Seeing in Color

I have been knitting a pair of black and white mitts for my mother F.O.R.E.V.E.R. This pair of black and white mitts, to be exact.

I have been working on these puppies since Christmas. Why, you might ask? It may have something to do with the fact that it is my first attempt at fair isle, and the completed mitt took me three tries to get right. Well, three tries once I found a good yarn. I actually purchased and twice tried another yarn before finding this one and beginning. And in fact, it still isn't right, as the top is too loose and will have to be redone upon completing the second. As you can see, it has been a bit of a frustrating road.

At first, I was excited about the pattern, the yarn, the fact that it was perfect for my mother and I knew she would love it. It was a challenge, and I love complex and visually stunning knitting patterns. The enemy was tension. For the life of me, I could not get my tension correct or even. I couldn't get the hang of carrying the yarn behind without pulling too tight, not understanding the concept behind it. I tried and tried, getting over halfway done at one point and having to frog my way back to the beginning. My optimism is running thin, and it is taking longer and longer to get anything done with them because I am so fed up. I still love the pattern and cannot wait for the completed product, but the amount of effort is not stacking up in solid results.

Luckily for me, there is such a thing as Mochi Plus, by Crystal Palace Yarns. :) I bought this from Northampton Wools a few months ago, and have been dying to try it out ever since. The colors are amazing, the softness is divine - it was exactly the sort of yarn therapy I needed. So yesterday on the way back to school from a quick weekend home, I whipped up this cute little hat with earflaps (it still needs to be blocked and have the ends woven in). It was easy and fun, and just what I wanted - great results with very little time and effort.
Luckily I still have two more skeins of this yarn left, so I can make another little something before having to buy more!

I also took a little time to spin, and finally finished up some alpaca that I have been working on for months now.
Although I got myself into a little rut with the mitts, all I needed was a break to get me back on track feeling refreshed and ready to tackle the first Knit for Those in Need meeting on Saturday! :)

Keep Knitting!

The Stuff

These are some pictures of some of my work - both completed and in-process.



This is a hat that I made for one of my best friends, Ian. He picked out the red Peruvian wool, and the black is some stuff I had lying around that I decided to add some stripes with. It's always fun getting two different yarns of different weights to work in the same pattern! :) I actually ended up making this hat twice, because the first time I vastly miscalculated the size of Ian's head. No offense Ian.



This is my WONDERFUL roommate/best friend Liz wearing the "Weasley" sweater I made for her over the summer. This was so much fun to make, from beginning to end. Karen and I spent ages at a Webs tent sale finding just the right yarn in just the right color, and after that it knit up in about three weeks! The hardest parts were finding the yarn and adjusting the pattern for the bulky yarn we settled on, but other than that it was a breeze. This pattern came from the book Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter, by Alison Hansel. That book is a godsend!



I had been dying to make a scarf with a leaf pattern for some time, but I was waiting until I found yarn that was the perfect shade of green. I finally found it for three dollars a ball with only two balls left in the backroom at Webs! The pattern comes from knittingpatterncentral.com, a great source for free knitting patterns.



This was my first serious foray into lace knitting, and I turned into a bit of a fanatic. For the month and a half it took me to knit this shawl, my day almost literally went: go to work, knit during lunch break, come home, knit until bed. I think there was some food thrown in there too, every now and again. This was bliss to create. The pattern came from a book that has become a staple of my knitting library: Victorian Lace Knitting Today, by Jane Sowerby. This incredible book is worth every penny, with beautiful pictures, helpful instructions, and tons of historical information about knitting in a time when patterns were only just becoming mass produced. I HIGHLY recommend this book, and am in fact working on another shawl from it at the moment. (I estimate I have roughly 40-50 hours of work left on it, which becomes difficult during the school year :(). And thanks to my friend Brooke for being the beautiful model on both this shawl and the leafy scarf above! :)





This is some yarn that I have spun. The silver is unknown fiber (I suspect merino top, but it was so long ago now that I don't remember), the green is merino and wool, and the white is Great Pyrenees dog fur. My friend (and Karen's sister-in-law) Judy works at a Pyrenees rescue shelter and owns several of them herself. A few years ago Judy helped organize a fair about Pyrenees and rescuing them in particular, and Karen and I went to support her and do a spinning demonstration to show how the fur of this amazing dog is a wonderful, warm, beautiful fiber to work with. And they shed like crazy, so it works out perfectly!



This yarn was so much fun to spin! (Although I had a spinning wheel malfunction when I was 2/3 of the way done which reduced me to a hysterical mess for about an hour. Ahh, nothing like fiber to put you in your place).




These fingertip-less mitts are a work in progress right now, and are partially of my own design. The design down the center is a modified version of a lace bookmark pattern that came in a knitting Day-to-Day calendar that I bought a few years ago. I changed a few things around and combined it with a basic pattern for fingertip-less mitts that I got from an unknown source (Karen, probably), and viola! The white is paper that I put in them to show what they will look like when they are done. They are knit in Noro silk, but I am going to line them with some white and fluffy angora that Karen spun up for me - she's the best!