FO Friday

Look, fingerless mitts!

Since I'd never actually made any mitts I thought these deserved their own post. 

I used this simple pattern HERE and it's pretty much perfect. They fit snugly but not too tightly, and I adjusted the length a little because I quite like it when they are a bit longer and go up the arm under your coat or jumper. 

I'm not keeping them, alas, they are a Christmas present for one of my stepsisters. I'm making two more pairs of mitts, but I'm using different patterns for them.

 I've never really given knitted gifts before, so I'm a bit nervous. I hope they like them... 

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A very quick FO

If only all craft projects were this quick then all my Christmas presents would be already done!

Cast on one morning, finished the same evening, the Holbrook hat was a joy to complete and I am so pleased to have finally found the right project for this big and bulky monster of a yarn. 

Have you ever knitted with super-bulky slubby yarn before? It's a bit of a bear, to be honest. The needles are unwieldy, and the yarn, because of its slubbiness, does not want to pull through your fingers and continues to get stuck. It was pretty good fun for a hat, but I'd be hesitant to do a much bigger project in a yarn like that and by the end of the evening my wrists were hurting from the strain of working with it. 

That said, it's perfect present yarn, because what other project could you complete that quickly? 

I'm half tempted to keep this one for myself because it's just soooo cuddly and cozy, but I'm determined to give it to my step sister, who is studying to become a vet. She also works at a veterinary centre to earn some money and for that she works outside quite a bit so this hat will keep her warm in the winter. 

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FO Friday

It’s been a while since I’ve last done an FO post, not  because I’ve had no FOs but because I’ve never got round to photographing any of them. I normally rely on Boy #1 for this now. His  genuine interest in photography has made him into a fantastic little helper, but this still requires me to actually find the time to model the knitwear.

In the end, this morning, I just decided to take a few shots in front of the mirror instead. Not ideal for photographing cowls in particular, since my hand is sort of hiding half of them, but hey, better than nothing, right? ;)

The first set is the Cosan Cowl that I did as a testknit for Ruth a while ago. The pattern can be downloaded from Ravelry HERE. I’ve shown glimpses of this, but I never took any shots of it for the purpose of showcasing it as an FO.

I really enjoyed knitting this, and I love how lush and rich the colours of the two yarns are together.

I liked it so much, in fact, that when the boys started asking me why I didn’t have a beanie yet I decide to make one to match the cowl.

I’m quite pleased with the results, even if I accidentally knitted this beanie with a smaller set of needles, resulting in a slightly more snug fit for the hat. I’ll see how I go with this. If necessary I can always re-do it in a larger needle size…

The second one is the Alban Eilir Cowl, the most recent testknit I did for Ruth. The pattern is released now and you can purchase it HERE.

Again, I really enjoyed knitting this, although I was more than a little rusty with the colour work. The first few rows on the reverse side are a bit of a mess, but I’m not showing you that bit!

All in all I think this is a good little project for anyone who wants a gentle start into colour work. Just remember to carry those strands of yarn with you rather than cut them, is all I say!! ;)

So there you go – 3 FOs in one post, not too bad, eh?

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Post-holiday FOs: Meet the Beanie Boys

I've not been entirely idle this holiday. In fact, while we were away I was downright busy. It felt like a regular beanie conveyor belt for a while!

The start was a beanie for boy #2. He'd been asking me for a beanie and scarf combo for a while now, and I thought this was as good a time as any to finally cast on for it. 

The colours he had picked were red and green. I wasn't took keen on buying lots of new wool, so I rooted around in my vast stash and found some dark green wool. I'm pretty sure it's Cascade, and I'm also pretty sure that I've had it since D's and my honeymoon, which is something like 10 years ago now. We spent it travelling New England on a Harley Davidson. I'm not your typical biker chick (or a biker chick at all, really!), and the trade-off for riding on that Harley was that we were also touring the Yarn Shops of New England. We visited many, always drawing surprised looks when we entered some little LYS in our full motorbike gear. It was a great holiday, and I brought back a whole lot of yarn - as much as would fit in the saddle bags on the bike, really. I also learned to spin on  that holiday, but that is another story.

Anyway, I still had this dark green yarn and I thought I'd use it. To accommodate boy #2's wishes I then bought some dark red Alpaca-mix yarn and I was set to go. Boy#2 told me later that he had envisioned brighter and lighter colours (something like bright red and a glowing neon- green... I should have guessed that I suppose!), but he is nevertheless thrilled with the beanie. So thrilled, in fact, that he's been wearing it most days, both during the day and often in the evening, in bed. :D

I used a very simple pattern for this. The inspiration came from Haven Ashley's Man Hat, but I amended the pattern a bit by using thinner yarn. I also went with a k1 p1 pattern on every row for this hat, which gae it quite clearly pronounced stripes. 

As soon as I had finished it, I saw boy #1's eyes light up - 'Mummy, that's cool, can you make me one!?'

Sure I can, darling, I'm glad you asked!

He chose a combination of the dark green yarn and the light green one that I still have left over from the Eyelet Yoke sweater. I love it when I find small projects for left-over yarn! 

I can tell you now, though, that one does not tolerate any procrastinating when he is waiting for something to be finished. At one point I was sitting down on the sofa for 5 minutes and he spotted me without my knitting, so he went and fetched it for me and threw it to me with a 'come-on mummy, you need to knit.'. Ha! 

That hat was finished in record time.

The next one was obviously boy #3's beanie. Since we now had three colours in the mix for these beanies I thought I'd go with the combination that hadn't been used before - the dark red Alpaca and the light green. 

I went with a k1 p1 row followed with a knit row for these two, which gave a slightly different look and shape. They are less stretchy and wider, overall, and for boy#3's beanie I altered the stripes by knitting 3 rows with red and two with green, which, together with the pattern, produced an interesting effect of one solid green stripe and one sort of dotted stripe... I quite like it. :) 

I obviously didn't want to leave out D, and in fact, this is the hat that started it all. I knitted it with a ball of Noro that I have had for ages. The pattern for this one is made up, and as you can see I ran out of yarn right before the end so I finished it with that dark green Cascade. 

So you see, I wasn't that idle on holiday, not at all!

4 boys - 4 hats! :)

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FO - Eyelet Yoke

What a week this was! At one point I thought I couldn't possibly get it all done, and then I discovered errors on the computer system at the very last minute, and then... Well, enough said about that, it's all done now. Today I spent a bit of time attending to things that I haven't been able to do recently, such as going to the bank for example. Nothing exciting, but it felt good to re-connect. I also dropped off and picked up boy #3 from preschool and he was delighted and so excited that I was picking him up. That felt good too.

I have also finished the Eyelet Yoke. I didn't do that today, though, although I did sew the ends in just now, while 5 (!) boys are playing Super Mario on the Wii all around me (the noise level is pretty awesome...). We have been watching a new drama on TV, Humans, and it's gripping enough that it let me completely forget how boring I find sleeve knitting.

The sleeves are still sort of short - but I like it that way. It fits really well and the yarn is oh so soft. 

I also quite like how the neckline has turned out. 

Although if I wanted to quibble I'd say that I would have been better off with a less stretchy cast-on (I used the stetchy German cast-on). With less stretch the neck wouldn't be quite so wide, which doesn't matter at the front, but gives me quite a generous dip at the back too... It doesn't gape, though, so it's OK. 

Pattern alterations:

Well, I re-sized the pattern so it would fit me. 

I also changed the hem. The original has quite an interesting short-row hem that makes the sweater longer at the back than at the front, and I was quite tempted by it, but while I thought it'd be great for jeans, I knew that I'd be wearing this sweater a lot with skirts and I don't think that kind of hem would look that great with those. 

Overall I'd give this top marks - the pattern, that is, not my knitting! ;)  

Rav page is here, but it doesn't really say anything I haven't discussed in my updates on the blog. 

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That muddy-brown raglan: An 'Ugly Duckling' kind of a tale...

I've got another FO to show you! It's the Easy Raglan V-Neck by Stefanie Japel, knitted in my not-so-loved brown GGH Savanna.

I didn't have particularly high hopes for this project, mainly because I didn't love the yarn. It seemed drab and, with its mottled brown colour, kind of ... messy-looking? Since it is a soft yarn, though, I thought that perhaps with the adorable Stefanie Japel v-neck pattern it might make a good home / allotment jumper that would keep me warm and cozy, even if it was never going to look very stylish. 

Half-way through I started to panic that I wouldn't have enough yarn, so I decided to add some orange half-sleeves to make sure I didn't run out. To create a more coherent overall look I added the stripes at the bottom of the body and reversed them at the bottom of the sleeves. I initially just added a thin crochet border to the v-neck edge, but because my gauge had been slightly off the neck came out a bit large and the thin orange band didn't look right so I ripped it out and added a ribbed edge.

You know, I'm actually really really pleased with how this jumper has turned out:

In fact, I think I kind of love it!

It fits so well, and it's so very comfy and you know what - I think, if you squint a bit, it's downright stylish! Who knew the drab brown GGH Savanna had such untapped potential!

Since I said I would, and also because it's so snuggly and warm and it was a cold day, I did wear it to the allotment last weekend, and I have also been wearing it quite a bit at home because it keeps me warm when I'm working in my office, but I'm planning to wear this jumper A LOT, and I'm so happy with how it's turned out, I don't think I'll have any qualms about wearing it 'in public'. 

My photographer, as has been so often the case recently, is boy#1 (aka The Bean). He's actually started to direct me on where he wants me to stand and how he wants me to pose and look. Clearly he is taking his new job very seriously! ;)

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FO Friday - Green Ink Flare

Yes, two FOs in a week! First the Lombard Street Socks, and now Ink Flare. 

Ink Flare, after being a really quick and straight-forward knit, actually caused quite a bit of high drama at the end. I finished the body and the sleeves very quickly - all in all it can't have taken much more than a week - and I was equally quick to assemble the jumper and sew the sleeves on. I then grabbed my crochet hook and set to crocheting the hem, and that's when all the trouble started.

I'd decided to forego the garter hems at the sleeves. The plan was to hem with a crochet chain instead.. Having done it I realised that the end result was... odd-looking. The yarn is so stretchy that the crochet border, even when done very loosely, kind of drew the knitted fabric together in a way that didn't suit the jumper at all. 

So the crochet border was unpicked. Now the sleeves rolled up slightly - much better.

I then went on to crochet the neckline. This turned out to be much more of a problem than the sleeves. Even without the crochet border I'd already had the suspicion that perhaps the neckline is too high / narrow for this type of jumper. I don't mean that there is a flaw with the pattern - it worked just fine for my purple Ink Flare for example - but that for this type of yarn, and this type of open, airy fabric, the neckline needs to be particularly open and slouchy to pull the project together. See, even while I got the correct gauge, the open fabric stretches quite a bit and makes this a very casual knit, wide in the body and the sleeves, and the neckline, I think, needs to reflect that slouchy look. As it was, the neck looked like the only fitted thing on the jumper, making the whole lot appear like it was oversized with only the neckline done to the correct sizing - not a great look! 

So I unpicked the crochet, then tried it on again. While this was better, the neck was still too tight. This is where it got messy. Being the lazy thing I am, I didn't then, like a good girl, decided to de-assemble the jumper to carefully unpick the tops of all the pieces. Nooooo, not me! Instead I decided to do it while it was all still hanging together. 

Yeah.

You can imagine how that went... 

It didn't help that a) the yarn had sort of tangled and didn't particularly wanted to be ripped (it is mohair, after all) and b) that I had already sewn some of the ends in, meaning that I had to unpick as a I went along... 

Great idea, that was... 

I undid what I think was about three rows, then crocheted that border on again, using the leftover yarn from the unpicking (that was another bad choice because there was never enough of it so I had several joins). I cast off, then tried it on. 

Nope, the cast-off, despite  being very loose, was still too tight and bunched the fabric up. More ripping, followed by another, ultra-loose cast-off. Then I crocheted a very very loose crochet chain to finish the now rather messy-looking neckline off more neatly. Tried it on again.

Nope, still not right - the crochet border, once again, pulled the fabric together in a way that made it bunch up. This was quite amazing to me because you can't imagine how loosely I did the crochet border - the loops were HUGE!

So the crochet was ripped once again. Assessing the situation I then decided that I was going to have to go with the flow and just leave that slightly unsightly unfinished border as it was, because at least it meant that the neckline sizing was right. 

I tidied up the sewing where the sleeves attach to the body of the jumper - this looked pretty messy by now but not much I could do about it, and then stuck the whole project in the wash in the hope of levelling out the neckline a little by blocking it. 

Some blocking was required, and it's still not perfect, but hey, the rolling hems do help to hide the unsightly bits!! 

But you know what? I love it.

It's been some journey, this last bit of knitting Ink Flare, but I love the end result. Yes, to the discerning knitter the problems around the neckline and the messy sewing which resulted from the repeated ripping are fairly obvious, but the jumper is cuddly and so so soft, and I do actually quite like how it fits now. The boys like it too - boy #2 has already announced that he wants me to knit a jumper for him now. I'm only too happy to oblige! :) 

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FO - The Garter Yoke Cardigan

Two FO Fridays in a row! This hasn't happened in a long time!

The Garter Yoke cardi is finally finished. The buttons arrived this week, were sewn on, and I've even already worn the cardi. :)

This cardi has been soooo long in the making. Seriously, there were moments when I thought I'd never finish it, lol. It's not that I didn't enjoy knitting it, and the pattern is great, but those sleeves really got to me. With that DK yarn it just seemed to take ages, you know?

That said, I'm really happy with how it's turned out. I ordered these buttons for it because I thought it might be nice to go for some yellow ones to complement the yellow flecks in the yarn. The alternative was wood, but I wanted something a bit more eye-popping than that. I was going to order some normal round ones when I spotted these elongated ones. I wasn't sure it was going to work but seeing it all together now I think it does!

I can already tell that this cardi is going to get a lot of wear this winter because it has long sleeves (hurrah for not giving up on those) that are going to keep me warm, but with the dk yarn it's not heavy and bulky but instead drapes really nicely and will fit under my slim-line coat.

So there you go the Garter Yoke cardi is finally finished - tadah! ;)

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Fridays are for FOs!

Yes, yes, they are!

It's been so long since I've been able to show off any finished projects on a Friday, and I'm so very happy with this project.

The Scheepjes Mystery Blanket has been finished for a little while now, but I never seem to get round to photographing it because either I'm at work, or it's in use, or it's too dark and dreary to get good light...

But anyway, here it is, in all its glory:

And another one for good measure... 

And from above... 

And if you haven't had enough now, here are some detail shots... 

I added the squares together with a single crochet stitch, which works quite well I think, because it adds a little raised frame around each of the squares but it is simple enough not to draw attention away from the individual squares. After some contemplation I added a plain single crochet border. I was going to make it wider, but D convinced me that it was good as it was and I was pretty sick of border crocheting by that point, so who was I to argue? ;)

Again, I deliberated for a while but in the end decided on a simple border because i didn't want anything too busy that would compete with the crochet squares. I really like how it's turned out and it's definitely been a success with the family, boys and cats and all - it's almost constantly in use, in particular as boy #1 seems to have kidnapped my granny square blanket for his own personal use in his room. Yesterday when I snuck up there before I went to bed he was all snuggled up in it. Much as I'd like the blanket back to keep in the living room I just don't have the heart to take it when he clearly likes it that much. Maybe I'll have to make another one...

I'm still waiting for the buttons for the Garter Yoke cardi to arrive, so I'll have to leave that FO for another post... 

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A Tiny FO...

A while ago I made this little fellow:

Birdie is a little crochet bird from a very simple and fun pattern published free on Attic24's website. I've been meaning to share him for a while now. He came into being on one of those days when you have plenty of jobs you ought to get on with yet can't make yourself actually start. I was at home, and I was supposed to tidy and clean, and this proved too much of a temptation for me - a new pattern, a new skill to learn, and it promises to be a quick job? I'm right there!

This was so much fun to make, and look what a cute little fellow he is.

He was immediately claimed by boy #2, and I didn't manage to get any better pictures of him before that happened. Still, I think it's enough to show him off. ;)

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FO - Socks for Boys

I had this idea in my head of this perfect shot of all the three boys, lined up with their new stripey socks on, ordered from littlest to oldest. I was going to take a shot of their feet and you could all marvel at the cuteness of the socks on little boys' feet.

Ha!

Instead you get to marvel at the discrepancy between said ideas and the reality of lining three boys up for long enough to take shots of their feet. 

They were happy enough putting the socks on -that much was no effort. They were thrilled that it was all finally done, so as soon as I suggested that they might wear them they were off to pull them over their feet.

So yeah, that was the easy part. The impossible part was to then keep them still to take pictures. Not even all three of them - just keeping one of them still was already pretty much impossible. D stood by and laughed at me as I futilely tried to motivate them to line up for my 'perfect' shot. 

In the end I got them to lie down on the grass with their feet together. They were sufficiently intrigued by the novelty of that to try it for at least 3 seconds so there you go - 3 pairs of socks for boys, completed. 

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