First FO of the New Year, and Start of the Baby Hat Parade

It's Hooks and Needles tradition: the annual baby hat drive! I made my first hat this year, based on Algerian Action's Sweet.  I cast on 40 stitches using size 6 needles, and worked the pattern as best as I could (ha ha).  The hat might be a little small - the norm is 50 stitches on size 5 - but it looks like it will stretch to fit.  The only other change to the pattern I made was I only knit in stockinette for 4 rows, so, it's definitely smaller than it's supposed to be :)

I knit this with yarn donated to me from a friend of a friend, whose mother passed away.  I have about 5 skeins of Lion Brand Wool-Ease in a sunny yellow, and I'm thinking about making a sweater with it.  Or more baby hats! :)

My goal this quarter is to make one baby hat every club meeting - so, two a week for the next 6 weeks.  If I just make plain stockinette stitch hats, I'll be able to churn out four a week- they really don't take much time at all to do!

*Facepalm*

I am so silly! I almost forgot to make my new moon TUSAL post! Thankfully I saw Dee's post here and remembered, thanks Dee :)  Hopefully I won't forget next month! Enter a photo snapped in Photobooth:

So what in my jar?  The ends from Christmas projects, and a bit of yarn from the mittens I made for W's puppet.  I hope to add the threads from quilting, but I haven't even gotten the machine out! :(  Vowing to cut all the pieces first is a hard promise to keep!

New Year, New Design

All crafters get requests from friends and families, but knitters more so. Whether it's a hat for a sibling, mittens for a guy on a bus, or dolls for who knows who, I've done a ton of knitting for others (all of my knitting). Last year, I even got a request to make someone a mer-horse.

Usually, when someone asks me to make them something, I assume they're serious. I ask for measurements, yarn support, what color they want, and if they want to pay me (usually all I ask is that the person buy yarn before the project, and after the project they can "tip" however much they want.) I admit, not a sensible business model but I'm not in the knitting business.

I've had requests for gloves, hats, and even a Barbie sweater "of the finest silk." Often, after the serious talk starts, the person blinks, suprised, asks "You'll seriously do it?" and then needs some "time to think."  Usually I don't hear back from them, the subject is dropped, and they never mention it.  But this time that didn't happen.

My friend asked me to knit her cat a sweater.  Now, my cat experience has told me that cats might not like sweaters, but this cat does.  Zucchi loves wearing her sweater, and by golly, if she wants to wear sweaters I should provide a variety for her.  What are friends for?

So tonight at club I'm going to cast on for my second WIP of the year.  The first sweater will be red, with embroidered white flowers on the back, and the second sweater will be faux argyle on the back and plain in the front.  I'm going to improvise the second sweater based on the measurements I took from Zucchi's current sweater, and the first sweater is going to be the Kitty Cat Argyle Sweater from Eat Sleep Knit.

You may say that all the stress from my vacation has warped my mind.  I will neither confirm nor deny that statement.

The Best of 2010's Photos

I had a REALLY hard time making this post, and that's why it's coming up now instead of yesterday :)  I took over 5,500 pictures last year, and got that number down to 100 of my favorites.  Then I got that number down to 40.  So, here they are!

Let me know which one you think should be the best photo of 2010 :) Oh, and more knitting tomorrow. (P.S. - there are a lot of pictures, so I decided to put them all after the jump!)

My Year in Knitting

It was a truly prolific year for me this year! Wow! I finished 36 projects, some that I blogged and some that I didn't. 

3 Pairs of Slippers

4 Pairs of Socks

9 Hats

12 Stuffies

26 Hearts for Charity

6 Hats for Charity

Wow... I'm amazed at all the work I did. Can you pick out the projects that were a secret up until now? (Hint:  There's 5.)

Crafty Math

Have you ever dreamed of a craft project?  A few nights before Christmas, I dreamt of this quilt.  There was a little boy with curly blonde hair and blue eyes wrapped up in it, sitting in some green grass, grinning.  And that was it. 

Of course, after I got my sewing machine I had to make this quilt - though I've never quilted before and have very little idea of what I'm doing.  I bought the basic materials to make the top - yellows and oranges for the center of the flowers,  and blue for the background, and different prints for different flowers. I even nominated fabric from my gigantic stash of fabric to serve as flowers.

Today, I sat down and drew out templates, deciding how big my pieces will be.  I want to make a queen-sized quilt, so I'll need a lot of fabric.  I don't have all the stuff I need (batting, or backing, for example) but I figured this is going to be a long project, so I can buy more stuff as I need it.  No point in spending mucho dollars on something I won't use for ten or eleven months, I thought.

Yes - I bet understand quilting takes a lot of time. I thought about this as I hunched over on the floor of my childhood bedroom and measured and cut.  Hey, maybe I should cut all of the pieces first, that seemed to be a methodical way of doing things.

So I took out my paper and pencil, and did some calculations.

To make a 100x100 quilt, I will need:

40 edge pieces

100 center peices (the center of the flower)

80 petal pieces

That's not hard math. That's 220 squares!  I'm a little intimidated.  I think the actually sewing is going to be a ways off, while I contemplate how I'm going to tackle this task. I think it's kind of funny that I decided to do this quilt with squares with a ten inch diagonal, instead of squares with a 5 inch diagonal, which was my other idea. That would be even more squares!

And Thus Another Christmas is Conquered!

The presents are delivered.  Everyone loved them! I'm pretty excited that this Christmas went so well, especially since I made more hand-knit items then ever before this year - five!

Even the slippers, which I was really nervous about, were well received.

As for me, I made out like a bandit.  I got a new sewing machine, some rocking boots, and books, to name a few of my favorite gifts.  I'm already planning to quilt a bit, having little experience in quilting but a lot of experience reading about quiliting... so here's hoping.

Also in the realm of my life... my Dad's  computer got hit by a pretty nasty virus, and I'm having some very bad family problems.  I don't like keeping secrets, but the women of my family gathered around a table today and made the decision not to tell certain people in the family things "so that they can enjoy the holidays."  I'm happy I got to sit with my family and give my input, but I don't believe in keeping secrets.  I'm pretty bummed out about it - can't post here, of course, it wouldn't be a secret - but if  you could spare a prayer or a kind thought, I would appreciate it :)