February Is All About Colour

February's theme certainly looks to be colour and beautiful colours they are!

I decided, the last week in January that I want to knit myself a throw blanket using TinCanKnits pattern. I love how it looks like a quilt and the variation with the squares having a variety of centres and one border is my favourite. I really wanted to knit this in DK or heavier weight wool so it would knit up super quick and be lovely and warm, but I decided that stash diving is the better part of valour and went with my collection of solid colour WYS sock yarn. I was originally going to hold the yarn double but I was having trouble with the pin-hole cast on (CO) and a single-strand made it easier. The WYS sock yarn has the added advantage of being superwash which is useful for something large like a blanket. 

My first colour was Blueberry Bonbon, a lovely saturated medium blue just edging towards teal, and I knit four centres whilst waiting for the cream I ordered to arrive. Yes, I decided to knit from stash and then immediately ordered more yarn. Well, I had to: I only had two colours, Blueberry Bonbon and Cherry Drop (blueish-red, same saturation as BB), neither of which was the cream for the borders. So I ordered two skeins of Milk Bottle (cream) and one each Raspberry (bluish-pink) and (light teal). And stitch markers to qualify the order for free shipping (and because I can't find my small ring-os).

I finished adding the cream borders to the four blueberry squares, lightly blocked (washing and stretching out the lace) the first square and they look wonderful. If I do 4 squares a month I'll have 48 squares, 49 gives me 7x7. If I do one a week, I can do 49 squares and still have three weeks to sew them together. I need to properly block (wash and pin out) my squares to see how big they are and decide if I'm happy with that size blanket. 

I also signed up for Bombella's colour-work KAL which runs 1 Feb-10 Mar. Any colourwork project would work so I decided to finally CO Pleadias Hat by Ann Kingstone in the special limited edition Cornish Tin in (blue) and (silver) I purchased over the summer. I didn't realise at the time that the Rowan Felted Tweed That the patten suggests calls itself DK but is actually sportweight, casualty to the UK not yet having embraced sportweight. My yarn is thicker than the pattern's, so I CO a smaller size (and then the smallest when I realised one round in that it would still be too big). I added an increase round to emphasise tam/beret rather than beanie. This is my first time working a corrugated rib, so yay for new skills. 

Speaking of Ann Kingstone, I also signed up for her joint "on the other hand" Mystery KAL which started on Friday. I am using some stashed Ripples Crafts 100% BFL 4-ply in teal and cream. I finished the first cuff that day and only then realised I would need to knit the second cuff before the next clue if I want to finish on time so I pulled from the other end of each ball to make a second set of balls, moved the first cuff to a smaller needle and knit a second cuff. I don't really see myself doing fraternal mitts.  Picture shows the "wrong side" as I'm knitting them inside out and it's generally considered polite not to post a lot of "spoiler" photos.

New skills here include corrugated rib and lice stitch (prettier than it sounds, though it would have to be, n'est pas?) and Norwegian purl. I'm doing them slightly different in a way that's faster for me but means wrapping my yarn the other way. I can live with that.

A Hat, a Headband, and Another Hat

At the Edinburgh Yarn Festival, one of my only yarn purchases was a skein of Old Maiden Aunt's beautiful Superwash BFL DK in the colour Midnight, which is a lovely tonal dark purple with hints of violet and navy. It's the recommended yarn for Karie Bookish's Baskerville which I've admired since it was released in the OMA accessories yarn club in 2012. I've ordered OMA yarn online (sock yarn back in March of that year and while the colours are lovely they're perhaps not ones I would have picked out in person. Taking pictures of colours is an art, not a science (for example, looking at the website, I would have thought Midnight was a dark blue with purple undertones - it's very much a purple), so I put OMA on the list of "squish in person". I'm so glad I finally got a chance! I cannot say enough nice things about the wool or the colour.

I'm really happy with the hat, too. Tams/berets frame my face and suit me more than beanies, and it was a pleasure to knit. I particularly like how neatly the crown decreases fit with the lace pattern. Little Djinn really likes my hat, too.

Too much. Every time I turn around she's pulling it out of the pram and wandered off with it. This from a child who won't otherwise wear a hat. I should probably accept the inevitable and just knit a second one. The colour on her is the accurate one.

My Baskerville only used about half of the skein so I knit another pattern I had queued for years, Knitted Bliss' Strada Headband. I made mine a little shorter, used a provisional CO, and grafted the ends together to make a loop rather than a button closure. It is perfect for keeping my ears warm around the house or a little bit of warmth (and hair control!) on a warmish spring day. We had a bunch of those back in March when I knit it and not so many since. I still have around 10g of wool left so I added it to my DK toys stash.

Continuing my Karie Bookish love-fest, she released a free hat pattern around Easter, Seaforth. I knit it with some mystery yarn I was given when a friend of a friend decided knitting wasn't the hobby for her and destashed everything. I used just under half the wool and I'm thinking of maybe doing a cowl in the same stitch pattern with the remainders. The hat itself was a fun knit, the ribbing in particularly reminding me of dancing a zweifacher. Alas it's slightly too big for me (a risk when doing a yarn sub, particularly with mystery wool) but I figured if it didn't fit me I would pass it on to someone else,, in this case, Chris who appreciates a warm hat that covers his ears and likes bright colours and patterns.

Little Djinn likes this one, too.

Flurries Cowl and the Great Cowl KAL

You might think that, with two pairs of socks in progress, a hooded scarf on the needles, and yarn either acquired for specific projects (a sweaters for my husband and one for my self; mittens for Aged Parent) or less specific projects (socks! socks socks socks socks, socks! Well, at least three pairs) that I wouldn't be looking for new projects. Though, to be fair, if you actually thought that you're probably not a knitter or otherwise crafty.

In my defense, I didn't go looking for patterns, but one (well, five really) jumped out at me from behind a bush (RSS feed) and, what can I say other than that I'm a sucker for a free pattern, especially one that's only free for a limited time? I've recently downloaded The Sexy Knitter's thummed Muffalette, Kate Davies' Fair Isle Mucklemuff and Mary Jane Mucklestone's matching Muckle-mitts*, all Christmas or New Year's presents and thus they free for a limited time.

Those are not my current projects (though they've all been queued because they're lovely and I don't have a single muff** and now I have very different patterns for two of them!). My current project is a slightly different proposition: Liz Abinante of Feministy is doing The Great Cowl KAL, a series of five cowl KALs with the first one Flurries Cowl currently being free. If you knit it and submit a picture by the deadline, 8 February, you get the pattern for the next cowl for free. The cowls are all listed in the original post, it's not a mystery game, and if you miss a cowl you can buy the subsequent pattern and still earn the following ones. Isn't that nifty? Add in that the first cowl calls for Brioche stitch, one I've been wanting to try, and I had to cast on:

I've decided I really like the concept of giving a pattern away for free for a limited time, and not just because I like free stuff***: it's a reward for fans who pay attention, a way to attract new people as your existing fans tell their friends about this limited-time offer, and, importantly, when the pattern is no longer free, when you're asking strangers to pay for it, there are already a slew of projects and feedback with a variety of yarns alternatives and proven modifications. You basically turn your fans into Beta Testers (not to be confused with test knitters who provide a valuable service, one worthy of remuneration) and increase the value of a given pattern.

~ * ~

* if you read further through her blog, May Jane Mucklestone does a little tutorial on after-thought thumbs, well worth the read: prepping, picking up, and fixing holes

** don't be dirty

*** free doesn't necessarily correlate with "good", know what I mean? Also, I am entirely in favour of paying designers for patterns I like so that they can afford to design more things that I like. It's win-win.

Baby Baby Baby

I have reached that age when all of my friends seem to be spawning (whereas five years ago they were all getting married - I guess I'm a late bloomer) and I have finally decided to try my hand at knitting baby garments. Some four years ago I knit a beautiful baby blanket, which is still sitting in my closet, unblocked and the ends un-woven in, and that was when I realized I wasn't yet ready to knit gifts. Too many of my projects languish unfinished or are judged unsuitable. I did go on to knit a couple of "stroller blankets" for co-workers' spawn out of acrylics as I figured if I don't have to weave in the ends (and could rather melt them discretely) then I wouldn't give up at the end.

But I'm trying to expand my knitting repertoire, to face new challenges, and when you're posting things to friends it's more difficult to have the "this blanket is for supervised use only - don't leave it on your baby, asleep in the other room - as heaven forfend there should be a fire, rather than burning like plant fibres or self-extinguishing like animal fibres, it will melt and when you go to pull it off your baby it will take his or her skin with it" talk. So natural fibres and the need to weave in ends.

I started with baby leg-warmers as I figure two little tubes would be perfect - no heels to turn, no seams to sew up, just a little tube and two ends to weave in. Easy! I started with the simply titled "Baby Legwarmers" and then another pattern from the same lady, "Super Simple Baby Legwarmers" but by the time I finished them the far-away baby I had in mind had grown beyond them. Has anyone else noticed that the majority of babies they know are at least in the 90th percentile of growth for their age?


But more friends announced they were pregnant and I had all this yarn, so I figured I'd start a baby sweater. This would be my second-ever fitted garment and sewing up seams seemed about as appealing as weaving in ends and a lingering fear of blocking, so I picked a very simple, top down, seamless sweater, "Cuddly Wrap Baby Sweater". Not knowing the gender of the expected baby, I made it in teal and it knit up in no time at all so I decided to try my hand at another, a "Seamless Yoked Baby Sweater" again knit from the top down, with the sleeves held on stitch-holders to be knit after completing the body. I learned a technique for slipping the first stitch of a round to make stitch or colour changes knit in a round look less disjointed.

Inspired by my sweater efforts I decided to make a matching hat and wound up using the carried-over stitch pattern from the second sweater with another hat pattern and came up with the "Slipped Stitch Baby Hat". I added the left-over button from the matching sweater as an added detail.


As long as I was going for a set (though the red leggings lack the slip stitch), I knit up a pair of "Fleegles Seamless Saartje Booties" a seamless variation on a popular baby bootie.

I posted all but the teal (super simple) legwarmers to Baby Stephanie, born a week and a half ago.