Hank is TWO years old! He’s getting lots of love from his people. He might get a birthday doggie donut from our local donut shop later. He’s already excited.
Now, those socks.
Aren’t those colorful? The yarn is an older Opal sock yarn color, named Kasimir the Daredevil. I entered it into my stash in 2008, so it’s doubtful that it’s still available. The pattern is the same one I always use, Jerry rigged to fit my foot. I have found that I needed to decrease the number of stitches around a bit since I lost weight. Not a bad problem to have. I put a picot top on these, which is fun, and also keeps John from stealing them. He thinks picot tops aren’t “manly”.
And no, they don’t match. No, I don’t care.
And here are the new socks on the needles. Seattle Seahawks colors, to kick off the new NFL season.
Here you go! This still needs a little seam steaming to really finish it, but it’s all put together, and ready for cooler weather.
Sorry for the bad in-the-mirror photo. My usual photographer was unavailable, and Hank the corgi doesn’t have opposable thumbs, so he can’t manage the phone camera. The sleeves also look a lot puffier in that photo than in real life.
Project Details:
Pattern: Father/Son Pullover, by Cheryl Hevey
Yarn: Peace Fleece worsted, in the color It’s Gonna Be Alright. This yarn is actually more of an Aran weight; if you knit it to typical worsted gauge, it probably would stand up by itself.
Started:December 2023. Yay! I managed to finish a sweater in less than a year!
Finished: August 2024
For: Me
Needles:size 6 and 7 Chiaogoo
Yarn/Pattern rating: The yarn is *****/*****. I adore Peace Fleece. The pattern is more of a ****/*****. I’ll explain below.
What I liked/learned: I love simple sweaters. This will get a lot of wear. The pattern is very straight forward. What I don’t love about this is the sleeve shaping. For the size I chose, the height of the sleeve cap is 11 inches, and the top of the sleeve before the sleeve cap is 18 inches. That makes for a really oversized sleeve, even when worn over a turtleneck. This would look great on a working man with huge shoulders and biceps. I knew this, I knitted it anyway. As I said, I’ll wear it, and love it. BUT:
Now I’m on a mission to knit the best-fitting plain stocking stitch crew neck jumper.
There is something very satisfying about going from fluff, to handspun yarn, to a finished wearable thing.
The fiber was something that had been sitting on my wheel, partly spun, until a few weeks ago when I finished spinning and plying it into yarn. As soon as it was dry, I cast on a little neck scarf.
The pattern is Orbit, by Janina Kallio. I knit this on 4.5 mm needles. This was finished two days ago, it came off the blocking boards this morning.
I couldn’t be happier with this. It will be a very wearable piece, and if this color doesn’t make you happy, you might be dead.
What I liked/learned with this project: I’ve made several of the Boneyard shawls. It’s mindless, and good with many different yarn weights and styles. I used 3 skeins of this, and I only wasted less than 10 g of the yarn getting the gradients to work. The yarn is lovely, woolly stuff. I may have more in the stash.
As per my typical inattentiveness to detail, I missed my blog anniversary last week. 20 YEARS, people! And I forgot to post about it. Oh well, too bad, as John’s cousin says.
The last few months really got away from me. I signed up for 3 separate classes at the Graham School for both fall and winter quarters. These are 3 hour classes per week for each class, with an accompanying amount of reading. While I enjoyed all of them, it hasn’t left me much time for other things besides the real life stuff that doesn’t go away, even if I’d rather be sitting in a chair reading. I had signed up for another three classes for spring quarter, which starts next week, but came to my senses yesterday and dropped one of the classes. It was a class on Ulysses, by James Joyce, which I’d really love to take, but it will likely be offered again at some point. John has three grandsons in university, and has pointed out that I was probably doing more class work than any of them.
I have been knitting, but slowly. I pulled some yarn out of stash a few weeks ago to knit a plain warm shawl.
I bought that in 2022 after we got back from our Scandinavian cruise. It’s a lovely, woolly yarn made in Sweden. I’m doing another Boneyard shawl, which is dead-easy, and doesn’t require much of my available brain power to work on.
I really like how the gradient striping is turning out. I have the last skein to go, so this will be a really huge shawl to wrap up in.
That stack of books behind the knitting is for spring quarter. We won’t read all of each book, but it’s still a lot of reading. I’m taking a three-quarter class on the history of US immigration, as well as the Graham Basic Program (great books class), which is a four-year program. Spring quarter will complete my second year, and it has been a real eye-opener for me. The books we read are mostly things I missed in college, since I was on a premed track, and didn’t get a chance to study many of the classics. For fall quarter, I also took a class where we read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and for winter it was Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. (Spell check wanted to change that to The Brothers Kalamazoo, which certainly could be an interesting book, but not the same.)
I did actually finish a pair of socks over the weekend.
Aren’t those pretty? The yarn is from a UK dyer, Felt Fusion. This particular yarn base is John Arbon’s Exmoor Sock yarn, which I love. It’s the same old plain white bread sock, top down with a flap heel and gusset.
That’s all for now. I’ll try to not stay away so long this time!
I finished a couple of things this week! Our neighbor was over last week to have a wee dram with John. Whilst he was distracted, Hank ate his hat. 🙄
So I did what every good knitter would do. I searched the stash and knit him a new one.
The yarn is Manos del Uruguay Wool Clasica, from deep stash. I just cast on as many stitches as I thought it needed and knit away. Of course, I have more of this in the stash, and John needed one, too. This is good hat yarn. It’s a thick and thin Aran weight, so it goes fast. I cast on 80 stitches, single rib till long enough to make a thick turned-up cuff, then stockinette for a while, then decrease for the top. Size 7 needles.
I might be on a roll here. These are perfect TV knitting, and they’re a little like potato chips, it’s hard to stop at one. I have lots of single skeins in the stash that would make good mittens and hats.
And here’s my new sock, so far. There hasn’t been any progress since the hat knitting began.
It’s time for more finished stuff! First up is a pair of socks.
Aren’t those pretty? The yarn is Urth striped sock yarn, Uneek Sock, in oranGGe. These are for me. The pattern is the same as always, though I continue to tweak it to fit better. Currently, I cast on 68 stitches, but increase to 72 just before the heel flap, to fit my instep better. I decrease back down to 68 in the gusset decreases. I also knit the heel flap a few rows longer. This is what I love about hand-knit socks: they can be truly customized for the wearer’s foot.
These were knit on 2.00 mm double points, with a picot hemmed cuff. I started these back in July. I blame the Corgi for the slow progress.
Here are the new socks:
These are definitely going to be for me. The yarn is John Arbon Exmoor sock yarn base, but dyed by an independent dyer in the UK, Felt Fusion. I love every last John Arbon yarn I’ve touched, and their sock yarn is no exception. This color is “Down Devon Way”, and it’s still available. The Felt Fusion page has some additional colors available as well. (There maybe a few more skeins of this in my stash.) Her colors are very rich and saturated.
Here’s the second part of the two-fer:
It’s a washcloth! How exciting! Really, though, I love these. I keep a stack of these near the shower. This is Euroflax sport weight linen, which makes great face cloths. It feels weird and stringy whilst knitting, but softens up tremendously once washed. I just toss them in the laundry with the rest of the towels.
The pattern for this is Grandma’s favorite dishcloth, here.
Our Thanksgiving was quiet. John and I both had Covid this month, two weeks before TG for him, and the next week for me. We both took Paxlovid, neither one of us were very sick, but the subsequent fatigue has been a bit daunting for me. Since we were out of quarantine by turkey day, we were able to go to our friends’ home for dinner that day. It was lovely to spend the holiday with good people and good food. We’ve all gotten to the age that we don’t take for granted a single one of those moments together.
Yarn: Black Wolf Ranch Spirit Alpaca/silk blend. This is a DK weight, I used 3 skeins, or 750 yards. The ranch is located in St. Ignatius, Montana, they are on facebook, but don’t have a retail outlet online. I bought this four years ago at a local fiber festival.
Started: September 15, 2023
Finished: November 19, 2023
For: Me
Needle: 3.75 mm
Yarn/Pattern rating: *****/***** This is a free pattern, but it is clearly written, very easy to make. The yarn is stunning, I wish I had a whole bathtub full of this.
I started this in the summer as a “mistake rib” scarf, and quickly became completely bored with knitting 2 by 2 rib, and ripped it out. I am perfectly happy knitting garter and stockinette stitch for miles, but ribbing and seed stitch make me crazy. I wanted a pattern that just showed off the yarn, and that was adaptable to a larger yardage. An added bonus is that it has a RUFFLE!
Pattern: Hitchhiker, by Martini Behm. As of today there are more than 35,000 of these either finished or in progress on Ravelry. That is sort of moderately insane.
Yarn: Arcane Fibre Works 80/20 fingering yarn. The color name is Who’s A Good Boy. Though this is technically sock yarn, it’s pretty soft. I’m not sure how it would hold up in socks. It’s divine as a little neck accessory though!
Started: January 2023
Finished: August 31, 2023
For: ?? This is going in the gift basket for someone.
Needle: 3.25 mm
Yarn/Pattern rating: *****/*****. This may be the perfect knitting pattern. You can use a wide variety of yarns, you can change it up by adding eyelet rows or lace inserts, or it can just be a terrific easy TV knitting project. You just knit along until you have just enough to finish the last repeat and bind off.
Hank likes it!
I also never got around to posting the last sock pair I finished.
Those were for John. The yarn is one of the Regia Design Lines by Arne & Carlos. The color number is3879. It’s a sock, what can I say. This is my usual cobbled-together sock-pattern-in-my-head.
It’s finished! Well, it’s been finished for awhile, I’ve just been too busy to get it photographed.
You can tell by the socks and Birkies that it’s not that hot here. We’ve had a few warm days, up into the low 90’s, but that’s it. Yes, I’m extremely grateful that the awful weather around the world seems to have bypassed us for now. Today it was in the mid-70’s, dry, and with a light little breeze.
Yarn: Tajik Kid Mohair. This was marketed and sold by Peace Fleece. It is handspun mohair made by a woman in Afghanistan. There is a cooperative of women spinners there and in Tajikistan that spin and sell their yarn. You can buy similar yarn by them now at Port Fiber, though she doesn’t have it in this put-up. The color is a deep, glowing scarlet. I used about 240 grams of this, which is called lace weight, but i’st more of a light fingering. It reminds me of shiny Ruby Slippers.
Started: Embarrassingly, February 2016. 🙄
Finished: June 12, 2023
Needle: 3.25 mm
What I Learned: Eventually, all projects can be finished. I have no idea why this took so long, since it is lovely yarn, and a lovely pattern. The pattern is knit entirely from charts, and I added a bit of length to each end of the stole to use up more yarn. I also love big shawls that I can wrap up in.
Yarn/Pattern rating: *****/*****. The pattern is probably not for beginners, though it doesn’t have any exotic techniques. It’s just…brief. You get a few terse paragraphs of instructions (short paragraphs!), and the charts. The yarn is gorgeous, though as handspun, there was an occasional bit of unevenness, and the odd splice/knot. I wish I’d bought more of this when it was available.
Here is a photo of the woman that spun this particular yarn. Her name is Maliknoz, her bio is here.
Here is one more photo:
I am beyond happy with this one. I also have some newly finished socks to show you, and a couple of new projects, but I’ll save that for another day.
Holy moly. I’ve never taken such a long blog vacation previously. I have been knitting, though very slowly. Hank (remember him??) loves to steal yarn balls and run around the house like a demon with them. So there are only two kinds of knitting around here: One kind, where Hank is sleeping, and the other kind, which involves a lot of yelling and dog spit-soaked yarn.
Here’s a recent photo of the yarn destroyer.
I HAVE finally finished something though! It’s PINK and it’s PRETTY!
Yarn: Cream Silk, from DyeForYarn, in the color Baby Unicorn. This is fingering weight, I used two skeins, 800 meters worth.
Needle: 3.00 mm Chiaogoo bamboo interchangeable
Started: Dec 22, 2022
Finished: May 31, 2023
What I learned: I like PINK! I don’t think I have much of anything PINK in my wardrobe, certainly not in my shawl collection. I bought it for the color name, because who doesn’t love baby unicorns?? I also learned that knitting silk on metal needles is guaranteed to result in tears. Once I switched to the bamboo, I was one happy camper.
Yarn/Pattern rating: *****/****. This CreamSilk stuff is like crack. The colors are gorgeous, and it knits up beautifully, other than being slippery. The pattern is a simple triangle shawl, started at the bottom point with just a few stitches and increasing on each side. It makes a weird, really pointy triangle shape that isn’t my favorite, but I tend to wear shawls wrapped around my neck anyway, so it doesn’t matter. The pattern itself is well-written.
Those are my peonies in the background. I moved them to this location two years ago, and they apparently love it, and are blooming like crazy.
That’s all for now, I’ll try not to take such a long break next time!
What I Learned: This is an interesting pattern construction, starting at the top of the head with a few stitches, casting on until it’s big enough around, then knitting straight for a really long time, then decrease. See below, the photo explains this better than I can. It leaves you with a double-layer hat that is very cozy.
Yarn/Pattern rating: *****/*****. Clearly written pattern, can be used for a wide range of yarn weights and hat sizes. This yarn is just divine. It is soft and lofty, but also durable. The kid mohair gives it a nice sheen.
Here’s a photo of the whole hat:
I do have a few more colors of this yarn in the stash. This hat is for me, but John tried it on, and he’s picked out his color.
Last but not least is Hank! He’s growing, learning, and in general being a whole lot of fun.
I finally got around to blocking this shawl. Don’t judge me, I have a 14 week old puppy to wrangle.
No apologies for the photos in the bathroom mirror. John isn’t home right now, and I just needed to get this posted.
Project Details:
Pattern: Pattern? I made it up. It’s a plain garter triangle shawl, increases at each end and along the center spine every right side row. I just knit each color until it was gone and attached the next one.
Yarn: This is Icelandic wool, from an Etsy shop, Hespa. I’m pretty sure this is Istex Einband that is hand dyed. She dyes her skeins with plant dyes local to Iceland. I bought all but that last light brown stripe as a kit from her Etsy shop. The last color I bought on our trip through Iceland. It’s the same wool, from the same dyer, and matches the color scheme well.
Needle: Oh, holy hell. I didn’t record that. I’m pretty sure I used a 3.25 mm Chiaogoo bamboo circular, as it is sitting on my desk still instead of being in the case.
Started: June 12, 2022
Finished: Oh, who knows. I apparently didn’t record that either. Let’s just say sometime since the end of July.
What I learned: Great yarn doesn’t always need a fancy pattern. Just cast on and knit. This was a perfect travel project, and I LOVE the colors.
I still haven’t gotten around to doing a remodel post. I will tell you the Arlo story that goes with it though. The last day of the major work was the day the plumbers came to drop the tub in and get the plumbing hooked up for it. It was sort of an all-day project. They built a plywood platform under the tub, with an opening to access the plumbing works. When they were ready to put the tub in, I sort of joked that they should make sure that all the cats were accounted for.
You can guess where this is going, right? They finished up late in the day and left. I hadn’t seen Arlo all day, and was beginning to get a bit suspicious. After the noise of the construction was done, I could clearly hear him in the dining room. Coming from the ceiling, where he was trapped between the subfloor of the tub and the dining room ceiling.
Our neighbor came over with power tools to help. This is a small hole he drilled in the ceiling to make sure we were in the right crawl space. Then the fun began.
I wasn’t nearly as cheerful about this as I look in this photo. My little worrier brain had already traveled the distance between “cat trapped in the ceiling” to “dead cat in the ceiling, we’ll never see Arlo again”.
It took a bit of coaxing, but we got him out. The guys came back the next day and patched the hole in the ceiling. And Arlo promises to never do anything like that again.
I have so much yarn, a significant portion of which is single skeins of the “my precious” variety. A lot of it is sock yarn, which will become socks if I ever get to all of it. I also have a bunch of non-sock single skeins, including impulse purchases, or “souvenir” yarn.
Enter “little neck things”. Little scarves, cowls, etc. This one seems to be the latest thing on Ravelry.
Isn’t that pretty? It’s just the right size to grab and go when it’s chilly out. Here’s another photo.
It’s an idiotically simple pattern, but the i-cord edging jazzes it up and makes it look like something more than a plain garter stitch scarf.
Yarn: Shilasdair Aran merino, I bought this on a trip to Scotland in 2011. The color is Sandstone. Their yarns are dyed with natural dye materials; this skein was dyed with madder root and onion skin. I used one skein of this, 175 yards. I have a tiny little ball of yarn left over.
Needles:5.5mm/US 9
Started: November 2
Finished: November 4. That’s right, people. I started and finished a knitting project in less than a week. The fact that it was finished in the same decade in which it was started is newsworthy around here.
What I learned: Knitting from stash is delightful. Knitting something useful from stash is even better. This is a dead-easy pattern, and though it is written for DK-weight yarn, it could be knit from a skein of almost anything. Just weigh your yarn, knit the increase section until you’ve used half the yarn, then do the decrease part.
In other news, our sunny fall is finally over here in the Pacific Northwest. We’re being hit by an “atmospheric river” today and this weekend. This basically means we are going to get a shitload of rain. And apparently, severe winds, though that hasn’t hit yet. Thankfully, our generator has been serviced and fueled up so we’re ready if the lights go out.
We’re also nearing the end of our bathroom remodel. I’ll save photos of that for the next post.
New socks! I started these in August, finished last night.
The yarn is Stocainn sock yarn, from Shilasdair yarns in Scotland. They don’t have this in their online store currently, but I cleverly bought a few skeins of this for the stash when they did have it. Their yarn is dyed with natural botanicals. I didn’t record it, but I’m pretty sure this was dyed with madder root.
I used 2.00 mm needles, and the same old jerry-rigged pattern. These are for me.
