Tag Archives: gift

Scarves and elephants and pattern writing, oh my!

Ralph's scarf

I finished Ralph’s scarf (pattern: Clincher by Ash Kearns; yarn: Malabrigo sock in Ravelry Red and Knit Picks Palette in black), and he’s been wearing it around the house even though the weather is warm :-)

Green elephants on parade Purple elephants on parade

And off the back of publishing the one-size version of the Dylan’s Elephants pattern, I’ve written the sized-up version (four sizes: 0-3m, 6-12m, 12-24m and 2-3y) and am test knitting one of them in an assortment of bits of left over sock yarn. If anyone reading this knows doubleknitting (or wants to learn) and has someone in their life who’s under 3 and would like an elephant cardigan, email me – I could do with another test knitter.

 

Longer time no blog!

This is mostly going to be a photo post rather than a words post, because I’m so far behind ;-) First, Christmas presents for other people…

A scarf for my dad, which seemed to take ages and got very, very boring. But it was worth it because I found out after I’d started that he’d asked my mum for a hat and scarf, and she hadn’t been able to find a scarf to fit his exacting requirements, but had bought him a navy hat. And he loves it :-)
Dad's staggered rib Christmas scarf

A hat with ears for my friend V’s baby. Ears to please mummy, goth black to pacify daddy ;-)
Lucas's hat with ears

And four identical pairs of cable mittens, for three of my best friends and me, with a deeply symbolic four-strand cable design.
ACLV mitts

And a finished birthday-and-Christmas present to myself (because apparently you can never have too many pairs of fingerless mittens), the modified reading mitts, which I’ve been wearing all the time:
Modified reading mitts

These aren’t technically a Christmas present, but I knit them over Christmas after I realised Ralph had no gloves, and I had some spare black yarn left over from the hat-with-ears. (They’re loosely inspired by pictures of Dashing, but not knit to that pattern.)
Ralph's gloves

In fibrey gifts, my parents gave me some spinning wheel bobbins and a rather steam-punky bobbin winder, which I haven’t photographed yet, and my in-laws gave me this lovely fibre:
Fibrey gift

I’m now making a third attempt to knit this lovely purple merino into a jumper. The picture is actually a lie, because something went wrong with my gauge calculations and I had to frog, but the second go is going much better, and is nearly at the armholes (bottom-up) at which point I’m going to have to make a decision about what kind of sleeves to have. It’s deliberately plain (no cables on the second version, though there were on the first), so I can knit without looking at it, and therefore read academic papers at the same time, and doesn’t mind being put down in the middle of a row (and the harmony needles are grippy enough that I don’t need to slide them through) so I can stop to make a note whenever I need to. This means I’m getting through it quite quickly :-)
Purple picot hem

And finally, the first FO of 2010! Felted slippers, to an improvised design with stripy double-knit soles, and felted to exactly the right dimensions so they fit perfectly!
Felted slippers

Baby things are surprisingly small

…Yeah, I know. And the pope shits in the woods.

After saying I might get a pair of mittens out of the green-and-orange combo when I’d finished Tomten and the jester hat, I realised that I really should weigh the remaining yarn and work out how much of it was left. It was more than I thought:

The back of Thursday's starry kimono

This is the seamless baby kimono, with added colourwork – the large star at centre-back is intarsia (apart from the points at the bottom, which are stranded), and the band of small stars are stranded. The light-green-and-orange doesn’t work very well from a contrast point of view, because the colours are too similar in brightness, but it was fun knitting it, and has reminded me that even though I’m evidently incapable of maintaining motivation for stranded knitting for two socks, I do enjoy it in smaller amounts.

Since taking the photo, I’ve finished the body, and am now working on both sleeves in parallel, because I’ll be finishing them on fumes and I want the stripes to match. Sadly there’s not enough yarn left to do a band of the smaller stars on the sleeves as well.

Green and orange and some more green

Tomten is now finished, apart from the buttons and button loops. I’m trying to source some green plastic toggles for this, but I can’t finish the icord trim until I know what I’m doing about fastenings.

Tomten for Thursday

Despite being made of the same yarn, at the same gauge, the jester hat doesn’t match the hoodie at all, which is good and nicely avoids the absurdity of making a hat to go with a hoodie ;-)

Jester hat for Thursday

I might make some little pom-poms for the corners of this, and I’ve got a fair chunk of yarn left, so I’ll probably make some mittens as well.

The opposite of lost mojo…

…Is what happens when I have loads of ideas for things I want to do, and I flit manically between them, unable to settle on anything for long enough to make decent progress ;-)

My second package arrived today, and I’ve swatched and started knitting EZ’s Tomten, for Thursday (which is what we’re calling my oldest friend’s child-to-be). I love knitting baby things – they’re small and quick, and I get to knit with bright colour combinations that most of the other people I knit for wouldn’t wear.

Careful! Don’t scare the mojo!


I have knit all of my spinning oddments into a decent-sized (ie its ‘wingspan’ is a bit longer than mine) triangular shawl, and then crocheted an edging onto it, and added crochet ties. It’s the craziest garment ever, a hotch-potch of colours and textures, and I doubt I’ll ever wear it outside the house, but I love it anyway, and am enjoying identifying all the little bits of handspun yarn.

I’ve also made some purchases, one within the rules of the self-inflicted yarn and fibre diet, and one breaking them. The permitted purchase is a bunch of nice-but-cheap superwash wool yarn in three different colours, which will be a Tomten hoodie for the baby my oldest friend is currently working on. Depending how much yarn is left after that, there will be a matching hat, and possibly even mittens to go with (in which case I’ll come up with some way of attaching the mittens to the jacket). Yes, I know a hooded jacket doesn’t need a matching hat, but I’m having the urge to knit the baby jester hat.

It’s a permitted purchase because I don’t have any superwash in stash apart from sock yarn, and baby gifts need to be washable! Plus it comes from the gift budget, rather than the yarn one (or would if I planned my budgets that precisely ;-)

The not-permitted purchase is 1kg of undyed grey wool fibre, with a couple of discounts applied, which worked out to be really quite cheap. I’m toying with the idea of spinning a jumpers-worth, and then following someone else’s patten, in the hope of actually achieving a jumper that I like. And the pattern might be the beautiful Wisteria (noooo, not influenced by sockpr0n at all, why do you ask? ;-) I can’t resist a bit of a mod, though – I think I’ll leave off the cables around the hem, because I suspect they look best on people much thinner than I am.

Depending on what kind of grey it is when it arrives, I might dye some or all of this, possibly carding the dyed with the undyed for a heathered yarn. Of course, thinking about all this has reminded me that I haven’t finished carding the black alpaca and purple merino blend, and have spun only a very little of it, so now I’m thinking about that again, as well, and trying to decide once and for all what it will be, and therefore how to spin the rest of it.

This in turn reminds me of the red leaf wrap, still sitting mostly-unwoven on the loom, and calling to me every time I go into the library and see it sitting there. I have a crafting date this weekend, so I’ll probably take the loom or the wheel with me and weave or spin while the others knit.

Talking of spinning: the weekend just gone, I met my first real in-the-wild spinner (Sadie and B don’t count, since I pimped the spinning shiny at them), and I’m deeply envious of her since her father owns a sheep farm and is the neighbourhood shearer, so she gets her pick of fibre!

Finally, a new project! This is another baby hat, two coloured intarsia in the round, and intended to have zig-zaggy stripes and cat ears (for which I might need to ask around for a little bit of pink sock yarn, since I don’t have any, and I think ears look cuter with pink inside – anyone have any spare?). The zig-zagging, shown in closeup in the photo, means the join between colours moves one stitch each row, which is helping with the holes intarsia would otherwise risk.

So on the whole I’m tentatively declaring the mojo returned, which is a relief :-)

Getting back on the horse

I’m just back from a lovely week with some roleplayers, during which Frax and I compared notes on our lost mojo. She recovered hers during the week, and mine is now slowly resurfacing, I think. I don’t want to scare it.

In the couple of months since I last wrote here, I have done some knitting, including most of a cardigan, but it’s not gone well, and I’m not sure if the yarn (soft handspun singles) will stand up to frogging and re-knitting (not least because there has been quite a lot of frogging already), so at the moment I’m not thinking too much about that.

last pair of baby coriolis

While on holiday, I picked up the sixth and final baby jungle stripe coriolis, and forced myself to knit a few rows. Now, at home again, I’ve found that finishing it required less force than picking it up again did. And I’ve now wound my first skein of spinning oddments into a ball, and am starting to think about the shawl I’m going to knit it into…

ball of handspun oddments

Finished heel!

I haven’t done much knitting since I got back from holiday, so it’s taken until today to finish the heel:

All is not going smoothly, however – I twisted some stitches when starting the leg, and now have to do some complicated untangling. Writing this blog post is useful procrastination ;-)

I’ve also been doing some weaving on the red leaf wrap (no photos, cos they wouldn’t look any different from the last time I photographed it), after showing the loom off to my parents yesterday re-enthused me about the project :-)

Holiday knitting

I’ve just come back from a week roleplaying in Lincolnshire, during which I did quite a lot of knitting – my second pair of push-me-pull-you socks, for R this time (on the equivalent roleplaying holiday last year, I also made socks for him). I took this photo as I was just about to turn the heel:

Ralph's blue stripy socks

The heel is progressing slowly so far, because I got my yarns mixed up and had to tink about three rows, but I think I’ve got it fixed now.