Feb 19, 2016

let's try that again

I wrote a bit and then I paused it (without saving) to go take a crappy cell phone picture. I lost the writing. Rookie mistake.

So I just finished this Hayley's Comet shawl, with a different colour arrangement than in the pattern because I was using odds and ends:
It isn't really properly blocked. Just enough for me to weave in the ends, and then I may block it again with pins. Maybe.

I'm going to cast on the Antler sweater this evening and I'm stoked. It doesn't actually have antlers on it. It's a fingering-weight sweater with interesting details like the saddle shoulders, garter cowl, coloured sleeve ends and things like that.
She's helping me ball the yarn. I do it by hand because I enjoy it.
And here it is all balled. It's four 50g skeins all wound up together with the ends felted together to make it think that it's one big 200g ball. It's a big beast. I can't wait to cast on. But first I shall take my daughter for Thai food and we will grab something from the coffee shop on the way home. That's very exciting - I don't have Thai very often.

This new knitting project is going to live in the new project bag. The yarn is excited about that.

Feb 14, 2016

order

Ahhhh, project day! And not a planned project day either (that may have been overwhelming so I let it hit me spontaneously).

I finally finished cutting up the scraps to get them under control. This is all the widths going into individual baggies. I'm so happy with this organized state. The 2.5x2.5-inch squares are stacked separately and I have a plan for them now. I'm going to sew them to a 2.5-inch strip of white and then press them and cut them apart. Then they'll all have a white buddy and I can play with layouts and see what sort of scrappy wonderfulness I can come up with.


I started today by quickly sewing up some fleece for lining the guinea pig cage. They have some, but another set was necessary. I hope they enjoy their new mango-coloured bedding.

Then I moved on to the camping ponchos. We had bought $5.99 'beaver blankets', knowing that we'd need three for the ponchos and a fourth to fashion hoods for them. My husband grew up in Beavers/Scouts, so he is delighted to be able to use these type of blankets again. I even had 2/5 of a blanket left for our wee doggie to lie on.


After that, I whipped up a quick burrito-pattern pillowcase using some Batman flannelette with a plain black cuff. Daughter can never have enough Batman.

I made a larger sized knitting project bag and the coolest thing about this flannelette fabric is that it looks like knitting! It's perfect and I love it. I got the fabric at the January destash that was conducted at my modern quilt guild meeting this year.


After that, I decided that I couldn't make anything work the way I wanted to with my leftover purple-and-green rail fence blocks. So I'm going to make a table runner. Who doesn't need a purple-and-green table runner?


And in the middle of all that, I did some grocery shopping, picked up bubble tea and Starbucks and made escargot. Oh, and I watched a movie and did some knitting. What a day!


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Feb 9, 2016

chop chop

I'm working on organizing my fabric scraps. I'm about 2/3 of the way through. It's a year-and-a-bit's worth of scraps, so nothing too crazy, but enough that it's taking me days to get through it. It's a lot of work getting organized, and it's a pain in the butt when you cut at a kitchen table. Well, more like a stress on the back than a pain in the butt, I suppose. I'm breaking it up with knitting and eating.


  • I'm leaving big pieces and strips that are at least 6" wide alone.


  • I'm leaving things that look like they want to be strips as strips. I have separated them by width and I have about 10 piles. I don't have a 2.5" width pile because ...


  • ... I'm cutting anything oddly-shaped or 2.5"-in-width down to 2.5" squares. I have plans for these squares. It will involve a LOT of chain-piecing.


Pictures when I'm done. Hopefully by Friday.

Can you believe that I've been collecting selvedges for just as long? And not only my own, but my Mum's and anyone else's who wanted to donate them when I was at quilt camp. I have enough now. I will figure out a way to use them and it will be awesome. Later.


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