.  🙂  Pattern is cut, just haven’t started sewing yet.
• Shiny grey/multi cotton lace scarf.

I wonder if I can fit all my WIPS in my trolley to take along on Saturday?  Maybe, but then I wouldn’t have enough space for cookies and that isn’t cool.  Be there kiddies, at Southbank, come knit up a storm!  Heh, did I mention the cookies?