Small Things

My next Seven Skeins project is the Stranded Bunnet, but it's not my best work. This happens to me sometimes with Sudoku, too. I go crashing along and then find out when I'm nearly done that I've screwed up back there somewhere and it's too late to find the mistake without erasing/frogging everything back to the beginning.

The gauge or something was off, and it ended up somewhere between a beanie and a slouch. My double decreases were wrong, and they look like rubbish. On only 1 of the 5 decrease lines the Coo color predominated, so I stitched it over with Ptarmigan in order to make it look a little more like the others. Bleh. Still keeps the noggin warm, though.

One of the fun things that happened with the hat was needing new needles. Yes, although I have many many needles of many many kinds in many many sizes, I did not have a set of 4mm dpns. I'm sure this never happens to you, right? So I hie me to my nearest yarn shop and come away with these beauties:

See the points? Half blunt end up, half pointy

Addi Flipstix. One end of each needle is sharp; the other is rounded. A handy feature, but you do have to pay attention every time you start on a new needle that is the way round that you prefer. I think it's delightful that each set is multicolored. I'm not sure what benefit that confers, but it makes them look fun, and just right for knitting the great colors of Buachaille.

But all is not Buachaille all the time. Like a true acolyte of the Yarn Harlot, I get sidetracked by other projects, to wit:  The Fish Bone Scarf from a Morehouse Farm kit.

I bought a bunch of kits from them, and this was one. It was a quick, fun knit, but not a terribly practical scarf. Nice and soft, but too lacy to be very warm, and it needs to be worn as in the picture to display what it is. I made the tail bigger than the pattern said, and added a yarnover eye to make it look fishier.

Also from Morehouse is a kit for their Dinosaur Scarf, which I made into a Dragon Scarf, mainly by making meaner eyes and trying to rig up some fire breathing instead of a flat round tongue. The shaping of the piece is really genius. Except for separate upper and lower jaw, the whole thing is knitted in one piece. Really fun to knit and pretty cool looking.

  Morehouse has designs for lots of animal scarves--alligator, fox, raccoon--a bunch of them are in their book Critter Knits.

Finally there has been enough clear weather and daylight to photograph the Solar System Blanket in all of its glory. (Pause to consider the irony of depending on sidereal conditions.) It was given and, I think, much appreciated, to my friendly local astronomer for Christmas.

It's Been a Long Time

I'm sorry to have deserted you faithful readers, both of you, for so long. I have been dwelling in a deep cellar of Family Obligations and am finally coming up for air.

When last we met it was--brrrrrr--February and I was getting frostbitten trying to put up yarnbombs. I did go back later and shot a couple of my tree sweaters that hardier souls had installed.

 These are the ones I got before my battery pooped out, but you get the idea.

I have been doing plenty of knitting down there in the cellar, and here are some of the Finished Objects:

 The Brocade Leaves cardigan is all done and complete with nordic clasp. It was from a Poetry in Stitches pullover kit that I converted to a cardigan.

I made a Hippie Scarf out of that crazy Himalayan Recycled Silk yarn. It's really fuzzy and fun and warm with all sorts of draping possibilities.

.....And then there are the mittens I made for a temporary winter resident of Fairbanks.  Scroll down that Fairbanks link to "climate" in order to see why a person needs a pair, nay, many pairs of double-layer mittens just to make it from the front door to the frozen car on an average January day.

Currently on the needles is Siv by Elsebeth Lavold. I'm making it in Lavold's Silky Wool, a yarn I've drooled over for a long time because of its season-spanning capabilities and its deep, deep saturated colors.

I've changed the pattern a little to make the links the same length as the knot sections, increasing the chances that I will be able to be consistent over the whole garment. Looking at some of the other Sivs on Ravelry, I know I'm not the only one to have thought of this.

Wotzis?

The initial stock for the Ptarmigans Pscarf Boutique? Nope. A few elements of a Work of Art.

Hint: Trees.

Fixed It

When last we met, I was having a bit of a boo-hoo in my beer because I screwed up the assembly of the last block. It's all better now, see:

And doesn't that orange line make better sense? No? Well, wait till the blocks go together in the glorious whole.

Alas, I have no more Viola progress to show you because fixing the mess was the last thing I did before leaving on two weeks of travel. And a giant pile of blanket blocks is not exactly ideal travel knitting. Takes up room in the suitcase, for one thing. And the plane seatmates may not be too crazy about your spreading your blanket over their laps while you add on blocks.

So a new project for travel was in order, and I grabbed Willamette and some cheap sparkly sock yarn. (cheap and sparkly, that's me!) Actually, I really think the yarn adds to the theme of the pattern, which is the ripples and texture of the Willamette River in Portland:

What intrigued me about the pattern was the herringbone stitch that makes up the main section, shown here both front and back. (linen stitch on the tails). I had a hard time catching on to it from just the verbal description, but YouTube to the rescue! I found it easy and fun once I saw a demonstration.

Once I got going, I also found that the edging is what amounts to an i-cord knitted along as you go. That might really come in useful some other time, I think. So I just knit along, increasing the width, until I come to the end of the first ball of yarn and then start decreasing through the second ball.

And how do you like my improvised short needles? No use poking your fellow passengers in the ribs when the projects is so narrow.

A Further Digression

What's this? A snake?

 No, just a harmless Saroyan scarf, off the needles and ready for blocking, all 7 feet of it.  The yarn is nowhere near the worsted weight the pattern was made for; it's Blue Moon Socks That Rock Pining 4 Ewe. It started with a sock club skein, to which I added a second skein so the scarf could be long. The designer said it was adaptable to lots of different kinds of yarn and she was right!  I also added some beads as is my wont. They're not very visible in the pictures, but they're there!

Here's the blocked result:

Neither the indoor nor the outdoor sun shows the actual color. You can get the best idea of it from the yarn link.  It seemed to me that this yarn wanted to be leaves, not socks, and it looks very happy in this incarnation.

Still winter here; still up to our eyeballs in snow, thanks for asking.

The neighbors' mailboxes protrude just enough from the snow to be reachable.

Charlie the dog (18 inches high at the withers) climbs the berm across the road from the end of our driveway in search of horse muffins thrown up by the snowplow. He thinks it's a wonderful treasure hunt in the mountains.

Meanwhile, a young moose rests in the driveway next door. The good news for them is that the high berms give them access to willow branches they've never been able to reach before.  The bad news is that slogging through snow up to their (very high) armpits is extremely exhausting and they've given up finding quiet places to ruminate. They just flop down wherever they happen to be, and sometimes that's a driveway; tough luck if you need to pull in and park. Come back when I'm done with the cud, bud.

Hello Possums!

That's the friendly greeting used by Dame Edna Everage, Australian superstar.http://youtu.be/YV6Q4Q9u1pU

And the possums she's referring are not the American opossum, but the Australian possum, a marsupial varmint native, as is the Dame, to Australia, but an invasive species introduced to New Zealand that started causing havoc the minute the first one got loose.  In NZ they have no natural enemies, but find the native plants much to their taste.  Eradication attempts had paltry success until the Kiwis found a use for the fur of the wee beasties.  Possum fur yarn!

I've just finished a scarf/shawlette using a possum/merino silk blend, and it's wonderful. Soft, very light, and with a slight fuzzy haze of brown possum fur.  It's cosy and cuddly and warm around the neck like a knit scarf should be.

Pattern is Dolcetto, from KnitCircus. Yarn is Supreme Possum  Merino, a sock-weight blend of possum fur, merino, and a little silk. The golden twinkle you may see if you click and enlarge the photos is a Japanese gold machine embroidery thread that I got at a quilting store and knitted along with the possum et al.  Wish it was a little longer with the same depth, but otherwise it's quite satisfactory, possums.

Packing Up

Sorry I haven't been around here for a while.  Yeah, it's the old story--busy, busy, busy.  But still knitting.  I've got a bunch of things in progress, but not much in the way of Finished Objects.  Something of a bout of startitis and no finishupitis. And now I am packing up for a 2-week trip in which I anticipate having a lot of knitting time.  What to take? Here's the menu:

Winter Flame, a free scarf pattern from Knit Picks (also downloadable from Ravelry) in a cheap silvery yarn, Vanna's Glamour, bought on super sale at Joanne's.  And a few beads for trim.  Intended as a prize for my H2O class promotion next fall.  Just goes to show, I will knit with acrylic if I really fall in love with the look of it.

More of Vanna's Glamour, this time in Ruby Red, a simple long K1P1 scarf to donate to the Red Scarf Project next fall. For some reason the sparkles show up better in the silver than the red, but trust me, they both have a beautiful subtle twinkle.

The big project is Kirman, by Nancy Shroyer for Nancy's Knit Knacks LLC. The pattern is not on Nancy's site.  The copyright is dated 2002, and I think she's forgotten all about it and moved on to hats and ball winders.  It was a kit I bought long, long ago that has mouldered away in the stash until recently resurrected.  It's a fair isle pullover "inspired by the Symmetry and Colors of Oriental Carpets".  I changed a couple of the colors from the original--just couldn't stand the crayon yellow and green.  They've become a light blue and a light teal respectively.  I guess if I take that one, I need nothing else.

Last are Ringo and Elwood.  Well, just Ringo so far.  These mittens are soooo darn cute, but less fun than I thought to actually make.  The long carries call for careful tension.  Yarn is Knitpicks Stroll  sock yarn in Agate Heather and Fedora.  The plan is to make Ringo for one hand and Elwood for the other.  The Grandboy is not very impressed by Ringo, so it's hard to get motivated to polish it off and go on to Elwood.  Still, once I have two mittens I intend to connect them with an i-cord and string them up in his coat and to heck with the child safety mavens.  I seriously cannot recall
a single child back in the "bad old days" who was garrotted with his/her mitten string.  Not even cautionary tales from moms or grandmoms.  I wonder how many of those mavens have spent hours hunting lost mittens or being harangued by daycare providers who can't find them either.