Posts from — October 2008

These are so fun to make.

Specs:

Needles: US 1 (2.25 mm) bamboo Profi dpns.  (Love these needles.)

Yarn: Baby Ull leftovers (5 colors).  Could also use Stork for these, or other fingering weight/sock yarn.

Gauge: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 sts/inch.

The stockinette heel flap was a new thought to me.  Not sure why I never considered doing that before, but I like it.

Have you ever eaten this stuff?  (**Don’t** if you’re allergic to MSG.)  It’s probably one of the most potentially addicting snack foods EVER.  Some friends of ours treated us to a containerful.  They got it at Costco and shared with us.  It’s got pretzels, cheezy things, crunchy melba toast pieces that taste like really yummy croutons, and these little sesame seed sweet things among other flavors.  Your mouth just doesn’t know what to do with all that great snacky goodness.  So, yeah – not a good idea to keep around the house if you’re not real big on the self control and you’re trying to limit salt and carbs.  However, it was a great little treat – or actually kind of a big treat, because these containers are big.  They’re about the size of a yarn cake in diameter – so of course my brain started devising a plot for the empty container.  Suffice it to say, I didn’t have to wait for a great deal of time to try out my idea.  It was empty soon enough.  The lables are stuck on there good though, so I soaked it and soaked it and soaked it – and still it refused to just slide off.  So, I ended up getting out the “Goo Gone” and that sticky label was history in no time.  So, now with a nice clean snack-free container, I drilled a hole in the top with a 1/4-inch spade bit, and voila! yarn storage/dispenser.  I’m not using it to deliver yarn to a project yet (I want to file the hole a little smoother first so it doesn’t abrade my yarn that I pull thru that hole), but it is a nice size to keep the little rounds of KnitPicks andean silk that I’m using for my February Lady Sweater attempt.

The jury is still out (so to speak) on whether this attempt at the Lady Sweater will survive as a project to the finish line.  I can’t decide if I’m knitting the right size or not.  It seems like it’s the right dimensions, but I’ve just started the gull lace part, so it remains to be seen how it blossoms after this section.  If it looks like a keeper, I’ll be putting up progress pics eventually.

Every now and then, I consider subtitling this blog: “Confessions of a Crummy Knitter” – or words to that effect.   So, anyway, I’ve been knitting.  Things come out close to how I envision them, but usually not quite in the same ballpark.  I just keep telling myself it’s a learning process, and even though they come out flawed and full of “oops” moments, I’ve learned that much more from the mistakes.

A friend of mine gave me the most amusing book from 1968, and it’s full of baby and toddler and young children’s sweaters and hats, and of course booties, and a few other fun things, like mittens and hats with animal faces and ears on them.

The pink bonnet is one of the bonnets in the book.  I need to stitch some satin ribbon on it to finish it off.  I goofed up the lace pattern…of course. The textured pattern is called “Quaker stitch” and it’s alternating stockinette and reverse stockinette to make a nice stretchy fabric to accommodate a pretty good range of head sizes.  I like the seed stitch borders.  When I bound the bonnet off along the bottom edge, I used two different bind-offs.  The front sections, I used one that I saw Annie Modesitt demonstrate once which she calls the k2tog bind off.  I like it because it’s such a pretty edge, it looks kind of “crochet’d”.  However, it’s not very stretchy, so for the midback section of the bonnet, I used EZ’s sewn bind off, which is illustrated in her book, “Knitting Without Tears”, for a slightly more stretchy area.

The black socks are just the finished pair I’d been working on previously.  Basic sock “recipe” – and they also have my unique stamp of “oops I forgot I did that” on them – and one heel flap has a 3 ST garter selvedge – and the other does not.  Sigh…

How cute is the ladybug sock????  Yes of course there are boo-boos in it – need you wonder???  I finally got my hands on a copy of the (out of print) book Vogue Knitting on the Go, Socks.  I’m sure I could have improvised this from the Dale of Norway book that has Marihone in it (the Ladybug sweater that still sits waiting for steek cutting and sleeves to be sewn in), but I’m glad I got the book because I knew it had the pattern in it.  I found the book used through Amazon.com.  It smells of ciggy smoke though (ick!) but hopefully that will fade eventually, and I won’t have to resort to putting it into a plastic bag with some charcoal briquets to take that stench away from it.  The book is a small one, and just the right size for a knitting bag.