Posted: April 30th, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: projects: oslo (travel scarf), projects: slow curve, things i knit, year: 2012 | 2 Comments »
The big brown sweater is continuing apace. I’m finally onto the last sleeve.
However, being close to done with this project is making me look forward to the next – turns out, I can’t stay away from tiny gauge projects for long. I’m going to be doing a bunch of traveling over the month of May, and that means I need something portable.
I have my heart set on Oslo (the buttons! The bajillion miles of stockinette in the round!), but I wanted to modify it a little bit to use yarn I already had.
I’ve swatched the first colourwork repeat, using dark brown Malabrigo as the main colour and the leftovers from my Paulie sweater for the colourwork sections (modified to only use two colours).
I spent a few days sort of ambivalent about the colour combination. I wasn’t sure if the navy stood out enough, or if I wanted to frog and redo it with purple and grey.
But the more I stare at this picture (and the scarf), the more I feel like the colours I chose are probably the right ones for me.
Posted: April 25th, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: things i sew, things I spin, year: 2012 | 2 Comments »
The end of this month is a pretty big blur, as I wrap up a lot of pretty big life stuff (including school!) and organize myself for two months off and the start of even more life stuff.
I’ve gone back to spinning, which is always a nice, zen way to take study breaks. It calls for patient hands and focus, which is exactly what I need right now.
Along the theme of “not doing crafts I don’t love doing,” I let myself take a break on the Big Bag Of Shetland I’ve been spinning for approximately eternity. I plan to finish it, but I needed to let myself work on something else for a while, and 110g of electric, punch-in-the-face green and black merino/silk seemed like a nice fit.
I also did a very, very wee bit of patchwork.
I have been a little obsessed with patchwork chevrons (and maybe sketched out an entire, bed-sized chevron quilt in mutliple colours), so I decided to make some small ones to get them out of my system. These are 3″ half-square triangles, machine sewn together and hand-quilted, with wool batting in the middle. I’m going to add buttons and elastic
loops to the short edges and use this as a French press cozy.
This was also my first time making binding and stitching it on, which was easier than I thought it would be, but helpful to do on a small scale before trying it on a full quilt.
Posted: April 19th, 2012 | Author: admin | Filed under: projects: bellevue 2.0, projects: slow curve, things i knit, year: 2012 | 1 Comment »
Last month – after finishing up Paulie, I set out to start a new sweater.
I had yarn all ready, and a pretty specific idea of what I wanted in this sweater. I wanted it to be a nice, versatile, everyday sweater, and I wanted it to be knit up in giant needles at an enormous gauge, because oh good grief was I sick of teensy needles and fine yarn.
I started with a sweater from Twist Collective that I’ve had in my queue for a while. I got gauge, started knitting, and managed to get through the entire back and several inches of the front before I finally admitted that I really wasn’t enjoying myself. I really love the finished sweater, and think it would suit me, but the whole sweater is done in this garter ribby stitch pattern (which looks beautiful) that I just hated knitting.
So I ripped it out, and looked for a different pattern.
My search turned up Slow Curve, which is the same stitch gauge – no new swatch – and has a lot more stockinette and a lot less paying attention to what row I’m on, which makes it much closer to the sweater I want to be working on right now.
I can tell because it’s going a lot faster.
