Baby, It's Cold Outside

Continuing on my path to ignore holiday crafting for others until the last possible minute, I have been foolishly working on.....foot garments. It HAS been cold, and this seems a reasonable way to handle the freeziness of it all. I'm on Sock #2 (of 2, just in case y'all were wondering) in the Helloyarn "Dusk" colorway. The yarn is a joy to work with - super squooshy, such vibrant colors, interesting pooling, not splitty at all.



I should be a good little crafter lady and get into the holiday hub-bub, but it hasn't really happened yet.

Miss Alayne was kind enough to send me some remnants of alpaca that she happened to have in her stash, in just the colorway I was seeking in order to complete the Anthropologie Hayride Capelet. After binding off, I had about....2 yards of yarn left - most certainly not enough for an I-Cord and pompoms! So making some cord is on the agenda, and then quick-like-a-bunny writing up the rest of this pattern (I'm halfway there!) for Miss Max to test-knit it (and then have one of her very own). I've got to tell ya, though....I am LOATHE to make any sort of significant length of I-Cord, donchaknow. In fact, I am loathe even to have others do it. Nonetheless, I think I've found a decent solution:



This is my super-cheap modified Lucet. I saw these at Rhinebeck (much MUCH nicer, though!), and they work in a similar way as spool-knitting. You wrap the yarn around a prong and flip the bottom loop over the top loop. Pull yarn to tighten, and rotate lucet in order to loop the other prong.....continue in this manner forEVER. You end up with a really nice boxy rope. I figured a lucet is nothing but 2 fixed prongs that you can easily slide some yarn over. I considered rigging up some chopsticks, but the plastic fork seemed All Class for this endeavor.

I'm taking suggestions for fast, cheap, outta-control holiday gifts I can make - any ideas?

Long Weekend

Last week I taught a 5-day Non-Adhesive Bookbinding class. I had 6 students, and we made what seemed like 734658 books! Here are a few:4-Needle Coptic on Boards (2), Historic Longstitch (2), Coptic on Binders Board, Butterfly.

It was nice to be teaching again, especially this class - I've been teaching Non-Adhesive Binding for......7 years or so? And it's still plenty of fun. I tend to teach this course a bit fatalistically - I've seen - and made! - a lot of mistakes when making these, and I let the students know what many of those problems are/might be. They don't make the same mistakes, and we can spend more time making more books! Everyone wins.

So after a long week of teaching bookbinding what's a girl to do? Well..............

This was NOT my original plan for a long weekend - I WAS set to do some long-overdue quilting (finally finishing up a quilt for my father that I "gave" him for Christmas 2 years ago) and maybe get a jump on the holiday crafting. I got a wee bit immersed in the scraps of fabric though:This is the Color-Wheel Quilt form Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts. I added about 13" in border to make it a more useful size. I gotta tell you, this thing went FAST - the entire business took about a day, start to finish. I cut a template for the circle color pieces, picked out 52 (!) fabrics that sort of worked together, and got to sewing. Of course I managed to sew half of the pieces backwards - the transitions weren't working out for awhile. After some un-sewing, I got things back in order, tacked on some white fabric, found a suitable border fabric (and had *just* enough!) and got to machine quilting! ...Which went surprisingly okay. I gotta say, it was getting the color pieces in order that took the most time. My only issue with this is the build-up of thread in the center. As I intend for this to be used as a blanket quilt, it's a bit rough, but not intolerable. If I make this pattern again (I may!) I will probably put some sort of hand embroidered motif in the center.

(I did finish dad's quilt, too, but I haven't taken any pictures yet)

And I got some knitting done a well: Not much to look at, but that there IS progress - I'm through 2 of the 3 balls of yarn, and thinking a bit that i might run out. Not sure though - I'm doing decreases so it is a bit tough to say, and I haven't figured out all of the shaping at the top of this yet. We'll see. I'm hoping to complete this in the next week or so - it's going quite fast and rather smoothly. And man oh man is the yarn a joy to work with................

On and Off the Needles

Well! Pictures, as promised. The above is a close-up of one of my TWO completed Socks That Rock, and I have to say that these socks do indeed RAWK. They are pretty rad. I'm not quite sure of why this color (Loch Ness) was one of the very few available when I managed to get to the booth dispensing such yarn (and got a free pattern book!), but I think it is just divine.

Also off the needles, after many many years, this blue mercerized cotton lace-ish scarf. I realized that it's scarf-like nature did not NEED me to complete the half ball of yarn remaining; I was never going to get to that. However, 5 rows of garter stitch and an easy bind-off seemed much more reasonable. Now to move it to the blocking pile......
But really what I want to tell you about is some reverse-engineering. Which I love.
I picked up some lovely alpaca while at Rhinebeck, and I think that I had this project in mind for it. I somehow fell in love with this (the drape, the swing, the warm!) and quickly realized that:
1. It's way too expensive for what it is,
2. I'd probably never wear it,
3. Looks easy enough!
and so began the task of reverse-engineering. Made infinitely easier by the most amazing ZOOM feature on that site! You can count the stitches!

Here then is a bit of process: I poked around to see what Barbara Walker had resembling the pattern and quickly found the rather simple "Horseshoe Pattern" - a 10 +1 repeat. Based on the pattern (and the stitch orientation) I could tell that the garment was knit from the bottom up. It was really just a matter of figuring out what the frequency of decreases was between the patterns. Some math, a bunch of random notes, zoom zoom zooming a lot, and a rather large cast-on later (382 stitches) gave me this:
.....and here's the Horseshoe pattern repeat:This yarn is really lovely to work with, and I think my numbers are (thus far) correct. Why am I doing this, if I know that I most likely will not wear it? Process knitter. Through and through. Fer reals.

Meanwhile, this has been beckoning from the "feed me" bin:Quilt pictures soon! Moth - in action! - soon! Handspun soon!