Tag: Knitting

Knitting some more Monkeys

These ones from the Regia Hand-Dye Effect Design Line by Kaffe Fassett, in colour 08855.

sock showing colour gradations
Image from yarn.com.

This seems to be my go-to pattern when a yarn is frustrating me or I can’t make up my mind. These socks are going to be for a friend of mine from high school that I have recently come in contact with again. This yarn is perfect because this colourway has all the shades she likes to wear. It should match everything.

My one complaint with this yarn is that it’s very splitty, but that may be helped by switching to Addis instead of KnitPicks needles.


Making a Quilt

Quilt PatternInstead of going to the Knitter’s Frolic in Toronto this year, I went to New Hamburg with one of my knitting buddies to Shall We Knit. I ended up taking home some dark brown Malabrigo Lace (181 Marron Oscuro) that I had wanted to get at the KW Knitter’s Fair last year. It’s beautiful stuff. Lofty and soft; it should make a wonderful shawl for this winter.

Aside from our trip to the yarn store, we also stopped at the Mennonite thrift store just outside the town proper. They have all kinds of wonderful things there. My discovery this time was a package of pre-cut quilting squares in random colours, to make a 60″x80″ quilt. Because there’s a quilting group that meets in the shop, they have lots of odds and ends of fabric around and these packs are a way of making use of the leftovers while still raising money for the community.

I counted how many squares I had of each colour, fired up my handy-dandy PC Stitch, and then semi-randomly charted out where I wanted the squares to go. After that I put them in order by row, paper-clipped a label to each row, and stacked them all in order. I still can’t get my sewing machine tensioned properly, so I’ve started piecing the thing together by hand. Having never done this before I thought it would be difficult, but it turns out all the other needlework I do has prepared me quite well for quilting. The resulting quilt should look very nice on the bed in the spare room.


All the pretty colours

I made a bunch of dishcloths last month since the cotton yarn was on sale for cheap and we were in desperate need of some cloths for the kitchen. I basically grabbed a ball each of the colours I liked, and then mixed and matched until I was out of yarn.

Dishcloth

There are eight of them in total and I look forward to using them for a very long time. You can see all of the combinations on my Flickr under the dishcloths tag.


Need New Colours

endpaper mitts

This holds in life in general right now as well as for crafting. I’m so so unbelievably sick of all this dreary weather.

My copy of Color in Spinning arrived this morning, which is doing a lot to help with the doldrums. It’s such a great resource, but right now all I’m doing is looking at all the bright and pretty pictures and wishing it was like that outside right now.

I’m also thinking I need to start messing with colours that I normally don’t think to use. On Wednesday during weaving class I realized I inadvertently chose the same colours for my scarf that I used for my Endpaper Mitts last year. This is great because I will have matching outdoor wear, but it really cemented the fact that I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately.


More on the Leaves

I’ve got all of the orange ones done and most of the olive green ones. I’m halfway there! Unfortunately I’m working on a MySQL assignment at the moment and I was on a field trip to Delaware with my weaving class earlier so blocking and pictures will have to wait until tomorrow.

BUT! I might have finished a few more by then. It will be worth it, I promise. At least, it will if you’re as obsessed with cute little knitted leaves like I am.

ETA:

One of the normal-sized leaves being blocked:
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One of the smaller leaves for the toe insert being blocked:
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A gods-eye-view of my blocking setup:
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I didn’t notice until afterwards that the towel I was using is the same colour as the main yarn for the socks.


Leaves!

So far so good. It’s been taking me roughly an hour to knit each leaf so far, so I’ve only got 8 of them done. I did one of the green ones for the toe and 7 of the orange ones so far. Once I finish the 8th orange one I’ll block them and take pictures.

These socks are going to be so great when they are done. I’m still at a loss when it comes to how to wear them though. It was brought up at the Knit London meetup this week and I still haven’t decided. I don’t want to wear them without shoes because I’m pretty sure the carpet in here would wear them out super-quick. But at the same time, shoes would do a lot of damage (my boots ripped a huge hole in my angora socks) and I still want to be able to show them off. I think I need to get used to the idea of wearing them around the apartment, or getting clear shoes for the summer.


It's here!

omg omg omg! I checked the mail on my way back in from the doctor, and look what I found:

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Even the kit is a thing of beauty. The pattern is incredibly detailed and includes colour photos of some of the harder-to-explain steps. I’m so excited!

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I’m not going to start it until later today when I finish setting up my loom for weaving class, but I think it’s safe to assume that half the things I was going to do tonight are pushed to tomorrow.

ETA: The yarn came wound into hanks, so before bed I took the time to wind them all into centre-pull balls. At first I was using my thumb, but there was too much of the purple to do that comfortably so I used my spindle as a nostepinne.

Before:

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After:

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Red, Red Wine

“I’d have sworn that with time thoughts of you would leave my head.
I was wrong.” — Neil Diamond

Marin said today that “the Harlot is to knitting trends what Oprah is to book sales” and she’s not far off on that. You see, on Wednesday Stephanie posted about Vintage and people started snapping it up. I ordered it in the Pinot colourway yesterday. The funny thing is, I’m not usually one to go out and buy things just because someone makes them popular. I don’t buy books that Oprah endorses, I tend not to follow trends that Stephanie does either. This isn’t a case of that even though it might seem that way on the surface.

What happened in this case was that Stephanie’s blog was the means through which the gods finally caught me. When I went to the website and saw these socks I swear they were daring me to knit them. I don’t back down from a challenge. Especially when it comes in the form of knitted socks. This might sound like crazy-talk, but I get the sense that these socks are the embodiment of the Dionysian spirit. It’s not just the subject matter. It’s because of the arrogance I sense coming from these socks. They know they are magnificent but at the same time they also know they’re going to make you let go of your fear and inhibitions, make you get into another mindspace and do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do in order to get them done.

Now, I don’t need to commit hubris against the knitting gods and have things come crashing down on my head, but at the same time I realize there’s a lot of work involved here and I refuse to let these socks beat me. I tend to see it as a way of putting my skills to good use serving a higher purpose, whatever that turns out to be.


Flickr is back!

For those of you that didn’t know, I’ve been unable to log in to my Yahoo! account all summer. When our Rogers account was cancelled it never properly unlinked from their system, and when I try to go through the steps online to do it nothing happens. It’s still doing this. I’ve emailed, called, and IM’d Rogers and Yahoo! both, and all they do is shuffle me around. Rogers says they have no record of me anymore so it’s Yahoo!’s problem, Yahoo! says it’s Rogers’ problem for deleting all record of me. I don’t care anymore, because there has been some small measure of success finally.

The thing is, I have two Yahoo! accounts, and although the one I’m locked out of is my oldest one (and thus most well known) I don’t use it anymore except for my Flickr photos. This was a huge problem for me, because Flickr only lets you assign a custom url to an account once, and you can’t take it back for use with another account. So in order to keep my http://www.flickr.com/photos/heavenlyevil URL I’d have to get my Flickr associated with another Yahoo! ID.

This normally is very easy. You just sign in and fill out the form and confirm that you own both Yahoo! IDs and are thus allowed to make the switch. Which means I couldn’t do this, obviously, not being able to get into the first account at all.

I emailed the Flickr people and they looked into it for me. It took them some time to confirm my information and that I really was locked out of my account, but once that was established I got an email back saying that they’d separated my Flickr from any Yahoo! ID so I could go back and attach it as if it had always been separate. Huzzah!

This I did, so now I have my pretty pictures again and can add more finally, after not being able to for ages. It’s exciting, see, because there’s this new site, Ravelry, that I’ve been a member of for most of the summer and haven’t been able to make full use of since I couldn’t link my pictures.

Really, I’m excited because I have yet another avenue for showing off my yarn stash. Unfortunately, a bunch of the projects I’ve finished this summer have been gifted away and I don’t have pictures, but for the rest they will be up soon for those of you who are also on Ravelry. Exciting, yes?

ETA: Well, now that I’ve said something I get an email from Yahoo! saying they’ve fixed everything and I can get back in my account now. For the trouble I think I’m getting my stuff out of that account and deleting it. All I get is spam from it anymore anyhow.