Weekend Things

For some reason I felt the need to make a slouch hat this weekend. So I did. Never made one before so I looked up some patterns and the basic construction and made up a pattern. Then I decided to make fingerless mitts to match. One is done.



Only one skein of yarn to make the set. Will have pictures of hat and finished gloves either tomorrow or wednesday.

Spring Tulips

With spring here my attention has turned to a shawl I started last year.  Technically it's the first design I came up with.  Meet the Spring Tulips shawl.

Yeah, I know.  Tulips?  What?  This yarn is quite loud.  It's 100purewool.com's merino lace in the Happy Colors color way.  Definitely happy colors, aren't they.  Not colors I usually like but I loved this skein of yarn the moment I saw it.  The colors said to me tulips, which are my favorite flower.  At the time I had just learned entrelac and had come across Jane Araujo's beautiful entrelac shawl Dianna.  I wanted to do something like it but with a tulip lace pattern instead of leaves.  I couldn't find a tulip stitch pattern that I liked to I eventually took some elements from a couple I did find and continually adjusted the pattern till I got something I liked.

Here's a close up.

You can kind of see the tulips.   Admittedly, this is not the right yarn for what I had in mind, but I think things will look better once it's blocked.  If not I'm fully prepared to knit it again in a solid color for the pattern.

Here's a close up of just one square.

You can definitely see the tulip here, so that gives me some hope that everything will turn out okay.

Starting back up on this shawl wasn't exactly easy.  I haven't been working on it till now because I caught my cat, the yarn eating terror, chewing on the yarn.  She managed to chew right through where the ball was connected to the shawl.  I shoved it in the drawer and tried to forget about it.  Spring time and the craving for bright colors that comes with it had me pulling it back out.  And finding out that the yarn had been chewed through in several places on the ball.  Dozens actually.  Not the work of the cat.  Possibly a mouse (brought in by the cat) or moths (more on that in a bit).  Thankfully whatever chewed on it hadn't chewed a hole into the ball, just kind of chewed around on the outside of it, so I just unraveled it, removing the smaller bits and rolling the bigger sections in balls incase I need them later.  Eventually I reached a point where it seemed like there were no more chewed sections.  I think I'll have enough to finish it.  I was thinking I wanted to put a border on it, but I might not have enough for that.  Probably going to knit a second shawl for writing up the pattern anyways so I can include a border.

Now about them moths.  Me and my dad have some brewing stuff that we keep in a purple plastic box my mom provided for us.  A couple weeks ago mom was baking and ran out of sugar and went to pull out the bag of sugar that was in the box only to find out it was full of moths.  The kind of moths that eat wool.  Needless to say, the sugar was no good, along with pretty much everything else in the box.  We cleaned it out today and discovered there's holes in the handles for the box so now we know how the moths got it.  And that also means a bunch probably got out as well.  Gonna have to go through all my yarn now to make sure the moths didn't get at any of it.  Nasty little buggers.

So the stuff I knitted for AK Kerani was in a fashion show this last weekend.  I should get pictures from it sometime soon so I can share them with everybody I know.  

And, that's it form me.  

For now.

WIP Wednesday: Things for me!

First, I'm going to start with some finished objects.

The lace shawl for Knitivity is done and is now being test knitted.  It came out just beautiful.

Calling it the Butterfly Wings Shawl.

Next up, I finished my assignment form AK Kerani with just enough time to send to my boss before this last Sunday.  These items will be appearing in a fashion show this weekend and I should get some pictures from it.  The shawl and red scarf are my own designs.

Now onto the work's in progress.  Stuff I'm making for me.

The first is a lace shawl.  The pattern is Mystic Star Shawl by Anna Dalvi and the yarn is Claudia Hand Painted Yarns Silk Lace in the aubergine color way.  Gorgeous yarn and it's 100% silk.  Bought it with the money I made from working at the fair last year.

Not the best photo.  My camera wasn't cooperating.  I started it a while back then put it to the side while I worked on the finished objects up above.  Picking it back up again came with a headache.  I'm not sure what happened but after knitting four rows I found myself with one extra stitch and while I was tinking back to find where the mistake occurred I came across two dropped stitches.  Fixing the dropped stitches took me back two rows before where I started that day.  Overall progress:  -2 rows.  The next day started out awful with extra stitches popping up again (too many yarn overs) but then went fairly smoothly the rest of the day.  Today started with a missing yarn over but there have since been no major mistakes.  Hopefully things will continue this way and it won't give me anymore problems (Ha!).

Next up is a hoodie I'm making for myself.  This is the back, I'm to the point of shaping for the armholes.

The pattern is Zig Zag Hoodie by Cheryl Beckerich and is in the January 2011 issue of Creative Knitting.  The yarn is Berroco's Pure Merino Nuance, which I made my first sweater out of in blue.  This yarn is very soft but split's real easily.  I'm finding it a lot easier to work with now that I'm more experienced and have some nice lace needles (Chiaogoo Red Lace needles sizes 6 and 7, and I'm using 3's on the shawl, love these needles!).  The stitch pattern is easy to follow and I've been doing the cables without a cable needle for the first time.

I had made a hoodie for myself a couple years ago.  The Central Park Hoodie in dark purple Cascade 220.  Worked on it for a good part of the year and then it didn't fit (gained a bit a weight and my boobs went up a whole cup size while I worked on that hoddie).  It's now sitting in my room still waiting for the buttons to be put on it.  My mom keeps coming up with suggestions on what to do with it, but I just want to keep it.  Maybe one day I'll lose enough weight to wear or maybe it will stay in the bottom of drawer until I have kids and pull out and try to get one of them to wear it.

It's a rainy day and I had wanted to get the rest of the yard work I started over the weekend done, but no such luck.  I guess I'll go get my inside chores done, then back to work on the shawl!