simple gray coat in a simple white room

Celtic cabled socks.

So the minute I post these pictures, they don’t look as fantastic as they do in my head, or as much smaller pictures. Probably because I snap them in the four minutes between putting pasta in boiling water and mixing up the peanut sauce, or the 45 second commercial break on hulu, and I’m in too much of a hurry to actually make sure I have proper lighting. Someday, I will make up for this. These are my socks knit with a nice 14 wpi fingering yarn in a color called Morello Mash. I have no idea what that means, but I love the yarn.

Broken Glass, unblocked.

Broken glass, blocked

This is my mom’s cowl, before and after blocking. Sometimes I’m a little scared of how much a little water and an air dry can change the texture. Luckily, in this case I loved the before, loved the after, and am now in the middle of writing up the pattern. If only I had Microsoft Office 2007 instead of just Google docs.

Travelling twisted mock cables...

Texture. Gotta love it.

how I’m programmed to function…

Apparently I’m obsessed with warm fingers this winter. This current project is gloves for my sister. If you can spot the mistake, I’ll give you a penny. If you can convince me that it adds personality, I’ll give you a twenty dollar bill.

This is a cowl for my mom. My design, although I am still unconvinced about my choice of a border pattern. It’s growing on me.

Happy New Year!
I have been knitting for nearly 19 years, but this past year was my most prolific, and I learned so much. I learned left and right leaning increases, knitting 3D objects, some cool uses for twisted stitches. I learned several new cast-on methods and at least one new cast-off. I began work on three original patterns, and while I haven’t finished any of them yet, I have started moving in a direction I like with my own work.

I fell in love with the twisted stitch pattern of these mittens, so I knit them for myself. They’re a little large, so I’m considering knitting a liner for them.

Liked the pattern so much I knitted a second pair over New Year’s for my pregnant baby sister, using a wool/angora blend and a little smaller needles. They’re divinely soft.

Knit for a hard-core Twilight fan, she loved them.

My New Year’s resolutions for my knitting are to finish my mitt pattern and my simple cowl pattern, offering the latter for free on Ravelry while I figure out the logistics of selling the former both there and at my LYS. I would like to take a class on spinning, and perhaps one in knitting, just to get my feet wet, see whether that’s a direction I could move my own talents.

knitting things for your ears.

Hats.

More hats, this time for a specific person.

Then some hats just for the sake of knitting (who am I to give these to?)

And then….

I wanted to try again. I think I delivered.

A slouchy hat for me.

I have been obsessed with hats recently, as you can see. But I have a better design in the works, for my arms….

sit on the pavement while you fly

I’m transferring my knitting work to this blog. I know I’m obsessed, and this time, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing. As I stated the other night in my facebook status, I’m intimidated by my own design, a little. I think I could probably make it a lot better if I frogged it all the way again and started over, but I think instead I will finish this one as is and knit a second one to nail down the finer points, like using this on the edges of my wheat pattern to keep the ladders at bay.

Do you want pictures? Will you ask nicely? Will you promise not to steal my ideas and run to press with them? (I’m cracking up over here, in case you’re wondering.) It’s a vest, perhaps a sweater, if I’m in the mood for muddling sleeves on. (Can you just pick up stitches and knit sleeves out? Because I HATE seaming.)

The wheat lace inset.

Don't judge the shape, it looks more dramatic than I think it will come out in the end.

I have never knitted anything like this, so knitting the design from my head might turn out to be a massive mistake, but I haven’t woven in the ends as I go (a trick of a lazy knitter who hates to do it all in one go at the end) to keep my options for frogging the entire project open. What do you guys think? Maybe, if you’re super nice in the comments, the second one I have to knit will land on your doorstep. (No promises, folks, no promises.)

most wonderful time of the year

Finished my purple leftover from the sweater wool shawl yesterday, except for the last bit of weaving ends in and the blocking, which I will do tonight, hopefully. I’m also working on a (nother) new pattern, with some sweet yarn I picked up yesterday at the same time as I picked up my perfect button for the Colonnade. Smoky purple, precisely what I would have been looking for if I knew at the time what I was looking for.

Not a great picture of the shawl with button, but best I've got.

will be on every magazine.

Asher and Elekk hold court. In plaid shorts.

This kid is like a mini-Brock. Plaid shorts and all.

dripping from my fingertips

Hehe. I like that lyric for this post. Guess what I’m finally going to post about? My sweater!

I got the sleeves and body together!

I’m really glad I didn’t try to attach the sleeves and body together on the train from Memphis. I was tempted to, but given the fact that I panicked halfway through and frantically counted stitches, worried I didn’t have enough, I’m really glad I didn’t. (I did have enough stitches. Naturally.) The first two rounds were a little wonky, loose stitches, hard to work with. But it’s gotten much better.

Emerging owls

This is the cablework on the top, soon to be owls like Ember’s cellphone cozy:

OWLS!!

The cozy really helped me see the owls, understand the cable pattern and test out the tension of the pattern before I had 41 owls in a row to work with. It was good practice, and reminded me that there are only actually 3 cable rows in the whole pattern. I really love the color of the yarn, too, which I don’t think the pictures do justice to. I mean, it’s a really deep blackberry color and while not supersoft wool, is a nice texture and stretch. Yay! I’m going to end up with an addiction to sweater knitting. I have a new pattern in background already…

one-armed badger

Seriously, a miracle.

Mission accomplished.

I finished the elephant!! I’m amazed myself. I don’t normally finish projects this quickly. It’s a miracle. Not the same kind of miracle as all of Buffy’s stuff fitting into that storage unit yesterday. Right, Buff? (Yesterday was fun, by the way, and I was super impressed with your preparedness, despite U-haul’s non-preparedness.) I have about 20 other pictures, of the elephant in various stages of completedness, but I didn’t think you all wanted to see a one-armed, no legged blue elephant. You wanted to see the finished product, right?

This wasn’t a hard project, at all. No seaming, at all. I knitted the body right off the head, and the limbs and ears off those. The hardest was the ears, trying to make sure they were even with one another. I used some new (or barely remembered) increases and I kitchenered the ears, which I only use on the rare ends of socks, so it was a good review. Hopefully, this will warm me up for my next project.

Starting my sweater.

rehabilitate my smile

I am waiting on yarn to knit my first sweater. Because I apparently have caught the bug again, I started another little project last night, just with some of my (monstrous) both-my-grandmothers-left-me-knitting-supplies-and-yarn stash. Blue, sport weight, just plain old acrylic, using my size 5 bamboo double pointeds. I bought some batting to fill up my project, and went to town.

And I knitted a head. Not just any head, an elephant head.

Elekk head this morning.

And then, when I got home, I got to knitting again (even though my sweater yarn arrived) and now, it is an elephant head with a body and the start (the THIRD start, which I have yet to get right) of an ear.

With new, improved body!

Hmm. Do I go to sleep, or try, try again with that ear? (Maybe I should have moved on by knitting him a limb or two, since those seem much easier…)