Another photo dump for swap stuff

This was my first Odd Ducks Swap on Ravelry.  The theme was things starting with "W."

Hat time!

I finished the hat I was test knitting, and the pattern is now available - Cedar Shakes hat by Kate Boswick.  I finagled Ryan into taking some pictures with his good camera while I was at work on Sunday.

I'm not an expert on slouchy hat style, but it seems like it came out a little over-long, but Silas isn't complaining, and he got many a compliment on its debut at church.

I really can't express the fullness of the joy I find in dressing my son up like a little hipster.

He just needs some headphones and a little Starbucks cup, don't you think?

The pattern is absolutely mindless knitting - I memorized the repeat after executing it once and it was great TV knitting.  My appreciation for fingering weight projects continues to grow - I really like how it turned out in this yarn, and the self-striping worked really well with the stitch pattern.

I need more sock yarn!

Speaking of socks - I can finally show off my swap projects!  My letter was 'F,' and my swap partner loves shawls, so I was originally going to make her a fichu, or at least I was going to make a shawl pattern that started with F (Frederica, in fact), and call it a fichu, because really - close enough.  But then my partner said, "Please don't send me any shawls, I am making enough of my own," or something to that effect, so I had to reevaluate my choices.  I decided on fingerless gloves, and I had elaborate fair-isle plans with finches and the word 'flight' and so on, when someone asked the group, "What would you really like to receive?" and my partner said, "Socks, but you don't have to!"

Sure, I don't HAVE to . . .

Challenge accepted.

I waffled over many a sock pattern, and had many a false start, before I finally found the February Lady socks, which had the advantage of being the only pattern designed for the kind of tiny feet my partner ostensibly has, based on the measurements she provided.  I don't have small feet, not remotely, and it is difficult for me to scale down my expectations of how big a sock is.  My first attempt was much too tiny, so I ripped back, used larger needles, and I'm praying that they fit.  It is very challenging, not being able to try a sock in progress against the foot in question.  I knit three socks, and finally ended with a matching pair (after ripping back the toe on the second one to make it bigger . . .).

I dyed the yarn myself with Kool-Aid and a crockpot, and I took lots of pictures of that progress and detailed notes of the colors I used, and then Ryan threw my notes away.  In his defense, I wrote them in marker on an old church bulletin, so it probably didn't look very important.  The point is, I have no idea if I'm going to post the pictures now because I can't remember what I was going to say about them.

After I had gotten all my swap stuff together and cast a critical eye over it, I knew it needed something more.  I had been pushing "Ice Queen" up and down my queue for a while, uncertain if I could make it suit my needs, but I finally struck on the inspiration and the right color of yarn that I needed.

I had originally wanted to make it flame-orange with the same mix of red, orange, and yellow beads, for a fiery effect, but alas, there was no orange kidsilk haze to be had.  There was fuschia, but it left me cold.  My swap partner's winter jacket is cherry red, and while fuschia and cherry red probably look fine together, it wouldn't work with the beads.  Cherries, cherries, cherries.  Green stem?

Please excuse my terrible photography skills - I was using my phone.  I really liked the idea of the flame-colored mix of beads on the green, like a forest fire, but the end result was a bit more Christmas-y than I might have preferred.  Festive, though!  I'm not a cowl person myself, but I have to admit that this one was so light and easy to wear and pretty that I might make one for myself . . .  I'll have to get more yarn, though.  The pattern is supposed to take exactly one ball of Rowan's Kidsilk Haze, but I went up a needle size (because it was all I could find), and one ball was exactly enough to leave me screaming with frustration when it ended half a row before the bind-off.  I had to buy a whole 'nother ball of yarn just to finish that row, bind off, and and pick up the provisional cast-on and bind it off, too.  Another entire ball, just for two and half rows.  I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of it, but obviously it won't be enough for another cowl.  It's such a gorgeous shade of green, I'm eager to use it.

Anyway, that about catches me up.  On my needles right now are the Changement shawlette for the mystery KAL the designer is hosting, and a hat for my mom for Chanukah (coming up way too fast this year, btw).  It's entrelac, a new technique for me.  Can't wait.

One last baby shot to carry you out!

I love autumn, don't you?

Catching up

Today is the last day of my vacation, which has mainly been spent playing Candy Crush.  Today, however, I did manage to get a couple loads of laundry in and pick up the trash that has been accumulating around the upstairs.  Accomplishments!  Of course, it's a tiny dent, imperceptible in the remaining mess, but I feel good about any amount of progress.

My swap package is in the mail, and good riddance to it.  I don't want to see another ball of mohair for a long time now.  I'm pointedly ignoring the one sitting on my desk.  It does not exist in my reality.

Angel sent me a picture of her baby girl wearing the dress I made for her, and also some random hat of Carlin's.

This is a fantastic picture of Gabriella, but not the greatest shot of the garment.  Babies don't make the best clothing models.  For instance, most of the pictures we tried to get of Silas wearing my last test knit looked like this:

So here's a picture of what the dress looks like in entirety.

Isn't it just darling?  It's called "Oriental Lily," but it makes me think of Guinevere.  So sweet.  And Angel was so happy to get something that wasn't pink.  She'd like some brown clothes for Gabby, but it's hard to find brown baby yarn, at least where I shop . . .

Connections

This little guy is on the move.

As you can see, Autumn is here, the leaves are changing and blanketing our yards, and there's a chill in the air that has me bundling the baby up with extra care.

Those are hand-knitted fingerless gloves on that baby.  This is the first time he's worn them willingly, without fighting or pulling them off.  It's a nice feeling, clothing your child in something you've made.

Mmmm, wool.

They're the Sucky Thumb mitts pattern, done up using two strands of Berocco Sox held together.  It made for very nice little stripes.  It's not the softest yarn in the world, even after washing, but they're holding up well to several encounters with the concrete driveway.  Walking is hard.

I still have lots of the yarn left, so I'm using it to test-knit a hat for Cowtownknits on Ravelry.  Pictures to come later.  It's an in-between project, because mainly I'm still working on swap stuff.  That involves mohair and beads, and sometimes I need a break from that insanity.  Sometimes I just need a simple hat in simple wool, in a pattern that doesn't require six stitchmarkers and a row counter and four pages of instructions and a bag of beads and a crochet hook . . .

As the weather's been turning colder, I've been doing more cooking, which has also been easier on our bank accounts (for how little money we have, we have an absurd number of accounts to keep it in).  Soups, stews, and skillet meals are the order of the day.  Ryan brought home a bag of potatoes one day, a few weeks before the cold snap, actually.  I don't cook a lot with potatoes - too much prep/cooking time, as far as I'm concerned.  However, a bag of potatoes I had and since a few were rotten, I figured I'd better cook p as many as I could before the rest caught the bug.  On my next day off, I decided to make potato soup.  I budgeted my time with an eye towards Silas taking a nap before dinner.  The parents among my readership can well imagine how that went down.  Not only would he not take a nap, he would not self-entertain.  He wanted Mama.  Folks, there is no good way to hold a toddler and peel potatoes at the same time.  There isn't a good way to hold a toddler and wash potatoes at the same time.  I was at the end of my rope, and there was only one thing I could think of doing (well, two, but I couldn't wait for my mom to drive three hours to come babysit).

I took everything outside.

I filled an ice cream bucket with hot water, brought out my veggie wash spray, and sat on the bottom step of our front porch and scrubbed potatoes for all the neighbors to see.  After some trial and error, I discovered the only way to keep Silas out of the potato water bucket was to get him his own bucket, and he happily splashed in it next to me, gathering a thick coating of mud on his clothes and his rubber ducks.  I felt a nice connection to my ancestors, who quite likely also did a lot of prep work out of doors, to get out of smoky, dark kitchens and make the most of fresh air and light.

Now, our next-door neighbors have four children, and they were hosting some daycare children while the kids' normal provider was laid up with a broken hip, and it turns out that there is nothing more fascinating in the world to young children than someone doing something perfectly ordinary like washing and peeling potatoes in an un-ordinary setting like OUTSIDE.  Also, small children like babies.  So I quickly found myself faced with a semi-circle of children ranging in age from 3 to 9, all absolutely engrossed in what my son and I were doing.  Mr. Next-Door was pretty confused about the interest garnered by potatoes, but it's easy to forget that anything can be interesting if you've never seen it done a certain way before.  And EVERYTHING is more interesting if there's a baby involved.

This picture wouldn't be half so fun to look at if it were just my unraked yard, right?

Anyway, there's something about scrubbing and peeling potatoes that, even in the kitchen, makes me feel this close connection to all the women in my family, present and past.  How many generations of my family have made potato soup or latkes or stews with hearty chunks of potato?  I get the same feeling when I make bread from scratch, and of course when I'm knitting.  It's one of the things I love best about both activities - they're ancient, and they're ways to keep my family warm, either from the inside out with a good garlic potato soup, or from the outside in with a pair of fingerless gloves or a stocking cap.

Yeah, I occasionally knit for this guy, too.  

Photo dump

Got a lovely swap package!

Dobeedobeedoo

I'm taking a break from laundry to bring you a blog entry!  In actuality, the previous dry load is all folded and put away, the wet load is in the dryer, and the new load is in the washer, so there's nothing laundry-wise to do for at least half an hour, but as very few people read this, actuality is of very little consequence.

Silas is napping - I'm trying to get him to take his morning nap earlier and earlier so that he won't sleep through lunch time at daycare.  At daycare they eat lunch at 11:30.  At home we eat lunch at 1:00.  This is causing some conflict.  Theoretically this should mean that I get Silas up earlier in the morning, but if I'm working a 2-11 shift, I can't wake up before 8 or I sleep through the drive home - and I'm the driver.  It's very distressing.

I'm hard at work at swap stuff (not really, I'm blogging).  Can't find my E-6000 glue . . .

Can someone explain to me how a darning needle can just up and walk away?  Maybe it's having lunch with my glue (at the daycare, where they keep the meal schedules of the elderly . . . )

Anyway, I meant to tell a bit more about my knitting field trip to Rose Tree.  Where to begin?  "It's a clear night in Ancient Greece . . ."

This winter I joined the library's winter reading program, and at one of the activities I was suddenly inspired to see if I could rustle up any knitters in the bunch.  So, while I was discoursing on a novel I had read, I managed to drop the term "yarn swap."  Sure enough, someone took the bait.  As we were leaving, a woman, Mikki, approached me and asked if I were a knitter.  Hallelujah!  I gave her my phone number and my Ravelry ID, and we exchanged a couple of messages on Rav, but for a while just went on our merry way.

A couple of months ago, I was out walking the baby (as you do), and as I was leaving the local crafters' boutique, I was utterly surprised by a building.

Now, buildings don't suddenly appear out of nowhere.  Especially buildings that are sandwiched neatly between the Daily Herald and the H&R Block.  I stood there staring at it for a long time, utterly unable to remember what had been there before, and wondering if perhaps it had always been a coffeehouse, and I was like unto the muggles, whose eyes always slide from the big book shop on one side to the record shop on the other, and never seem to notice the Leaky Cauldron.  My next thought was magical traveling music shop.  Of course it's always been there, but was it always there yesterday?  I swallowed my social anxiety, went inside, ordered an iced chai, and asked.  It turns out that Greene Bean Coffee, while a pillar of the community as a local business at the Farmer's Market and online, only set up shop two weeks prior to my stumbling across it.  So I'm not crazy, a muggle, or Corporal Nobbs, I'm just not getting out of the house enough.

The first thing I did when I got home was to  . . .  well, eat my Chinese takeaway meal.  THEN I did a brave thing (as far as my shyness rates it), and sent a message to Mikki, because in my mind, coffee shop = knitting group meeting place!  We met, we knitted, we chatted, we learned that certain patterns don't work well for knitting and talking at the same time, and it was all just delicious (coffee included).

Long story short (too late!), she knew other knitters, we met other times, and when I saw on FB that the RTFS was having a Click-Along, I sent out word of a potential field trip, we went, fun times were had by all, hats were knitted for a good cause, and Mikki generously gave forth from her stash some yarn that she was no longer using, and thus now I have Noro and beads and my eye on the Shipwreck Shawl, as soon as this swapping business is done.

Back to the laundry!

Oh dear

Poor neglected little blog.  Have you missed me?  I've missed you, though I haven't much to say.

I've been busy throwing my time away with swaps.  Stalking and crafting and brainstorming are just sucking my brain dry, and all the energy I have left is for work.  At work I create myriads of lists of swap-possibilities.  I just want to get some mail - is that so bad?

Before swaps, there were purple baby hats.

Those are the ten purple baby hats that I knitted and crocheted for the Period of Purple Crying Click-Along at the Rose Tree Fiber Shop in Ames.  I was a purple-hat-making machine!  Unfortunately, not a picture-taking machine, but there's only so much you can do with limited skills and bad lighting.

Hat the first:

The Little Knight Hat, right off the Click-Along website.  Twisted rib, somewhat absurdly tight gauge (fault mine), tiny hat.  Red Heart Super Saver, "Lavender" colorway.  Garnered lots of "Awwwww!"s.

Hat the second:

The plum or eggplant hat, better known as the Berry Baby Hat.  This one came out somewhat more on the oversized size.  I used RHSS, "Amethyst" and "Spring Green"

Hat the third:

Luuk hat the first.  Verrrry tiny.  Very mindless knitting.  RHSS "Lavender"

Hat the fourth:

 . . . had a model!  Gabriella Rose, daughter of good friends Carlin and Angel.  About six weeks old.  Ridiculous amount of hair.  Looked a bit like Miss Cleo in this wee little crocheted butterfly beanie - Olivia's Butterfly.  It's meant to be worn with the butterfly over one eyebrow for a jaunty, cloche-like look, but with the butterfly centered over the forehead, it looks like a wee turban, especially on a dark-haired little gypsy babe.  Red Heart Sport, "Purple."  I left off a few increases and rows to make it infant-sized, came out very tiny indeed.

Hat the fifth:

Rosa Villosa.  I went out on a limb for this one after all that easy crochet and used sock yarn for this one.  Lion Brand Sock-Ease, "Grape Soda" colorway, to be precise.  The stem is in Zitron Trekking XXL, "Wicked Green."  This hat was too adorable for words, and worked up much more quickly than I expected given the much finer yarn and tiny little needles.

Hat the sixth:

Luuk hat the second.  After a failed first attempt, finally managed to read the directions correctly and make the 0-3 month size instead of the newborn size (which on my needles turns out more of a preemie size).  RHSS, "Amethyst"


Hat the seventh:

Ashen hat.  Love the moss-stitch brim.  Another one in RHSS "Lavender."

Hat the eighth:

Otis Baby Hat.  RHSS "Lavender" again.  I had a lot of false starts with this one - I think ribbing would have worked better for the brim than the garter stitch did - even using smaller needles for the brim didn't solve the warping issue that you can kind of see here.  I love the big fat cables, though.

Hat the ninth:

One more quick crocheted hat, Flower Hat/Photo Prop, in Red Heart Sport, "Purple," and Caron Simply Soft Brites, "Limelight."  Very cute, came out enormous.

Hat the tenth:

Baby Tart.  This one took the longest - I started it shortly after I began the first hat, and finished it at the Click-Along.  The bobbles were murder - all that purling!  It went much more smoothly once I slowed down and concentrated on knitting loosely.  Unspeakably adorable result, sadly difficult to get a good picture of.  Caron Simply soft in "Plum Perfect" and "Bone."