month of craft photos

I’m not a big person for photo-a-day challenges, but one of the bloggers I read, Andi, has started a Month of Craft Photos challenge for February, and I’ve decided to play along.

(In a very low-commitment sort of way. I’m not going to be able to take or post a picture every single day in February, but I plan to take a photo for every prompt in the challenge, and post them in batches when I can. The point of this for me is fun and a little thinking outside the box with my photography.)

Day One: You in Action

It is really, really hard to take action photos of yourself while you’re knitting. I was hoping for something that looked a bit more in motion than the picture I finally decided on – I was actively knitting while I took this, but the picture feels a bit posed.

Day Two: Craft Tools

As much as I like to flirt with other mediums, my go-to crafting tools are definitely knitting needles. This is how I “organize” my ever-expanding circular needle collection – note the euphemistic quotation marks; my system is one step up from a Big Bucket ‘O’ Needles – in their packages, tucked into the front of a binder.

things i did with my week: a list

1. A lot – a lot – of traveling and Real Life.

2. Some sweater.

I’m at the body now, which means the rows go faster, and also that I get to motivate myself with stripes. (There is something very pleasing and a little addictive about stripes.) I really love the navy and yellow together – the yellow cheers up the dark blue a bit, I think.

3. Some sewing.

Knowing myself, and how I have at least four craft projects in progress at any given time, I figured I’d get bored of working on the same sweater all week. So I brought along my hexagon pillowcase, which has been basically-almost-done-except-for-finishing-the-applique-and-sewing-the-front-and-back-together for months, now.

Each of the hexagons were made using this English paper piecing template. The ones in the big strip were hand-pieced together, then I hand-stitched it to the grey background fabric. I also added a few extra single hexagons in the same way.

Let me tell you, you get some looks when you pull out a hand sewing project on a train.

fussy AND time-consuming!

It is not all blankets and sewing all the time around here, I promise. (Except for I have maybe, a little bit, been fantasizing about English Paper Piecing and all of the beautiful fussy handwork I could do.)

I’m about to embark on a fairly stressful three weeks for Real Life, and it’s going to involve a lot of travel. Going in, I wanted to make sure that I had enough knitting to hold me through the whole block of time, and for that to happen, I had a few criteria:

1) Bigger project – something that would take more than two weeks of substantial knitting time to finish.

2) Portable – I need to be able to travel easily with the half-finished project and all the yarn I might need for it in a carry-on bag.

3) Easy. There is a time and a place for complicated heirloom lace shawls; this will not be it.

I’ve settled on Paulie. It’s a fine-gauge cardigan, in fingering-weight yarn, because apparently one sweater was not enough to get that out of my system.

After washing and hanging my swatch, I discovered that my gauge is much smaller than the original pattern gauge (7.33 spi instead of 6.5), and having learned a valuable lesson about not listening to gauge swatches, I decided to trust it. I kind of love the fabric I get when I knit this on the needles the pattern calls for, and didn’t really want the extra drape I’d get by going up a needle size or two.

Modifying this involved doing a bunch of math, but I think I’m a better person for it.

It’s given me some fairly daunting stitch counts – and I plan to try it on a lot to be sure that I haven’t made a mistake in calculating them, because big numbers make me instictively mistrustful – but I think it’ll work out the way I’d like.

And it’ll definitely take me longer than three weeks, which is the important thing.