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this was a special request for a very special recipient. The brief was long, skinny, bright blue or eggplant. First, I agonized over how long and how skinny. Because we are talking fashion royalty here, but when I found the yarn at the store, everything fell into place. I used 3 balls of the Babybamboo yarn. Suer nice to knit and the color is stunning, almost shiny.
Here is my girl, modeling the scarf. on her, it's wrapped 4 times, because the thing is 6 feet long!
here is a glimpse of Dumpling, now 6 3/4 y.o., learning to knit on one of those bobbin thingys.
poor kid is struggling with reading and writing, but this, she's got downpath!
My knitting group was asked to knit a bunch of red scarves with green fringe for the local food bank. Never mind that every single member of the knitting group, save one, are Jewish! Still, we always need excuses to knit, so we agreed, and I set out earlier this week to make one red scarf. It had to be a quick and easy project, but I didn't want to do just a plain stitch. After yet another hour spent on Ravelry, I found this pattern. Super easy, but very very textured ans squishy.
The red scarf, with one skein of donated Red Heart Bulky, in red, turned out very well.
so well in fact, that I'm making a very long, very skinny version in bright blue bamboo for a poet friend who needs something stylish to wrap around her neck a few times.
the mitts.
I used the pattern from yesterday, but like the hat, I made an Entrelac band of 2 x 5 sts triangle (cast on 10) then continued the pattern as is. I skipped the ribbing on the end, selecting instead to finish with 2 purl rows.
Hopefully it will be freezing outside tomorrow and I can wear it all. I ended up steam pressing the scarf and it looks fabulous. Less bulky/squishy, but a lot prettier.
when I was done with my scarf, I still had 2 skeins of the fab yarn (having bought all 4), so I started looking for a matching hat pattern. The very few entrelac hat pattern were, well, frightful. Pouffy beret types. Not me at all. Eventually, I did come across this fabulous hat and mitt set by Blacker Designs.
At first, I was going to knit it as is. But then while I was sitting at my weekly knitting clatch with my friend Melissa, she suggested and I agreed that I should change the cable band to create an entrelac band.
The one from the scarf was way too wide, so I cast on 10 and built it on triangles of 5 stitches instead of 8. Then i just kept following the pattern for size and picked up the 80 stitches recommended. Since I'm not a big fan of poofy hats, I did a K2T, K9 decrease pattern instead and got a much tighter fit.
Voila, the new and improved Entrelac Hat.
Tomorrow, the mitts!
I have absolutely no idea why I became fascinated with Entrelac. I guess one night when I was spending hours clicking through patterns on Ravelry, I spotted the criss-cross patterns and was intrigued. While I was power-knitting some dresses for my daughters (pics to come over the month!) I put Entrelac in the back of my mind, to knit for myself at some point.
I decided to opt for this pattern. The instructions were clear, and I really liked the way her multi-colored yarn made it look like each square/triangle was a different color. Then one day, at my absolutely favorite knitting store, Ariadne, I spotted the Ozark Companion hand-dyed yarn in Indian and Fire and I knew I had a project. My winter coat is white, so the orange and pink combo was going to be just the thing.
It took me about 3 repeats to understand the pattern enough to not need to read it anymore. Once you understand the way the short rows form the combination of squares and triangles, it's really easy-peasy and just knits itself. My scarf is done, but I have not bound it off, because I decided to make a matching hat and mitt set. When I'm done, I'll use whatever yarn I have left and I will lengthen the scarf to have nothing left. I hate having a quarter ball left in the stash.
Tomorrow: the hat I came up with to match the scarf.
hi there. how are you. Remember me? Well, I'm still here, sort of. Truth is, I don't think I'll ever come back as Mortimer's Mom, but as my life as been major sucky lately, I've been knitting. Knitting and knitting and knitting. non-stop knitting.
so when the Nablopomo email hit my inbox last week, I didn't think I couldn commit to it, at least not from a stardard blogging angle. But Then I thought I have all this knitting and some crafting that I could talk about and post pictures of.
Here I am. A month of knitting and crafting. I will be here everyday, either with progress reports or pictures of past projects.
I've been trying my hand at Entrelac knitting, which is basically all short rows to create a basket weave pattern. here's a glimpse, I'll tell you all about it later this week.
