Huzzah for the shopkeep!

I want to knit all of the baby things.  When I search around on Ravelry for projects, I'm drawn to the itty bitty little baby things, and the cute little stuffed animals and dolls.  I'm really into these crochet dolls right now:


They're by lalylala designs and there's a whole series of them.  I'd like to get one of these under my belt before nugget is born so I can hopefully make a whole fleet of them.

Enough of that pie in the sky knitting stuff.  Let's get down to brass tacks.  I made a trip to Shall We Knit? at the beginning of the month to buy yarn for baby soaker pants, knitted pants, and also to support my hexipuff addiction:

Mostly Sirdar Snuggly (with a Wendy Peter Pan thrown in for colour variation) for some baby pants:



 The ol' standby, Cascade 220, for diaper covers:

 

And a little something pretty for me, some Madeline Tosh Light Unicorn Tails for hexipuffs:





























I whipped up my first diaper cover in a couple nights of knitting.  This will be an easy and mindless knit to plug away at.














These are Milo Soakers by Kristen Rengren from Vintage Baby Knits.  They are knit flat and then sewn at the side seams.  Easy peasy, and a very satisfying little knit.  I have enough leftover from this green pair to hopefully combine it with another colour for a striped one.



What do you think, blue and red for one and yellow and green for another?  I'm trying to keep the colour combinations as baby gender neutral as possible.  I chose bright primary colours instead of blah and boring "baby" pastels.  One, because they're more fun for me to knit, and two, because they are meant to soak up "liquid", which we all know is not bottled spring water.  I can only imagine how disgusting a light-coloured pair of these would be after one wearing.  Gross.

I have to hunt around for lanolin to lanolize these puppies.  That will be a fun adventure, I'm sure it will be sticky or greasy too.  I'll bring you along for the ride when I get to that point.

I also made some baby pants.  As of this morning, I bound off that second leg and grafted the crotch hole.  I still need to weave in all the ends from my colour changes and stitch on the monster face.





The red mouth on the bum is soon to be a monster face, with eyes and teeth and everything!  These are Das Monster by Hronn Jonsdottir, to fit a baby who is 9-18 months.  I have no concept of baby sizes, so I will present these to Tam Tam and she can put them on nugget when s/he is the right size for them.

These were a quick knit too, nice and mindless once you got passed the monster mouth.  I totally have enough yarn in each colour to make another one.  A friend of mine from college just announced that she's expecting a baby in August, and I think she would really love these.  She might get a pair too.

Aside from finishing up these projects, I'm getting back in to spinning.  The speaker at the Guild meeting on Tuesday was telling us all about natural dyes for yarn, which she happens to use almost exclusively on her own hand spun yarns.  When she passed around sample of her yarns, it tickled the spinning itch inside me and I immediately went home and dug out my wheel for a little action. 

I haven't touched my wheel in almost two years, ever since we moved and my flyer got knocked against something and a piece of it snapped off.  It was still hanging on by a tread, so I very gingerly clued it back in place this week, and it worked like a charm!  To be extra safe, I also contacted Gemini Fibres (they're north of Toronto, I've seen them many times at the KW Knitters Fair as a vendor) to ask if a replacement piece can be ordered.  My wheel is my mom's, which she purchased in the 80's.  It's an Ashford wheel, but the ones Ashford sells now aren't a perfect match (the closest one looks to be the Ashford Traveller).  I sent a picture of my flyer to the kind folks at Gemini and told them all I know so they can hopefully make a recommendation. 

In the meantime, I spun some yarn yesterday!  I took a 50g hank of roving that I bought on a knitting field trip years ago and finally turned it into something.

I spun it, plied it, niddy noddy'ed it, washed it, and hung it to dry (weighted down by a Star Wars coffee mug). 



Isn't it pretty!?!?



I think this may get turned into some delicate and pretty fingerless mitts for Tam Tam.  She loves pink more than life itself.

And also while I was at the Guild meeting, I borrowed a book for my next project.  Doesn't everyone need a knitted cat?  Spoiler: these may or may not be your Christmas gift from me.



Did you know yesterday was Pi Day?  I made butter tarts to celebrate.  You better hurry up and ask for one, they're getting all cold and eaten.

Sections of couch everywhere!

I think a Wednesday blog deadline might be a bit of a stretch for me, readers.  I definitely finished my required knitting for the week yesterday, but fitting in the blog time didn't quite happen this week, and it didn't happen last week.  I'll aim for Wednesday, but I think I'm more likely to set aside time on Thursday night.  Either way, here's what I've been working on this week:

The sock has another 7 rows on it, and I'm still not even at the end of the ribbing.  The ribbing calls for 1.5" and I'm about a week away from moving beyond the k3 p1.  A handy thing about Week 2 is that the blue-er blue worked out to be exactly 7 rows, which made it super easy for counting my rows.  The grey-blue continues on for a bit more, so it won't be an easy marker for Week 3 unfortunately.

Last week, I also introduced my Home Alone hat idea.  I was struggling to find a pattern that I could rework to fit my needs, and no chart seemed to exist to make Kevin McAllister's signature moose hat.  The best I got on Ravelry was this:






Moose Camouflage Hat

It had the trees along the crown, and the repeating moose pattern, but it wasn't close enough in my opinion. 

So I did what any dedicated Home Alone fan would do, and I made my own chart in Excel.  Fun fact: knitting stitch height and width ratios can be recreated in Excel by setting the column width to 1.67 and the row height to 13.2.  I did this, and then got to work with the best picture of the hat I could find, which showed very clear stitch definition:

Once I had one moose sketched out on the chart, it was easy!  One chart repeat is 24 stitches across from nose to tail, and the diamonds and trees work out nicely.  Just now, as I was typing that last sentence, I realized I goofed on the pine trees in my chart.  It appears that they are in two different styles - one branchy bare tree style, and one solid filled-in tree style.  Shoot. 




Problem solved, I just went back in and fixed it.  But I also realized I can't add a pdf file to my blog post, so my plan to share the chart is not going to happen right now.  I'll get back to you about that.

In other moose hat news, I also need to figure out the rest of the hat pattern so I can actually make it.  I figure the hat circumference would be six moose around, for a total of 144 stitches.  With a head circumference of roughly 23", that means I need a yarn that gives me 6 stitches per inch.  I'm thinking something DK for this one.  Worsted just seems like it would be too bulky and thick for the hat. 

I made a quick swatch in some worsted yarn I had lying around, and it confirmed my suspicions; I want a denser, tighter looking fabric, but with finer stitches.  Make sense?  My swatch was also done flat, so I had to do my colourwork on the purl side.  BALLS.  My first swatch was mostly to confirm that my knitters' graph paper dimensions in Excel were right, and that my moose wouldn't look too squat or stretched out.  The moose look perfectly in-proportion, they just need to be done in the round so I can get a sense of what they will really look like, and so I can do it in the right weight of yarn.  All in good time, lovelies.  I'm in no rush to get this project off the ground, because I have bigger fish to fry right now.

And here are my bigger fish:

This is my progress on the Nordic Mittens I mentioned last week.  I'm on a knitting roll and I threw this right mitten together in a few nights.  The Swish DK was a really nice choice for these.  It's soft and smooth, but completely machine washable, and these are a gift for a non-knitter so that's a definite must.  The left mitten is on my knitting to-do list this weekend so I can present them to my student on Monday when she's back at work.

It's a nice colourwork pattern, my only complaint is that there are some sections with longer floats between colours, and I would prefer a nice neat every 3 or 4 stitches goings back and forth between two colours.  I suppose this challenges me though, so you've won this round Nordic Mittens.

I also received a box full of yarn from Knit Picks last week, and I had every intention of taking pictures of all of my purchases to show you, but then my basement flooded and all my craft stuff had to be emergency evacuated into the laundry room.  The basement is fine, the most annoying thing is that we had to tear up our laminate flooring (which was just put down in September, but can be used again because we acted quickly to get it up off the floor), and all of our basement stuff is currently relocated around the house and it's going to be crowded and overwhelming at my house for a while.  We probably won't put the basement back together until all the snow is gone outside, just to make sure that the fixes for the cracks worked.  In the meantime, here is the gist of what I bought, with pictures courtesy of Knit Picks.

Palette fingering yarn in Cream and Hollyberry for my reindeer legwarmers:




Palette yarn in White, Ice Lily, Mulberry, Hare Heather, and Grizzly Heather for Slim Jim's polar bear hat:







And Wool of the Andes worsted for my lined nordic mittens in Garnet Heather, Gosling, and Pumice Heather:


























Feast your eyes on my yarns, and I'll catch you up next week with my progress.

Onward,

vrock

Winter holiday decor is a let down

Week one has already come, and while I'm technically a day late (shhh, don't tell anyone), here's my update on the One Row at a Time socks for 2014:

That's 7 little rows, reader.  Seven adorable little rows, each knit (more or less) on each of seven different days.  I mostly kept to the one row per day part of the agreement, although there was one day where I had to catch up on 3 rows.  It's not a perfect system, and I think nailing myself down to sitting down and doing exactly one row per day is unrealistic, and just setting myself up for failure.  I'm happy with the Wednesday deadline, and I'll keep letting you know how it goes.  Okay?  Deal.

In other knitting news, I started and finished a whole project in just a few days.  I made an entire fingerless mitt, Beer Gloves by Kurt Fausset, featured in Son of Stitch 'n Bitch, in one afternoon/evening (read about it here), and then I cranked out its partner a short while later, also in one afternoon/evening.  And while the first post about these mitts had my girlish red-nailed hand modeling the man mitts, here they are on a genuine, bonafide man:

So rugged and manly.

I don't know how many of you received Christmas money as youngster (or if you still do, as an oldster), but that was never a thing in my house.  I had two great-aunts who would each send $10-20 every Christmas from England (and sometimes they couldn't be bothered to get Canadian dollars, so I got pounds), but that was it, and it was hardly something to write home about (although I always wrote a hand-written and thoughtful thank you note, because my Momma raised me right).  Once I joined Fuzzyhead's family and started making regular appearances at his family Christmas gatherings, I was brought into the inner circle and I started receiving Christmas money from his grandparents, just like he did.  It's weird and different.  I've read/heard that even after all the thoughtful people in the world put great care into choosing a gift that you would love and appreciate, receiving cash is still the number one gift choice of recipients everywhere.  Isn't that sad?  Well, the point of the story is that I received Christmas money this year, and it came in the form of a MasterCard gift card.  I had $100 dollars burning a hole in my wallet, and since it was in credit card form, it was only natural that I do a little online shopping.

I've been queuing colourwork projects like the dickens since just before Christmas, when I watched Home Alone (as part of our annual holiday tradition of watching all the best Christmas movies, obviously) and was hit with a sudden NEED to knit Kevin's moose hat:

I went searching high and low on Ravelry for a pattern, and one doesn't seem to exist (I'll tell you more about that next week).  But while I was there, I found a bunch of other colourwork things I want to make:



Mitten with Nordic Pattern



Polar Bear Chullo



Northman Mittens



Reindeer Socks



Anders

And there's even more in my favourites list, this is just what I actually plan to make in the near future.  So I merrily logged on to KnitPicks and bought myself a bunch of yarn for colourwork projects, and it just arrived this week!

There's nothing like getting a package in the mail.  It's like baby Christmas.  I ordered a bunch of similar colours, and it took me longer than it should have to sort them out from each other for the projects they will one day become.  Sitting on top of the pile are a few balls of Swish DK for the Mitten with Nordic Pattern.  These will be for one of my co-op students from work.  She's only working with us for one more semester, so I've given myself a March 1st deadline to get them done.  The rest of the box can remain a mystery to you until next week, it's good for you.  Delayed gratification is the definition of maturity.

Onward,

vrock

A worthy post after months of no action - Rhinebeck 2013!

Hello readers!  Before you even say anything, I'll explain myself.  I went through a bout of no knitting this summer, where not only did I not write any blog posts, but I also did not do any knitting.  I bought a house with Fuzzyhead in June and all of my efforts went to doing all the little things with the house (for your own amusement, you can follow my house adventures at joeyandjanicebuyahouse.wordpress.com).  Now that we're settled in, I think it's about time for me to get back to knitting, and writing about it.

We begin with my most recent knitting excursion to Rhinebeck.  You may recall that Catherine and I went last year for the first time, and we were gung ho about going again.  We went with the same bus group, a bunch of ladies from Georgetown who organize the trip each year.  We were fully prepared for the bus of cackling hens syndrome again, and I think it really helped to know that was coming in advance.  I brought my ipod and I think I chiseled away about more than 12 hours worth of podcasts on the trip.  Let's start the recap!

Here we are, shortly after 8am as the bus is rolling out of the parking lot to begin our journey to Rhinebeck.  As someone who doesn't live in Georgetown, this meant I was up at 5:30 in order to walk a dog and get ready to leave and then drive to Georgetown to meet the group.  The lack of sleep didn't catch up to me until later that afternoon, around the time when I was getting mildly bus sick from the combination of jerky stopping and starting and what I later found out was a vanilla air freshener.

At about 10am, we arrived at ye olde duty free.  They are a well-oiled machine at duty free, since they get so many bus loads of cackling hens arriving each day to load up on booze and designer fragrances, so a kind young lady from the duty free hops on the bus to give us the low-down on the process.  She also handed out two $10 gift certificates, to force us to spend money, and Catherine won!  As soon as it was in her hand, we started chanting "candy! candy!" and the other gals on the bus laughed at us.  Who's laughing now, ladies?  We scored two GIANT Reese's peanut butter bars for $6, with money left over for jelly beans.  Super score.

Our border crossing experience was the exact opposite of what happened last year - this year we were really delayed in crossing to the states, but breezed through the border stop on the way home.  Here we are crossing over to Buffalo, before we even got to the hour long wait in the parking lot before the let us come inside and flash our passports.

In knitting news, this is what I was working on on the bus.  The pattern is Rivercat from Knitty and this is yarn that I bought last year at Rhinebeck.  It's from Cephalopod Yarns, Skinny Bugga in Green Darner Dragonfly.  This is where I was at the start of the trip, and within the last hour of traveling back, I was grafting the toe.  I started the pattern a few days ahead of leaving for Rhinebeck so I wouldn't be figuring out the tricky little parts of the pattern while on a jiggling bus.

We arrived to Poughkeepsie in one piece and ditched the rest of the group at the Olive Garden to run across the street to Chili's.  We were in bed early, and up at the crack of early to get ready for the fair.  Here we are on the bus on Saturday morning, excited for yarns!

I made a list of what I needed to buy on Friday night in the hotel.  I had specific projects in mind, and I jotted down the basic requirements for yardage and yarn weight:

Norie Hat - 260 yards, DK weight


Rockefeller Shawl - 450 yards colour A, 505 yards colour B, light fingering weight


Larch Cardigan - 1580-1720 yards, Sport weight


Hemlock Ring Blanket - 600 yards, worsted weight


And I was open to the idea of picking up yarn for a baby project for a coworker, and I wanted to pick up some yarn for Tyler, who just started knitting earlier this year.  His only request was "red", so that left it open for fun interpretations.
 

Blurry, but it`s the entrance to the fairgrounds - Dutchess County Fairgrounds, home of the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival!

The line-up.  This is mostly to show the scale of the event - when I tell people I went to a knitting festival, they don't really get that it's a big deal, with THOUSANDS of people.  It was way more crowded on the Saturday than last year, and I'm not sure what made the difference.  A lot of the vendors were the same, the weather was equally nice, so....?

Waiting in line to get our chance to squeeze all the yarny goodness.

We took a different approach to shopping this year; we weren't just going to browse all day on Saturday and miss out on getting the yarns we wanted.  Last year, our "take notes first, and buy later" philosophy meant some of our choices were sold out before we got back on Sunday with money.  This year's plan was to hit up the popular booths first and make impulsive purchases so we wouldn't regret it later.  First up, Miss Babs.

As soon as we were inside the gate, we did a hop, skip, and a jump through the leaf piles and booted it up to Building C to visit Miss Babs.  Last year they were crazy busy all weekend, and I never ended up buying anything from them.  This year I wanted to get something, and I was open to what that would be. I decided on getting the worsted weight yarn for Hemlock, and I picked up four skeins of Heartland Worsted in "Fieldmouse".  The line-up to pay was stretching outside the building, and one could describe her booth as CRAZY.  We waited in line for one hour and five minutes.  No joke.

I was almost more excited about the food options than I was about the yarn.  We chose this cute little food truck for lunch on Saturday.  They make flamms, which are like pizzas, but super duper thin.  I chose the Traditional, which had spiced creme, red onion, scallions, bacon, and some other kind of cheese.

It was so delicious, I can't even tell you.  The only thing I didn't love was the charred edge bits and the amount of flour that they had to use to get the flamms to slide in and out of the oven easily.  Catherine described it as eating an ashtray after a while, and because of it she didn't finish all of hers.

We did more wandering and shopping in the afternoon, and we also hit up the other very popular booth of the weekend, Cephalopod Yarns.  They had a pretty big line-up last year, and by the time we got there, there wasn't much selection.  This year, we were ahead of the game, and we went there with guns a-blazin'.  I picked up a skein of the DK weight in "Arkham" for my Norie hat.

After the two big names were out of the way, we wandered around and took in the sites.  I wish that I could have bought a $10 bunny:

But I'm pretty sure I couldn't get over the border with one, plus it didn't look like they had anything for you to carry it around in.  Too bad.

One of our major afternoon stops was at The Fold and Blue Moon Fiber Arts, which is where I bought the yarn for the lovely sweater I wore on Saturday.  They carry Socks that Rock, and I remembered their booth fondly from last year.  From them I picked up a skein of mill ends heavyweight sock yarn for some winter socks for Fuzzyhead, and the yarn for my Rockefeller shawl in the form of mini skeins of Socks that Rock in "Sabertooth Caterpillar" and "Cozy Fierce and Dirty Orange".

By 4:00, we were tuckered out, and we spent the last hour or so sitting on a grassy and leafy hill, resting our tired little tootsies.

  Back at the hotel, I documented my scores from the day, on my hotel bed, in poor lighting:

That's Heartland in the back, my Socks that Rock for Rockefeller in the middle-right, Socks that Rock for Fuzzyhead's heavy winter socks on the left, and Cephalopod DK up front.

Sunday went by a lot faster, and we were mostly concerned with doing our quick final shopping and getting back to the bus, with food in our bellies, by 11:30.  We went back to all of our "saw it yesterday and kept thinking about it" booths, and Catherine picked up a few more things.  I only needed to grab Tyler's red yarn and a mini skein of white sock yarn from Miss Babs for an upcoming project.  I went up to Miss Babs first thing in the morning, and the giant line was already starting, so I almost dismissed the idea of getting the mini skein.  I left it for the time being, and I went to another booth and got two skeins of Shepherd's Wool in a nice bright red for Tyler.

I still had some US cash burning a hole in my wallet, and I really didn't want to have to exchange it back to Canadian.  And what's the one thing everyone needs more of?  Sock yarn!  I went to TuckerWoods and got a skein of Rory's Toes, which is their tweed sock yarn.

We petted a few sheep and walked through a few more buildings to make sure we weren't missing something fantastic, and then made a break for lunch.  While Catherine was still finishing lunch, I zipped back up to Miss Babs, hoping that the line wouldn't be too big to mess up my timing to get back on the bus.  I saw some other people from my group, so I figured at the very least, we would all be late, and I picked up one last skein.

We were back on the bus in plenty of time, and I got some solid knitting done on the drive home.  We made record time on the way back, mostly due to the fact that we only stopped once before the border (and there was a Starbucks, hallelujah!), and we were through the border control stop in less than 10 minutes.  We arrived back in Georgetown at 9pm, and loaded up our bags for the drive home.

And now, the final yarn round-up:

I've still been taking pictures of all of my knits and yarn purchases, so I'll work on putting together some catch-up posts of everything I've been knitting.  You can look forward to that, and now it's lunch time.

Onward,

vrock