More FOs: Owlings and Ellies Blankie

This month, for my group's 12 in '12 theme (we're all going to do at least 12 projects in 2012), the KAL theme was critter mittens. I'm not a big mitten fan (except on really cold mornings) so I went for mitts. I wanted to use up some leftover Rowan Cashsoft, so I hit on a pattern called Owlings. It's a take off on the ever-so-popular Fetching mitts, but with li'l owl cables.

Not easy to take pictures of black yarn, but you get the idea, I think? I like these. The yarn is thick and warm. I had to take one owling out (5 stitches) so I could get two mitts out of the small amount of yarn I have, so these are closer-fitting than the would otherwise have been, but even on my big hands (over 8 inch span, folks, I shoulda been a pianist, but three years of piano lessons convinced me it was a hopeless cause) they fit just fine.

Some time over a year ago, folks in the group knit up squares in sock yarn for a baby blanket for one gal who was expecting. The squares got knit, then edged with single crochet, and the person who was organizing the thing finally got them pieced together and got the blanket to me. I added a simple crochet lace border (I only had small amount of yarn so I kept it real simple), then washed and blocked the blankie. Baby is already walking, but at least it's done well before she heads off to college.

FO: Morgan for Me

I made one of these Morgan hats last year for my hubby. When I acquired two skeins of Lorna's Laces Swirl DK in a lovely marled purple with touches of green and blue, I had in hand just the right thing to make a Morgan for me, too.

Stylish, no?

I like how the yarn gives a tweedy effect. An English driving cap needs a touch of tweed to look just right.

Playing with patterns: Log Cabin

The thing with a small loom like the Cricket is that you're kind of limited in what you can weave -- but then again, you're only limited by your imagination in what you can do with the narrow strips that come off of the loom. A thousand scarves? Stitch the strips together to make an afghan? Heck, weave them together, maybe? There's a carry bag for the Cricket that I've seen that's made with long strips cleverly arranged and sewn together that I hope to make when I can find suitable yarn at a decent price. I'd like to use linen for durability, but may settle for bright cotton.

In the meantime, I'm playing with patterns from The Weaver's Idea Book by Jane Patrick. It has dozens of patterns for rigid heddle looms, and I plan on playing with lots of them.

I warped the loom for a log cabin design, which was pretty simple, but took careful attention to the order of the colors as I wove, as well as twining the two colors together at the edges:

But the final scarf was worth the extra attention, I think:

The warp is:
1 dark
1 light
1 dark
1 light
1 dark
1 light
1 light
1 dark
1 light
1 dark
1 light
1 dark
repeated across. The order of colors when weaving is the same.

This scarf is another that's destined for the Pine Ridge Reservation. They often need things for men, and that looks pretty manly to me.

Knitting blogs, post-SOPA/PIPA

Hey, did you see this gorgeous new sweater on Knitty.com? Here's a linked image:

Oh, and did you see that wonderful cable design in the new afghan from DROPS? Here's a detail:

The cats were particularly adorable today, so adorable I captioned the photo and posted it on the I Can Has Cheeseburger site. Cute, huh?

And I finally finished that Alice Starmore aran sweater that took forEVER! Here's my own photo of my own rendition of Starmore's gorgeous design:

There you have it, blogging post-SOPA/PIPA. The idea was good -- stop internet piracy -- but the actual documents only hand control of the internet over to corporate interests. Readers in the U.S., please write to your senators and representatives to oppose these two bills. The internet is still the one form of media not entirely under corporate control -- yet.

Do you want "fair and balanced?" Okay. Here's a short video from YouTube titled "Why you SHOULD support SOPA/PIPA." Give it a click. I think you'll like it.

The Cricket is chirping along

I'm simply enchanted with how magically this houndstooth check appears as I weave on the Cricket:

I would never have imagined it was that simple. The warp is 2 gray, 2 black all the way across. I weave 2 picks with gray, 2 with black, careful to pick up each new color by passing it under the one I just put down, so they twine together at the selvage. That's it. The houndstooth check just appears as I weave.

There's a charitable group on Ravelry, For the Children of Pine Ridge, that knits for the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The poverty there is gut-wrenching, with about an 80% unemployment rate. (All those companies sending manufacturing jobs overseas really need to rethink that when there are parts of this country in desperate need of meaningful employment.) The group is doing a "Babies and Elders" campaign this month and next. I thought I'd put my Cricket to work making wooly scarves. I ordered some closeout washable wool blend yarn from WEBS, but accidentally bought the fingering weight instead of the worsted weight I had intended. Instead of waiting for the 12-dent heddle that I ordered to get here, I doubled the yarn. It seems to be working well, and in fact, I like the fabric that it's making. I chose black and gray (and have tan and brown as well) because the group says they don't get a lot of things for men, and the men there tend to prefer conservative colors.

The one thing I worried about in getting a Cricket was, "What else can I make besides scarves? How many scarves can I really use?" I might not need many, but there are others in the world who can use a warm scarf. I'll get to practice different weave patterns, and other people will get warm woolies.

Last FO of 2011

Sometimes it takes a while to get the project photographed, the photos off of the camera, and then put them out where others can see them, but... finally, here is the last FO of last year:

The pattern is Silk Shimmer Scarf, which came free with a skein of Silk Shimmer yarn from Blue Ridge Yarns. It's 100% silk in DK weight, soft and luscious.

Hard to get the colors just right in a photo, but that's pretty darn close. The pattern is a simple knit-purl texture that produces a twill look.

Now, what will the first FO of 2012 be? Here are the current contenders:

First up is the Vest in a Jiffy pattern from Lion Brand Yarns, done in the Eco+ wool that I had left from my Iced cardigan. I'm making this for someone at the Pine Ridge Reservation, as part of a campaign by the For the Children of Pine Ridge group on Ravelry. With harsh South Dakota winters to contend with, and an 80% unemployment rate, the people of Pine Ridge need all the help they can get.

Next up, is a Morgan hat for me, which will be an English driving cap style of hat, done in Lorna's Laces Swirl DK that I got in a swap:

Back from a long time-out is a pair of Sailor's Delight socks, a pattern in 2-At-A-Time Socks by Melissa Morgan-Oakes. The two-at-a-time on circulars thing wasn't working for me. I kept going around both socks with the same yarn and got so frustrated that I set them aside. I guess I'm a DPN gal all the way. After I put both socks on DPNs, they've sped right along.

And I'm taking a stab at knitting mitts straight from silk hankies without spinning. It's taking a bit to figure out how much -- or rather, how little -- to draft out the hankies. The mitts are soft, but started out pretty floppy, and my laddering is awfully obvious.

Have I had a touch of start-itis? Why, yes, I have, in spite of my good resolutions, but hey, I'm being good and trying to finish at least one project that's been on the needles for a long time.

Knitters are superheroes!

But you already knew that, didn't you?

For more evidence of superhero-ish-ness of knitters, watch this delightful little video, Aleksandr the Last Knitter.

Crafty New Year 2011

Hello, 2012! May this year defy all dire predictions and be the best one ever, for everyone, in every way. (I mean really, just because the Mayan calendar supposedly runs out this year is no reason to panic. What do you do when your calendar runs out? You buy a new one, right?)

Continuing the tradition begun last year, the Salem Area Ravelers got together for a craft-a-long at the IKE Box. Most folks came with their knitting. I brought my spinning. We had a raffle and raised $186 for Isaac's Room Foundation, which helps us feel like we're paying our fair rent for the space that we get to use free.

It's hard to get good candid shots indoors with the kind of lighting that's in the ballroom. Besides, when people are bent over their work, they tend to look serious. We were having fun. Really we were.

A Cricket (Loom) by the Hearth

Some of the best memories of Christmas are about playing with all the new toys. Naturally, I had to play with my new toy, my Schacht Cricket Loom. Day after Christmas I ran through all the instructions to warp the loom, then ran through them again to do it right, then sat down to weave the striped scarf, which is the project in the accompanying booklet that goes with the yarn provided.

The weaving goes surprisingly fast, especially working a narrow width in worsted-weight yarn.

Much faster than knitting a similar-sized object, as weavers probably all know already. By the end of the day I had this:

Okay, so the selvages are a little wobbly and there are some mistakes here and there, but it's my first loom-woven project!

The Cricket, being a rigid heddle loom with only one heddle and a 10" width, is pretty limited in what it will do. Nevertheless, I plan to push those limits and see what all I can make it do before I run out and buy something larger and more complex. I see there's a lot of vocabulary to learn as well.

Seeing how quickly I wove my project, my son decided to give it a go. As a starving student, he doesn't have a lot to spend on presents, and he wanted something nice to give to his girlfriend. I don't have much worsted weight yarn, but we did some stash diving and came up with enough Lion Brand Organic Cotton to make a scarf.

I helped James warp the loom and he set to:

And a few hours later, he had a scarf made, too.

"Do you like it? I made it myself!"

A flock of FOs: Striped socks, Iced, and Clarissa.

One thing about having multiple projects on the needles, is that if they all get finished about the same time, it makes one look like a prodigiously productive knitter. Of course, that generally means they've all been on the needles for some time, making one look like a prodigious piker.

Three projects just came off the needles -- one very long term, one that I cast on in the summer, and one that was cast on in November.

I'll start with the one that's been around the longest. Not the most complicated. Actually the most simple. Just a pair of plain stockinette socks, using the sock recipe from Knitting Rules by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, in self-striping yarn that I dyed myself from a KnitPicks sock blank.

The only reason they took a long time is that I like to keep a pair of plain socks in self-patterning yarn on the needles to pick up at odd moments, so they only get worked on here and there. But now they're done.

Next up, let's look at Iced, a cardigan from a past issue of Knitty. I bought three fat skeins of Cascade Eco+ when a local yarn shop went out of business, and used about half of it to make this cardigan.

It's an easy, comfy, cozy cardigan to throw on when it's chilly. Goes well with jeans.

May need a little more blocking in the back, though.

And finally, the showpiece. Last summer at Sock Summit 2011, I was going by the Sanguine Gryphon booth when I came to a full stop in front of this:

Had to have. Had... to... have. I was directed to the White Lies Designs booth, where I found the pattern for the Clarissa cardigan. The Gryphon didn't have enough of the yarn that the sample was made from in either the ruby red or the deep purple that I liked, so I wandered around until I found a beautiful BFL DK from Fly Designs.

I cast on shortly after Sock Summit. Just before Christmas, I finished.

The front:

The back:

It still needs a little more blocking across the shoulders so the buttons don't pull in front quite so much. But Clarissa is finished, hoorah, hoorah!

Here's a close-up of the honeybee lace if anyone tackling this project needs a closer look. It's actually much easier than it looks at first, since it involves a logical series of decreases:

Feels good to have all of these done -- then on to the next projects!