Sunday, May 26, 2013

seasonably inappropriate knitting

The nice thing about learning to knit in the spring is that I have lots of time to get decently good at it in time for christmas presents. The silly thing about it is that I now have a matching neck warming collar thing and fingerless gloves, just in time for summer...

it pulls over the head and snugs up like a squishy neck corset. my guy says it looks like a neck brace, hahaha, but I think it's cute.
Out of the eight knitting projects I have either completed or am currently working on, only one besides this set is actually for me. Which is weird, because with sewing I am totally a selfish seamstress. It might have something to do with my current skill level not matching up yet with most of the things I want for myself though, so we'll see if I'm still this generous once I get good, hahaha.

isn't the lace edge pretty?! not supper lacy compared to, you know, actual lace work, but enough to make me feel fancy about wearing (and having made) it.

 The blue bit at the top of the last picture was my rather confused attempt at a provisional crochetted cast on, which didn't end up working quite right, but got the job done. Somehow I got confused while starting to knit out again from that point to finish the second lace end, and ended up offsetting the pattern by one stitch. With the confusion of the lace and the way the top flops down a little when wearing it though, I don't think anybody is really going to notice.

standing up like this, it kind of reminds me of illustrations of how wormholes (probably) work... and now I want to learn some recreational physics.

I had two balls of this yarn, and the collar took slightly less than one, so I needed some other smallish project to go with it. Seeing as my hand are always cold, some mitts sounded like a good idea, and since I'm always wasting time on the computer, fingerless ones fit the bill nicely; you can't skill mash wearing mittens :P.

I made the finger end ribbing longer than instructed for extra warmth.
I like the way they turned out, although they are slightly too large around the wrist. Which is, I'm sure, not generally a problem with this patter, as I usually wear children's store-bought gloves and really should have made the child's size of this as well. Really, it's a little freaky how small my hands are compared to the rest of my, or a normal person. One of my friends can fold his first two knuckles over my fingers if our hands are palm to palm; granted, he's a foot taller than me, but still!

during the day, the only place in my apartment that gets enough light for decent pictures is the floor by our patio door.
I got to learn increases for these guys, and stockinette stitch; neither of which are difficult, I just hadn't run into them before. I've finally learned enough that each new knitting pattern I look at is only 75% gibberish, hahaha. Anyway, once I had my very own coordinated mitts finished, I decided to give away my first mitt attempt, because one only needs so many of these things.

this picture demonstrates the oddly small difference in size between my wrist and hand, and why bracelets often fall right off.
I made these chunky blue fellows mostly to use up the leftover yarn from this cowl, and so when they became obsolete to me, I gave them to the friend the cowl went to. Now she has a matched set too! I feel very lucky that my co-workers don't knit, because they get really excited and amazed by the things I give them and will never notice any iffy bits :P. And it makes me happy seeing them enjoy things I made for them, like a big vicious circle of love.

Now I've ended up with three knitting projects on the go, although only one is particularly urgent. A friend is going through a rough patch right now, and with nothing helpful to do besides supplying hugs and moral support, I thought pretty new gloves made just for her might at least provide a little cheering. So now I'm trying to knit some up as quickly as I can without making loads of mistakes; the pattern I'm using is so cute I might just have to make it again for myself once I've learned enough to add actual fingers.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Busted!

So, this month I have:

- ufo-busted a two year old half finished (cow print) skirt. And then upon washing it discovered that the shell and underlining don't play nicely together, and that the whole thing will have to be recut and done again from scratch. At least now I have an extra two years of construction expertise?

- busted up both my arm and my back, on individual occasions, and for seemingly no particular reason. I just go to sleep perfectly fine, and wake up the next morning with some part that hurts when I use it or move in any way for the next week or two. Both are pretty much ok again now, but if I get up tomorrow with a bum leg, I'll be mighty pissed...

- and busted out my geekiness!
    I've started a biweekly gaming night with friends (the perfect way to pretend I'm sociable without really leaving my comfort zone. And by comfort zone, I mean house).
    Having already watched at least parts of most other extensive sci-fi franchise, I'm starting in on Stargate SG-1, and so far it's pretty awesome. Next in cue after that: Transformers, 80's style.
    And instigated by a Forgotten Realms trilogy that I snagged from booksale at work, I remembered my great love of classic style fantasy novels. I burned through that series in very short order, finally started in on reading Anne McCaffrey's Harper Hall trilogy for the first time since my Dad read them to me as a kid, and just started this book (I think after seeing it on Megan's totally awesome blog, but now I can't find where she mentioned it), which I thought was going to be a trilogy, but turns out to be a six part series, half of which I have to interlibrary loan in because my library is weeding everything good *sigh grumble sigh mutter bitterness contempt* and only have 2/3 of any given series I want to read now.... Anyway, books rock, especially if they have dragons and magic and lots of characters with incomprehensible names :).

I did not, however, do much in the way of sewing, and therefore almost missed out on this month's stashbusting challenge! But then last night, fuelled by a desire for craftiness (and, lets face it, a disinclination to be left out of the shiny row of clickable boxes over at Cindy's place), I dug out my scraps box and got to work.

Apparently all of my stash fabric is blue. Which I don't understand, as most of my clothing = not blue.

Dice bags! Lots of little divided pouch dice bags! I used the same pattern that I made for my own set, only this time around I lined everything so I didn't have to futz around with seam binding. And that way I used twice as much stash! The lighter blue spotty one even has a big sister.



This one is made from my other self drafted dice bag pattern, which has a flat bottom so it will stand up on it's own, and is big enough to hold pencils and stuff. I made myself one of these to match the little spider-man/batman one (hence why I just called it a "set" even though the link only shows one, haha), but haven't gotten pictures yet. It turned out to also be just the right size to hold my tiny little knitting project for carrying to work :).

Pretty coloured linings! The little blue spots has purple lining like it's mate, and the green spots has a white lining. It also doesn't have ties yet, until I order some more colours of ribbon.
Except for the the green one, all of these where made with little leftover bits of fabric from past projects, so not only where they free to make, but actually served a very noble purpose of cutting down my terrifying collection of scraps. The green spotty fabric is actually something I was recently gifted (does it count as stashbusting if it was in someone else's stash?), but there wasn't enough of it to make any sort of garment, so it got relegated to bag duty. I already have the pieces for a large bag cut out of it, so that one will be a cute little matched set as well.


And they are all going up in my etsy shop as soon as I have the energy to write up decent descriptions and do all that drop menu stuff. Will anyone besides me like the whole divided bag idea? I guess we'll find out!