A long weekend is a wonderful thing.....

I have got the back of the Leilani cardigan up to the armholes, and it looks great. Unfortunately, it has become apparent that I do not have enough yarn to actually finish it. The bit of yarn left in the ball in the photo is all I have left of the 1st ball; the remaining 2 are definitely not enough to finish the back, both fronts, and the sleeves. I haven't yet decided what exactly I am going to do about it, so it will go into hibernation for a while until I come up with a new idea. My original idea when I bought the yarn was to make a vest, but took a chance on Leilani to see if it would work. So it looks like I'm back to the vest idea. Any good suggestions?


I've made good progress on the Moderne Log Cabin Blanket - it's definitely getting bigger, though so slowly that sometimes its hard to tell. It's just about up to being square, and the goal is for it to be 50" x 60" once its done. But done-ness might be achieved in a different manner by simply running out of yarn at some point in the near future. But I am enjoying knitting on this. The yarn is so pleasant to work with and garter stitch is so soothingly mindless that this makes for superb coach-potato knitting.


Since I don't have much new getting started right now it feels like I don't have much to blog about, but seeing all the things I found to take pictures of reminded me that I've always got several projects going at once. I spent part of this weekend working on a couple of hats for Afghans for Afghans. These are intended as kid's hats and are knit with bulky weight yarns on size 10.5 US needles.

I work these scrap yarn hats from the top down, beginning with a bit of I-cord that gets tied into an overhand knot, and then increasing out from there. Using 4 double pointed needles makes it easy to plan the increases: I just knit into the front and back of the 1st and last stitch of each needle every other row until I have enough; the larger hat had 14 stitches per needle; the smaller one 12. I work even from there until it looks right (about 5" for the larger one, less for the small one) and then do the ribbing, and bind off. Doing the increases in this way makes for a somewhat squared hat top, which worked very well in these bulky yarns. While I didn't follow the pattern in doing this, I got the idea from brooklyntweed's Turn-a-Square hat.

And at long last I made the 2nd part of my baby gift for my coworker, Delphine's expected little boy, due in December. I made this sweater a while ago, and then decided it needed something to go with it. I found a nice little orange and cream checked cotton for a pair of overalls, and finally got them sewn up today. They turned out very well, but I think I made them in too big a size - I made the 3-6 month size but now I think the sweater is closer to a newborn.

But that's ok - they can both be worn at sometime, even if not exactly at the same time! Take a look at the 2nd picture for the carrot buttons - too cute.