7 posts tagged “knitting”
This is the hat I finished up for Eawyn a couple days ago. She grabbed a skein of yarn and wanted to buy it while we were wandering around Jo-Ann's tracking down a couple other things I needed. It was inexpensive acrylic so I humored her. It's totally my own design and I'm fairly proud of the stem design I came up with at the top where I decreased it to the point where I could throw in a little cabling.
Show us something you're working on.
Submitted by Sephy.
This is the back of my version of the Petrol vest from knitty. Since sports jackets have fallen out of favor with the Ferris coaching staff in recent years and I'm a reasonably competent knitter these days I thought it would be cool to knit up a Ferris colored sweater vest to wear during our games. I'm using Wool of the Andes (love the balance of cost/sturdiness/softness) which isn't quite as bulky a yarn as the pattern was originally designed for. I've had to adjust slightly for the gauge, but it hasn't been a big deal. Initially I didn't like the garter stitch ribbing, but changed my mind after knitting a couple swatches. I've been working on it pretty steadily for about 3 weeks and it's come together quite rapidly. Now that the basketball season is in full swing (we have our second game tomorrow) and I'm still at least a week away from completion I hope to roll it out for the Rubber Chicken game at the beginning of January.
Originally I was going to start a vest with a main color of the new Lake Ice Heather, but that yarn turned out to have a light blue element that wasn't obvious on the web site and made it less suitable for my purposes. I still had plenty of red skeins so I went with that for my main color and ordered a few more skeins of Fog (light gray) and Mist (dark gray). I picked Fog for the contrast stripes (I decided two narrow stripes looked sportier than one large solid stripe) and I think I will make a Mist colored vest as well if I have enough time. The Lake Ice Heather is stashed away for now, but I have a couple ideas for future projects with it.
Eawyn's Haiku sweater is going to be ready just in time for her birthday tomorrow. Last night I seamed the shoulders and sewed on the buttons I had purchased earlier that evening. That went pretty well considering my lack of experience in that aspect of the process. I didn't do any blocking on the main body portion because I was satisfied with its dimensions, but the sleeves definitely needed it.
I wasn't too familiar with the blocking process so I did quite a bit of research online to find out the best way to block cotton knits and steaming seemed to be the general consensus. I have a small cork bulletin board that I acquired during our yard sale this summer (funny how that works) and it's actually a very nice size for blocking small projects like this one. I covered it with a plastic garbage bag and then started pinning down the two sleeves opposite each other. Once I had the sleeves pinned down in the form I wanted I put our iron in maximum steam mode and waited for it to warm up.
The iron warmed up way faster than I would have guessed and began spewing out steam within a minute or two. I quickly set Houston down in his bassinet and made sure that his binky was keeping him happy for the moment (it was late last night and Mary had left him with me while briefly attending to Eawyn, who had woken up crying) and turned back to the sleeves. I began running the iron back and forth roughly a half inch above the sleeves and it didn't take very long for them to become warm and damp. I made sure that everything had been evenly steamed and that there were no dry spots left before shutting down the iron and returning my attention to Houston.
I wasn't sure how long the sleeves would need to dry so I left them pinned to the corkboard overnight. This morning they seemed dry, but I wondered if they would maintain their new shape once I removed the pins. Much to my relief the steaming process had worked. The sleeves retained their corrected shapes and were ready for seaming. The end of my first really sizable project is in sight!
What's the last thing you crafted, constructed or created yourself?
Houston's hat was the last crafty thing I've completed.
I've got a sweater in the works for Eawyn's birthday, but I still have a couple sleeves to finish before it's officially complete. I went for the larger size of the pattern so it's going to be big for Eawyn, but the upside of that is that she should be able to wear it for a lot longer before she out grows it.
I spent a good portion of my spare time in August teaching myself to knit. There's an unbelievable amount of knitting information and patterns available on the internet so it's really not that hard to pick up once you apply yourself. Knitting Help has a lot of very helpful free instructional videos for a lot of different techniques and was the biggest help in mastering the basic Continental (as opposed to English) techniques.
Here's the Iceland Baby Hat I knit for Houston. I deviated from the original design in a couple ways. I used a smaller gauge cotton yarn rather than wool and I made a big H in the front by mixing purl and knit stitches. I think it ended up being just about the right size for a newborn baby's head, but we'll know for sure in the next week or two.
