Too hot to knit!

Oh, yikes, has it really been over a month yet again? It has, and I don't even have that much to show for it. What can I say, summer weather doesn't really inspire me to knit much. I know some of you make some really cute tanks and whatnot, but I just haven't found any of those that really grab me, at least not yet. Instead I've decided to use my summer knitting time on small winter accessories, some for me & some to give away when it gets a little colder out. At the moment I have a hat & a scarf on the needles, both of which haven't been touched for weeks & weeks. The hat's for me and the scarf is for a friend.

I've been enjoying my summer despite the lack of knitting, though! I've been reading constantly, of course, and doing yoga, cooking, baking, & working in my garden.

Oh, wait, I do have something I can show you! Here's my friend Steve modeling the hat I made him ages ago:


I took way too long to send it to him, but since he lives in Alberta he said it's still useful, even this time of year. I'm glad!

Also, I had the good fortune to win a copy of Sew U Home Stretch from Dramatis Personae a while back! Thanks to that & some of the other beautiful hand-sewn items I've seen around, I'm itching to actually learn how to use my machine. With any luck, you'll see some sewing posts here soon!

Cloud Bolero: SO much better!

I ripped out that silly picot edging and did garter stitch instead:



I think garter was what I was originally planning when I started this 8 million years ago, but some Ravelers had such cute picot-edged versions that I guess I forgot. Anyway, yesterday a very helpful commenter suggested that garter would help tone down the flaring at the bottom without me needing to do any shaping (thanks!). It definitely did help. The loose fit still bothers me a little, but only a little. Overall I really like this!

I'll probably make another someday, with sleeves, but this one is really great for throwing over tank tops or sundresses. I'd love to find a nice brooch to fasten it at the top, but for now wearing it open is fine too.

The pattern is pretty great but I hated the way it was written & had some real trouble following it -- of course, a lot of that was probably just the fact that it was my first lace project. The thing that bothered me the most was that she has you cast on extra stitches to fill the gap created by binding off the sleeve stitches. Maybe it's just the way I did it, but it makes the underarm area of my sweater look horrible and just sort of adds unnecessary bulk to an already loose-fitting garment. So, next time around I'll be skipping that part. Still, I think the designer is a genius and I want to make more of her stuff soon! She has some great hats and I'm developing a slight hat obsession right now. :)

Cloud Bolero: Kinda Finished.

So I'm done with the Cloud Bolero & my feelings are very mixed:


(Try to ignore all those ends I haven't yet woven in!)
Don't get me wrong, I think it might be the prettiest thing I've ever knit! But I am much less than thrilled with the picot edging (translation: all those silly little triangles at the bottom) and also with the way it fits. It's perfect around my neck & shoulders, but it really flares out at the bottom. Soooooooo I think I have to rip out the picot edging (which I suspect will be a hellish endeavor) & maaaybe even go back farther to add shaping (which I am probably too lazy to do). I am totally not excited to do those things, which of course is why I am taking & posting pictures rather than doing them. :)

NOT DEAD! (+ my first pair of socks!)

Hi, blog, remember me? No? That's ok, it's been a million years and I don't really have a very good excuse. I know there were final exams in there somewhere, & then my wonderful friend Linn visited for a week, but really I could've taken the time to put up a post or two even in the middle of those things.

Sorry. I'll be better from here on out, I promise!*

The upside of me having abandoned you for nearly a whole month is that now I have lots of cool things to show you. I won't cram them all into one post, but for now I will show you my completed pair of socks:

Aren't they lovely? I finished the second one while my friend Linn was visiting from Toronto. We took a trip down to Illinois to visit my beloved Aunt Deb while she was here, & on the way we knit & knit & knit. Here's the trippiest sock-in-progress photo you ever will see, taken in Chicago's famous "bean" sculpture:


And here we are knitting in Millennium Park:


A busload of senior citizens happened to arrive while we were doing that, and of course many of the women told us how happy they were to see us knitting, and one old man asked to take that picture. Cute! (Yes, Linn is borrowing a Calorimetry I made.)

When I finally did finish that sock, it might've attacked Linn:

Ahahahaha! Best sock photo EVER!

You can see the rest of the pictures from Linn's visit here.

So, I think S. succeeded in her mission & got me a little bit addicted to sock-knitting. There will definitely be more in my future! For these I used the provisional cast-on, short row toe, & short row heel. I hated the provisional cast-on the first time around, but the second time I used a smoother cotton yarn for the crocheted part & found I didn't mind it at all. Also, the short row heel on my first sock is a little holey but on the second one I just picked up some stitches where the holes were threatening to form & it looks perfect. I definitely liked the toe-up method overall, but I am interested to learn some more toe & heel methods in the future!

Since then I've been working on a pair of legwarmers adapted from a sock pattern -- more on those soon. Cherie Amour is on hiatus still, but yesterday I finally picked the Cloud Bolero back up. It had been lying neglected & untouched for longer than this blog had, if you can believe that. Now I'm in the middle of binding off the body (woohoo!) & I need to hurry up & decide what I want to do about sleeves. The original pattern doesn't really have any & I keep waffling on whether I want to stick with that or not, and then of course if I am going to do sleeves I need to figure out how I want to approach them. Hmmm...

Anyway, I promise it won't be a month until next time!


* Maybe.

In all its glory.

My first sock!
I'm almost done with the toe on the second one.

First sock finished!! (+ stalling on my other projects...)

Guys!!! I finished my first sock!! No pictures until tomorrow, I'm afraid (I tried taking some just now but the light is, of course, much too low), but trust me that it's spectacular and that I love it very, very much. The feeling of finishing your first of a certain thing is always so great. I still remember dancing around like a complete nerd after finishing my first hat, and the feeling of finishing the first sock is similarly wonderful. Hopefully that'll motivate me to get started & make some progress on the second one soon!

My other projects, unfortunately, are still kind of on hold. With the Cloud Bolero, I still just need to sit down with the pattern, but I haven't really had the time or patience for it yet. I've honestly been much too busy, and the next week is only going to be worse. In the next 7 days I have more papers and exams than I even want to list, so I don't think I can do anything with the bolero until those are finished...

Then there's Cherie Amour. I'm halfway through the waist shaping but the sloppiness of my ssk's on the bottom is really bothering me. They're really lumpy, but I rather stupidly assumed that perhaps that was just the nature of ssk's and that I shouldn't really try to fix it. Yesterday I read this thread on Ravelry, though, & now I'm thinking there might be some ways to fix up my technique. So the question, of course, is: do I start the whole sweater over, or just do the "better" ssk's from here on out? I can't quite decide.

Anyway, I mainly just wanted to share my delight over finishing that sock. :) I'll be back soon with photos + a new cookie recipe to blog about, FINALLY.

Springy knitting.

Hi, everyone! I'm sorry it's been so long. I still haven't been baking, unfortunately (except for bread), but I'm knitting a lot and kinda jumping from project to project. The Cloud Bolero has hardly been touched since my last post. My stitch count is way off so I need to sit down with the pattern & figure out where I went wrong and how to fix (or, more likely, fudge) it. Since I'm too lazy to do that, I started Cherie Amour & got up to the waist shaping. I don't have any very good pictures of it just yet, but my cat Bob seems to like it, at least:



By the time I finish that and the bolero it will (hopefully) be too warm to wear either of them. I am 100% ok with that, believe me!

Most excitingly, though, I've been working on my first sock! I know, I know, it seems like just yesterday I was saying I would never do socks, but it turns out they're actually really fun and quick. Here's mine over the weekend:


It's grown quite a bit since then, actually. I'm already up past the heel. I love how quickly it moves and it's great to have in my purse to work on whenever I get bored. And isn't the yarn gorgeous? These socks are my contribution to Lynn of ColorJoy's "Knitting Spring into Existence" project. I think it's working, too!

A pretty WIP & some pretty yarn!

My knitting just made my day!! I picked the cloud bolero back up a few days ago and finally got to the part where I separated the sleeves from the body. This is my first remotely lacy project and it's been sort of tough to tell what's going on while it's on the needles, so I really wasn't sure how it was looking. Once I finally had the sleeves separated, I could try it on & find out, and it turns out that I LOVE IT!





I can't believe it was actually making sense that whole time! The pattern as written would have that be all for the sleeves -- I was actually supposed to do a picot bind-off on the last row. But I think that looks kind of stupid, so I'm going to go for probably 3/4-length sleeves. I'll figure it out when I've got the body done.

Also, my yarn from HandPaintedYarn.com came yesterday!!



It has more hot pink than I expected, and pink's not usually a color I go for, but isn't it beautiful? It's going to be Cherie Amour!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Sad news + cookie #8.

Sorry for my absence of late. I haven't been doing nearly enough knitting or baking, but I have an excuse: after over 2 and a half years together, Brian & I broke up last week. Yeah. That's about enough to kill anyone's inspiration for a little while, don't you think? Well, perhaps you would actually think that knitting & baking would bring me lots of comfort during such a time but instead I've been going for the most mindless activities possible: reading guilty pleasure blogs, playing solitaire on my computer, whining endlessly to my friends on the phone, and taking as many hot baths as I can. I'm starting to feel a little better, but obviously it'll take me some time to get over this. Never doubt anyone who tells you long-distance relationships are insanely difficult! It was mainly the distance, I think, that did us in, and I'm hoping we might be able to give it another try in the future, some time when we're actually living in the same state, but...hey, this is already more than I wanted to say about it on a public blog, so I'll leave it at that.

If you do go through a break-up, I probably won't be the only one to recommend chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate as a coping strategy. In fact, if I really like you, I'll probably make you a bunch of these phenomenal cookies:

Recipe: Chewy Brownie Peanut Butter Chip Cookies
Modifications: I think I halved it, but other than that I didn't change much.
Review: PERFECTION. Chocolatey, peanut buttery perfection. If the whole point of this project weren't to try lots of different recipes, and if I didn't have a desire to be at least slightly healthy, I would just make these every few weeks for the rest of my life.

Hopefully next time I'll have some knitting content. I am deeply ashamed that I've been staring at that gorgeous yarn for almost two weeks without knitting it, but as soon as I can get some teeny tiny sock needles I'll be all over it, I promise! I also ordered some stuff from HandPaintedYarn.com, so you know I'll be showing that off when it arrives. And I'm still working on the little iPod cozy, but it's my knitting-in-public project and I haven't done that for a while. The Cloud Bolero is still happening, too, it's just at a standstill for the moment.

At least Spring is almost here, right? I'm excited to see the snow melting, FINALLY. A belated Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it!

Gorgeous Yarn!

So I finished my Montana Scarf over the weekend but I don't have any good pictures of it yet -- I never seem to think of it until it's dark, and the few I've tried in the sunlight are just unacceptably crappy. I also can't show you pictures of the hat I knit for a friend over the weekend (not until I send it to him, anyway), and the Felted iPod Cozy I started yesterday is too boring to warrant photographing at this point (picture a green stockinette tube & you've got it). But I can make up for this lack of FO/WIP photos with some seriously beautiful yarn:




Are you drooling yet? That's 2 skeins of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport in Watercolor.




And this is 2 skeins of Claudia Hand-Painted Fingering Merino Wool in Caribbean Blue.
So, reason #230483240238 why you should join a knitting group in your area? Because if you say on your blog that you want to get started on socks, incredibly beautiful sock yarn might just come your way! Seriously, how lucky am I? The wonderful S. of Short N Crafty Sista read about my interest in socks & gathered up a whole bag of sock yarn that had green in it, since she needed to destash & doesn't care for green. I got to pick the two delicious yarns pictured above (an excruciatingly tough choice, by the way, since there were several other beautiful options), and everyone else got to take the rest. There aren't even any words for how grateful I am for this, but it definitely made my week!

I was up wayyyy too late last night trying to find suitable patterns for these. My first socks should probably be pretty simple, I figure, but I also want patterns worthy of these incredible yarns. I've pretty much ignored sock patterns up until now, so "overwhelmed" doesn't begin to cover how I feel looking through them now! There are so many! I'm starting to narrow it down, though, and hopefully I can start soon. I still need to get some of those tiny little sock needles, though -- I was going to run out & buy some today, but I think I might try to be patient and order some KnitPicks needles soon instead, since there are a few sizes I need for upcoming projects.

I did go yarn shopping over the weekend, too! I picked up some Berocco Peruvia in Maroon. (I almost went for green but I'm trying to branch out colorwise.) I'm using it on my aran weight version of Ysolda Teague's Cloud Bolero (Ravelry link). I am insanely nervous about this pattern, since I've never really done lace before, and I fully expect to make 10,000 stupid mistakes and have to restart it more than once. So far, though, it's going decently (knock on wood). I started it last night and have only moved through 10 or so rows, but it looks impressively lacy & lovely and I'm very excited about it!