AK Kerani Designs

I knit for the online company AK Kerani and now have a couple of my own designs up on their site.

Red Rhody Scarf - $40

Lilac Slouch Hat - $25

Lilac Mitts - $18

You can order them all through AK Kerani and 18% of the profit will go to the charity of your choice!

I'm also thinking of starting to offer commissions so if you'd like to commission me to knit something for you fill free to note me about it.

WIP Wednesday: Shawl Progress

I've been spending lots of time working on the Mystic Star shawl.  I'm to the last section of it.  576 stitches around.  The chart for this part is 48 stitches wide and covers over 70 rows, even rows not being show since they're just knit.

Here it is on the needles.  I tried to spread out the middle so you can see the pattern at the center.

And here's part of the section of just finished spread out a bit.

I've been enjoying working on it and the cat seems to like it as well.  One knit while I was trying to knit Lindy jumped up onto my lap and curled up on the shawl and then shoved her nose into and fell asleep.  It was very cute.

The stitch markers I was using for the shawl were annoying me.  The yarn kept getting snagged on them so my mom was nice enough to make me some out some stone beads a got some time ago.

There's four round ones and four tear drop shaped ones.  I looked them up and they're synthetic blue malachite that's been dyed, or something like that.  Not something that occurs naturally.

The other project I've been working on this week is a crocheted stegosaurus.

That's the head there on the pattern.  It should be adorable when it's done.  Don't know what color it's spikes are going to be yet.  I'll have to look in my stash for something that would look good, or find something at the next Knit Wits meeting.

I've also been working on the hoodie for myself.  It's been my social knitting so not much work is getting done on it but I just might have the back done before the end of the month.

Spring has been just wonderful.  The flowering plum and the wild plum have been absolutely gorgeous this year.  We did get some really cold nights over the weekend, freezing the bleeding heart and the lilacs.  One lilac is not going to bloom this year but the other too will.  The freezing coincided with my mom buying plants for the deck, of course.  Again this year she put Dahlia's in the boxes around the deck.  They were gorgeous last year and the Moose didn't eat them.  Here's some pictures of my favorites.

 I spent several hours out on the deck enjoying the sunshine, gorgeous flowers, and hummingbirds that were coming to the feeder.  Lindy joined me this afternoon and I got some nice pictures of her.

Hey mom!

Snoozing

Pictures

I took a bunch of pictures today and here are the ones that turned out the best.

Spring Tulips Shawl on lilac bush

Treelephant in flowering plum

 Galaxy Scarf in wild plum tree

 Cable running through the woods

Now to get back to working on the Mystic Star shawl.

The First Warm Day of May

There was sunshine today.  I went out to look at wildflowers.  Lots of violets blooming, and strawberries, and there's a bunch of grape hyacinth down the hill from the house.  And I didn't see any snow!


I finally caved and got a skein of the ruffle yarn that has been so popular amongst knitters lately.  I have made a scarf, which is being modeled here by the wonderful Miss Chenille.

The yarn is Marina Multi by Rozetti in the Galaxy colorway.  Loved how it knitted up, didn't enjoy knitting it.  This stuff is a pain to work with.  You have to spread ite out as you knit, inserting the needle into the loops along the top to make your stitches.  You're basically looping the loops together, so stitch size is dependent on the size of the loops and not the needles you used.  I followed the pattern on the label for the yarn which called for size 9 straight needles.  I recommend using circulars, if you can.  With the straight needles the stitches kept wanting to come off the needles and the needles kept getting caught in the already worked ruffles of the scarf.  Definitely a yarn you need to watch your stitch count with.  Only eight stitches to do the scarf but do to the tendency for the stitches to fall off the needle I kept losing stitches and having to stop and find them again.  I also at one point picked up an extra stitch.  At least with so few stitches it's easy to tell right away if you've got the wrong number.

Overall I say avoid it if you can, but if you really want to make a ruffle scarf (or need a quick knit for a mother's day present) now would be the time to do it.  With the current popularity everybody and their mother is making this stuff and their are plenty of options out there.  You're bound to find one you like.

On Friday I bound off the Spring Tulips Shawl and today I blocked it.  I must say it came out quite beautiful.

Here's a picture of it before blocking.

And a close up of the pattern.

And here's how it looks after blocking.

It stretched farther than I thought it would and is a wonderful size.  It 56" along the top edge and wearing it the point hits right at my butt.  Very comfortable and delicate feeling.  I'm really happy with how it turned out.  You can see the tulips a little better in person, and on the wrong side, and when it's held up to the light.  Overall that part turned out better then I expected, you can definitely see the tulips much better then while it was on the needles.

Originally I was going to write up the pattern but the more I think about it the more work it sounds like.  I didn't keep any notes while I worked on it, just have the chart for the tulip and the number of stitches and rows for each rectangle.

I should note an interesting thing happened while I was working on the triangles along the top edge.  The triangles are all almost identical in their color placement.  Seemingly completely random color placement in the whole shawl and then it patterns along the top.

While blocking the shawl I also blocked the elephants parts that have been in my knitting bag for months.

I want to take a picture of this one sitting in the flowering plum while it's in full bloom, and the flowers are starting to open on the tree.  Time to get this elephant together and without any shawls hanging over my head I should have no problems getting this done.  Unless I keep procrastinating on it because I don't like sewing.

Aren't there like sewing gnomes or something that will do it for me if I leave a bowl of milk out, or something like that.  I suppose if there were my cat would catch and kill them before they got any work done.

Lilac Slouch Hat and Gloves

Here's the finished products from the weekend.  3 days, one skein on yarn, all my design.

Picture of the two together.  Going to sell them through AK Kerani.

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.