Fall in NM

It's everybody's favorite season in New Mexico right now. The temperature is nice, the chiles are roasted and the tourists are keeping Old Town busy.

 A few weeks ago, we celebrated a milestone birthday for Hubbers by backpacking Hermit's Peak outside of Las Vegas. We took a circuitous route up El Porvenir Canyon, looped back over Hermit's Peak and came down the steep Hermit trail.

 The aspen were just beginning to think about turning yellow.

It rained lightly several times in the three days we were out there. But we still managed to get a campfire going so I could bake a birthday cake on it. We made it up and over the peak just before the storm clouds came in.

The birthday gift that I carried for two days in my backpack until I could give it to him.

It's still a bit too warm to be wearing a wool cap with ear flaps, but it should come in handy for skiing this winter. The hat pattern came from a free Ravelry download, but I made the Zia chart. See my project page for details.

Geek knitter

It has been a while since I posted about knitting, yet those are always my most popular posts. I had a fun, geeky knitting spree on laptop sleeves over the winter. They're fun to knit because they're just big rectangles which I treated as an empty canvas for colorwork. The three bags I made are different in the type of colorwork I did, the material (type of yarn) and even the construction of the bag. Here's an overview and comparison.

My favorite bag turned out to be this one. It is knit from a self-striping yarn (so no real colorwork there) and then felted. After felting, I needle-felted the metro logo using dyed roving. This is my favorite of the three because it turned out strong and protective for the laptop and it was the easiest to make.

This next one was made for an iPad, so it is a bit smaller and doesn't need to carry as much weight. I used a cotton/silk blend for this bag so that it would not be very stretchy. It looks really cute and the person that I gave it to says it works great. The front and back have different patterns because I've always wanted to knit an argyle pattern.

The last bag is actually the first one I started, but the last to get finished. I learned some lessons from this bag. The space invaders pattern was just too cool not to put on a laptop sleeve! Recently, a guy asked me where he could buy one for his wife… and then asked where he could get the pattern when I told him that I knit the bag. So I like the way the bag looks, but the yarn is too stretchy to carry the weight of the laptop. I had to put in a fabric liner and that took me 5 months. It still doesn't seem quite as strong or protective as the felted laptop bag. But it does look cool, I almost wish I had put space invaders on both sides of the bag instead of the flowers.

You can always get more knitting details and links to patterns or charts from my Ravelry project pages.

Probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever knit

Every year, I go to the Taos Wool Festival and visit Ellen's Wooly Wonders booth and am amazed at the patterns that she comes up with. I couldn't resist this motorcycle pattern. It took a few months (as most projects do) but sewing all those little parts together really turned out to be the time-consuming part, more than knitting the parts.

Knitting Backlog

My knitting posts always seems to get more attention than anything I write about. Since the blog was dormant for about a year, there is a back-log of knitting project to share with you. I'll start with the things that I was working on about this time last year.

Two pairs of mittens donated to an orphanage in Kazakhstan. This is a great way to use up non-washable wool leftovers.

A sweater for Hubbers' birthday last year. This is from some great hand-dyed wool from the Taos Wool Festival.

A vest for Mom, from some yarn purchased in Kazakhstan that claimed to be camel. However, it appears to be machine washable, so I'm not so sure. I managed to find the word "100% wool" in Chinese on the label (followed by 6% something else), but can't translate anything else. The labels are nearly identical for the gray and orange yarn, yet the orange seems decidedly more acrylic while the gray has wispy white hairs throughout that could believably be camel.

A sunglasses case for my sunglasses. Made from cotton yarn purchased in Vancouver last year. The little strap with a button lets me attach it to my purse. Despite the current giant purse craze, I insist on carrying the smallest purse that fits my phone, wallet and ipod. But that doesn't leave room for my sunglasses, so this hangs on the outside.

 If you want more info about these, like the names of the patterns or the modifications to the patterns, that info is available on my Ravelry page.

Pulling my hair out

This is the saga of a sweater that either wasn't meant to be knit or had to be knit, I'm not sure. In summary, I had the wrong yarn, wrong pattern, then it was eaten by a dog twice, pattern lost, and I had to learn several knitting techniques while pulling out my hair along the way to even make the thing work.

It started with a trip to the Taos Wool festival in 2008, where the mountains of wool inspired me to knit a sweater for my husband, despite having only learned to knit a year earlier. I bought 1600 yards of yarn, in two colors which he picked out... then started looking for patterns only to discover that the thin yarn I bought would not make a men's sweater.

So it became my sweater. I found a tank-top pattern that I liked and thought to just make it a bit longer, with less of a scooping neck and add 3/4 sleeves to make it more of a sweater than a tank top. Nevermind that I had never made a sweater and did not know how to make sleeves, and the pattern wouldn't tell me. I'd deal with that when I got there.

I started knitting the sweater in September 2009, and a couple of months later discovered that my re-designed neckline was not acceptable. I undid the top of the shirt, and re-knit it. Then spent a couple of weeks researching sleeves and how to get the right size/shape. At about this time, the puppy managed to bite five holes into the front of the sweater. The helpful people at Village Wools taught me how to fix up those holes.

The sweater went along with me while camping in the winter, although I also found plenty of time to ignore the sweater by working on other projects.

As I was finishing up the sleeves, the puppy once again got her teeth on my project eating the needles off of it. It is possible to make a complete circle in our house from the dining room to living room to hallway to office to kitchen back to the dining room. Puppy did this trailing sweater yarn with her... twice. What a goofball and a terror, she is missed. I fixed that mess but lost my motivation to finish those sleeves, until just a few weeks ago.

And voila, I have a very well-fit sweater, as though it were custom-made for me! And no more hair to pull out!

Mittens for Akkol

I will soon be embarking on a trip to Kazakhstan to participate in a seminar with the University of New Mexico and the Kazakh National University. Upon researching what kind of knitting tradition I might find in Kazakhstan, I found Mittens for Akkol. Click on that link! It's a charity that sends warm mittens, hats, socks, scarves and sweaters to orphanages in Kazakhstan. So I'm making and donating a hat and pair of mittens to take with me.

Pinwheel hat with Lion Wool (lemongrass) and Kerry woolen mills (berry). It's sized for a child and is quite thick and warm.

Now I'm starting on mittens in Plain and Fancy wool. They may not be completed before I leave, but in that case they certainly should be done after 26 hours of traveling.

If this sort of charity interests you, you should also check out Wool-aid. And even if you do not knit or crochet, these types of charities could also use cash donations to help ship donations to their destinations.

What Knitters do in Winter

My posts about knitting generate the most comments, but I haven't posted any knitting in nearly a year. Is that because I'm not knitting? No, here's what this winter inspired me to do...

Hey, Eureka is shivering, she needs a sweater.

Hey, my neck is cold while riding the scooter.

Wow, that was fun to make... somebody else's neck might get cold on her motorcycle.

 

My running buddy might get cold ears, here's something for her.

 

Hey Hubbers, who else would want one of these? You would? But not as thick?

Now my neck's warm, but my legs are cold on the scooter.

Hmmm... my ears might get cold if I start doing a lot of cycling.

Far more details on each of these can be found on Ravelry. All of these small things have been started and finished during winter, unlike a certain sweater that I started in September and hoped to wear this winter. More on that disastrous project later.

Granby hat and scarf

Soon, I will be home where the internet flows freely... well okay, I pay for it to flow at a specified bandwidth that I share with only one other person (Hubbers). I will not miss the frustration of sharing wifi with a whole building full of people and without somebody to hit "reset" on the router when it needs it. This is my excuse for not keeping up with the blog. It has just been too painful. Almost as painful as sharing a single washer/dryer with the whole building.

A while ago, I mentioned that I went to Lonesome Stone and got some new yarn to go with some previously-stashed yarn. So here's the deal. I knit this hat from their beautifully hand-dyed baby kid mohair:
However, I have no scarf that does not horribly clash with this hat. But a scarf made of the same yarn seemed a bit much. This stuff is just too bright and fuzzy. Here's where the new naturally-brown alpaca yarn comes in:
The brown was supposed to tone down the orange. Instead, it highlighted all those minor tones of blue and red. At any rate, it screams a bit less loudly. The pattern is the Anthro-inspired scarflet.Now putting the original hat with this, still looked too bright and fuzzy. Therefore, I needed a new hat to go with the new scarf (how circular). The first hat was too small anyway, so it makes a great ski-helmet-liner. Here's the new hat (pattern: Amanda hat from Sleepy Eyes Knitting).
Now if I just had a pair of gloves made from that brown alpaca, it would be complete. But I used up all of that yarn... maybe next winter.

Charity knit

I get more comments on my knitting posts than anything else, so here's another one for you.
That is my first ever charity knit. It's another iPod cozy, using the same B's Buzz pattern as the last one, but with Peaches & Creme yarn. It's much chunkier looking which may be more stylish these days for high-schoolers. It's going to be sold at a high-school fundraiser. It was entirely knit during a drive to and from Copper Mountain. I'll see how many more I can make while riding in the car/bus by the end of the month.

Irish souvenir sweater

It's done! My souvenir sweater from Ireland. I didn't have enough yarn for a full sweater with sleeves, hence the vest. I really think it's a cute design and I'm amazed that it actually turned out like the Talia pattern promised. It was really an easy pattern requiring virtually no seaming. Although there were times I though I'd never finish it.
This may not be the ideal shirt to wear with it, but hey, that's the shirt that I packed for that day (see previous post).

Projects

I have not had much time for crafts lately (as I thought I would). Here's an update on what I'm working on. I made this cool iPod cozy out of leftover sock yarn, it even has a pocket for headphones. Hubbers is worried that the wool might scratch the touch screen, but I tried rubbing a corner of the screen with the cozy and couldn't see any damage. I did buy some cotton yarn to make this, but then decided that I really wanted use up the last of that sock yarn.

A while ago, I started this sweater vest with yarn from Ireland. It's getting close to finished. It looks almost like a vest. I just need to sew the shoulder straps together, and then there is an edging that goes all the way around the neckline and arm holes. It will probably need to be blocked quite a bit to make it fit right. I'll be glad to have my wearable Ireland souvenir less than a year after the Ireland trip :)

Then there's a sorta-secret cross-stitch project that I'm working on. It will be a gift, so you won't see any photos of it until it has been received. However, the recipient knows about (and even requested) this gift, so it's not so secret that I can't talk about it. It's a birth announcement for my friend's third baby. I made baby samplers for her first two babies, so she rather expected that I'd produce a third cross-stitch. I have picked out the pattern, assembled all of the supplies and started it. I should have another couple of months to work on it.

Knit-phobia?

"Be afraid of skydiving. Be afraid of wild boar. Be fearless with knitting." - from At Knit's End by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

This quote is quite amusing to me... does it really need to be said? I've seen this talk of "fearless knitting" a lot in the past year. Maybe it was just last year's buzz-phrase, but it would seem obvious to me that knitting is not frightening. However, I did just read an article about a woman who was walking into her knitting group when she fell and stabbed herself in the heart with a knitting needle, nearly killing her. So maybe the fear is justified.

At any rate, I believe knitting and other crafts to be safe hobbies. So I am not afraid to share with you some of my recent craft failures. In the end the knitting failures are harmless because they can be stuffed into boxes where they're never seen again. House painting failures, on the other hand, are much more painful.

1. Chirstmas card holder
For Christmas, I really wanted to make something to hang on the wall that can hold all those cards that arrive in the mail. I bought some red wire and attempted to knit it into garter stitch. The idea being that it would hang on the wall and the corners of the cards could be pushed into the spaces of the garter stitches. However, it became clear quite quickly that wire is difficult to knit, and making a rectangle big enough to hold just one card would take a week.

So I tried using some gold crochet thread that I had sitting around from a previous failed knitting experience (trying to make fake gold jewelry for a toga costume). The crochet thread is knittable... but it creates such a delicate little fabric that it would take forever to make anything big and then it wouldn't have the strength to hold cards :(

The cards simply sat on a table in a pile all month.

2. Cabled hat with mohair yarn
I bought some gorgeous hand-dyed mohair months ago and have been waiting to come up with the perfect idea for it. I found a great hat pattern. The only problem was that there are cables in the hat pattern. I assumed that cables in mohair would be rather uninteresting... but I didn't realize that they are nearly impossible to knit (stitches dropping everywhere, impossible to see how many stitches are being slipped) and then the cable looks really terrible. So I had to pull that out and find a simpler pattern. That hat turned out great (bottom of this post)!

3. Card holder
Here's another failure turned success. Here's the post (the blue thingy) about the finished product. I want you to know that I actually made this little thing twice. The first time it was totally the wrong size despite my careful calculations and I thought of other little adjustments to its construction that resulted in the near-perfect finished item the second time around. I'm glad the size was so wrong the first time. If it hadn't been, then I would not have re-done it with those adjustments.

4. Pink bathroom
Our bathroom has pink and black tiles surrounding the shower, possibly from 1951. We are not removing those tiles anytime soon, so I thought it would be fun to give the bathroom a retro look. I painted the walls pale pink and bought black & white geometric patterns for the shower curtain, bath mat, etc. That pink is killing me. I tried to buy an even paler pink to sponge over to give the walls some texture... but they were nearly the same pinks. So I got a darker pink and sponged over again. Now it's a 4-year-old girl's dream room. But I'm really tired of painting, so I'll suffer with it for now.

--
Fyi, this post was 4 days in the making due to intermittent and irritating network failures. I may need a new modem.

More FOs

Here are a few more items that I finished knitting recently. The purple and white dog-bone pillow was a "holiday" gift... it didn't get done until January, but that sometimes happens :) The white side is the last of the Irish yarn. The purple stripes happened thanks to my inability to decide between the two shades of purple. The whole thing was felted then stuffed to make it into a pillow.Just before Xmas, I had some leftover yarn and an idea. Thus, I created from scratch a little holder for all those cards sitting in my purse. I was rather excited that I was able to envision such a thing, and several hours later I turned a little ball of yarn (plus a square of velcro) into my vision.
Finally, I just finished this hat for myself which I also started before Xmas. It's made of hand-dyed Mohair from Lonesome Stone. I love the colors! Now I have enough yarn left over to make two more of these hats... or something else, ideas?
This blog makes it look like I've been a knitting machine lately. However, I simply stopped posting any finished objects after August. These things were worked on over the past several months and they are relatively small items.

Revival

I was first inspired to start this blog a year and a half ago by all the knitters that I know. And so I will revive it with several posts on knitting. Some travel and some other crafts may find their way back in here again as well.

This past fall, I knitted several gifts which understandably did not go on the blog at the time. So here's the first of many projects that are already done and gifted...

My first attempt at a sweater was a baby sweater for my nephew's 1st birthday. I was advised to make it the 2-year-old size so it would fit him for a while. So I searched for cute sweaters, and found a cardigan with paw prints. I didn't think that intarsia with 2 colors would be too difficult. However, I didn't realize until I was knitting that I needed 8 separate bobbins to make those 4 pawprints. The fact that there were 2 colors did not matter as much as the fact that there were 8 blocks of color. And I did most of this on an airplane :)

Here's the completed sweater. For more details on the pattern, yarn, modifications, etc... you can check out my Ravelry project page.
Not surprisingly, this gift was not nearly as exciting to the nephew as his big dump truck :) However, it's clearly big enough to last him 2 winters.
And here's a preview of things to come on the blog (I can't stop myself from actually writing the list forming in my head):
- more gift knits, including what happened to that kool-aid yarn and all that Irish yarn
- project ideas that I tried but couldn't get to work
- knitting and cross-stitch projects on the queue
- travel notes
- grad school ranting