December » 2010 » Untangling Knots

2010 in Crafty Projects

With the exception of October when I moved to Lancaster, I managed to finish at least one crafty project a month. Some months I finished oodles of projects. It was a good year for me in terms of crafting. I wrote my first knitting pattern. I knit six sweaters. I made Britta 3 hats and a cowl. I managed some sewing. I did some drawings. I painted my bedroom and some shelves. I messed around with the hot glue gun. I did a bit of most things.

So here is 2010 in a variety crafty projects. I picked one for each month.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Sweater Update

I’ve got two sleeves and button bands! I just need to get the neck band knit and to do all of that obnoxious finishing work. I’m so close to being done! I’m in the middle of a hat for Britta right now, but as soon as I can finish that, I can finish this! I’m pretty excited to have this sweater to wear when I get back to Lancaster.

I hope everyone had a happy Christmas! Until the end of December, you can get my leopard print beret Stray for 50% off with the code growl on Ravelry. Knit yourself something nice after all of that Christmas knitting.

Intarsia?

Sorry for dropping off the face of the planet. I had a bunch of papers due last week and then some I-might-not-get-home-for-Christmas anxiety because I had to fly through Charles de Gaulle. Anyways, I made it home eventually and there was a big box of yarn waiting for me on my bed!

I ordered it for a school project. I’m going to adapt Alice in Wonderland into a sweater with some intarsia work. Yes, I am sort of stretching the assignment so I can do something I enjoy but whatever. Apparently someone adapted a book into a cake for this project one year so I feel alright doing a sweater. It’s due at the end of March so I’m going to have to put most of my other knitting on hold until I can get this done unfortunately.

I want to get a head start on this over Christmas break, but I left my knitting reference books in Lancaster on accident. I’ve never done intarsia “correctly” before so I wanted to read up on it before I got started. Can anyone recommend some easy to find technique books on knitting color work?

Handmade Decorations from my Feed Reader

While I did a few posts on handmade decorations, even more have been popping up in my feed reader. There were too many good ideas and clever projects to not share some of them with you.

Rebecca Danger made some adorable Christmas monsters to hang on her tree. These guys are called Holly, Ivy, and Steve.

A lot of great knit decorations have been popping up. The Twisted Knitter made a miniature mitten ornament. I’m of the opinion that everything is cute in miniature form. I’ve also been seeing classic knit stockings like the Haphazard Knitter’s bright and cheerful stocking.

The Student Knitter made this cute yarn snow man. I think this would be a clever way of disguising the fact that I never seem to be able to get all of my yarn stash put away.

On the crochet front we have Attic 24′s colorful crocheted ornaments. She even wrote up a tutorial for them. Rachel of Cornflower Blue used crocheted embellishments to repair and spruce up thriftstore decorations. I think they turned out quite attractive.

Katie from Under the Red Umbrella has been hammering out these embroidered felt ornaments for her Etsy shop. I think the mugs are my favorite.

There were some cute felted Christmas trees recently on The Purl Bee. These guys are knit and then felted and embroidered. They look so cuddly!

Over at The Fabled Needle, Jen made some garlands for her tree using bits of vintage wrapping paper. I think this is a great idea for using up bits of awesome wrapping paper that are too oddly shaped to wrap a gift in.

And last but not least is this beaded snow man at I Want to go to Faerie College. Shiny things are a necessity for Christmas decorations.

Have you made any holiday decorations or have you seen any good ones lately? Feel free to leave me some links in the comment section!

Please note that none of these images belong to me. They were used with the kind permission of their owners. Clicking an image will take you to the owner’s blog or Flickr page.

Our Tree Is Up!

My flat put up our Christmas tree and decorated it last weekend. I crocheted up a few more ornaments for our tree. Each has one of our initials on it.

They were really quick to make. They’re an inch and a half or two inches in diameter. The round ones were slower to make, but they were quicker to assemble. The square ones were opposite so in the end they took about the same amount of time. The embroidery probably took me the longest. It’s pretty terrible, but I think that the obvious lack of skill gives them charm. Someday maybe I’ll learn how to embroider properly.

They’re made up out of two pieces. I made the backs match the letters on the front and then I used the third color to seam them. I used cheapo DK acrylic and a 4mm hook.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

Instead of being a good little student, I’ve been working on knitting stuff. Yay! I was working on that other one and I reached the cuffs where the lace panel ends. For some strange reason, the lace didn’t match up with the other sleeve. I had an extra half of a repeat. I thought that maybe I had knit too many rows so I counted all the rows on the inner arm on the left sleeve and then I counted all the rows on the inner arm on the left sleeve. That was soooo much fun. They added up the same so I flipped the sleeve over and counted all the short rows. Even more fun! The numbers were still the same. I couldn’t figure out what went wrong. Then I saw this…

I skipped some rows of the lace repeat there. Oops. I’m pretty sure that happened when I was working on the sleeve in the dark during this weeks film screening for Lit and Film. The mistake happened at about the elbow. I had to rip back past all the lower arm shaping to get to it. Gah. I thought about leaving it, but I’m not on a deadline to get it done so I might as well make the sleeves match.

Stray

It’s essay writing season which means that I get everything that isn’t practical finished really promptly because it’s an excuse to not work on my essays. Today I knit half a sleeve, put together a PDF for this hat pattern, and made a chart for my next big knitting project. In my own defense, the last thing on that list is for Uni. It’s just not due until Lent.

I’m happy to present, as a strange product of procrastination, the pattern for my stranded leopard print beret, Stray. I couldn’t think of what to name the hat for a really long time. I happened to be listening to Stray Cats while I was curling my bangs for the pattern photos and I thought why not? Leopards are cats! My other idea was to call it Panthera after the genus that Leopards are in, but I kept reading that as Pantera. That just didn’t work with the look I was going for.

You can check it out on its page on Ravelry or buy it now.

Stray

You can check it out on its page on Ravelry or buy it now.

Rejected

This weekend I found out that the pattern I submitted to Knitty was rejected. I was half tempted to just enjoy my hat and let the pattern rot on my hard drive. No one knew that I had submitted it except for my family, so no one would notice if I never mentioned it ever again. It was a bit tempting, but I like the hat so it seemed silly to do that. I wasn’t horribly surprised that it was rejected. On the submission page Knitty clearly states that they’re mostly looking for garments for the upcoming issue. They only want a few accessories and mine didn’t make the cut. It’s also not as creative and innovative of a pattern as Knitty usually goes for these days. The finished product is really good looking, but the actual pattern is pretty straight forward. It still was really disappointing.

For a while I waffled about submitting the hat pattern to other publications. I had done a good job keeping it secret and off the internet so I had that option. I finally ended up defiantly adding the hat and pictures to my Ravelry projects so I’d stop being indecisive. I wear the hat all the time and I used to take it off every time someone pulled out a camera because everything seems to end up on Facebook or whatever and that got old.

The supportive comments and interest I got on Ravelry made me feel a lot better about the whole thing. And then I remembered that I had these pictures with Bean. They just give me the warm fuzzies. I couldn’t do anything with them before because I had to keep pictures of the hat off the internet and they didn’t show off the hat well enough to be in my submission.

So now that I’m less bothered by the hat, I think I’m going to self publish the pattern. I have to put it together into a PDF, but that should happen sometime this week.

That Other One

I didn’t work on this too much when I was in York. I ended up reading 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith mostly. I can’t really recommend it. It’s not bad, but it’s no where nearly as good as The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency so I was a bit disappointed. Despite that, I did get a lot of work done on the cardi this week so I thought I’d share and show you the changes I made. You can see the first try here if you want to compare and contrast.

I changed the lace I used on the sleeves and actually finished knitting a sleeve. I originally had the narrower abstract lace panel on the sleeves. It was too plain. The wider leaves were just too wide, but I had a brilliant idea. The lace panel on the sleeves is a severely modified version of the front panel. It sort of matches because the leaves are knit identically, but they’re arranged differently so it adds some variety to the sweater. I put cuffs on because I like to be able to pull my sleeves over my hands when it is really cold.

I kept the cool side shaping, but I added to the number of stitches in between the front and back shaping so the shaping is more visible. I was really pleased with the way it looks so I wanted to show it off more.

The back is still just as awesome as it was before. It’s just a little wider so the shoulders fit better.

The front is where I made more dramatic changes and I’m much happier with it. Let’s see… I got rid of the narrow lace panel that the front originally had and replaced it with the narrow lace panel from the back. The original panel that was there had a 10 row repeat. All of the other lace panels’ repeats are increments of 4. The 10 row repeat was insanely difficult to keep track of (it didn’t help that the lace pattern was hard to “read”) while everything else matched up quite nicely. I don’t miss it. I moved the narrow panel over a little so it’s not directly next to the armhole. I also moved over the wider lace panel. In the original it went directly down the center of each of my breasts. It looked sort of silly. Moving it made the sweater much more flattering

I’ve got most of a sleeve, button bands, and a neck band left to knit. I’d like to get it done this week, but the end of the term is coming and I should write papers instead. Bleh. I have a feeling that I’ll finish this sweater just in time to go back to California for Christmas where I won’t need a sweater this heavy as badly.