FO: Fish Lips Kiss Heel Sock

Last month, news reached me of an unfortunate Amtrak accident near Philadelphia.  

"Gosh, I hope I didn't know anyone on the train", everyone thinks.

Knowing lots of people who work in Sales and travel the East Coast corridor almost constantly didn't help my chances and I did end up knowing someone who was gravely injured on that train.  

Third hand news of a long-term ICU stay, surgeries, concussions and broken bones reached me but ultimately a long and painful recovery was in store.  It gave me nightmares for a week.  

Once I was assured that he wouldn't be an amputee (a very real possibility) I set to work on a pair of socks.  Dapper, simple, comforting warm socks.   

This might sound new-agey, but when you are knitting something specifically for someone in mind, you are thinking of them subconsciously or consciously with every stitch, and whatever you thoughts are towards that person gets woven into the fabric of your garment, much like a protective amulet or magical armor to keep that person safe and well.  

Big man feet, loads of stitches, loads of healing thoughts.  

Once modeled by a for-hire foot model, I packed them up sent them off with well wishes and healing universal vibes to my friend, who I am certain is in need of a bright day here and there.  I told him "wear them with Birks, you'll be a star!" knowing that it will make his blue blood curdle.

New technique:  the Fish Lips Kiss Heel, a nice way to avoid gusset shaping and keep your stripes consistent on your self-striping yarn, and not having a heel flap to pick up stitches- Thanks, Sox Therapist!  I think it worked- they seem to fit and the unique short rows made for a flawless gap-free heel.  I'm making another pair right now to fit them to the next recipient better as this pair required a little guesswork as far as foot size goes.

Yarn is Online Supersock 4-ply "walking color".  I think it looks quite dapper, Birks or no.

fo: Plain jane socks

I've changed gears and started making socks again.  I love the usefulness of jumpers, but I have much sock yarn in my stash that needs to be turned into socks, and those socks make for wonderful gifts.  Maybe someone particularity cold-hearted might turn down a pair, but what ice queen wouldn't want a pair of these?

Quick, plain jane socks.  The yarn is Online Supersock 4-ply City Color.  This yarn is fantastic- it's affordable and the 75% superwash 25% nylon blend is just the easy-care hard-wearing for non-knitters who can't be arsed with handwashing their precious.

The colors are fun.  I didn't bother trying to line them up, giving them a charmingly mismatched quality.

Pattern is my basic toe-up two at a time sock with the Fleegle heel, and a couple inches of ribbing at the top.

Best part, they took me all of 8 days to make.  I'm not a speedy knitter, but that's really fast as far as sock knitting goes.  For me, anyway.

FO: Buchanan Tee

I finished a fantastic little summery top a couple weeks ago.

It's the Buchanan sweater from Kate Davie's wonderful little book appropriately titled "Yokes".   The last sweater I made of hers was the whimsical Owls pullover.  Sadly, I left it in storage and I want it back (along with that denim pencil skirt, ugh, sometimes I just miss my stuff).

There are several winners in the Yokes book.  Loads of simple, creative designs that would be flattering to most- there is quite a bit of waist shaping worked into these patterns, which, hello, I can't do without.

This was designed with a heavier wool in mind- a mohair blend!- but I couldn't do a short-sleeved top in wool.  In my mind, it called for cotton, specifically some of my jealously hoarded long-discontinued Rowan Calmer.  It behaves like wool but it's nice and light weight, making it perfect for summery little tops that you dream of wearing.  Lately, I've been in a "suns out, why am I freezing?" sort of place so it hasn't gotten any real use yet.  I can't wait.  Tomorrow is a warmer day according to the Met office.

I loved the colorwork on the Yoke of this.  It's much bolder and graphic than traditional fair-isle yokes.

All-round, a winner.

FO: Circle Socks

It's been a while since I've made a pair of socks.  This is an odd thing since most of my yarn stash is sock yarn.  I should probably make more socks.

They are still my go-to for travel projects.  If I have a long train journey in store and I'll be hiking around a bit then I always have a pair on the needles.  It's much easier than having a adult-sized sweater shoved in my bag while walking hill and dale.  

I made these for a guy-friend who is generous and gregarious.  He's had us over for dinner more times than I'm comfortable with before making a grand gesture of thanks.  So here they are:  a pair of socks that he can wear with his crocs while out back brewing beer.

I started a basic toe-up, two at a time sock while on the train to Exmouth last month.  When I got to the heel I tried something new:  Fleegle's No-flap-no-hassle sock.  I really liked the heel it made- smooth and flat- and once that was done, I chose a pattern to compete the cuff- the Circle Sock, modified to work with my sport-weight yarn and stitch count.   It's a simple slip-stitch pattern that adds a little bulk and texture to the cuff.

I'm modeling them here, so they are much bigger than my foot.  I used a skein of Online Supersock Murano color, and they do look a bit like Venetian glass.   Except they are wool and sock-shaped.  Even though I don't know the recipient's dressing habits intimately, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't wear handknit socks with shoes, but he does keep a cold house and a no-shoes policy, so I think these will nicely fit the bill for house socks.  Sport weight yarn is a bit thick to shove into shoes, but they make a cushy and warm house sock.  It's also very durable- the superwash wool/nylon blend means this will last a good long while.  They aren't precious at all.

FO: Olive

Oh, ugh, I am so disappointed with this little pullover.  It just looked so adorable and casual and wearable on the model, I jumped right on it with needles and yarn.

I mean, it made the model look like this:


(c Helen Isager)

But me?  It had quite a different effect on me:

Ugh, really??  I even added waist shaping to try to pull in the sack a bit.  This just doesn't fit me at all, and I have no idea how my neckline ended up being a gaping maw of terror.

See?  The cute little scoop neck just splays out across my shoulders and I'm tugging at it constantly to re-shape it into a scoop.  I got gauge, I made the smallest size knowing it would be billowy and I'm not exactly willowy, but still.  I wanted it to fit and I was really thrilled with the colors I chose.    

It had cute details though- the yoke and the sleeves are in garter stitch, and the rutching at the neck and waist added interest to the sack.   I was in love with the shiny Danish packaging of this pattern and didn't see the reality of the situation before it was too late.

And I loved the yarn I used- Sanguine Gryphon Bugga in Tulip-Tree Beauty, with some assorted scraps for the garter bands.  I like the fit and drape of garments made in sock or sport weight yarn best, and because most of the knitting was fairly mindless I didn't take me all that long.  However, being handyed, there is more purple in the top half of the body than the lower half.  I didn't alternate skeins. I can live with that- it's not the worst thing about this pullover.

So I'm gifting this, which is just as well as I'll never wear something that I have to fidget with constantly and even wearing a sack around the house is just a bad idea.  I'm still searching for a lightweight casual sweater.  I've been having fit issues all over the place this year, which seems to be a phase that I can't get out of.  Maybe it's a time to make some socks for a bit.

Pattern is Olive from the Amimono collection.

FO: Mandala Rug

Bear with me.  This was a bit of an impulse project.

We are floor-sitters in my house.  Ever since I was a kid, I would sit on the floor.  For fun, for study, for movies.  I love Japanese and Korean restaurants where you take off your shoes and sit on the floor.  I feel like it's better for your back and posture to sit up unaided, and you can sit in lotus or half lotus and give your hips a good stretch that you don't get from sitting in a chair.

Yes, bean bag chairs are comfy but not exactly classy decor, and building a low padded platform like I saw in the Tokapi palace in Istanbul is kind of out of the question in a rental flat.  

I was wandering the local TK Maxx (which inexplicably is called TJ Maxx in the states).  I occasionally find yarn here- last year I ended up with oodles of Rowan Kidsilk Creation to make oodles of ruffle scarves with.  Baby mohair and silk are things you should never turn down, even in novelty yarn form.  This go-round, they had oodles of Boodles- what they call "textile yarn".  It is stripped-out bits of leftover t-shirt fabric.  Most people know it (or have made their own) to make rag rugs.  I picked up all the good cones of colors I could find- it was tough as they didn't exactly have a brilliant selection, but for that price, I made do with what they had.  I was going to make a cushy little meditation rug.  

In the end, I found enough white, grey and red to do the job.  A stop by the little craft department at Morely's, my underrated independent neighborhood department store in Brixton and I had a 20mm crochet hook to wrap my hand around.  

A few hours later, I had this:

If I had more yarn, I could have kept going.  I did run out of red (oops!) and had to finish the row with grey, but it's not the most atrocious crafting crime of the century.  One day, I find enough good colors, I would love to do a softly graduated color rug.  The whole thing cost £12, plus another 2 squid for the crochet hook.

It was fun to make, and a real upper-body workout to wrestle with super thick stretchy cotton fabric yarn.  Roar.  It got heavy quite quickly, and a gator-wrestling match is the only thing I can think to compare this with once the first few rounds were done.  It's so cushy, too- your ass doesn't fall asleep at all, even after a sitting through and entire movie.  I put it next to my coffee bench, plop down in the centre bit and type away until I'm out of things to say.

Dear diary, it's now been 8 months, 2 weeks and 3 days since my last pedicure.  Not that I'm counting.

I used 4 cones of boodles yarn to make a rug that's about 3 feet across.  This is a pattern you could go on and on and on with and consume an entire room with if you felt so inclined.  It's a free pattern, too, and they have a great step-by-step tutorial to go along with it, so even the most basic of crafters could whip this up in no time.

It makes me feel peaceful and happy to have this around.  If it didn't weight more than a freight train, I'd be making more of them as gifts.  For now, I'll just quietly hoard any more good cones of Boodles that I might find.  

FO: Hitchhiker, take two

I made another hitchiker scarf.  The first one I had gifted.  I quite liked making it.  It's fairy mindless, it's garter stitch, and it shows of wildly handpainted yarns quite nicely.

Like this skein of Wollmeise that I got in a swap.

The color was "Aspen Tree".  I loved it because it was COLORFUL, but couldn't really think of too much to do with it as I felt it was a bit busy.  Except...

It's glorious, this second hitchhiker scarf.  Wollmeise is sturdy stuff, so wearing this on a trail was no thing at all.  Plus, when I went to the pub at night, I had some class little accessory to brighten things up.

 I used up the entire skein, and it is plenty long.  It can drape, it can wrap, it can just be an awesome scarf-shawl and keep me warm, I can flip the end around and make a bandanna.  The asymmetry is fun to play with and I've worn this quite a lot already.  It's too bad- I love knitting lacy fancy shawls, but they never get any use as I feel they are too delicate or fussy to actually wear.  The big boring plain knits I wear all the time.

  Also....there's a fair bit of navy blue in there, which means I can wear this with pretty much anything in my wardrobe.

FO: Var

My obsession with all thing Icelandic continues.  While I won't be stocking deliciously fragrant Hakarl any time soon, I am loving lopapeysa sweaters.  Casual, functional, warm colorwork pullovers and cardigans were my go-to this winter.  Now that it is springtime, I still wanted to wear one, so I decided to fight my fear of zippers once again and make a jacket that is still warm and weatherproof without being too swampy-pits on.

The great thing about Icelandic sweater patterns is they all follow a very basic formula for men and women alike- a tube for the body, two tubes for the sleeves, then you join the whole mess when it hits the yoke and decrease down to the neck.  They are perfectly unisex, and while you can add waste shaping for a more flattering fit, I opted not to.  I found a yoke pattern that I loved but it didn't match my gauge (Var), so I mashed it up with another sweater that did (Frost) and added a steek in the front so I could install a zipper.  Both patterns are found in the Istex Lopi 29 book, which is full of patterns that you can just adapt and run with your own creation.

I wanted a longer sweater, a bit oversized, so I know this isn't the most flattering length on someone with curves.  I wanted function over fashion this time around though, and having something that reaches you hip makes for a really warm jumper.  I also added a hood.  It just felt right to be able to have a built-in hat on something that I would wear in such changeable spring weather.  Plus, I've never made anything with a hood before and was long overdue.

I am also getting so much better at installing zippers.  This one I got right on only the second try!  It's practically bulge-free, and the whole process went so smoothly that I have conquered my fear and I'm zipper-ready for anything.

The pattern for the hood also said that you should roll the edge of the hood under and seem it in place, but it does that naturally without any help from me, so I left the edge unfinished.  If you were really inspired, you could do an i-cord edging on it, or extend the button band up and around it, but I think it was fine as it is.

I used up almost all of the Rowan British Sheep Breeds that I had in my stash.  The colors:
White= BFL
Black-Brown= Black Welsh
Brown-Grey= Jacob
I also used small amounts of Grey Suffolk and Moorit Shetland, as I was just down to scraps with those and still wanted to put them to use.  

It's just fascinating to feel the different wool characteristics in this way.  The BFL is by far the softest and silkiest and I want to buy all of it in the world and live in a house made of it.  

I am quite pleased with it.  It's just suck a simple design and only took a few weeks to whip up with no real intense effort needed.  I'm quite sad to see it done, as this is the very last of the instant gratification projects for a while.  On to sock-yarn pullovers!

FO: Babette Blanket

Like so many knitters, I had accumulated a really large amount of scraps since I've started knitting.  Hopefully, you end a project and still have a bit left and don't have to put a funky contrasting stripe in.  Ahem.  What to do, with all those odd balls and leftovers?  A bit of color-work here and there fits the bill nicely, but it still won't put a dent in my scrappy stash.

Since moving abroad and starting fresh three years ago, I managed to knit enough to once again get an overflowing bin of leftover odds and ends.  Sigh.  I resolved to do something with them instead of cramming yet another partial skein into the bin.  Searching the vast crafty pages of the internet, I ruled out loads of ideas before starting to drift towards blankets.  I have never made one of those before!  My fully-furnished rental flat had a decor scheme of white and beige and zzzzzz I'm sick of that.  

Finally:

The Babette blanket, a crochet calliphony of different sized squares, all cobbled together and tied up with a border.  It is a sight to behold.   All my sport, sock and robust laceweight yarn scraps...every last bit used up.

If you have received a knitted gift from me in the past few years, chances are you can possibly play a game of I-spy and find your leftovers.  wow, much pink.

It's kind of a hot mess of whatever I could grab and crochet into a square.  I tried to mix it up as best I could without too many similar colors grouped together, but that was really all the planning I did.  I've seen other people's blankets where they actually planned out their color scheme, and it looks fantastic.  However, I am not that color coordinated and I really just wanted all the stash gone.

I did have a small moment of cheating as a friend of mine brought a bag of scraps of Wollmeise to knit night and was just giving it away, so I got a much-needed boost of someone else's stash.  Otherwise, I would have run out of scraps, the horror of it all!

I tried to seam it up as I went along just to save myself the mega headache of getting this all together.  This didn't work really well:  after washing and hanging to dry, the weight of it all unravled many, many seams of the slippery superwash wool.  I spend a whole afternoon piecing it all back together again.  

It really was so simple, and not so huge where it didn't drive me mad.  It's a good scrap-busting project, and it adds a much-needed pop of color to my world of beige.

It's throw sized, so it's nice to curl up on the couch with it with a cuppa.

Since I had never crocheted a square before, a found this tutorial quite helpful:

It took me three or four watches and then I was motoring along like a pro.

 I am quite pleased with it.  No awkward bin of scraps, some cheerful warmth, and self-satisfaction all in one project.

FO: Oranje

My fair isle obsession continues.  This has been the winter of colorful colorwork for me, with nary a cable or lace to be seen.

I liked the idea and look of a more modern take on the traditional fair isle yoke sweater- something with a bit of shaping and more modern looking yoke motifs- and I've been wanting to cast on for the Oranje cardigan for a while.  I originally thought I would work this monochrome- black, grey, white- but got inspired and replaced the black with the most insanely shocking pink I could dig out of my stash.

The yarn was sport weight, so it took quite a while to get knitted up.  It was pretty boring until the yoke, and then it got colorful and a bit complicated with all the braids tangling up the yarn.

I finished the knitting, then butchered it.

Ha ha, kidding, I machine-stitched neat lines on either side of the steek, and then split it from navel to throat like the barbarian that I am.  Pullover become a cardigan, presto changeo!

 Oh and I did try it on before I sliced this- I was happy with the fit.  Then I washed and blocked it, and wouldn't you know it?  That son of a bitch grew and grew and grew.  Behold the wonders of superwash wool.  I blocked it a bit smaller, with some success.

Behold.

It is now a too-large cardigan.

I put in button bands, but no buttons or zippers yet as I give this some thought.  The cardigan is in time-out while I decide what to do with it.  I had made the Medium size- 40", wanting something that wasn't skin tight.  Unfortunately, if I would have made the next size down, I would have gotten a much better fit.  So it sits, folded in the corner, waiting for divine inspiration or someone slightly larger then me to be in want of a sweater.  

I love the details- the short rows to build up the back of the neck:

The neatly turned hems:

The colors I chose, and the braids that added texture and gave it a more modern look:

Alas, none of this will make up for the fact that it's about two sizes too big.  It's just way too much fabric for me to swim in!  I did want a relaxed cardigan, but this much ease is just unflattering and unkind to the curvy.  I'm trying to decide if it is worth it to tuck in the button bands and attach a zipper- it would lop off about two inches that way.  I need to somehow get rid of six before I felt like this was a good, flattering fit.

It's not a complete loss: It was fun to knit.  But you can see perfectly in the photo below that all the extra fabric is just hanging out.

But the yarn, ooooh, the yarn.  That touch of cashmere makes it so lush.

Sigh.

I used 2 skeins of Sanguine Gryphon Bugga in Tulip Tree Beauty (grey) and most of one skein of Devil's Flower Mantis (pink) plus a skein of undyed yarn.   I DID SWATCH and yes, I did get gauge.  It's just bad judgement on sizing and yarn drape on my part really.

If anything, this cardigan has taught me to doubt myself a bit more and to take my self-confidence down a few notches.

I did make some modifications: the original has 3/4 sleeves and a high turtleneck that reaches the chin.  I lopped off the turtleneck once I finished the short rows, and added inches to the sleeves.  Having a winter sweater with 3/4 sleeves just seemed silly.

To be continued...