Retrospective

Happy New Year everyone! 

2011 was incredibly crazy for me.  I published six designs, made four pairs of socks, knit a sweater for a cat, sold toys at a craft sale... and that's just the knitting!

I made a little collage of all the things I've finished:

The project from 2011 that I'm most proud of is (of course) my Blackbird Shawlette.
The project from 2011 that I use the most are my Pomatomus Socks - I love having socks of my own!
The strangest project from 2011... well, that's hard to decide.

Of course, I didn't include photos of the 12 hedgehogs that I made for the craft sale, or the pile of bricks that I'm knitting for a project I haven't blogged about, or the latest design that I'm slow cooking.  I DO have a camera, though, I got one for Christmas, so... expect more blogging!

December has been incredibly busy, but, I know that I'm going to be able to use these next few days before school starts up again to hit the ground running.

What's in store for 2012? Not even I know!

How about everyone else? Best project? Biggest mistake? What are you happy to be finished with?

It's OVER! Oh, and I got to meet Anne Hanson!

First thing's first... my academic quarter is officially over as of today! I am so, so, so relieved, and so exhausted.  I can't wait for a good week and a half of vacation, then moving into my new apartment.  It's going to be nice to have a room to myself with a desk instead of, say, this:



Oh, see that bright thing on the table?  Monday, my friend Rebecca called me and said "The Rochester Knitting Guild is meeting tonight and I want to check it out... want to come with?"  Another knitting club to go to? Hot swift!

Anyway, I went on their website and saw that Anne Hanson, from Knitspot, was going to be there! I've been following her blog for a while, and I though - huh, funny, I never really looked at her patterns.  So I spent a few hours doing that on Ravelry - yes, maybe a good hour and a half.  There are a LOT of patterns!  I finally decided on making some Longjohn Socks.  It just seemed like a great mindless sock project for me to work on... and I'm loving it so far. 



It's been hard for me to knit with all the stress I've been under.  I enjoyed listening to Anne speak, but I liked being able to sit and knit just as much! It was also really cool to hear about her inspiration and see photos of her finished works juxtaposed against the photos that inspired them.  At the end, she even signed a paper copy of a fingerless gloves pattern that I bought!



It was also really exciting to see her trunk so - and to see all the versions of projects that people had brought with them. I wish I had brought W's DSLR so I could have shot photos of the night!

And, at the end of it all, I went home and made a creamsicle float.

Pretty Shawl Photos

I love my Blackbird Shawlette. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.  I blocked it really quick on Friday, and realized Monday that the decreases in the center were wonky.  So, I re-blocked it, taking my time. 

 

The difference between the blocked and un-blocked version is phenomenal.  It's like my shawlette is me, tiny and with a lot of potential.  Unassuming, but when teased and stretched it's something to be reckoned with.  It's elegant and beautiful, like a butterfly in a glass case. I almost don't want to take it down... it won't be this gorgeous.

Repurposing W's homosode was such a good idea. The pins slide into it, and I don't have to worry about someone stepping on it - I can take the board and prop it up against a wall.  Or maybe mount it on a wall! It does seem like it could be a work of art more than an article of clothing.  It isn't very warm.  

But blocking also brings out the bad.  I found mistakes I didn't know about (in addition to the ones that I knew about but chose to ignore.  Below you can see where I messed up an eyelet row.

Also, I dropped a stitch at the veeeerrrrrryyyy beginning.

 While I'm knitting something, I look at mistakes as nonconformities (sorry, engineering school) that need to be fixed, but on the blocking board they're not mistakes, they're things that make my shawl unique and different, like a birth mark. 

W and I tried to do an impromptu photo shoot but it just didn't work out.  We got a few pictures taken but they were HIDEOUS.  I'm transitioning to paleoshowers, and I'm still kind of greasy.  I told myself I would give it until the end of the academic quarter and decide if I would continue then - it's only been 8 days.

But I did get one shot where I don't look terribly hideous.  I usually hate photos of myself, but every once in a while W takes one and I think "Oooh... I like that picture."  Then W says something like "It's overexposed."

Beck from Rhinebeck!

Rhinebeck was pretty super awesome. I blocked my shawlette while the friend I went with, Rebecca, packed. We drove to Schenectady Friday night with it in the back seat of my car, and then it sat there until Saturday morning, where I took it down while we waiting in traffic for an hour and a half to park in the fairground.

W let me borrow his camera, but remember those nice blog photos I put up on Thursday night? I was an idiot and left the cap on. So, I can tell you about the sheep, the crowds, and the YARN... I can even tell you about the projects, and the people watching, and they lady that wore three shawls... but no photos.

I wish there was some kind of way to describe the Rhinebeck feeling. I get through the gate and I feel like it's Christmastime. I glimpse bloggers that I follow waiting in line to get food or coffee. I get to look at and touch yarn that I only see photos of online.

Maybe I can describe it with the photos of the swag I got.

It's a pretty modest haul. I got sock yarn for me, and enough yarn for two W socks from the same stand that I got my Opal Sock Yarn last year. No Opal this year, though... but Regia isn't so bad, I guess...

I also got a sweater's worth of yarn! I saw the Maple Creek Farm stand that I bought yarn from last year, and I saw their Jade colorway and KNEW I had to have a sweater made from it! It was only 678 yards - nothing to laugh at... but not enough for a cardi for someone as busty as me. So I got the lighter color, Sherwood Forest, to stripe with it and maybe push it a little more.

I would definitely recommend checking them out if you ever have the chance - there's supposed to be a website for them, but the link on Ravelry is broken! Even if you don't want to spend some money... just go and smell the yarn. W thought I was crazy, sniffing yarn, but it just smells so good!

Crazy luck got me this lace yarn. I was suffocating in this crowd in one of the buildings, and I slipped into a booth to cut towards the exit... but I was fixated by the colors! I ended up picking up Sweet Nothings Silken in a colorway called "A Rose By Another Name." I would definitely recommend them... Bittersweet Woolery.

I also managed to snag a project bag from Go Monkey Design!  I keep all my projects in little ziploc bags... Now I have a REAL project bag! :)

Speaking of snagging...

Ash couldn't come with us - she has been really sick - but she gave me money to buy her some goodies. I'm not going to reveal the bag until I give it to her, so I'll save it for a later post. I really hope I can make her happy! I would be nervous giving cash to someone and saying "I'd like a tote bag and... I'm sure you'll find good things for me."

RIT After Class Showcase!

Today I spent my day in the SAU, hanging out and telling people "Yes, we're the knitting and crochet club." "No, really, everyone tells me they've never heard of us. That's why I'm here!"  We probably had the most traffic out of any of the other (four? six?) tables there, mostly because of our choice location.

Mostly because of these guys.  I REALLY need to make at least a hundred more so I can sell them at our craft table in December.  Gak.

 

Plenty of people joined to show all of our awesome skillz.  Or, just sit and craft and eat ice cream.

All and all, a good day, and also, there was this:

I've claimed some of W's homosode board (he's not shooting until November, anyway, right?) and I'm going to block this baby tonight.  Rhinebeck, here we come!!

Stop Motion Knitting - Pre-Knitting.

As you might (or not, I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on the blog before) know, W is working on his thesis.  I'm working as his "Fabricator" - a fancy word for how I'm helping him build his puppets.  He's doing all of the shop work, and I'm making all of the outside parts. 

The plan is to have felted puppets with an underlying wood and wire armature.  I'm trying to make the outsides so that if W needs to change the inside armature, he can just take the knit parts off like clothes and put them on a new armature.

Designing these puppets has been similar to designing toys, but you have to take a few things into consideration.  For one, the covers can limit access to he underlying armature, so if the armature breaks you would have to knit a whole new cover over a new armature (gulp!) or cut the cover.  Another is that these "toys" will get a lot of play time, so seams need to be tight and neat (because they're on camera! :) )

Anyway, I haven't actually knit anything (aside from a felted swatch) but over the weekend W and I sat down, looked at our supplies and my stash and made decisions about what fabrics I'm going to use.

I tried to give him a lot of options, since we didn't have a lot of options in the main color department when we went to JoAnn Fabrics - we noticed that most big box stores that we went to didn't have a very large selection of colors for 100% wool, but JoAnn's had the best. We even found a little bow for the girl puppet!

The monsters' horns are going to be wrapped in yarn - we have 3 options for that.   One is an acrylic, one is the Samba that I bought the other week at the Yarn store, and the last one (our top choice at the moment) is some handspun that I bought at Rhinebeck last year.  I wrapped each option around an index card so we could compare how they looked.

The other choice we had to make was what yarn to use for the monsters' socks.  We could order sock yarn, but without being able to see the color, we were hesitant - and don't get me started on the sock yarn options at the big box stores we went to (almost zero).  So, we looked into my stash and I wound up the possible combinations on this card:

I kind of like the idea of wrapping yarns around cards, especially when planning colorwork.  I think this could be a useful in the future - it's quick to make, and easy to see how colors blend together.

My Random Monday - 10/10

1. OMG FIVE DAYS UNTIL RHINEBECK AND THIS SHAWL IS NO WHERE NEAR DONE HELP WHAT DO I DO?

2. Okay, for some reason I'm not at Defcon 5 on this project.  I am convinced that I can take it with my in the car on the blocking board. So, it will be worn on Saturday!

3.  All of my spare time has been spent playing Glitch this week.  I think my friends have conspired to make me not finish this project.  Glitch is VERY addictive, so if you like online game you really shouldn't click the link!

4. Between school, actual-get-paid work and not-paid-really knitting, I think I am the most miserable person in the world. I have a team project in every class and they are all giving me ulcers. 

5. W has been working on his thesis, and he has a blog, too! It makes me very excited.  I have a post about my work on that... I should post that tomorrow.  A lot of posts that I write get lost in neverland and never published.  I need to work on that.

6. I made Jambalaya completely in the rice cooker yesterday.  I was really proud, but it didn't taste as good as I thought.  It looked good, though!

7.  This week is HUGE, Rochester, HUGE.

My DAL Design (And a little about how I got to it)

Goodness gracious, September went by REALLY fast.  Thankfully, I finally have a design for the DAL, and part of it knit to boot! But I'm going to have to work really fast if I want enough time to have the pattern tested and edited before the November 25th deadline.  I feel like it's going to be down to the wire for me again, but at least I won't be weaseling out of this like last time! :P

This round has been a bit hard for me.  I had a ton of ideas when the theme was announced ("fairytale") - but when I put the mood board together, I got a bit of a blank.  I spent time doodling on this piece of paper that I keep near my desk, and it took a huge beating.  I narrowed it down to three ideas:

There was a Seven Raven's Shawlette, which would have been double knit, reversible, and SO MUCH WORK.  There was the Princess and the Pea socks, which I really liked the idea of, but... they looked oddly familiar to Warren's room mate's socks... which I had never heard of, but am fascinated with! They're called Solmate Socks.  Cool idea, but... why not do something original? 

So, I settled on a gingerbread house inspired cardigan.  Wait.  Freeze.

I've never knit a cardigan before.  In fact, I've never designed a wearable before (unless you count socks, but really... I don't) and, seeing as I've only ever knit one adult-sized article of clothing, maybe I should scale it down in three months?

So, out went the pockets.  Out went the contrasting i-cord trim in white and the multicolored "gumdrop" bobbles that would have transitioned the edging from the stockinette stitch base.  (It looked so good in my head, but the look I got when I explained my idea at Hooks and Needles made me reconsider.  Writing it down now, and reading it, I understand)  I cut it down so that it would seem more like a knit object that babies would wear and less like... well, a gingerbread house costume.  It will have bright red buttons, though! That I will not compromise on.

So, that's where I'm at right now.  I'm not quite sure how I'm going to work the decreases for the yoke (having never worked one before) but I think I can fandangle it! I even did a swatch, although that's been entered into service as a brick... more on that some other time, I think.  I have a lot of projects going on right now, and I feel like I need to finish at least 8 before I can breathe again.

My Random Monday - October 3rd

1.  I have bronchitis.  This explains a lot of how I've been doing these past 10 days.  The health center thinks that I got a cold, then it's developed into bronchitis because I haven't been "taking care of myself."

2.  Considering that I've been sleeping for twelve hours at a time, forcing myself to eat, and still managing to do the chores around the house and "most" of my homework, I seriously wish someone at the health center would define "taking care of myself!"

3.  Also, my lost camera has not turned up.  I only assume that it's living a happy life taking photos for someone else's blog (though, if my camera benefactor ever reads this, if you could send me the touristy photos I took I'd really appreciate it, since all W really took were  artsy photos of birds.)

4.  Speaking of W, he is letting me use his camera but it's a Nikon D300 and it's really, really fancy.  It took me 20 minutes to take photos of the yarn I bought on Saturday.

5.  Oh, I bought yarn Saturday.

Plymouth Encore in bright colors for an upcoming craft table that Hooks and Needles is going to do as a fundraiser.  I'm going to un-vent some flowers, and make little Inkly's, and maybe some hedgehogs if I can find the yarn.

Mini Mochi to go with the Mini Mochi I already have in my stash to make a Mini Mochi striped scarf (like a Noro striped scarf, but without the Noro because... I'm still not convinced I want to try Noro) for myself.

Some cotton that was in the sale bin that will make good fingerless gloves.  It's organic, naturally dyed cotton and it only cost $3.90 for the two skeins! Who says yarn stores are pricey? :P

6.  I ended up finding another mistake on my shawlette last night (besides the surprise stitches) - I had messed up the lace pattern beyond tinking back, so I just frogged back to the lifeline.  Stitch count for the entire weekend: -15. 

Progressing Steadily Towards a Rhinebeck Project!

So, despite a mountain of work, 800 pages of reading (between all my classes combined) and a massive cold (when I cough, it sounds like the swamp-mobile in "The Rescuers") I've knit almost 2 inches on my Blackbird Shawlette! I'm really excited, because I feel like I may actually get to wear this at Rhinebeck.

But, tonight, I noticed a problem.

(Please pretend my iPhone photos are clear.  I lost my camera in Canada, still hoping someone will mail it to me.)

I have 3 stitches more than I'm supposed to.

Three.  Meaning I did just mess up, I had to have perpetrated a number of mess ups to end up with this number, since the pattern decreases by 4 stitches every other row.  So, I don't know.  I had just cast a lifeline so I had two options.

1.) Frog back to the lifeline (1 row) and re-knit another repeat of the plain section, but only decrease by 3 stitches instead of 4.

2.) Forget it ever happened, keep the 3 stitches and just knit them together later in the lace pattern.

Typically, I would be the #1 type of person, but today I just don't feel like fighting it.  They say that the Amish always make a mistake in their quilts, on purpose, to show that no human is perfect (only God.)  So this is what I'm calling it.  My "I'm not perfect" feature. 

Viva La Canada!

This past weekend I had the joy of going to the Ottawa International Animation Festival with W. Ottawa is the most beautiful city I've ever visited. Aside from seeing a lot of really gorgeous buildings, foods, and (of course) animations, I got a good portion of my blackbird shawlette done.

We DID visit a yarn shop, but it was a little small and not so impressive - I told myself we'd have to stop at some of the others I saw on knitmap, but by the end of the weekend we had run out of money.  I DID buy this:

It's a little owl whose head spins back and forth. 

And there was hot cocoa in a bowl and beautiful pastries at the Byward Market.

There were so many beautiful things, I can't decide what to put up, so here's a mishmash:

Anyway, I'm off to catch up on the 100+ blog posts that piled up in my google reader over the weekend... oy! 

Busy As A Bee

I've been busy, mostly because I don't have any assignments for work, so I've been doing homework - and the best pair to reading is knitting! I managed to finish my baby cardi last night at Hooks and Needles!

I'm so proud! The pattern is Cascade, from Petite Purls, and the buttons are from Jo Ann's...  I'm really happy with the pairing.  The yarn is Cascade Pacifica, in colorway 507.  I made the 6 month old size and used pretty much exactly one skein.  I'm going to make an elephant to go with it (her theme is "jungle") and hopefully I'll get to send it off!

I also sat down with some Sculpey yesterday and made a ton of little stitch markers.  I just wanted to Do something and have it pay off instantaneously.  Well, faster than knitting does. It still took time to sculpt the tiny figurines, bake them, then add the fixtures, but compared to a sweater... not long at all!

I made three hedgehogs,

An owl whose eye fell off

Two markers whose jump rings were too small - I'm going to dub these the sock yarn markers.

And a sort of set.  The flowers are supposed to be hydrangea's... but they're still pretty.

I also wound yarn for a super secret Hooks and Needles project... hee hee.

You know I would divulge it, but we need approval from the school to do it, and once that happens we'll be knitting our butts off...

I'm really bummed out about things, like this horrible cold I have, but I'm trying to keep busy and do everything I'm supposed to because tonight is the season start of Glee, and this weekend is OTTOWA with W and his friends! Something big is happening every day this week, really, so I don't have time to slow down.