Posted: November 4th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: lorna's laces shepherd worsted, projects: holding hands feeding ducks cowl, yarn i use | Tags: cowl, diy, knit, knitting, knitting patterns, lorna's laces, lorna's laces shepherd worsted, patterns, star stitch | 2 Comments »
My entire Halloween weekend was, unfortunately, pretty unremarkable. I had other things that needed to get prioritized over dressing up and acting like an idiot (which is a shame, because that is my favourite). I did, however, cast on and cast off for something new.
IT’S AN UGLY TUBE!
Just kidding. Okay, well – it is a tube. But it’s not anywhere near as boring as it looks in that picture. If you arrange it right, it can look like this:
Or like this.
Which I think is much, much nicer. This cowl is based on the stitch pattern from the Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks scarf, one of those patterns that I’ve always loved but never found time to knit. It’s also dead easy to turn into a cowl, and leaves a fabric that’s really springy and dense, but doesn’t curl (even though it looks very stockinette-y).
Pattern: Cowl modified from Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks
Yarn: Nearly a skein of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted, in Pewter.
Needles: 5.5mm
Directions: The pattern calls for a multiple of 4 sts plus one, so I cast on 41 stitches using the long-tail cast-on and leaving a VERY long tail, on purpose. This made my scarf about 8″ wide, unblocked.
Then I worked in the star stitch pattern established in HH,FD for 25 inches, give or take. I was going for a big, floppy cowl, not a nice, tight neckwarmer. If you wanted to make one of those, though, you could just knit for fewer inches.
Then, I stopped (ending on a knit row), but did not bind off – I left my work on a holder. Using the tail from my cast on, I picked up 41 sitches at the cast-on edge of my work, and then I believe I had to knit a row so that the working yarn was on the same side of the work when I held them both together. Finally, using the tail from my cast-on (but you could also break the working yarn if your tail wasn’t long enough) I grafted the two ends together.
This left me with a big, floppy tube. I blocked it out a little, so that the finished dimensions ended up being closer to 9 inches wide and 23 inches long (11.5 inches with the ends grafted together). It’s so, so squishy, and perfect for throwing on when it’s chilly out, but I don’t want to carry a scarf around indoors all day.
Posted: September 4th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: lorna's laces shepherd worsted, mittens, projects: bella's mittens, things i knit, yarn i use | Tags: bella's mittens, crafty, finished knits, handmade, knit, knitting, mittens, twilight | 1 Comment »
I appear to be knitting projects faster than I can find time to blog about them. This is, on the one hand, kind of awesome, and I can’t really complain about how many new wool additions I’ve made to my wardrobe. (If only it was winter.) On the other hand, it’s possibly a sign that I should start knitting bigger projects that take me a little longer.
Either way, the mittens I teased in my last entry are completely, 100% done. After last winter – a winter I spent with my hands jammed into my pockets, completely mittenless – I was determined to have at least one pair of handmade wool mittens for this year, and that appears to have happened.
Pattern: As Julie guessed right off, these are Bella’s Mittens – so named because they’re a pattern written to match the mittens Bella wore in the Twilight movie. While ordinarily, the very fact of that would make me balk, I am a complete sucker for horseshoe cables. So, there you go.
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted, in Blackberry. These mittens used maybe a third of a skein.
Needles: 5mm dpns
I modified the pattern a little bit – as written, the mitts are actually these forearm-length gauntlets, which doesn’t suit my style at all, so I shortened them. (I did this by casting on 33 stitches instead of 43, and starting the cuff at Row 34, instead of Row 1. I worked six even rounds and one cable round, then followed rows 34-39 as written, leaving a much shorter cuff with only two cable repeats, instead of eight or so like the pattern called for.)
It is very hard to take a picture of your own wrist with an SLR camera, but that’s what they look like on my hands. They’re purple, and squishy, and they made a deeply satisfying project.
Now, of course, it’s time to start knitting something that’s going to take me a little longer.
Posted: September 2nd, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: lorna's laces shepherd worsted, mittens, projects: abandoned socks (trekking), socks, things i knit, trekking xxl, yarn i use | Tags: crafty, finished objects, handmade, knitting, sock knitting, socks, stockinette socks, trekking xxl | 4 Comments »
I feel like I’ve just completed some sort of knitting marathon. Except not really, because put together all of these unfinished pairs of socks were probably only a little more knitting than one entirely new sock. Still:
So, there’s that.
Pattern: lol. Generic stockinette socks.
Needles: little. I have lost track of it now, but I’m positive it was either 2.0mm (US 0) or 2.25 mm (US 1), which is possibly why I got so sick of knitting these when I first started with them.
Yarn: Zitron Trekking XXL, in Color 101.
I do actually quite like the striping in this yarn, and I am excited about how thin the fabric in these socks actually is (no risk of not being able to wear them with certain kinds of shoes, etc etc), but they were definitely the hardest of the bunch to motivate myself to finish.
But now they’re done, and I am practically giddy with excitement. I got to cast on for a pair of mittens! They are going obscenely fast! Look!
Song of the Entry: Spoon – The Underdog (Listen)
