Since I missed another post last week I've got a lot of catching up to do! I finished the Simple Yet Effective Shawl from my last post, and it's really nice. The Noro Kureyon sock yarn does soften with washing, but I still wouldn't say that softness is one of its virtues but it's soft enough to wear. The pattern is as easy as it gets, and in the self-striping yarn is endlessly entertaining as the stripes change as the triangle gets wider. Of course, it would also be wonderful in a non-striping yarn.

It's somewhere between a scarf and a shawl in size (a shawlette?) and will be a nice colour accent on a grey winter day. Not that the 80 degree plus weather we're having in the Bay Area is even close to grey, but sooner or later wintry weather will arrive and a little warmth will be appreciated.

I've gotten a little side-tracked from the 1,000 Petal Lotus chair slipcover, but I have completed most of the backside of the chair back. I'm using the same magic ball technique as I used for the flower design on the chair seat and the front of the backrest but am using a very different colourwork design. The flower was knitted in a stranded technique, while the more angular stepped design for the back is being done in intarsia.

While the stepped design for the back is very different from the organic, curvilinear flower, the basic idea was to keep the same feeling in having a warm-coloured centre surrounded by the cooler blues and purples of the petals/steps. The hope is that the back will be a more abstract, geometric interpretation of a flower, while the front is the more literal version. Does it look like the idea is working?


Because the steps are more rigid in the number of stitches and the shapes, the individual colours in the magic ball make larger blocks of colour rather than a painterly flow from colour to colour. Once I get the second half of the back done I will start sewing the pieces together and figuring out the actual construction. I'm really looking forward to seeing what this ends up looking like in the long run!


And lastly, and ongoing and seemingly endless project is drum carding a big bag of alpaca that my friend Cat gave me some time ago. It's a beautiful creamy/beige-y colour that will eventually have some undyed silk noils and maybe tussah silk blended into it, but the first task is simply to card the raw fleece into manageable batts. I washed the fleece some time ago (it was pretty dusty) but am only now getting around to carding it. I neglected to weigh the whole fleece before starting so I'm not sure how much I have in terms of weight, but that big stack of batts there on the table is about half of the fleece. I am astonished at the quantity of alpaca that continues to come out of the single grocery sack.

Charity begins close to home

My batch of hats and mittens have been delivered to Afghans for Afghans for their current drive to help kids, but I've had a few reminders in recent days to not forget friends and organizations that are a lot closer to home in my charitable efforts. Most distressingly, I heard from one of my knitting buddies that her husband has just been diagnosed with lymphoma, and as she described it herself, life feels pretty unfair right now, and I have to agree with her. But in the face of events in which I can do so little to help, I do what knitters have always done - knit something. I've gotten a chemo cap started and hope to finish it this week, but if anyone reading this has time to spare for some good thoughts for my friend and her husband it would be greatly appreciated. I'll post more on the pattern and yarn I'm using for the cap later.

I also am very active with the local historical museum, which is facing some tough times this year with reduced funding from the city as well as other challenges posed to everyone with the economic mess that is affecting us all right now. I am making as many items as I can think of to donate to the annual fundraising auction that will take place in early November. The auction will have a food theme, as we are also publishing a cookbook to sell as another fundraiser, so I'm making things like aprons (sewn, not knitted) as well as the string market bags I blogged about last week. They turned out very well, and I had enough of each solid colour to make a striped one, which turned out to be my favourite in the end.

And as a change of pace, I started a simple triangular scarf using Cosmicpluto's Simple Yet Effective Shawl, which is a free download from her blog. While the pattern was originally written for a heavier yarn, she recently made a version from Noro's sock yarn which looked great. I have a skein of the yarn in my stash which I had bought thinking that it might end up as a scarf rather than socks anyway, so it seemed like the perfect time to give it a try.

I'm not a big fan of self-striping yarns, but every now and then they are fun to play with, and the triangle shape is fun as the stripes will be very different as the triangle grows. This might be a gift or might not; it remains to be seen, but it's a lot of mindless fun to knit on right now.

Stringy

I've often thought of making some sort of knitted mesh bags for taking to the farmer's market or grocery store but haven't gotten around to it until this past week. Spurred into action by a combination of seeing the Monteagle Bag pattern on the Mason-Dixon Knitting blog (it's a free download); remembering I wanted to make something more to donate to the Vallejo Naval & Historical Museum's annual fundraising auction; and lastly, remembering I had 2 balls of J.P. Coats Royale Quick Crochet Thread in my stash (thanks to my friend MmmmYarn - thank you!) I finally sprang into action and got started on my bags.


While I did start off using the Monteagle Bag pattern, I must admit that I found myself defeated by the left-cross right-cross double-wrap drop stitch stuff and gave up without much of a fight. I dropped far too many stitches than were intended and this made for a real mess, let me tell you. I ended up winging it and working up my own pattern starting with a garter stitch square, then picking up stitches around the circumference and doing a fairly simply double-wrapped drop stitch with garter stitch rows in between. This made for a nicely meshy bag that wasn't too stringy and not too crazy-making to knit, either. I finished off the top with an attached i-cord border and an I-cord strap.

As can be seen by this photo with the bag full of several pounds of carrots, potatoes, and red onions (farmer's market stew for dinner tonight - yum) the bag can stretch to hold a lot of stuff! I've finished one out of the cranberry coloured string and have now embarked on a 2nd in a more neutral beige. Each ball contains about 400 yards and was 8.5 oz at the start, including a cardboard core; I used more than 1/2 of the ball of cranberry so I am guessing there will be enough of the beige to do a 3rd and final bag in a stripe of both colours for a total of 3 bags.

Muddling through

I missed a blog post last week, unfortunately - after years of being more or less manageable, my chronic migraines have suddenly gotten all out of whack again, so I have not been feeling very well for a few weeks now. And as a result, I've been taking some new medications to try to get control of the situation again and they've had me feeling a little loopy, I must say, so I just never managed to get to the computer and get my thoughts out there into the blogesphere. But while I am still definitely not feeling quite myself I have gotten out of the migraine cycle, where one headache kicks off another, and another, and another..... It will take a little time but I'm sure I will be able to get back on track in the near future.

And I learned an important lesson. At one point I was taking a medication that had me very decidedly muddle-headed, and as can be seen by the unraveled mess in the photo above, this was definitely not a good time to attempt to knit even a simple lace pattern. I was doing okay while in the straight, unshaped portion, but as soon as I hit any kind of shaping at all it was all over.

So what is this lace I am knitting on? I finally faced up to the fact that the Teal Leilani was not going to work, and then got entranced by a pattern from Knitty called Hey Teach! that I saw progressing on several blogs, and it suddenly dawned on me that a much more fitted style like this might work for my limited yarn supply.

Once again, the gauge of this pattern is much larger than what my yarn can do, so I would need to do a lot of reworking, but I thought that if I did a provisional cast-on for the bodice, at the beginning of the lace pattern and knit the entire bodice,and see how far my yarn went, it would give me a very good idea if I really had enough to knit the whole sweater. If I was happy with the results of the bodice, then I could pick up the stitches from the provisional cast on and knit the remainder of the body from the top down. If need be, I could even leave off the sleeves for more of a vest-like garment.

So I started with that back and had no problems, and then knit the 2 fronts together, and had oodles of problems as evinced above with all the unraveling, but got passed them eventually. The shoulders were knit together as I usually do, and blocked the whole bodice pretty severely to open the lace out. After sewing up the side seams I removed the provisional cast on and picked up all the stitches to begin working the remainder of the body downward toward the hem all in one piece,with no seams. There's no doubt no - I have plenty of yarn.


And as an end note - I finished the 1,000 Petal Lotus Chair back and both pieces are blocking now. The two pieces will be part of a slipcover of sorts for my sewing room chair; now I need to figure out what to do for the back and lower portions of the chair to say nothing of how to actually construct the darn thing. But I sure do like how it looks so far!

Redecorating

I have been doing an unprecedented amount of non-garment knitting in recent months for some reason. Perhaps this is due to my squirrel-like tendency in autumn to hoard, to nest, to make my home ready for winter. I often go through phases of introspection and home-based activity in autumn, so turning my attention to knitting for my home seems to me to be a logical extension of this state of mind.


The chair cover I began in last week's post has progressed very well and quite quickly - the top of the chair seat is done, and is pinned over the actual chair for the purposes of the photo. I also tried the piece on the chair back for size and was pleasantly surprised to find that, with minor changes to the shaping of the top edge, that I could basically knit the exact same thing to make the chair back. I always find it to be an agreeable thing to not have to recreate the wheel and no less so with this project. There are still many decisions to be made as to how the chair cover as a whole will actually be constructed, but it will evolve as I finish each knitted piece - one finished part will inform the next, and so on. I usually find three-dimensional objects to grow in this fashion; I've never really been able to plan them out in my mind or on paper in their entirety ahead of time. I need to see what I have done and then respond to that before I can plan my next steps.

My other homey project is at long last done. The Moderne Log Cabin Blanket concluded yesterday after a long stint as the perfect couch potato knitting project. During the recent spell of 90+ degree weather it was less enjoyable, but now that the evenings have cooled down it's been great to be able to sit under it while I slogged along on the final stretch. Just about at the point where I thought it would never end, it suddenly did - and all that was left was a simple attached I-cord border, which took only a couple of evenings to complete .

The yarn (Silky Wool by Elsbeth Lavold) is wonderful for a blanket - light, softly warm, not itchy at all, and the colours are gorgeous. I think I could knit very happily with this yarn for years without tiring of it. I acquired the yarn for m y blanket a bit at a time, and ultimately ended up using less than the original pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting called for,resulting in a slightly smaller blanket - 42" x 54" instead of 50" x 60", but it's plenty big enough to nap under.

The blanket feels so good to sit under that TW couldn't resist hamming it up a bit for me as my willing model. There he is in all his glory, watching the Raiders (who won, I am happy to say), recliner fully reclined, remote in hand. Doesn't he look happy? (and no, he doesn't really wear the hat while watching TV).

Lotus blossoms in my sewing room

I have a very practical and very unattractive chair in my sewing room that I have thought about recovering for some time. The photo shows that its unappealing appearance can easily be discerned. My thoughts had not yet resulted in any observable actions when last July Kay of the Mason-Dixon blog suggested starting a Ravelry group devoted to the idea of knitting upholstery. This was the very spark I needed to help me make the decision about how I was going to prettify my chair. I would knit new upholstery (or perhaps more aptly, slipcovers) for it.

As I still had a very large Kaffe Fassett-esque "magic ball" and a similarly large ball of beige/taupe yarn of a similar weight, the decision about yarn and colours was already made. I looked through my Kaffe Fassett Pattern Library book and chose the large Damask Flower design, which after blowing up on a photocopy machine several times turned out to be very close to the proportions of my chair seat. I was off and running on getting a new look for my old chair.

I have chosen to call this the Thousand-Petaled Lotus Chair Seat - the 1,000 petalled lotus symbolizes absolute reality, and a place where consciousness enters into a new realm of perception. As I spend so much of my creative and restorative time in this chair it seems to be the perfect image to use on my chair seat.

I haven't decided yet what exactly I will do for the sides of the seat, or for the back. I'm really winging it on this one so it will be an ever-changing project as I progress on it. At some point I will run out of one or the other yarns so it will be an eclectic project as well.

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.