Category: Blog

I have two more skeins of yarn to add to the sock yarn stash. One was a straggler that I forgot I had (first picture), because it’s kept with the lace stash since that’s the intended project, and one I got in the mail today as a free gift with a purchase of other yarn (the red one in the second picture).
I bought a sport weight merino yarn from The Periwinkle Sheep last week. The color is called “Avocado” and I plan to use it for a Citron shawl. Through the end of January, the seller is giving away free skeins of sock yarn with any purchase, so I thought I would take the opportunity to buy the yarn I wanted so I could get free yarn.
She chooses the color of the free yarn she sends, so it was a happy surprise to find this lovely skein of soft red sock yarn snuggled next to my avocado. I think it will become a lace shawl as well (too pretty to put on my feet) but just have to find the right pattern.
This skein of yarn will become a Pretty Thing. The yarn is Imagination from Knitpicks, and is a beautiful alpaca. I have a thing against putting alpaca on my feet, because it’s just too precious for my budget to rationalize making into socks. So this little skein of “Looking Glass” (Alice in Wonderland is one of my favorite books ever) will become a lovely little pretty thing.

So now I have 619 yards to add to the sock yarn stash total, and so far, no yardage to subtract. ::Sigh::

This picture displays my entire sock yarn stash. Now, it may not look like a lot of yarn, but yardage-wise, it’s quite a bit. And considering each color is one pair (or more, since I have small feet), that’s quite a few socks. The nice thing about my goal of using up all of this is that I will turn sock yarn stash into just sock stash.

Actually, I forgot to mention that the six already-wound red skeins at the bottom of the picture are going to become a Pi Shawl (by Elizabeth Zimmerman), which is also my Ravelympics project during the Winter Olympics. So, that will make a bunch of socks and a round shawl.

I tallied it all up, and the yardage of the sock yarn stash comes out to 5628 yards or 3.2 miles. Not a lot for a person who used up 39,820 yards/22.6 miles of yarn for 2009 and 122 complete skeins of yarn. But I have yet to cast on for a single sock, and it’s nearing the end of January.

Yesterday was my 3 year blogiversary, and like last year, I missed it again. Oh well…so I’ve been doing this blog for 3 years. Yay! I was hoping to have a new pattern ready by this milestone, but alas, January has been just as busy as December as far as projects go. I did, however, take some time to go to my LYS, Tempe Yarn and Fiber, for the first time in probably a year or more. I was there for 2 hours just looking at all the new and different yarns, and trying to decide what to buy within my preset budget (I still ended up going a little bit over, but only by $5; now that’s self-control). I had three specific projects in mind when I went, so I wouldn’t be tempted to mindlessly buy as much yarn as possible. Although hard to resist, I only came home with enough yarn for the three projects I had in mind.

My other purpose for going to the yarn store was so I could knit on the World-Record-Setting “Big Sock” that is traveling around the globe being knit on by knitters everywhere. Back in 2006 this sock was started, and when it left Arizona last week, the “leg” of the sock had an additional 19 inches added to it! I got an opportunity to knit on the Big Sock for about half an hour while I was in the store on the second to last day it was there. It felt great to add my stitches to a project of this magnitude. You can see the journey that the “Big Sock” took at Tempe Yarn and Fiber at their blog here.

So in honor of the New Year and my blogivesary, and inspired by the “Big Sock,” I’ve decided that my goal this year will be to use up my entire sock yarn stash. Now granted, this is probably my smallest stash within my yarn stash, but I wanted to set an attainable goal, and also have a bunch of socks when I’m done.

This is the last post of the year, so I thought I would post about the last minute gift I made at, well, the last minute. No matter how well I plan, I always end up making at least one gift at the last minute, usually in the week before Christmas, so of course this year wasn’t any different. I needed a warm touch to go along with a bag of coffee I was giving to my co-worker, so a mug cozy was the perfect idea.
Using less than 100 yards of some leftover red multi-colored-speckled yarn and a size H crochet hook, I made this little thing in about an hour, including time to sew on the button. I did ten half-double crochets across to fit the height of the mug I was working with and then did as many rows as needed to cover the circumference of the cup. When I got to the handle, I centered four half-doubles in the middle and created a small, adjustable button band with three button holes. Viola! A quick and easy gift.

More posts to come about other things I made for Christmas.

Guess what Santa brought me for Christmas this year? A yarn swift!!! I’m so excited, and I can’t wait to use it with the ball winder I got two Christmases ago; it will definitely come in handy cause I have a bunch of yarn in hanks that need to be wound and the “over the knee” method is getting old. Yay for parents who shop from wishlists!

Merry Christmas everyone!

No, I haven’t been bitten by any vampires lately. Just the Bella’s Mitten bug.
It would be an understatement to say that I am in love with this pattern; it’s beyond that–I’m absolutely SMITTEN with these mittens. I had forgotten that I wanted to make a pair of these when I first saw someone had written up a pattern for the mittens Bella Swan (actor Kristen Stewart) wears in the movie “Twilight.” After going to a special double-feature of “Twilight” and “New Moon” the night the second one opened, I came out of the theater as a woman on a mission to get herself a pair of these dang cute mittens. I mean, how could I survive this absolutely frigid Arizona winter coldspell we’ve been having without a pair of these (that would be a high of 57 and a low of 35…frigid, I tell you, frigid).

Alas, since I’ve started furiously knitting this pattern, I have yet to make a pair for myself. But I’m okay with that because the pairs I am making are going to worthy recipients. The first pair were a birthday gift, which I converted to fingerless gloves, since my friend works in an office and has been able to get much use out of them while still being able to perform her job. The second pair, which remained full mittens, are in the possession of my sister. I’ll have to wrangle them back from her in order to get a picture. And I have to make three more pairs before I make a pair for myself. Actually, make that two for myself because I’m doing a version of mittens and a version of fingerless.
I don’t know what it is about the horseshoe cable, but I’m just smitten over it, probably because it just makes me feel so clever. Most of the time working stitches out of order can be problematic, but in the case of cables, beautiful, and in the case of horseshoe cable, which has two mirrored cables back-to-back, brilliant.

Ah, I love when knitting makes me feel clever.

Today, December 10th, is my sister Heather’s 22nd birthday. And today, my family celebrates alone because our precious Heather is in heaven. I don’t know what to do today without her here, so I thought I would just post something about her.
I’m wearing a scarf right now that Heather knit for me several Christmases ago. I remember opening a shirt box to find a grey hoodie shirt and a pink striped scarf inside. I was surprised to see this particular scarf in my box, because I had seen her knitting it, and she had told me she was making it for my other sister. All along she had intended it for me, and I had no idea. It always reminds me of the Cheshire Cat from “Alice in Wonderland,” one of my favorite books ever.

After that Christmas, I have worn the shirt and scarf together always. It was a simple gift, but one I have always cherished, even more so now that she is gone. I’m a fairly simple person who is easily pleased with small gifts and attentions, so having Heather knit me a scarf is more memorable than some of the other gifts she spent more money on. Being a knitter myself, I know the time and attention that goes into making even the smallest items, and I always loved it when Heather would give me her scarves that she had knit.

Heather was an erratic knitter–not that she wasn’t good at knitting, quite the opposite. No, it was when she knit that was erratic. She would get a wild hair and buy a bunch of yarn and knit like mad for a time. And then she would just stop. But whenever she did knit, she had such a way of making the most complicated patterns. I learned to knit a couple years after her, and when I realized how intricate it was to make things she thought of as “simple” blew me away. I wished she would have spent more time knitting more, but perhaps that is what makes the few items I have from her even more special.

I love you, my sweet sister Heather. Happy Birthday.

I’m really in love with mittens right now, and I am going to be making a bunch over the next month. The first finished pair to show is my lovely Selbuvotter Annemor #11 (aka traditional Norwegian fair isle mittens), which I finally finished. Remember this post last October about the Selbuvotter “gloves” I had started. If you noticed, I just said I finished a pair of “mittens” not “gloves.” Well, that’s because when I got to the part to start the fingers, I got scared and put the project away, and unfortunately it didn’t resurface until a week ago. After careful deliberation, I decided it would be better if I just made them as mittens and be done with them. So that’s what I did.

On the first mitten, I had already done the cuff
and had moved onto the back of hand pattern.
The tricky thing, and also the beautiful thing, about these mittens is that they are patterned on every inch and every side of knitting. Luckily I can knit with both hands, so it made fair isle stranding very easy (quick explanation: you carry 1 color in one hand and 1 color in the other and only knit with that specific hand when that color is needed–using both hands goes waaaay fast and helps prevent tangles).
Since the pattern was written for gloves, I had to decide how to turn them into mittens and still maintain a pretty pattern on the back of the hand. I looked at other patterns in the book that were mittens and counted the number of rows. I figured out I was able to do a second repeat of the flower/clover pattern and do the mitten decreases.
The thumb was a bit tricky just because they are smaller and it was harder to maneuver the two colors, but luckily my thumbs are short, so I didn’t even complete the whole chart in the pattern. I started the second mitten right away because I knew I would loose momentum if I left it too long, and I was able to finish it in three days. I wore them to work this morning, which was an overcast, rainy, chilly 40 degrees, and they were perfect.

So I got my box of yarn from WEBS yesterday. It was stuffed full of yarny goodness, and I enjoyed stroking and sniffing (wool smells GOOD) each skein as I pulled it from its wedged spot in the box. Classic Elite “Renaissance” yarn was on a super good blowout, so I bought enough yarn to make my mom, my sister, and myself a pair of Bella’s Mittens, essential accessories for all true Twilight fans who also happen to knit.

Anyway, my whole point for ordering the yarn was to get 2 skeins of Malabrigo in Vaa that they finally got in stock so I could finish my Ene shawl. I was scared to pull the skeins out, afraid that they would be too green. However, they match better than I thought they would, so it will work. One skein is really really close, and the other, not as much, so I think when I double-strand them it will mask the mismatch. I hope. And if the color difference is noticeable, then it will just make this shawl even that much more charming. Right?

Optimisim can be such a drag sometimes.

A friend of mine moved away a couple of weeks ago. I decided a blanket would be a good going away gift, especially since she moved to Colorado where blankets come in handy. I only had two weeks to whip up something, so it was the trusty old standby of granny squares. I can make them in my sleep (and in the dark). After I made all the squares, I decided to crochet them together to make it go faster, and also because it’s just more convenient. The main thing I love about crocheting blocks together instead of sewing them, though, is that the back has very straight-edged tidy seams. Look:
To make the grannies more modern, I made them big, did two different patterns of grannies, and also added one odd square that didn’t perfectly match any of the others.
The other reason I had an odd square in the blanket was because, well, I used only all stash yarn, and I ran out of purple, so I decided to make due. Shh, don’t tell anyone…

Sometimes imperfections add the perfect touch to a project.