SnapShots & WhatNots

I missed October!

Hello! I'm still here I just seem to have missed October. October was a crazy month, a fantastic month but crazy nonetheless. I spent a fabulous 2 weeks on honeymoon followed by a less than fabulous week recovering from the removal of an impacted wisdom tooth (ouch but yay no more wisdom teeth!) and then a week back in work playing catch up and prepping myself for the next couple of crazy weeks that are coming up. 

I have so many photo and stories that I want to share and remember and I also have 3 finished knitted items and a quilt and a fab work in progress to show you! I'm still playing catch up but at least this catch up is fun!

 

Working on the heart quilt

Progress on the heart quilt has been pretty slow lately but mostly that's been due to the fact that I haven't really had the time to sit down and sew. Funnily enough I've had the time to sit and knit but in my book sewing is a "focus on the task" kind of thing that means I shut myself away with the sewing machine - whereas knitting is done from the comfort of the couch, in company while watching TV. It's the less anti-social of my two favourite hobbies so it wins out more often than not. 

Even so, I have still managed to slowly build up the heart blocks piece by piece. I shared a few details before about how I made the blocks but after that I was a little stumped for a while as to the best way of putting them all together. I finally settled on expanded the white area about the blocks to make them 10" rather than 6" and then I sewed them together with a 1" strip of purple in between them. 

Overall I really like the effect. I found the perfect backing fabric online and have just starting the quilting process. I can't wait to share the finished quilt with you once it's done. That is of course if Boomer will allow me to work on it.....if you put it on the floor he'll "test" it for comfort!

Yarn-dyeing: My first skein

When I scroll through my Instagram account every second picture is either a baby, someone knitting or what IG folks refer to as “yarnporn”….that is yarn that is either in someone else's stash or that someone is selling….either way it’s super pretty yarn that I can’t afford to own right now. Then in my scrolling a few weeks ago I spotted a dye-in-progress and was hooked! It’s almost as though I never realized that I could actually try to dye my own yarn.

I ordered a Greener Shades Dye set and some bare 100% Peruvian fingering weight wool from knitpicks and borrowed a book called “Hand dyeing yarn and fleece” from the library – in kindle format because I was I patient which wasn’t the best move since all the beautiful colors were now in grey scale. It gave me an overview of the basics on how to dye and so I just jumped right in.

My scales are broken so I have no idea how much yarn this mini skein actually is but I was aiming for approx.. 25g (a quarter of my 100g skein) so that I could try 4 different ways of dyeing the wool. For my first attempt I hand-painted on three of the provided colors, without mixing shades or even properly calculating how much dye to use (like I said the scale was broken!) so I’m pretty sure I used too much dye. But I couldn’t believe my eyes when I took it out of the dye-pot after steaming it.

It was so bright and cheerful looking - and the wool took up the dye extremely well. It looks pretty great for a first attempt right? I waited rather impatiently for it to dry and then immediately re-skeined it and began a simple st-st swatch to see how it would knit up. I was thrilled to see that it ended up being something that I would actually buy if I saw it in a yarn shop.

That was it – that was all it took, one little mini purplish skein made on a Thursday night and suddenly my whole weekend was planned – I dyed another 3 mini skeins over the weekend, using different colours and different methods and every time I’ve been happily surprised by the results. It’s a little addictive.

I’m share the other three skeins as soon as I’ve knitted up a swatch – I’m trying to keep track of how I produce it, how it looks as an untwisted skein a twisted skein and a knitted swatch so I can learn about what works and what doesn’t.

Now if anyone can suggest something that can be made with tiny amounts of pretty yarn I’m all ears!

Hitofude: version 2.0

 

I have a finished knit to show you finally. I’ve been working on three knitting projects at the same time and I thought I’d end up finishing them at different times and then adding in new projects. Turns out I went ahead and just knit all three projects at the same rate and finished all three of them within a few days or each other. This Hitofude cardigan is the only one that I’ve managed to completely block and even wear this week…..the weather dipped below 80F (25 C) and I declared it sweater weather (for about 10 minutes!)

I actually made the Hitofude cardigan last year. It was my second sweater/cardigan that I’d made and I loved it! I loved making it, I loved the feel of the cardigan against my skin, I loved the colour…..I loved everything except the fit. Even after a really hard block where I stretched out the lace work it wasn’t right. At first I thought I’d be ok with it – it wasn’t crop top short but it was above the waist band of my jeans when I normally like the length to be at least 3-4 inches longer (to detract from the backside!) and the front of the cardigan pulled up really high and I though it looked a bit weird.

Thus it lived in the bottom of the closet for a year – until I was doing a clear out recently, rediscovered it and realized that I loved it enough to rip it all back out and remake it. Luckily when I’d bought the yarn, which is Madelinetosh Light in the Medieval colorway, I’d bought 3 skeins and only used 2 when I knit the cardigan. I think the last time I made it I made a small according to the measurements but this time I erred on the side of caution and made a medium.

I also changed up the pattern a little – I didn’t like the way it pulled up at the front which is cause by all the extra stitches in that area so I decreased the number of stitches. I did 4 repeats of chart A below the rib band before moving to charts B-D (I didn’t do chart E at all) and for each of the charts B-D I repeated the last 8 rows one extra time. This allowed me to get extra length without increasing the number of stitches at the same rate.

I really like how it turned out this time. The length is perfect for how I like it. The front sits flatter than the original version and I think it makes it more flattering and easier to wear. I’m really glad that decided to remake this one, now I have a cardigan that’ll be very heavily in rotation this Autumn rather than languishing in the bottom of the wardrobe forgotten.

Now to start blocking the featherweight and the daybreak shawl!

[Linking up with Frontier Dreams and Small Things]

Apple picking in North Carolina

On Sunday morning we woke up relatively early and drove up to North Carolina to go apple picking with some friends. We did this two years ago and ended up eating all the apples we got within about 2 weeks…making it not exactly worth the long car ride. So this time we bought twice as many apples and I almost made myself sick from eating so many while we were there – it’s pretty amazing to pick them straight from the tree and just crunch right in! So delicious!

There was also a beautiful field of pumpkins and sunflowers which I couldn’t resist taking photo of. Our friends used the day as an opportunity to take family photos but we on the other hand had hair sticking out in all directions and I looked like I’d been dragging through the corn maze backwards. Instead we just took photos of the flowers and ate some apple cider doughnuts.

Now I'll spend the rest of the week baking apple sauce...apple butter....apple pie...apple bread.....and anything else I can think of with apples in it! The house is going to smell amazing!