Well, I figure I ought to catch up on blogging some of the things I have finished lately. There are more, but I will get to them another time, when the baby is taking a longer nap. He is just learning to crawl and is so excited about it that he thinks sleeping is for the birds.
I just finished this pair of socks last Sunday. I saw them in the Knit Picks catalog and loved the color ways and the stripes and the ribbing. So, I had to make them myself. Frugal to the core (tee hee), I decided to wing the pattern since it didn't look like much more than ribbing and skipped buying a whole book for one pattern. After making them, I enjoyed knitting with the Knit Picks yarn (very soft and smooth--extraordinary quality for the price!) so much that I decided to buy another ball of each colorway and use up my leftovers with the new ball to make another pair of socks in each individual colorway. The purple pair is well underway--I'm just waiting now for the box to arrive with the rest of the yarn. Doot dee doo.
I am usually pretty monogamous to my projects but I may have to start something else this weekend. I already turned the heel in a complementary color to make the yarn stretch and to hopefully make it to package arrival time. It is 3:30 on Friday and it doesn't look like that is going to happen! I have been thinking of starting a garter mesh placket tee from a magazine pattern. Maybe now is the time to start it.
Yarn: Knit Picks 'Felici' in Tyrian Purple and AquariumNeedles: size 1.5 us double points
Gauge: 8.8 sts/in
My own generic sock pattern
inspired by the Knit Picks catelogue
I prefer top-down construction with slip stich heel. I don't normally like to rib a whole sock because I just don't like knitting ribbing, but I do like the way it looks in stripes with the purl blips (the opposite of what most people think, I suppose) and I also like the way it fits--I have large feet and am accustomed to snug socks--because it is generally difficult to find mass manufactured socks that are large enough. Size 11 shoe, ok? Geez.
I know there are a lot of yarn snobs out there who turn up their noses at Knit Picks. I am not one of them. I admire Kelly Petkun and her team for trying something new in the yarn world. A lot of other companies have tried to copy them but haven't succeeded nearly as well, in my opinion. I like expensive yarns as much as the next knitter, but am also very satisfied when I find a good value.
Which the next project was NOT. Oh, these gloves turned out beautifully. But they didn't start out as gloves! I kept hearing about Crystal Palace Mini Mochi yarn and decided I should splurge and give it a try. I got it and knit the first SOCK and was so happy with it that I wore the single sock around the house for the rest of the day while I started the second sock. Well, that sock ended up mixed into the wash. Oh bother. You know the rest. It is supposed to be machine washable wool. Apparantly (yes, I've said it before) that does NOT mean machine dryable. They came out of the dryer felted. Ugh.
Now what? Second sock already has several inches on it--but there probably isn't enough in the two skeins to make two more socks! And, I thought, I need to make something that doesn't get thrown in the wash with wild abandon. Gloves, I thought, are the solution. I just added 4 stitches where I was and then started in on the pattern for gloves from the book Not Just Socks. And I really dig how they turned out! I love how the fingers are each a different color. After I finished the first glove, I weighed it and the remaining yarn--and had a pile of yarn weighing two grams more than the glove, whew!
Pattern: Gloves from Not Just Socks
Yarn: Mini Mochi "Intense" from Crystal Palace
Size 2 dpns
They are rather long, due to the fact that they started as socks. I like that. It will keep the cold from going up my arm next winter. It was fun to try them on as I went and make each individual finger the right length. As you can imagine, I also have large hands and typical women's gloves come up a bit short and are uncomfortable. This was the first time I tried knitting gloves, though I have made a lot of mittens for other people. At times knitting the fingers on double points was a pain, but I'll be trying it again sometime. Especially if I can find some short glove needles.
FYI. I don't know html. Blogger is a pain in the behind with paragraph breaks. I'm trying to learn how to manage the html to make my blog as readable as possible. Bear with me as I figure this out.
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