Destroyed

I love knitting, but I hate finishing. I don’t like to seam. I don’t like adding buttons. And I especially don’t like blocking. I don’t know why I don’t like blocking. It isn’t hard. The item might take a long time to dry, but the process of laying it out isn’t difficult. It’s just annoying.

I dislike blocking enough that I only do it when I have to. If something is lacy, I block it. If the stitches look wonky, I block it. If it has no shape, I block it. But if I made something in stockinette stitch that looks fine, I don’t block it.

Sometimes I don’t block things right away. I had two finished objects underneath the coffee table in the living room that both needed blocking, but because it’s been too warm to wear them I haven’t bothered. If you are wondering why they were under the coffee table, it’s because that is where I keep my TV knitting. They were laying there next to other knitting stuff. Anyway, one project was a pair of legwarmers I finished about a month ago. The other was a lacy cowl I finished a couple of weeks ago.

Earlier this week I decided I needed to put the projects away for the summer, and I wanted to block them first. I started with the leg warmers, because that’s the project I finished first. I picked them up from under the coffee table and discovered this.

What happened to my leg warmers?

I have no idea what the black stuff is. It’s only in the spot you see on one leg warmer. I looked at the lacy cowl, and it has no black stuff on it. I looked at the other knitting items in the area, and there’s nothing black on any of those. I checked the floor, there is nothing black on it. What the heck is that?

I showed them to my boyfriend, and his immediate reaction was that maybe when he was vacuuming he accidentally caught the vacuum on the legwarmer. I didn’t know if that made sense. I checked the bottom of the vacuum cleaner, and there’s no black stuff there. If you look at the top of the legwarmer, you might be able to see that there is a bit of fraying. It’s hard to see in the picture.

I blocked the legwarmers anyway, hoping that soaking them would loosen the black stuff. It didn’t. It’s hard like a shell. What is it? I almost wondered if it was burnt. The fiber content of the yarn is 80% merino and 20% bamboo. Does bamboo burn to black like that? I don’t know.

It’s my fault. If I had blocked them right away they wouldn’t have been under the coffee table. They would have been put away, or in the laundry because I wore them.

What should I do with these? I think I have enough yarn to knit a new leg warmer. I can try to rip back, but I don’t think that would be easy with the black stuff. Or, I can wear them as is. They were just for inside the house anyway. And really, I have no desire to knit another leg warmer. I was ready to be done before I finished the second one.

For now I will store these in my sock drawer until I decide what to do with them.

The Dish Cloth Project

We’ve decided that all of our dish cloths and wash cloths will be hand knit. We will use the fun patterns for wash cloths, since they don’t get as trashed as dish cloths. And between a member of our knit group knitting dish cloths, and seeing someone else with them on a video podcast, I decided Grandmother’s Favorite is the new dish cloth pattern. It’s free, easy to knit, and easy to memorize. The goal is to make enough dish cloths to use a new one every day until we launder them all at a time. Every once in a while I will buy a new skein of cotton yarn and make some dish cloths. Here are the first two sets.

Pattern: Grandmother’s Favorite
Yarn: Lily Sugar’n Cream Ombres and Prints in Hippie; and Lion Brand Cotton Ease in White
Needle: US 6
Date started: May 18, 2013
Date completed: May 26, 2013

Pattern: Grandmother’s Favorite
Yarn: Lily Sugar’n Cream Ombres and Prints in Swimming Pool; and Lion Brand Cotton Ease in White
Needle: US 6
Date started: May 26, 2013
Date completed: May 27, 2013

These skeins didn’t have quite enough yarn to make two full dish cloths, so I added a little white yarn to finish the second one. I have one more skein of non-solid cotton yarn, so I can make two more dish cloths.

This has been the perfect project to work on while I watch the NHL playoffs. Not the Blackhawks games, of course. I can’t knit during those. But the other ones.

BBB

Pattern: Center-Knit Baby Blanket with Ruffle by Cathy Waldie
Yarn: Caron Simply Soft Solids in Red (3 skeins), White (.61 skein) and Black (.44 skeing)
Needles: US 6 and US 9
Date started: February 2, 2013
Date completed: March 30, 3013

BBB = Blackhawks Baby Blanket

I have to be up front and say I did not take this photo. I Forgot to take a photo of it before I sent it to my friend, so when my friend sent this picture to me I asked if I could use it. She kindly said yes.

As you can see, it’s kind of large for a baby blanket. I wanted it to be useful for a few years, so I made it bigger. I also didn’t make the ruffle that was mentioned in the pattern title because I didn’t think it would look right, being a hockey themed blanket and all. At first I tried an i-cord bind off, but that pulled in too much. Ultimately I decided to take out the i-cord bind off and knit a few rows of garter instead.

At long last… new hexipuffs

It had been months since I made any progress on my beekeeper’s quilt, but over the past few weeks I’ve made a few hexipuffs. I started by using leftovers from my most recent sock yarn projects.

The pink one on the right is made from Fleur de Fiber yarn I used to make a pair of socks. The black and purple one at the top is the Studio June yarn I used to make the Downton Abbey gauntlets. The other three hexipuffs are made from leftovers from three hats I made back in January. The purplish one on the bottom is Sophie’s Toes, the green and black is Dream In Color yarn I got from their warehouse sale, and the brown one is Evermore Studios yarn.

Recently a friend sent me a box full of yarn that had a bunch of fingering weight leftovers, so I have plenty of new yarns to make hexipuffs with. Also, I still have some Wollmeise that a friend wanted me to make puffs out of, so that’s up next.

FO: Stockholm Scarf

Pattern: Stockholm Scarf by knittedblissJC
Yarn: Michell & CIA Indiecita DK, 4.84 skeins
Needles: US 9
Date started: March 22, 2013
Date completed: April 17, 2013

This cowl/infinity scarf/whatever you want to call it is as soft as a cloud. It is quite possible the softest yarn I own. The yarn is undyed alpaca yarn that a member of my knit group brought back from a trip to Peru.

This pattern is written to be knit flat. I knit it in the round, and got messed up at first. I went through Ravelry comments for the pattern and found those who had already figured out how to knit it in the round. It meant casting on two fewer stitches than I thought, and swapping two rows. Thankfully I had only knit four rounds before I realized there was a problem.

The great thing about this pattern is that it is reversible. I have other cowls where, if they hang open a bit in front, exposing the wrong side, it looks weird. Because this one is reversible it doesn’t matter if someone can see the wrong side because it looks exactly the same. I never thought of that. The only other cowls I’ve seen where that works were knit in the round and are giant tubes. This is great.

YarnCon 2013

Wow, I haven’t posted in quite a while. I have been very busy lately and, between work, vacation, and developing a new exercise program for myself, I haven’t had much time to blog. However, a lot has been happening, so here we go.

YarnCon was two weeks ago. It was a two-day event this year, and I went on Saturday morning. I got there before the doors opened, but not early enough to get one of the free goodie bags.

Normally when I go to an event like this I walk around and look at all the booths before finding anything. Usually I have a strict budget, so I want to make sure I’m getting what I really want. I don’t want to spend money on a few things, then find something I like more and not have the money for it. That was my plan for this year as well, however, I did buy one thing immediately. I always check out the Piddleloop booth to see my friend Jen. Even if I didn’t know her, I would still love the bags made by her and her sister. This year they had a handful of Hello Kitty bags. If you know me well, you know I love Hello Kitty. As a matter of fact, when I was in Las Vegas earlier that week I saw a fantastic Hello Kitty tote bag in a shop in New York New York, but didn’t buy it because I could not justify spending $74 on a tote bag. So I was able to buy a much more reasonably priced Hello Kitty project bag! And really, can you have too many project bags? Isn’t it cute?

I looked around the other booths for awhile and pondered my future purchases. I then listened to a talk by Susan Gibbs of Juniper Moon Farm. She discussed how she went from being a news producer to owning sheep, and starting a fiber CSA. It was so interesting, and even though it’s clearly very hard work, has me wanting to ditch everything and start that alpaca farm I want so badly. There was a booth next to where she was speaking that was selling copies of By Hand Magazine. It’s a fairly new magazine, and Susan Gibbs is the editor-in-chief. It’s great. It includes recipes, knitting patterns, carpentry, gardening, among other things. I love the two issues I bought, and plan to buy future issues.

Next, I bought yarn. There was so much beautiful yarn, that in order to narrow the possibilities down I decided that I was only going to buy yarn from vendors I haven’t bought yarn from before. That eliminated three vendors.

The first skein of yarn I bought was from The Wool Dispensary. I almost bought some of their yarn at the last YarnCon, but ultimately didn’t. I chose a skein of Useful Stimulant sock yarn in the color Badass Unicorn.

This is not a great photo. The yarn is brighter than it looks above. It was such a beautiful purple that as soon as I saw it I knew it was the skein I had to buy.

Next I went back to the magic and moonshine booth where there were so many skeins of beautiful colorful yarn, much of which was self-striping. The yarn that intrigued me most were the handkerchief trick yarn cakes. These were yarns with longer blocks of color. There were so many colors to choose from, but I ended up buying perhaps the least colorful skein they had.

Guess why? Blackhawks colors, of course!!

There was so much more I wanted to buy, including a wire knit bracelet kit and felted earrings. I hope those vendors are there next year.

New peppers

At the end of last summer Tim’s dad gave us a pepper plant that had been in his parents’ back yard. I’m happy to report that the plant is still alive.

It started flowering a few week ago, and I became excited about the prospect of new peppers while it was still too cold to get our garden going. Tim said that even though there were flowers we likely wouldn’t get peppers, because we weren’t sure how they would be pollinated if they weren’t outside.

Lookie, peppers!!

Tim used a skewer to pollinate the flowers, and we now have 10 little peppers. Maybe we’ll be lucky and be able to keep this plant for a few years and get lots of peppers from it, even though it’s inside!

Speaking of the garden, we still have to figure out what we’re going to plant this year. Last year was so hot and dry that a lot of what we planted failed to grow until we replanted toward the end of the summer. We have to decide whether to try certain things again, like the eggplant, or try new things.

At least one leg will be warm.

Last weekend I finished the first of my Fresco Leg Warmers.

As you can see, it hasn’t been blocked yet. I will wait until I have both of them done so I can block them together. I haven’t started the second leg warmer yet. No, I do not have second leg warmer syndrome. I’m going to be using the second leg warmer as a travel project, and I didn’t want to start too close to my trip. I will cast on in the next few days. Actually, I hope I can find the second skein of yarn.

You may recall that in my last post I discussed what I want to make with some Dream In Color Classy that has been in my stash forever. Well, strike all that. I found a new pattern that I think I’m going to make with it. It’s going to be a cowl neck short sleeve cardigan that I will discuss further when I actually start the project down the road. I’m glad that’s settled!

Coming to the end of its shelf life

Here are five skeins of Dream In Color Classy.

I bought this yarn almost three years ago at a Dream In Color warehouse sale. The skeins were packaged together for $50, which is quite a bit cheaper than it would be if I bought the skeins retail. I had no project in mind when I bought this yarn. I loved the color and figured I could find a plethora of patterns to choose from. And I did. Only I don’t feel strongly about any of them.

Initially I planned on making the Minimalist Cardigan, but dismissed that pretty quickly. I thought the stitch pattern would drive me crazy, and I thought it would look better with a solid yarn as opposed to the semi-solid yarn I had. Then I set my mind on the Garter Yoke Cardigan. I was actually going to start this a while back, which is why I wound the yarn. But, I don’t know, it fell out of favor with me. So this yarn sat in my stash. Every few months I would peruse patterns looking for something to make with it, but either didn’t like what I saw, or didn’t have enough yarn for the patterns I liked.

For the time being I’m trying to finish some old WIPs. However, I feel like if I don’t use this yarn soon I may as well get rid of it. Over the past week I’ve been trying to come up with uses for this pretty yarn.

First I wondered if I really have to make a sweater with the yarn. Why not make several little accessories? I can make a hat, maybe a scarf, whatever. But I think I’m set with trying to make one project that uses as much of the yarn as possible. It’s rare that I have that much yardage in one color, I may as well take advantage of it. But does it have to be a sweater?

Recently someone in one of the Ravelry groups I participate in linked to the Big Honkin’ Bag. It wouldn’t use all of the yarn I have, but would use quite a bit of it. I figured I could use the bag as a knitting project bag. But don’t I have enough project bags? Well, technically yes, but can one ever have too many project bags? Why do I have to make a sweater? I recently chose a pattern to make a sweater for my cousin’s son, when I stumbled across Dangan. I think that would be so pretty, and so warm. So I went from a bag to a circular shawl.

I thought I was set. I thought Dangan was it. But then I stumbled upon my copy of the Fall, 2012 issue of knit.wear magazine, and I’m back on the sweater kick. There are so many projects in this magazine that can work with this yarn. The Columnar Jacket, Gathered Blouse, Horseshoe Cape, Hourglass Sleeve Pullover, Ribbed-Waist Pullover and Tucked-Buttonband Cardigan are all garments that are contenders. The magazine also has the pattern for the Waved Wrap, which I also think is pretty. Oh, and the Garter Yoke Cardigan is back in the running.

So now what? I think that’s more confusing that it was helpful. But I want to make a decision soon. I’m tired of sitting on this yarn.

Knitting’s been a no go

The first two months of the year were very prolific for me as far as knitting goes. Four hats, a baby blanket, a second baby blanket nearly completed, and the beginning of a pair of bright yellow leg warmers. The third month of the year, however, I hit a wall.

I blame the rest of my life. I had a really busy week this week. It was so busy, in fact, that I didn’t even feel like knitting when sitting on the couch watching television every night. I guess it’s for the best, as I fell asleep on the couch watching television at least twice this past week, and I really don’t need to stab myself with knitting needles in my sleep.

Today I seem to be back on track. This afternoon I bought yarn to make a sweater for my cousin’s son. I’ve also been working on a never ending i-cord bind off, which I seem to only be able to work on in short bursts. It will be the perfect project to take to knit group tomorrow.