Knitting for new arrivals

I don't knit as many baby blankets as I used to, as many of my friends and family have completed their families and now need hats and sweaters rather than blankets for newborns.  But I am always in search of an interesting knitting pattern for babies, particularly ones that look much harder than they are.

My cousin J had a baby on February 11.  L is her third son (she has 5-year-old fraternal twins) and bless his little heart, he stayed put until almost his due date, giving his cousin the knitter enough time to get his new blanket done just after he arrived.  Those were some dark days, though, right around his birth, where I was committed to knitting 10 rows a night in order to be able to meet my own self-imposed deadline to send out his blanket via post to Chicago.  I pondered calling in sick, but then we had a huge blizzard (Feb 8-9) so I had plenty of time to work on it while I watched meteorologists and television news reporters scurry about, looking for yard sticks long enough to measure the snow that arrived.  (It was about 27" where I live.)

The pattern is Knit Teddy Bear by Barbara Breiter, which I found for free on the web and really liked.  The pattern comes with a teddy bear chart, but I have found it easier to write out the pattern by row rather than count, lose my place, recount the chart, recount my stitches, lose my place, count again, lose my place again, give up and pour myself a glass of wine and watch Mad Men instead.  A good friend of mine, a much more expert knitter, double-checked my counts and I was good to go:

Now, the yarn for this is Merino 5 by Crystal Palace Yarns and calls for 5 skeins of 2 colors held together, for a total of 10 skeins.  The best price I found on it was $7.90 a skein, so the blanket was looking to run me about.....$79.  Before tax & shipping on the yarn, and shipping to send the blanket to the baby.  I would be better off writing him a check for $100 for college at that point and making myself something nice.  Still, third baby and I didn't want him to be treated any differently than his older brothers, and I did love the pattern, so I went to my favorite local yarn shop with the pattern & asked for some advice. I was steered towards some Plymouth Encore DK yarn, which retails for $5.99.  Already I was liking this better.  Based on the weight, they were recommending a single strand for knitting, rather than doubling up. Things were looking up even more.  And when they said I would need 4 skeins as opposed to 10 because of the yardage difference, I had my credit card out so fast it would have made your head spin.  I am really pleased with the way it came out, and would make it again.  It's nice to have a blanket over my knees while knitting in January & February.  I am less inclined to knit baby blankets in the summer; it is just too hot.

The other thing that I love is that I'm getting much faster at knitting patterned baby blankets.  It used to be that as soon as I found out someone was having a baby I had to start the blanket, in a gender-neutral color, if I had any hope of being done when the baby was born.  Whipped this one off the needles in about 6 weeks, a new record.  It is just knit and purl, though, which helps.  A lot.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

It occured to me the other day that I don't really talk about the process of starting a project.  Most of my yarn comes in skein form:

Pre-sock

This is the best kind because it means I can pull from the center of the ball, find the end, and begin my project.  Some people prefer to wind their yarn in a ball, but I'm really against doing extra work.  Sometimes, the yarn comes twisted together, like this:

Mmm, Madeline Tosh sock yarn - the BMW of sock yarns

I see this most often with hand-dyed and hand-painted yarns.  The downside of this is that sometimes while storing it, you end up with this:



Sock yarn purchased in 2011 in Watkins Glen, NY - beautiful, but oh, what a mess

I love hand-dyed and hand-painted yarns, but in order to use it properly, you must wind it into a ball.  I've accomplished this at home by asking my beloved husband to hold his arms up like football uprights while I drape the yarn around both arms, find the end, and begin rolling the ball.  This is tedious for everyone involved.  Particularly him, who often gets stuck figuring out where the jam is on the yarn and wiggling his arms around to help straighten out the jam.  He does this out of a deep & abiding sense of love, since it is so boring.  (Even I hate it, and I love yarn.)

So for Christmas, I decided to give us both a gift and ask for a yarn swift:

Instead of Himself being trapped on the couch for half an hour (or more), I can set this one to fit whatever skein of yarn I want to roll into a ball and leave him out of it completely.  Plus, it's a new knitting toy so it hasn't lost its attractiveness to me yet so I now find winding yarn fun.  Go figure.

He also bought me Vogue Knitting, a book on techniques, terminology & all things knitting.  It's ten years old but is considered The Bible of knitting by serious knitters.  Also, it's the only thing with "Vogue" in the title that will be found in our house, ever.

Birthday Socks

January & February are big birthday months on my calendar - almost every day for both months I know someone who is having a birthday.  Sometimes I know more than one person on a particular day.  Very few people get birthday socks, however.  That's because I am so fried from Christmas and because Facebook makes it easy for me to zip off a quick post and call it done.  I had three pairs go out in the first 34 days of 2013 - a pair of socks for my mother (Jan. 2), my toddler cousin M (Jan. 4) and M's big sister A (Feb 3.)  That's a lot of socks in a short time span.  Of course, I only remembered to photograph my mother's:

Accurate color of the socks, but no visible pattern

Hello, Vorticity!

This is the Vorticity pattern that I have used on my own socks & the pair I did for my MIL for her birthday back in November.  The original book pattern uses a darker colorway for the socks than I had previously used, and is very simliar to the yarn I chose for this (Regia Blitz Color - gray) so I was happy to see that the pattern still shows well.  Of course the Sock Mon....I mean, Mom, loves the socks.  She keeps raving about how warm they are.  Which they are, but that's the yarn, not the pattern.  My pair is made out of a bamboo/rayon blend, and they are as cool and breezy as a fan blowing on your feet.  Not really, but that paints a nice picture, doesn't it?

Currently on the needles are socks for Goddaughter E's birthday, March 21.  I picked a Lorna's Laces hand-dyed yarn in Girly Stripe, which I though would make thicker bands of color, but instead does alternating pink and purple stripes by row:

I am using Classic Socks for the Family as the pattern, which is what I use for all the childrens' socks I make.  I like variegated yarns (as do the kids - "Look ma, wild socks!") so I don't put the effort in of following a chart for a sock pattern because they are going to outgrow whatever I make them anyway.  I do hope the socks are being saved somewhere, or handed down to another family, because it would kill me to think they were just being tossed when they didn't fit.  (If anyone is doing that, stop it.  You're killing me.)

Can I just tell you how much my wrists ache these days?  And how sick I am of socks?  And yet there are more to come.  I am going to switch everyone over to woven throws.  Bet that will be real popular with the kids.

Holiday 2013 Roundup

Apparently I've been doing more crafting than blogging for the last couple of months.  I finished a slew of projects in the days leading up to Christmas.  A couple of children's hats:

Mmm, cupcakes

This hat looks better on a small person. 

These hats were for two of my favorite children, Super G and Marvelous M. Sadly, the designated hats did not fit their intended recipients, but their mother is not rigid in her observation of colors for genders, so she put the cupcake hat on her son and the Viking hat on her daughter.  Both children immediately yanked them off.  But in their defense, we were inside at the time.  And they're toddlers.

I also wove a scarf for my mother for Christmas:

My mother has been referring to it as a "neck warmer" because it is apparently shorter than she would like.  She also mentioned that she'd like a throw for the couch made from the same yarn next year.  I don't have the heart to tell her what the yarn for the "neck warmer" cost, but suffice to say I'll be using a base color purchased in 1 pound bulk from Michael's or Joann Fabrics for that throw.

Dad got a hat:

I feel guilty because my father's never gotten anything hand-knit from me - by the time his birthday rolls around in May I'm burned out from the holidays & late winter birthdays and all I want to do is knit stuff for myself.  Plus, he's not a scarf or sweater guy (just like my husband) and who wants a knit item for a May birthday?  (Besides my mother, the Sock Monster.)  I had started this hat last year but never finished it.  He was very pleased with the hat - he apparently needed a new one.  I figured he would wear it out around the yard, shoveling the driveway, etc., but he's been wearing it out everywhere, according to mom.  And now my guilt is lessened.  J has the same hat style, in gray.  He got his last year.

Goddaughter E got some socks:

I love the colors, but I am sad I had to adjust the sizing from child's large to a modified ladies' small when I knit this pair.  Stop growing up, damn it!  Only 8 more years until college.  Her mother shrieks when I mention that.

And once again, J got the shaft on the handknit gifts and received....nothing.  Which is worse than last year, when he got one sock for his birthday.  I intended to knit him a new pair of socks - I even special ordered two yarns I felt would match nicely to the 12,432 pairs of khakis in shades of green-grey that currently populate his section of the closet.  He's been muttering that he would like socks that coordinated better than tan or black and he's still muttering.  The road to hell, good intentions and all that.  Ah well, our anniversary is coming up in April.

A quick project for me

I usually start holiday gifts in August and focus solely on those until I finish - or not; last year Himself got one hand-knit sock for his birthday in early January because the mate was still on the needles when his big day arrived.

This year, because I have suffered from cold hands at work the last two years, I decided to take a quick time-out to make myself a pair of fingerless gloves:

The pattern is Woven Fingerless Gloves by Laura Eckel, from the book One Skein Sock Yarn Wonders, edited by Judith Durant, that I borrowed from the library.  (I like to see if a pattern book has multiple patterns I would make before I invest money in it.  This was the first project I attempted from the book, and it came out great.)

I found this beautiful blue-green yarn at my favorite local yarn shop - it's from Birch Hill Studios, a little-known yarn-dyeing studio in Mason, NH whose owner works part-time at the yarn shop I frequent.  (And who attempted to - unsuccessfully - teach me crochet.) So you can imagine my delight when I found out that I could show my finished product to the very person who selected the color scheme.  We had a discussion about how she needed to dye more yarn and get it into the shop, to which I agreed wholeheartedly.  The yarn is sock yarn, and I love how they came out.  They're soft with beautifully blended colors.

Even though my office building has the furnace running, I've been wearing them regularly at work because I like them so much.  I especially like that I was able to squeeze them into an otherwise crowded knitting season focused solely on other people.

Yet another hobby

So really, what I didn't need was another crafting hobby.  In the past year I've picked up card making, tried crochet (epic failure) and set a goal for myself of making decorations for upcoming holidays.  (Sometimes this is successful, usually it's a giant miss.)  I also sew, garden, write two blogs (kind of) volunteer 15+ hours a week, cook and work 60+ hours a week (including commuting time.)  So, you know, I don't really need new hobbies.

But I have one:

That, my friends, is a knitter's loom.  I took a class at the end of October that ran two weeks and included the "loan" of the loom, which meant at the end of class I bought one, and the stand, so I could keep on weaving. 

My first project was a scarf with scrap yarn (which came out pretty good, if I do say so myself) and the second project was a baby blanket for a friend who's just had her first child and is now living in Canada in an area where it starts snowing in October.  That came out really good:

Unlike crochet, which I have no talent for nor any urge to practice, weaving is much faster, easier and produces a beautiful project.  A knit blanket like the one above would have taken me 2-3 months, with weaving it was just 2 weeks (of half-attentive effort; I was out a lot at meetings during those 2 weeks.)  I could probably weave a whole blanket in a weekend.  The possibilities are endless.

I am practicing my weaving using some of my stash yarn - up next are placemats for Valentine's Day using some fuschia, white & red yarn from my stash so I can practice hem stitching and Spanish lace weaving.  Sounds very fancy, doesn't it?

Halloween

So now that Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I finally get around to posting photos of how I decorate my house for Halloween,

Dining room

Nana's chandelier - so happy she pitched the crystals that needed dusting!

Mmm, wine

Who's reaching through the shower curtain?

Kitchen looking onto porch

Front of house on Halloween night - the skeleton is new

Dining room into kitchen

Bathroom bats - made from a Martha Stewart pattern

Mice - also from Martha Stewart w/ construction paper

I have only made a few of my Halloween decorations in the past - I have a mummy hand from a few years ago, some runners I quickly hem stitched and threw out over tables, and this year's paper bats and mice.  The mice were a huge hit with the friends & family who passed through the house during my favorite holiday. Best of all, everything is reusable.  Even if it does take more than an entire day to set up.