Persistent Knitter

I recently visited my friend Jill, and we got her a felted hat pattern and yarn while I was there. She’s already finished it and here are pictures:

http://jillsscrapbook.blogspot.com/2006/12/felted-knit-hat-dec-28-2006.html

Go jill!!!! She’s already bought yarn to make another one for her other daughter. I deem the enabling a success!

It’s not knitting, but I just had to share. I broke off part of one of my molars this week. I have had a filling in one of my lower left molars since I was about 10. It’s a metal filling; and the tooth around it weakened enough so that cracked and it popped off on one side. My dentist says, “It happens. We’ll fix it”. She’s a great dentist so I’m waiting until she gets back in town to do the work. Luckily I’m not in any pain; but I do have to be careful when I eat. Click here
to see the missing tooth in all it’s glory.

(The dark area is just shadow - that’s the filling in there, so isn’t anything so mundane as tooth decay. You have to imagine that the 1/3 of the tooth is still there)

The office I work in now has a few heating issues. Mainly the specific office that I share with another person has no heat registers in it at all.  The other offices around us do, but not ours.  To combat this (and rather than getting up every 15 mins to do jumping jacks), I whipped up a pair of fingerless mitts:

Yarn: Mountain Colors Weaver’s Wool
Pattern: Pop Up Paws
Gauge: who knows, but somewhere near 5 st/inch
Mistakes: many

The pattern is really great. I decided I didn’t want the thickness of actual stubby fingers while typing; so I just did a simple ribbing at the end.  The pattern has you do some short rows to give you more room on the knuckles and on the index finger area, vs the pinky - the mitt on the left has short rows, the one on the right doesn’t.  I decided the short rows were too fussy and I just wanted to get ‘em done last night.  I also added two rows of k1p1 on the top of the thumb to prevent any potentional rolling there.

They aren’t perfect, but they will work, and that’s the most important part.

PS. Merry Christmas!

What happens when you forget you’ve already found the end to a center-pull ball of yarn, and pull out a huge clump of yarn on the other side?

This mess.

I spent about 3 hours total detangling it. I had to detach it from the knitting in progress by breaking the yarn once. Once I did that it only took another hour or so to get the rest of it into a usable state. I haven’t started knitting on that project again yet. I think I’m afraid of it.

Just for fun, I did a short video of plying from a center pull ball. Mostly it was for my mom, and is definately NOT the only way to ply
this way. You can also hold onto the ball and control the twist of the yarn and how fast the yarn
comes off that way. I’ll probably have a big tangly mess at the very end. The twist in this ball is also very inactive.

Last weekend I visited a friend I hadn’t seen in years. I had never met her youngest daughter, who is three. Well, due to an annoying power outage we spent a little time on Saturday doing some shopping in areas of town that did have power. We found a fabulous knitting/spinning/weaving shop and they were nice enough to show my friend’s youngest the basics of how to spin:

I also got my friend started on a felted hat project, spent a little time with the oldest child on her knitting project. (My friend learned how a knit a while ago, but it’s not her highest priority hobby. we’ll work on it)

Here’s a picture I took as we were driving to their house:

So beautiful!

Here’s a look at the final product:

(click for a larger version)
I just need to get the pattern finished up, and then it will be for sale over at The Knit Foundry.  Knitting this sweater will require intermediate knitting skills: Knitting in the round on circs, dpns, picking up stitches, two different styles of cast off, reading from charts.  It calls for worsted weight yarn with a gauge of 5st/inch.  I highly recommend the worsted weight yarn from Shelridge Farms; as this is what I used to knit the sample; and it’s just really fabulous yarn.

It is finished, including ends woven in, washed, blocked and dried. I gave up on waiting for it to dry on the towel, and tossed it in the dryer for about 15 mins.  Voila! Finished sweater:

(click for full size version) Is the fit not perfect?  I’m a bit bummed because I was hoping he’d be able to wear it longer. :)  Also, it’s now my goal to get anyone who I make a sweater for to do the pose with their arms straight out from their body.  It’s just so darned funny!

Stats
Pattern: "Xander Gansey" My own, soon to be for sale through The Knit Foundry
Yarn: Shelridge Farms, Worsted Weight superwash
Size: 2T/3T (actual measurements of sweater forthcoming…)

I got a new camera and of course have to go around and test it out to see how it does. I had this hat sitting out and it begged to have a picture taken of it:

(click for larger version).

The pattern is Snowflake Flurries, and it comes with a matching sweater (in three sizes) and a hat pattern. I designed the sweater pattern and my super-sneaky friend Rebecca knit the sweater and designed the hat based on the sweater pattern while I was pregnant with Alex (and pretending she was actually knitting her son one the sweater). This was more than 2 years ago and sadly the hat doesn’t fit him anymore. I have the pattern written up, and want to sell it (because it is totally cute), but it needs a bit of fact checking on it’s numbers in the various sizes before it can go up for sale.

As for the camera - The resolution on this camera is just ridiculous (7.2 megapixels anyone?) and it’s not even the highest res camera you can buy. It’s a simple point and shoot; can take videos (although at lower quality than a digicam) which will keep going until you run out of space on your sd card.

A long wait at the eye doctor this week let me make good progress on the Xander Gansey:

(click for bigger version)
The red pearl cotton you see on the neck area was my stitch holder before I had that done. It hasn’t annoyed me enough to have to pull it out (I tend to leave all weaving of ends until the very end). Since I had to do the neck twice to get the number of stitches correct and stretchy enough to go over the boy’s head, I thought I’d just leave it there for now.

The sleeve chart is basically done, so I’m ready to start getting the pattern together and ready for sale, and hopefully will only have to wait on the final picture.

Another gansey design (this one sized for Men!) is in progress (Marta and I are collaborating on the design)