Bunny!!!

I got a bunny for my birthday. She's really super cute and really silly. Here's some adorable pics of the bun bun :)




Bad Atari! Noooooooo!!!!

The other finished projects

Unfortunately, I did give away some projects before taking photos of them, but here are pics of what I still have kicking around the house.

Two pillows. Both need to be stuffed. Pillow 1:


Some detail. It's a cream and oxblood red. I sewed two identical short scarves with the pattern of red, white, red, white then stitched them together to create the geometric effect.


I made this one two Thanksgivings ago, but still haven't sewed it together. I need to buy a pillow.


Closer detail. I love this yarn. A little itchy but it has great variation.


A lopsided hedgehog


A penguin I made for my fiance

Bootiful Yarn

Excuse the silly headine for this entry - it's nearly Halloween and I'm all excited! I went to a party this past weekend and dressed up as Mia Wallace, just before she ODs. It was pretty funny. The party was crazy. A bit too bright for a fright fest, but there were some strange performances and lots of fun costumes, including a venus flytrap, and a dinner table, so it made for a good time.

This morning I spent twenty minutes digging through my yarn chest to come up with the perfect colors for a friend's birthday present - a chocolate cupcake with pink frosting! She has a cupcake blog, so I think she's going to love it. Unfortunately, the darn thing is on double-pointed needles! Ugh! I hate those things. One of my books says working with dps is like wrestling with an octopus, and I completely agree. At least the cupcake goes quickly - I nearly finished the icing on the train. I expect the entire thing will be done by tonight...then onto the next project! My friend just had a little girl, so I'm going to knit him a baby blanket. But I've got to do it fast, because there's so many other projects I've got to finish.

Speaking of, I've been trying to finish some of the projects that have been hanging around for years. For example, two years ago I knitted up what was supposed to become a pillow then I put it to the side. This is mainly because I love knitting, but hate the finishing part. I'm just not a sewing queen. But last night, while watching the mediocre Poseidon, I sewed it together. Now I just have to find a pillow to stuff it with.

Last week I bought the prettiest yarn - Manos del Uruguay #118 (Mulled Wine) and I'm whipping up a scarf based on my best friend's pattern. I've made two scarves already from the pattern - one in green and white, and another in purple and white, but this one is mulled wine and black. I might give it to the other of my bfs for Christmas as the mulled wine matches her hair.



Based on the amount of pics on this blog, it doesn't look like I knit too often! To fix this problem I took some pics last night, and I'm taking more tonight, then I'm going to post them up.

Knitting Rocks!

Want proof? I'm going to start posting a weekly column of the coolest stuff I can find that's related to knitting. This week: knitting tattoos. Plenty of knitters have tattoos - but what about tattoos of knitting? If I were ever to get a tat, I'd definitely get one related somehow to my passion for knitting. Here's the best I found:

Adorable. Helpul birds holding up the yarn end.

Simple but effective. Needles stuck into a ball of yarn.

I can imagine this yarn would knit a gorgeous scarf.

Indeed! Plus, I think I own those same needles!


..And my favorite?
Awesome. I'd love to see what this guy knits.

Unfinished Projects

Knitters are lofty, dreamlike creatures. We’re always gushing over (and buying new) yarns and patterns and thus, the well of what we need to finish piles up! Since I posted my to do list back in March, I have completed a number of projects, though I’ve added many more to my list!

Box stitch scarf
2 types of wrist warmers: shamrock and aran
clutch purse with aran stitches
blue shawl
Red and Black scarf
Hedgehog
Irish Armwarmers
Toy for my fiance
Kitty bed
red and white pillow
Blanket for friend’s baby
Matt’s pillow
Takashi Murakami scarf (for me)
Secret knitting project

So, that’s kind of a lot. But…I did finish these! ::grin::

Green and white scarf
Irish armwarmers (see below)

Oops!

So, I think it's nearly been five months since I've posted anything. Of course, like most knitters, I took a break over the summer, but now I'm back into the swing of things and approaching the holiday crunch! I can't post my holiday presents on here (at least not until they've been given to their recipients) but since September, I've been working on a number of projects, so here's an update!

1. The dreaded armwarmers
Last winter, my fiance asked me to knit him a pair of armwarmers after another girl offered to make him a pair. He requested one warmer be solid black and the other green, white and orange (the colors of the Irish flag). So, between projects, I worked on whipping these up. The first attempt, a derivative of a pattern from the book Alterknits was a disaster. They were incredibly loose on him, as I hadn't taken the time to measure his arm properly. Brilliant. The second attempt was from
this pattern from Slumberland. It's an attractive design, but too girly for him. That got frogged. Eventually, we asked the girl who had offered to make him the armwarmers in the first place what her pattern was. So easy! It required me to CO 50 and knit a 5x5 rib all the way up. I tried this and yet again, they were weird (we found out too late she had used a #7, not a #8) because I had to decrease them a few inches from the bottom so they would be snug on his wrist, and when I stitched the seam, the warmer looked really funky. I fixed this problem when I knit its mate by reducing the number of rows. I stayed with the 5x5 rib, but reduced the number of stitches to 40. This solved the problem! Finally!

I probably should have taken pics along the way...but here's the warmers that work!





2. Andre the Giant scarf
Knitty.com has some of the best free patterns available, so it's my goto source when I'm looking for new, fun ideas. After finishing my sweater, I wanted something else challenging to attempt, so I sent the fiance a number of links to patterns that I wanted to try. He picked this pattern and I bought the yarn and was off and running. Let me tell ya, learning intarsia (which I insisted for at least two weeks was pronounced inartasia - much prettier, really) from a book instead of a person, is much harder. The bottom half of Andre's face is all kinds of bumpy, the result of me not having a clue what I was doing. By the middle of the piece, though, I had gotten the right idea, so at least I know what I'm doing for future projects. I'll be learning the trick of Fair Isle when I get to the other end of the scarf, but for now I'm pleased that I've figured out intarsia. Yay!

There's a long way to go, but here's the front...


...eep! And the back. oh, how I hate finishing...sigh.


3. My first sweater (for me)
Last winter, I made a cabled blanket for my parents (see here). Since the yarn was so chunky, it was a good way for me to learn how to cable without fear that my errors would be discovered. But, after spying a pretty pattern for an angora sweater (angora!) in Knit.1, I just had to try cabling again. My goal was I would make it for my birthday, which gave me about 2 and 1/2 weeks. I bought the yarn ($40 - not bad for a wool/angora sweater) and began. Everything was going peachy until I realized I was able to poke my finger through the large cable running down the center of my sweater! I rushed to my reliable knitting store and asked them, what am I doing wrong?? Apparently, I was reading the chart backwards. Der. Cable charts are meant to be read right to left then left to right and so and so forth. Oh. They should tell us this in BIG BOLD letters. But, no. Oh well. I tore everything out and began again. I nearly got it done in time, but decided against finishing it as I was having Chinese for my birthday dinner, and the last thing I wanted was to spill soy sauce all over my new white sweater. Of course, now that I've missed my deadline, it's been hanging in the background, all stitched together except for the collar, which I still need to finish.

It's still missing the neck ribbing, but here it is.


A detailed look at the center cable