Dear Elisa,
Done with gift knitting. Well, at least the stuff that hasn't turned into Happy New Year! presents. I knitted up two of the lovely Children's Cotton Hats from the great Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. I love to read this book and ogle its pretty pictures, but had yet to knit anything from it.
These hats were a joy--super-quick and toddler-chic. Here's the one I remembered to take a picture of before wrapping:
Yes, yes. Pink and brown. Très 2008, non? Both hats use Cascade 220 superwash for the hat body and assorted oddments for the i-cord. The other one, of which I will hopefully have an action shot ere long, is magenta with neon green i-cord.
I dearly wanted to put just a teeny pom-pom or a little tassle on top just to give it some petite quirk, but two out of two surveyed said it would be silly. What do you think?
xoxo,
M.
News at 10!
Dear Elisa,
I have finished another project. I know it's the second one in a month, and I know you may be having to find a chair right now and perhaps are clutching at your chest and hollering about having the vapors.
Behold:
Puff Daddy. The twenty-minute knit, in ONLY a month and a half according to my Ravelry project page. This was my first pompom, and that was the stumbly bit. I just kept putting it off. But it's done now, and while it's cold enough to wear it! Hooray! I want to knit a million more of these things for people, if I can find a suitably soft but not meelion-dollar yarn like the Misti Alpaca. Wonderful, may I even say, fuckable stuff, but a little bit of a spendy treat.
Also note that this finished something is for me, me, me, and is NOT holiday gift knitting, because bugger holiday gift knitting. A scarf and two cute kid hats. That's it.
As a bonus, we have some gratuitous cat pictures since they were in there trying to kill me whilst I was doing my photo shoot.
Ghia, the Bitchy Calico:
Ghia thinks: Yes, I'm a pretty kitty. DIE, bitch.
Zephyr, the Big Snuggly Tomcat:
Zephyr sees into your soul, and finds it...lacking.
The other two kittehs get short shrift on the blog because they try to kill me much less often and so usually aren't around when I am pointing the camera at things. To celebrate the fact that I'm actually putting pictures in a blog post, I have scrounged up some older pictures of the calmer cats:
Lydia, Who Does Not Like Having Her Picture Made:
Niblet, the Cat We Never See:
Poor Niblet (left-side kitteh) was this poor little teeny foundling, but he's just never gotten used to us. He runs from us and some days we don't see him at all. Funny thing is, he's HUGE. He's still a wee kitten in that picture, but you can see the ominous signs of his future hugeness in his feet and head. He's about 4 now, and a third again bigger than Zephyr, in both height and length. Lean, but huge. So he's kind of a semi-domesticated ninja panther.
I seem to have digressed a bit from the OMG I FINISHED KNITTING SOMETHING. Crazy cat people are like that.
xoxo,
M.
P.S. I chortled mightily at you finally succumbing to the wonder that is the Two-Row Stripe. Muahahaha, etc.
Dear Elisa,
I have been knitting. Yes, I'm out of the dark times. This was spurred by two things:
1. Plane trips. Lots of work done on the Dreamsicle Scarf. It's an easy lace pattern, and makes for great plane reading with a good audiobook.
2. The Yarn Harlot's hubbub over the damned Noro Striped Scarf.
Number Two is actually where most of the knitting was done, at least in terms of volume. I'll admit it--I'm kind of a joiner. I jumped on Jaywalkers, cruised on a Clapotis, fashioned Fetchings...you get the picture. Many of my cast-ons are determined by the New Cool Hotness that's out on the knittertubes. You might say that I'm easily distracted by shinies. So of course, when I see the Harlot going on and on about this scarf, and I have a friend's birthday coming up, well, naturally I hotfooted it down to the yarn store and picked me up some Noro Silk Garden. This is the result:
Isn't it wonderful? It really is a scarf worth going on about. It's 1x1 rib, so it's something to do that's more interesting than six feet of stockinette. And every two rows, it changes a little. I couldn't put it down because I wanted to see what it was going to morph into next. When I finally decided it was getting too long and I really had to stop knitting, I was actually sad when I cast off the last stitch.
And it's all from these humble beginnings, in colourways 249 and 211, 2 skeins each:
Now, isn't that puzzling? We're going in orderly, two-row exchanges here, but I have significantly less left of one colour than the other. The first ball of the colourway on the left ran out several rows before the first ball of the other. Weird. Like, maybe the yardage isn't consistent between the colourways?
And may I say a word about the needles I'm using? These KnitPicks Harmony Wood straights are the best thing ever. Like the wooden equivalent of Addi Turbos. I ordered a trial pair in US 7s, since for some reason 50 pairs of US 7s is just not enough around here, and I am in love. The page from the KnitPicks catalogue with the set was torn out, circled heavily, and left on my husband's keyboard. He might get the hint, but this is never a guarantee.
And so now, with gift knitting staring me in the face like a cat who doesn't think you should be asleep this late, it's already 7 a.m. for gosh's sakes and I'm not going to feed myself dammit, you know what I'm doing?
Casting on another for myself. 211, 221, and 47 this time.
xoxo,
M.
Dear Elisa,
You know how I used to say that having to deal with the pictures was keeping me from blogging? Well, sister, now the pictures are inspiring me to blog. I am still loving this camera. Tonight I chased things around that weren't moving, like this newly-finished Tulip Cardigan:
Don't you love a nice, symmetrical armhole?
Look at this--miles and miles of seed stitch and applied i-cord. Do you hear Asleep at the Wheel? I do.
I also have a bonus picture. Instead of taking a fugly, washed-out picture of my Cardigan for Arwen, I can now show you how pretty the cabling really is:
Yum.
Trying hard to ignore the fact that I'm leaving for Germany in three days. Ayyy.
xoxo,
M.
Dude, I got a new camera. Check it out.
This is the kind of shot I would have taken with my point-and-shoot:
...pretty average picture. Not too close, looovely flash burn, completely flat. What is that stuff, shoelaces?
And this is what I'm able to take now:
OH, it's handspun. Nice and close, decent colours, a little depth of field going on. Yeah baby. Imagine if I could have arsed myself into setting up somewhere besides next to the TV!
I had better luck chasing the cats around for good pictures, though. I can't decide which of these is my favourite...
...or...
I'm hoping I'll come home from Germany a few weeks from now with some great pictures. And maybe even some yarn. Wollmeise? Do I dare to dream?
xoxo,
M.
