Socka 4 Finished & Blocking

Yep, I finished them last night and washed them this morning. They were suppose to be mailed today. I will mail them tomorrow. I hope my swap partner likes them.

I have never participated in a swap like this and am nervous that the socks won’t fit or the toe isn’t the way she will like it. I am going to send her the remaining yarn so if she needs to make them longer or different she can. I wish I had sock blockers so the socks would dry more uniform, but ah…once you get them on your feet it won’t matter that much, right?

I won an awesome blog contest a few weeks ago and look what came in the mail last weekend.  Thanks Sara!!!

Esta muy bueno!!  Te quero!

The book is more awesome then I had expected.  This is my first lace weight yarn.  I look forward to knitting a shawl. 

Socka 4 update

I finished one of my socks for my Sockapalooza 4 pal.

I am lining my Larger than Life Bag:

Here is the inside with pockets, one wide one and one long skinny one.

Here is the outside, you can see I put the print on both sides, not sure I like that, but that is how it is going to be, I am not changing it.

I fixed his eye:

Don’t worry, he isn’t going to be a toy for the kids, though that is how his eye broke. Froggy is going to be a gift for someone’s new desk. Froggy will make a good paperweight, yes? I can’t say who he is going to.

Tomorrow we will be having a garage sale. Wish me luck as I am trying to make some money to reduce my medical expenses. Those bills are starting to hurt and are getting in the way of future fibery purchases.

Lied

Rarely it happens, but I lied. I didn’t go to bed like most sane people would do (ps..I never said I was sane, remember I was the “crazycrafter.”) Instead, I got some type of second wind and in the midst of a bad toothache I did the dishes and finished the Jaywalker socks I have been working on.

Thanks again Sara for sending me this gorgeous yarn that you dyed. I absolutely loved knitting these and the colors never bored me, not once. Sometimes I thought the colors reminded me of a Mary Engelbreit Garden. Sometimes it was pure Christmas spirit.

Here is an inprogress picture of a scarf I am test knitting. This is where I was on Sunday. I am a bit further now. School might slow me up a bit, but I should have it finished by this weekend.

Do you ever wish that people would call you and start hounding you to finish your WIP’s? Okay, maybe that is pretty extreme…I guess I am feeling like I need to be accountable in finishing all that I have started.

Tricksy yarn, progress, and a frog

First, I offered to test a scarf pattern for Ev. Hopefully she is okay with me showing pics of my progress. She is using dk cashmere (yum.) I am using Cascade Quatro, which is a WW 100% wool on size 6 needles. I like how it is turning out.

The color tricks you. For the last 6 months, I have thought this was blue, with some green. I asked Tony what color the yarn was and he glanced over at it and said blue. Guess what. It is not blue. Then as I was knitting away, it hit me that it was purple and green. The purple goes from dark to light, as does the green. The green does have a bluish tone to is, but it is not blue. The yarn is purple and green, not blue…man, that is weird. Look at it, what do you think? Fools the eye, huh?

I was going to make this scarf for my dad, but now am wondering what he will think of purple and green…or maybe he will always think it is blue?

I am making progress on the sock. I am almost ready to do the heel, less than 2 inches to go. Not that I am constantly measuring

I wanted to be able to show you progress on Anouk or even finish it, but I have to be honest. I tried a provisional cast on and started to work on the pocket in intarsia and had to frog it all. Let’s just say it was a sick mess. It won’t defeat me though. I decided I will try again tonight. I need to finish something.

Maybe I will pick up the sleeve of the Angelica Tunic and start knitting on that? My goal this weekend is to be able to post some finished projects. I only have a short time before I start school back up and then it is study all the time. Sad but true. In fact, if I was a good student I would start memorizing bones and muscles right now and get a head start, but then that is just silly…

Finished Hat and Sock Progress

I finished another hat. This one turned out wonderful. I am going to mail this to Cordelia. Maybe she won’t read this? I actually did this a week ago or maybe more and hesitated if I should post it on my blog. I have been very lazy with my mailings. Send positive thoughts her way today.

The hat is crocheted from a pattern about 10 posts before this one, too tired to look right now.  It is in Plymouth Wildflower DK yarn, color green (or whatever fancy name they have for green.)

With the hat is the “dreaded” second sock. It is a jaywalker sock. I am working on this at a snail’s pace.

What have I been doing? Well, since you asked (okay, you really didn’t but humor me…) I have been setting up the new bulletin board Fiber Freaks. I have told you about it, right? It is an online community where knitters AND crocheters can talk about both with each other. We are breaking down the walls here. Knitters and crocheters can socialize. Good stuff!

Actually, it was my discovery at a crochet only board that there were “closet knitters.” They showed there crochet on the bulletin board and their knitting on their blogs. We all know that knitting and crochet have their place and there is a lot of grey (as well as a multitude of other colors) that overlap so it just isn’t all black and white. Okay, you get the point and I am tired and my eyes are blurring…

Tomorrow I am going to go to my yarn activity group with a local club so I should have some progress to show you tomorrow on something! (promise…yeah, yeah…you have heard that before…)

Socks on my mind

I tried to post a few days ago, but my computer was being strange and kept shutting itself down whenever it felt like.  After some detective work, Tony found out that it was our CPU overheating and in an attempt to save itself it would shut down the computer.  He vacuumed out all of the dust and added more thermal paste and it hasn’t shut down, since.  Yay!

I finished my mom’s socks, here.  

I didn’t block them.   My mom came this weekend, put them on, they fit perfect and she shoved them deep into her bag so she wouldn’t forget them.  Before she left I had her dig them back out for a quick pic.  They are a very simple sock pattern, co of 60 with 2×2 ribbed cuff and short row heel.  My mom likes the fit because she says they will fit in her shoes better.  I like the short row heel.

So, I casted on jaywalker in the yarn that Sara (topperarnold) sent to me.   The yarn reminds me of a spring garden.  When I got to the heel, I decided I liked doing the short row heel over the heel flap and so that is what I did.  I tried the sock on and it is good to go!  There is nothing like getting the heel done and trying the sock on to realize your foot won’t make the corner…nope, nada, not in this case, it is perfect.

Jaywalkers finished

Pattern: Jaywalker, largest size
Needles: size 2

Yarn: Claudia’s Handpainted yarn, color purple haze (which does not photography well.)

The color of these socks are an electric purple and a reddish/orange. There is black in there too and really these socks remind me of lava. I absolutely love this yarn and will be buying more of it one day in the future when I have money again.

I have organized my crafting space and am very happy about it. I put my ball winder to good use and I wound up lots of remnant balls of yarn. I am amazed on how much yarn I have that isn’t a full ball of yarn. These are all from projects that I have finished which didn’t require the whole ball of yarn. I need to think of creative ways to use up this yarn. Maybe I need to try intarsia or something that incorporates various colors of yarn. Also, I have been winding up projects that I started that I won’t finish. Some of these are knitting projects that when I started them I was inexperienced or lacked the right tools so just tried something that I thought would work but didn’t. It is a learning process and I am comfortable with reclaiming the yarn and using it for a project that I am happy with. Also it makes my WIP’s much smaller.
I am not done with my crafting area as I really could use a couple of shelves, but it is a start. My goal right now for this blog and for my knitting/crocheting is to have one finished project per week.

I know some people have more but I think this is something I can manage.

Current WIP:

Clapotis w/ sari silk yarn. (I looked at this and I wound the sari silk into balls and man it is dirty. I am not ready to start working on this. This could be something I don’t look at until after the first of the year, I don’t know.)

Socks – basic ribbed sock pattern

Sweat Pea Shawl – crochet project, near complete but am blah about the yarn choice. It isn’t yarn for me, but maybe someone else will like it.

Angelica Tunic – I have one sleeve to complete and then I need to pull out the bind off of the body and add a few more inches as I think it is too short and needs a longer body for my body type. I have kind of stalled on this as I realized that varigated yarn does not look good on a big body. I should have chosen a color that was a solid color. I plan on finishing this within the next few weeks, whether I like it or not.

Sierra is sick, cough, sore throat, 101 fever. It sucks and has kind of messed up my day today. I know that is selfish but in the past year I have had to cancel more stuff because of her or Madeleine getting sick. It is frusterating. Building better immune systems, right? I think I need to make her wash her hands more often.