Spring Green

Alright people, the sweater is finished!!! I worked on the finishing touches last night and blocked it overnight. 

I love the color and the buttons :) I think it turned out quite nicely. I might start on another one in a larger size so I don't forget how to knit it up.


I can't wait to get the dresser finished so we can figure out where we are putting all the furniture in Baby G's room. Then, we can hang everything and sit back to wait for his arrival. Well, I guess we need to do a couple of other things like set up the monitor and get the car seat and bases installed.


Have a great weekend everyone! It looks like it's going to be a beautiful one :)


Leaf out.

Baby Hoodie

I've mentioned before that I am taking a knitting class to make a baby hoodie (pattern: here). I'm halfway through the class. 2 more classes to go! I've finished the body, and the hood is done; I just have to do a three-needle bind-off (whatever that means). The class instructor is going to show me how to do that on Saturday. Then, it's on to the sleeves! The only thing left to do after that is knit a strip for the buttons and button holes on the front. It's a great first sweater pattern since there is no sewing. So here's what it looks like so far:

Front

Back 

(that spot is just the button I placed there)

Buttons!

I have been working on the mobile. I have made some woodland creatures, but now I need to put it all together. Maybe I'll have it done by next week!

Leaf out.

Happy Friday!

I don't know how the weather is in your neck of the woods, but it is fantastic here. The thermometer in my car was at 68 degrees this afternoon. Unheard of for February here. In honor of the warm weather, I went with a couple of friends to get a pedicure in my flippie floppies. My toes are so very happy and pink :)


Alright, let's get down to the craft business. I have wanted to knit some fingerless gloves for some time and finally settled on a pattern. Here they are:

The pattern is from Knitty.com and is called Fetching because the cables on each glove twist "fetchingly" toward the thumb. These were my first cabling attempt, and I love it! I think I'll put cables on everything now. The yarn I used is called Ella Rae Bamboo Silk in Apple.


The gloves had a different bind-off technique that I hadn't used before so I got some instruction from my LYS. It's a picot bind-off. Here's a close-up:

So the technique creates these little bumps along the edge. The gloves haven't been blocked yet (and I knitted one more tightly than the other) so after that they'll look a little more uniform and not so curly at the edges. 


Nextly, here is the promised photo of the necklace I made for a friend's birthday:

And here is a close-up:

My favorite flower is the one in the center.

I have been working on an art project for our woodland/forest friends-themed nursery, but it's not finished yet. LollyChops made an awesome tree .svg file that she used for her tree artwork. I loved it so much that I'm making one too (thanks Lolly!)! Lolly has a video on UStream for the project here. Here's a peep:

Have a great weekend! See ya next week :)

Leaf out.

3 Months Later

Hello Again. I haven't posted in 3 months. Yep, it's been that long. I really have no excuse other than the holidays. Well, and there was also finding out my eggo is preggo :) I love the movie Juno.


I do have some crafty projects to share. Unfortunately, I repeatedly forget to take pictures of my finished projects. I'm going to have to get better about that. Before Thanksgiving, I made a bib necklace for a good friend's birthday. I went a little crazy crocheting and knitting flowers and leaves in some of her favorite colors. Just for some added texture, I threw in some felt flowers and leaves. Here is the disassembled necklace:

I am going to post a picture of the finished necklace soon. I promise. I also crocheted a flower and tie to dress up the wrapped package:

The other project of which I forgot to take a picture was the shawl I made for the ?L for Christmas. Remember this yarn?

That's the yarn I used to knit the shawl. I was supposed to get a picture of the ?L in it after she opened it on Christmas, but the giant snowstorm that arrived made us depart on very short notice. I'm still waiting on a picture from my parents to share.


I was looking for some new techniques for making cards so I decided to try embroidering cards. Here's one that I made:

I cut out the "birthday" using Sure Cuts a Lot (SCAL) software and my Cricut. I haven't played around with SCAL very much, but it's going to be a very useful tool. You can use any font on your computer to cut out words in one piece. 


I have a bunch of projects lined up for the nursery so I'll be posting pics along the way.


Glad to be back!


Leaf out.

Autumn Fun

Autumn in the mountains was beautiful...the reason I say "was" even though it's technically still autumn is that it has been super chilly here for a couple of weeks now. It's supposed to be "warmer" today, but it's still kinda chilly due to the wind. Most of the trees aren't letting go of their leaves just yet, but I'm sure with these cooler temperatures and windy conditions, they can't hold onto them for long.


In the spirit of fall, here are some of the pics from our day at our local fall festival/pumpkin patch.


This is the hayride that takes pumpkin seekers out to the pumpkin patch:

I didn't get any pictures of the pumpkin patch because we were diligently searching for the perfect pumpkins. This particular farm has both a pumpkin shooter and corn "cannon." We were able to shoot some corn cobs (really, really fun), but the farm was about to close and the line was too long to get to shoot a pumpkin out of their launcher dubbed "Dorothy." I love that the launcher has a name :) Here are some folks launching mini pumpkins with Dorothy:

And here is the corn cannon:

The Gnome would really love to have goats so of course he was excited to see that they had goats at the farm. The goats weren't horribly interested in us so they stayed at a distance, but check out the contraption they have for the goats to climb:

The farm also had a corn maze. It was the most complicated one I've ever experienced. The maze had two phases. We only made it through one phase before moving on to the next activity. We got stuck (for quite some time) in phase 1 in a section for which there was only one way out. At least we weren't the only ones...we kept seeing the same groups of people over and over again. There was a bridge you had to cross to get to the rest of the path. I stopped and got some great pics of the surroundings:

Isn't that view magnificent?! (all of that corn at the bottom of the photo is part of the maze) And because I haven't shown any pictures of pumpkins, here is the toddler pumpkin maze they have set up:

Now, for crafty news...I've been working on several projects, but sadly, some are presents so no revealing yet. (Sorry!) 

I've mainly been knitting and crocheting all kinds of goodies. I've been making flowers from two different books: 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet by Lesley Stanfield and Crochet Bouquet by Suzann Thompson. So far I'm liking the 100 Flowers book better. It is much more organized, and I love organization! 100 Flowers has the patterns divided into knitting and crocheting sections. The patterns are also organized by degree of difficulty within those sections. The main reason I prefer 100 Flowers is that each pattern has a picture of the flower directly below it. Crochet Bouquet has the patterns listed all together with a group of flowers pictured at the side so you have to guess which pattern goes with which flower. Both books have patterns for leaves so they both earn bonus points for that :) I find myself wanting to attach flowers to everything, EVERYTHING. Look out! Aahhhhhh giant flower!!!!

I stumbled upon a 100 Flower Scarf here. So I decided to try it! Here's what I have so far:

I haven't been able to make any amendments to my Flower Vine Scarf from this post because the lady that was helping me at my LYS is out of town. 

Leaf out.

P.S. I went with some friends to an Indigo Girls concert on Saturday night. We had a fantastic time and even got autographs after the show (we camped out on the street with a small crowd and waited for them to come out). It was a great show and a great crowd :) Now, I can't stop singing..."How long till my soul gets it right..."

Straight Off the Vine

Last week I was working on a Flower Vine Scarf from a pattern in this book:

The pattern calls for bulky weight wool (size 10 needles). The yarn I ended up using is Ella Rae Bamboo Silk (size 7 needles) in Apple (The pink is for the flowers, but I can't remember the color name). I really like knitting with it. It's super-soft and smooth. My LYS suggested I use size 8 needles and increase the number of cast on stitches by 100 to make sure it would be long enough.

Here's the scarf at the 300-stitch stage:

A close-up:

It's starting to curl already! Then, I had to increase at each stitch (600 stitches). And then, increase at every stitch again. That's 1200 stitches people. This is what 1200 stitches looks like:

There's just a wee bit of my needles peeking out of all those stitches. The pattern only has 6 rows, but it sure took me a long time to knit a row with 1200 stitches.

Here is what the scarf is supposed to look like:

And here is what mine looked like after binding off:

It spiraled pretty nicely for about the first 50 or so stitches bound off, but then it started forming something more like V-shapes rather than spirals. I probably should have used a bulkier weight yarn, but I'm hoping I can change the pattern somehow to make it look better. I'm going to take it to my LYS tomorrow. I'm guessing there's definitely going to be some frogging involved :( especially since it ended up being about 10 feet long instead of the 5.5 feet in the original pattern. I'm thinking I need to start over and use the prescribed number of cast-on stitches and maybe increase the number of rows to make it more bulky so it will curve instead of bending into a sharp angle. I haven't tried knitting the flowers yet, but they are made from the same pattern with fewer stitches cast on.

In household news, our dryer started making some crazy noises yesterday, prompting the Gnome to turn it off and take it apart completely. Nothing appeared to be wrong with it. Once it was back together, we started it up, and it sounded fine until we put clothes in it. Spooky noises again. Then, as mysteriously as they began, they stopped. I have a load drying right now. Sounds fine. Maybe we have a haunted dryer :) Just in case, we have been researching front-loading washers and dryers. Anybody have any front-loading recommendations?

Stay tuned for pictures from our local pumpkin festival :) The weather has been lovely here...until today. It's really overcast and rain's a'comin'.


Leaf out.