Plays With Yarn

Plans for the rest of break, and knitting goals for the year

One of my blogging goals: come up with wittier entry titles :-)

Break is one more week, and I want to finish up some projects. I have a pair of socks going that I'm already sick of (the yarn is really sort of ugly, and I'm sick of looking at it), so I want to get those done before school starts again so I can put a more attractive sock in my bag for the bus ride to and from work. I'd also like to work on the sampler stole I started last March, and make a couple more hats for the winter that refuses to start. (That just means that when it finally does show up...whoa, Nelly!) I also finished a scarf last night that needs blocking, which with any luck I'll do tomorrow.

Tomorrow I'll also post some pictures if I'm lucky, as it seems my camera is on its way out of this life. I should probably think about getting a new one soon. I've heard good things about Nikon and Canon.

Goals for the year:

1. Make myself a sweater
2. Assign a project to every bit of yarn in my stash, and stop buying yarn for the sake of having yarn (I've noticed I tend to collect for the sake of collecting, in many facets of my life, and that's something I'd really like to get under control, in the hopes of simplifying)
3. Knit something for a friend who is having a baby in July
4. Finish the sampler stole
5. Learn Fair Isle and (possibly) intarsia

Well, off to do...something. I will either work on the ugly sock, wind the yarn I bought to make a Calorimetry out of, or (maybe, since I'm sort of tired) work on the Sampler Stole.

Blocking is amazing.

From a pile of yarn goo...

...to a delicate flower basket!

Pattern: Flower Basket Shawl from Fall '04 Interweave Knits
Yarn: Lucy Neatby Celestial Merino in Seashell, less than 1 hank (350 yard hanks, btw)
Needles: Bamboo circ, sz 7
New skills learned: Not so much a skill I suppose, but I used lifelines for the first time in this project.

And thank you so much for the compliments on Soleil! I was asked for the pattern for my lace inset, and I'm not sure if I should share it, because I could have done so much better with it! I could have done the math and knit a triangle to sew in...heck, I could have been really slick and actually knit it onto the neckline as I went! But since I'm math-phobic (I really have to get over that if I plan to design anything, huh?), here's what I did: The lace on Soleil is a 10-stitch, 8-row repeat. I cast on 32 stitches (3 repeats plus 2 selvedge stitches) and, keeping the two edges in garter stitch, knit 2 full row repeats of the lace. Then I sewed it to the back of the crochet edging on the neckline, and tacked the corners to the front. Like I said, it's not noticeably bumpy in actual wearing, just when you get up close and personal, and I'm fairly sure no one reading this blog is going to get that up close and personal with the Roomie :-D

Thought about taking pictures of my progress on the GWTF socks, but the progress is so quick, there just might be a finished pair by the end of the weekend! I think I'm going knitting-crazy now, realizing that when classes start knitting progress will be sorely lacking, because add working in the lab to two hellish classes and you get negative free time. Whee. I don't think I'm knitting Christmas presents this year. Of course, the semester ends on December 23, so I don't know when I'll be buying them, either.