Way too busy to be called the lazy, hazy days of summer

It seems like such a blur.  This summer has been jam-packed mostly with kid stuff....in fact aside from one ministry outing, it's been ALL kid stuff!!  And none of it has been the kind where I can bring along my bag of yarn and feel like I'm accomplishing something.  No, it's just drive and drop, drive and drop, drive and drop.  I am now thankful for the school year and things have slowed down!  All summer my only real knitting time was on Sunday afternoons, sitting in the back yard with Allen.  A couple hours at best before the bugs get to be too much.  Apparently they like me a lot more than him.  I hadn't managed to complete a single thing in weeks.  I did start working on the new technique for the Christmas projects then realized 90 degrees and humid in the back yard was not a good combination for wool-type projects so that got put on hold.

The purple anklets are still not finished.  Again, no enthusiasm for wool but mainly because even though I followed the directions to the letter, they came out too small.  I bound them off but didn't cut the yarn, tried them on and felt like they would slip right off my foot if I put on a shoe.  I was just about to hand them off to Sydney when I thought, "maybe if I make a little bit of a leg on them they'd stay on me." So I continued another 1/2 inch of garter stitch.  They felt a little less skimpy but way too baggy around the ankle.  Maybe a bit of ribbing would help?  Another 1/2 inch into that, yes it did help but i'm not sure i like the look of it.  So they sat, still unfinished, taking up valuable needle space until last weekend when I pulled it all out to the cuff and put them on waste yarn to free the needles.

There's also a baby blanket of my own design about a third of the way done.  It was moving along pretty well even though I was getting a bit bored of the seemingly endless stockinette stitch...but since it's my own design, I have no one to blame! This also may see the winder before long, I've been searching for a more interesting pattern that might actually get finished before mid October.

I do want to show the arm-warmers I made for a sweet young lady at church.

Cables on the tops

Lacey hearts on the bottom

And for a certain relative who's just dying to know what I'm making for Christmas. . .this is all you get Deb ;-)

May God bless your stitches,

nance

I Thought They'd Never Get Done

Have you ever had one of those projects you think is going to just fly by? Me too. But did you read the heading of this post? Guess again!! Sure I thought it would be challenging, I'm fairly new to knitting and my repertoire so far has only consisted of dishcloths, socks, mittens, hats and a simple rectangular/mobius wrap. Then came the convertible mitten/gloves (insert scary music here). When I couldn't find a pattern using WW yarn that I liked I thought I could improvise - start with a mitten pattern then just add fingers and make mitten tops, sounds so simple...until I got to the fingers then everything just started to collapse into a twisted pile of black spaghetti yarn. First attempt I used US8 needles because that's what the ball band recommended. When I got to the fingers, the stitch count was equal to the size M so I went with that. Now, I've never done anything like fingers on a glove before so this was a challenge but I plowed my way thru and made 8 lovely fingers, WHEW! I tried them on, figuring if they were a little loose on me they'd surely fit my brother....the mitten part fit just the way I'd hoped, the fingers just BARELY fit ME! UGH!! Back to the patterns. When I looked at the size L glove pattern there were WAY too few stitches. So I backed out a few rows and increased 16 stitches over 3 rows. So they were shaped a little weird, they're just gloves...for my brother...for hunting (does it sound like I'm justifying? I AM) Back to the fingers. Now that I'm experience at doing fingers the four on the first glove didn't take too long. I tried it on, nice fit. I held it up to admire my work....oh my! It looked sort of like, how can I put this tactfully, a "Jemima" doll. Do you remember those little flat dolls made out of black fabric with four or five little braids sticking straight up out of her head? (please don't send me "you're a racist" emails/posts, they used to have these when I was a kid and that's what we called them). As much as I wanted to keep justifying, I just couldn't. I have a certain, unwritten standard for my work and these would not do, not even for tramping around in the woods, living in a one room shack for a week with 5 other guys and no shower. It was THAT bad!


So I've had this illness since before New Year's Eve and by the second week of January (week 3 of the mitten/glove calendar) I could no longer look at them. My head was just foggy and I couldn't focus very well on anything, let alone a patternless mitten/glove. So I set them aside and made several hats. Knitting lots of rows, round and round in Stockinette was about all I could handle.

Two weeks later, I thought I would try again. I totally dismantled them down to the cuffs, changed to a US4 needle because they seemed a bit holey while I was taking them apart, and decided to use the Line By Line Mittens to Gloves pattern from KnitPicks that I used to make Mom's mittens. Her mittens seemed to come out a bit small even though I was right on gauge, I thought "WW yarn instead of DK and US4 needles instead of US3, I'll take my chances". My husband Allen and Andy seemed to have the same size hands (somebody had the idea at Christmas that they measure them against each other) so I was having him try them on thru every step. And finally, after a month, my brother will have a finished pair of mitten gloves to take hunting.

From 2010-01-25

From 2010-01-25