I'm So Proud

My kitty actually figured out how to sleep in his kitty pi bed instead of on it. You can see that photo in the previous entry. I'm not sure I even need to say anymore.

Misc

Adrianne

I took leftover cotton from Tabitha's kimono and a set of needles to work yesterday to give Adrianne a quick knitting lesson. Turns out her grandmother taught her continental all those years ago (yea!) and she had the second she took the needles in her hand. She took it home to practice last night. I'm excited for her to get started on her kimono.

Lacevember

I joined the lacevember KAL. In hopes that it would inspire me to finish the Swallowtail shawl. I think this shawl is for me and I'm really ready to wear it. Just not ready to finish it. Damn nupps.

Fawn's Kitty Pi Bed

I snapped this picture of kitty sleeping on the kitty pi bed. I put it in his favorite sleeping spot in the closet, so he really has no choice.

Cute Felted Slippers

http://www.stitchdiva.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=SDS-029

I found this link for slippers and they are too cute. I think I may add beads to some of my clogs. I like the look.

That is all.

Finished Objects

I guess I didn't blog much in the months of February and March. We had lots going on and I got a lot of knitting done. Some knitting I did on a cruise.

This is me on the deck of the Elation working on my kool-aid dyed "Autumn Flashes" socks. They are finished now and I need to get pictures of the finished object.

Here are the socks at 20 knots. I worked them both at the same time. I like having a pair when I'm done. Less chance of second sock syndrome.

Here's the Knitty Branching Out scarf branching out to Progresso Mexico.
I travelled 3 times in two weeks after we got back from the cruise. The socks and my Knitty Branching Out scarf went with me.

Here's the scarf on the AA 777 coming back from Chicago. I got to watch TV and knit uninterrupted for over 2 hours. The scarf also travelled to Midland TX and Cleveland OH. It is now finished and I need to take a picture of it blocked.

I finished one pair of Fiber Trends felted clogs (husband's grandmother) and I've made progress on a second pair (mother-in-law). Pictures needed.

Last night I finished chart 3 of the peacock shawl for my Mom. That's 2 days ahead of schedule. My goal is to do a chart a month. Not too big a task, but progress just the same. At this rate I should finish about August, but its the journey right? This has been a journey. I'm learning not to panic, to read my knitting and how to fix my problems. It isn't perfect, but it will be beautiful. I feel like pictures of the shawl now would only disappoint. Lace is kind of ugly when it's born.
I definitely owe more pictures, maybe this weekend. But I've been concentrating on my knitting and that paid off with 3 finished objects in March.

I'll be travelling again at the beginning of next week. I'm off to Orlando. Socks make such a great travelling companion so I'm going to start these lace socks. http://files.blog-city.com/files/aa/3830/b/hollyssocks.pdf with some navy Regia yarn I bought on sale. It's solid with small dashes of color so I'm thinking it will allow the pattern to show through. I may also take the peacock with me for the evenings in the hotel room. Long, quiet periods of knitting, just what the lace ordered.

The Green Sweater is Done

I finished the green sweater about 15 minutes ago. I am so exicted. It's late tonight, but I do plan to put up a picture. I have to say for my first sweater, I am very pleased.

Hallelujah Hats!

Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give Him glory! Rev. 19:6-7

The green sweater is coming along, but this week I took time out to knit a couple of hats. Tuesday at Knit Night, Linda told us JPS in Ft. Worth called because they need hats for their chemo patients. Linda keeps a box by the door at her yarn store Jenning Street Yarns, but right now the box is empty. She asked if we could help.

This my first hat ever! I've already washed it and it did shrink some, but someone out there will be able to wear it. This is the Elann den-m-nit medium blue. I had one skein this color. I have 10 yards left. It makes a nice beanie. I have two more skeins, one of the dark and one natural. I plan to try a couple more beanie patterns until I find one I like. This one is OK.

This cotton candy confection is my second hat. I followed the bernat pattern for their boucle yarn. This pink boucle is part of the Bernat baby line, but when I bought it the color was right for what I was working on. I intentionally put in eyelets so the recipient can weave ribbon through for a little variety. I crocheted a chain of double stranded fun fur as a place holder. I have one more ball of pink boucle the same size as the ball I used on this hat. I plan to make a second hat, but I'm going to make it a little smaller. This hat fits me and I have a big head and thick hair. The chemo hats should be smaller. I'm in hopes this hat will meet someone's need, even if it is on the large side.

They have the prayer shawl ministry (which is fantastic). These are my Hallelujah Hats. I'm following the same philosophy as the prayer shawl ministry in that I'm praying for the recipients as I knit the hat. I don't know who they are, but God does. I'm praying that He brings them joy and peace in this trying time.

I'm going to work on the sweater tonight, but I'll have more Hallelujah Hats soon.

"Be still and know that I am God" - Ps 46:10

More Sock Yarn, Yarn Stores in Tulsa and a Tow Truck

I went home to visit my parents, sister and nieces this weekend and to finally have Christmas. On Saturday my sister and I headed to Tulsa to visit a yarn store or two. The first store we visited was Naturally Needlepoint and Knitting. They were having a sale. 25% off everything in the store and more on some items. I bought more sock yarn.

I think I do that because sock yarn makes socks. You don't have to have a project in mind. The two skeins on the left are Regia. Jeri had the fantastic idea to combine two complimentary sock yarns to make her own pattern. I love how they look so I'm borrowing the idea. The top skein has dashes of color - green and light blue. The bottom skein is multiple colors of brown and blue. I think it will make for an interesting pair of socks. I can't wait to get started but I have to finish a couple of other pairs first.

The other yarn is Wildfoote from Brown Sheep. It's superwash and dyeable (I hope). I like to dye my own sock yarn, but I don't want to have to hand wash the finished product.
I didn't buy anything at Loops in Utica Square, but the store was wonderful. They had small groups of people knitting throughout the store. You didn't feel like you were intruding on just one small group. Everyone was very friendly.

We did hit a small snag finding Loops because we didn't have the exact address. While we were driving around we cut a corner a little short and hit the curb, then we drove over the curb. There was nothing on the other side so the tire was suspended in mid-air. Fortunately the tow truck made it in about 20 minutes and he unstuck the car in about 10 minutes. I had my camera to commemorate the moment.

Once unstuck, Jeannie asked a security guard where the store was. He gave us a personal escort to the store. Loops had a play room for the girls and Jeannie and I got to love on the yarn as long as we wanted.

I would definitely visit both stores again.

Swatcha Doin'

Here's a picture of a few yarns I've swatched recently.

The Den-M-Nit is from Elann. I bought one ball of each color. In the skein and even on screen I like the medium denim color. In person I like the dark denim better.

The upper right corner is a swatch of the blue and green kool-aid dyeing I did last Sunday. I just love how that came out.

The lower right hand swatch is the Autumn Flash colorway. I knit this tiny swatch so I could wash and dry it to make sure the superwash would hold the dye. It turned out fine. I do think I will give the finished socks a swim in vinegar just to be sure the dye is set before I wash and wear them for the first time.

It Rained - Praise the Lord - I Dyed Yarn

We woke up to rain this morning for the first time since Halloween - Praise the Lord. I wanted to dye some yarn and since I was going to have to be inside it was going to have to be short skeins. After church, I put on my dyeing clothes, got out the tape measure, my notebook, kool-aid and yarn and got busy.

The first skein I dyed was an 8ft test skein of knitpicks fingering weight dye your own. I put two chairs 4 feet apart to create a skein that totals 8 feet. The diagram below shows how I put the colors together. Changin' Cherry is a great turquoise color and artic apple is a yellow green.


The colors are great together and pictures in no way do them justice. I would definitely use these colors together again.

I had some kool-aid left over and I also have some knitpicks alpaca cloud in "sunshine" which is sort of cream. I dunked it in three of the colors.

Creating a skein that looks like this.

Here are the colors close up. I intentionally soaked these colors longer for more saturation. I didn't get a chance to knit this up tonight so I don't know how it's going to look. I made a 4ft skein by wrapping the yarn around a two ft ruler. In the picture above the colors are out of order. The lime green color on the right is actually in the middle. It will appear as two short repeats. The turquoise and blue are each one long repeat. I really like the turquoise and blue together, I'm not so sure about the bright limey green. I'm anxious to see how this knits up.

I have in mind to use this stole pattern to create a lace scarf . We'll see how that adaption works.

I should probably also mention the green sweater is coming along. I started the third ball of yarn and I'm nearing the 8" mark. I figure I'm going for 12" or 13". Then I get to start shaping the top.

More Sock Yarn

The last thing I needed was more yarn. However, I was in Addison this afternoon with time on my hands and Desert Design Knits just down the street. They had three big bins of sale yarn and the sock yarns caught my eye. I liked this yarn in particular because of the dashes of color rather than stripes. I don't know how a great deal it was, but I paid $10 for the two skeins.

The Frog Pond

The green sweater is headed to the frog pond. Rather than completely frog it now, I thought I wind the remaining part of skein 2 around the knitted part of the sweater. Then when I get back to it, I will frog it as I knit.
That's the sweater tucked nice and neat inside that ball.

Summer Sweater

I started a cute summer sweater from garnstudio.com. Here's the link to the pattern. http://www.garnstudio.com/lang/en/visoppskrift.php?d_nr=60&d_id=4&lang=us
It's not the best picture because the model is laying on the sweater, but I gathered from the pattern that it was the perfect first sweater for me.

Last summer I came across a sale at PassionKnit in Dallas and bought 7 skeins of Praemium Egyptian gassed mercerized cotton in a lovely pale green color (see 979 below). It was $2.25 per skein and I bought all they had. I've been waiting for the yarn to tell me what it wants to be. When I saw the sweater pattern above, I knew the yarn had spoken.

See how shiny it is!

I started knitting last Monday. I realized today my gauge is slightly off and the sweater is huge. Well the 5" that are done are too big. A big thanks to Jeri for helping me figure out what to do about it. I have to frog what I have, and start over with fewer stitches on smaller needles. It's OK though. I plan to wear this on the cruise in February, but I still have time.
Garnstudio.com also has patterns for den-m-nit yarn. I recently order 3 balls from Elann. I ordered 1 of each color. At the time I just wanted to see what the yarn was like and I knew it was kind of silly to buy single balls because what project can you make with one ball. But now I'm thinking, if I can make this sweater pattern work, I can make a striped version using the three different colors of den-m-nit even if I have to order more balls of yarn and they are they a different lot number, I can mix the lots in the stripes and it will look intentional.

Or I'll make a pillow case for a decorative pillow. That works too. Exciting projects lay ahead.

Flashes of Autumn

Here's a picture of the finished skein and the start of my sock. As you can see from the picture, the autumn colors are pooling together, one on top of the other. I couldn't have done that any better if I'd planned it - which I didn't. But I'm going with it. And because the colors are pooling or flashing together I'm changing the name of this colorway to "Flashes of Autumn."

I like the colors and the variations in the green. It's like real leaves, lots of variation.

I learned several lessons. First, next time I will test the spacing of the colorway before I commit all of the yarn. I'll make a small skein, dye the yarn and knit up the sample to make sure it works the way I want it to. I just bought 2 more skeins of dye your own wool. One entire skein will be set aside for testing colorways. Maybe in the end, the test colorways will be run together to make one colorful sock.

The second lesson - one round on my size sock is a 36" piece of yarn (cast on 60). In this case I should have put at least 30" probably more between autumn colors to ensure they wouldn't flash together. My skein was 20ft. Here's the formula I used.
11" yellow
25" green
11" red
26" green
11" orange
36" green
11" red
26" green
11" yellow
25" green
11" orange
36" green

As you can see the 25" and 26" even up with the 11" to make 36" repeat which lands the colors right on top of each other. For someone with a different size leg this would yield a different pattern. Hmmm - now that's a thought.

Going back to the variation in the green, I got that by adding some yellow to one of the green pots. I also sprinkled the last packet of lime koolaid directly on the yarn and then quickly rinsed it or dipped it back in the dye bath. I really like how that turned out.

Bottom line, I love the colors and I love the way the fawn colored yarn added color depth. I will definitely dye more of this yarn.

Dyeing my Autumn Walk Colorway

To create my striping pattern I needed a 20 foot skein. Fortunately that just means you have to put the chairs 10ft apart. You can't see it in this picture but the tape measure is laid out on the floor for positioning the chairs. After the skein was measured, I used floss to mark the color sections. And you can see, I have my handy dandy notebook to make notes.

I bought way too much orange, yellow and red kool-aid. It only took one packet of each to get to the color depth I wanted. After I was finished with the fall color sections, I dumped the water out and used the same jars for the green. I didn't rinse the jars any tint left went into the green. I figured it would add variety. I was amazed at how quickly the larger yarn sections soaked up the green coloring. I had 13 packets of the green and used it all. The last packet I sprinkled over the yarn in a pan for a dappled effect. We'll see how that works.

Not a very good picture, but this is the yarn in the backyard drying. It's a litte windy outside. I hope it dries in time to take it to knitting tonight. I can't wait to see how this knits up.

As I mentioned, the yarn really soaked up the green color. Look at all those lemon-lime packets. I thought I was going to have to make a run to the store.

It took only an hour for coloring process. I've read several descriptions of the stove top method and it said you had to soak the yarn in the dye for 45 minutes. Mine did not take that long, that could be because of the striping I'm creating.

Now I just have to get the yarn into a ball without it turning into a rats nest. I'll post a picture when that's done.

The Second Pink Sock

I finished the second pink sock yesterday - I didn't need a week after all. Actually I got up this morning and kitchenered the toe. The gauge is a little off from the first sock so it fits a little big. Not a deal killer and the good news is I am working the kinks out my sock process.

I did swatches of the kool-aid on the fawn colored yarn so I'll be ready tomorrow. I'm going with lemon-lime for the main color (green) and lemonade, orange and cherry for the dashes of color. I'm going to call the colorway autumn walk.

Because fawn in the base color the other colors will be deeper fall colors. Not necessarily the popping colors of New England. That is a later project when the knitpicks dye your own comes in.

Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas

Since I won't get to see my sister until mid to late January, here are her Christmas yarns. We did at least wait until Christmas day to tell each other what we got.

This is a squiggle yarn. It reads cool on my screen, but trust me it is red hot.


This is a colorful self-striping yarn with a black fur stripe everyonce in a while. The name on the label is Schulana Incanto.

This is a recycled sari silk yarn. Lots of rich color.

Oooh, this is chinchilla. It's made by Peluche and it is lovely. Looks like a fur when you knit it up. I can't wait to see what my sister does with this.

The next picture was a dyeing experiment we did at knitting last week.

The light green color is knitpicks dye your own fingering weight wool. The dark green is the superwash wool sock yarn base color fawn. The two yarns were put in the same cup of lemon-lime kool-aid for the same amount of time. It was test to see how the base color affected the dyed color. I like the deep richness of over dyeing the fawn color.

I'm off this week and dyeing the fawn sock yarn is definitely on the project list. Since my stripe pattern requires a rather long skein, I'm glad it will be nice outside. There isn't enough space in the house for a 40ft skein. I forgot to take pictures of the entire process last time. I'll remember this time.

In a final bit of good news, the second pink sock is moving at lightning speed. Yesterday I created the heel flap, turned the heel and started the gusset shaping. I'm really thinking it could be done in a week or so. DH got me a green shirt for Christmas that matches the green stripe in the sock. I can't wait to wear them.
Merry Christmas

Teresa's Purse

This is a purse I did for my friend Teresa. It's the hobo bag from the Pursenalities book. I used a single strand of Knitpicks Sierra coal and bud. I tossed in some black fun fur for show. It felted very nicely and created a thick fabric. I love the handle on this purse. I think it looks nice and I don't think it's going to have a stretch problem like some felted straps do.

The brilliant finish is the pin we used for the closure on the side. It adds just the right amount of bling-bling. I know Teresa is going to love this.
A huge thanks to my friend Connie for bling-bling suggestion and for making and sewing in the lining.

I wish the picture did better justice to the purse. You know how that goes.
I'm through with the top part of sock 2 on the pink kool-aid socks. It was a short top so it went fast. I just started on Sunday and I'm ready for the heel flap on Wednesday. That's pretty fast for me.

Pink Sock

Today is the day I will start my blog. And it starts with a single pink sock. I have it done and I think it looks pretty good. I call it my almost Martha Stewart sock. Because we all know she would raise the lamb from birth, sheer the wool herself, spin and dye the yarn. She would whittle the knitting needles from bamboo she grew in her garden...
Well for me, I kool-aid dyed the yarn myself and then knit the sock. I started sock #2 today so as not to suffer from second sock syndrome. This will be my second pair of socks.

This is actually a pretty gutsy shot. My kitchenered toe is right out front for the world to see. And don't worry about that thread on the right side of the picture. I guess that was laying in the floor.