FOs
My shawl love is not showing any signs of dying, and that's just fine. As long as I like making them and find people who want to wear them (although I do keep most myself...) I'll keep making them. They're so quick! They're so pretty! There's interesting lace! They're made out of sock yarn but aren't tiny gauge! What's not to love. This is my latest FO, the Clothilde (Rav pattern link) shawl.
I can't seem to get enough of shawls! I love knitting them, love wearing them, and I love how I can use sock yarn to make them and don't have to knit the yarn with tiny 2mm needles!
This is my newest shawl FO - the Twilight Gloaming shawl (Rav link), already shortly shown at my KYH posting a few days back. As I've mentioned earlier, I am sort of a Twilight fan, or at least I really enjoyed the books and have also knit Twilight fanwear previously (like Bella's Mittens), so it's no wonder this shawl pattern insipred by Twilight immediately caught my eye. After being so lucky and have the pattern gifted to me this spring I wanted to start knitting right away. Well...
Ok, I've cast on 26 things in June, all because I'm participating in the Finnish KAL I mentioned a few weeks ago, where you - starting from the 1st oh June - cast on something new every day until Midsummer, and you finish everything my the end of July. It's a challenge, but so much fun! Here's what I have ready (or almost done) by now (& since the last posting)
From up left clockwards: a shawl from the top of my head (it's the better version of my Tierheim bamboo shawl) with self-dyed yarn; the Twilight Gloaming (Rav link) shawl made with a Zauberball (I'll post more on these shawls later); seven mice that just need to be felted, filled and sewn close to finish these cat toys from Kitty Knits.
No, it's not a new health food, it's my newest FO!
I'm slowly getting back my sock knitting mojo which was gone for a long time - I've been enjoying shawl knitting so much that I've forgotten all about how I liked knitting socks. But then I discovered this pretty yarn and the Froot Loop pattern in my May Small Item Club bag, I decided to get my dpns out and make some socks. Here are the specs:
You might remember I volunteer for my local animal shelter by knitting things for sale and helping during open doors days, working at the sales booth. The shelter just had their big summer open doors day a few days ago, and to try out something new I decided to knit two little triangular shawlettes for sale.
That worked amazingly well! They were up for about an hour before a lady came and bought them both. Not for very much money, but still way more we usually get from socks or other knits that use the same amount of yarn! I was very happy about that and and plan to knit more simple shawls for the shelter in the future.
For the second time in a row, I'm participating in the Finnish knitalong "Kesäyön hullutus", which is a KAL for crazy Finnish people who want to start a new knitting project every day from the 1st of June to Midsummer, the 26th of June - and finish all 26 knits by the end of July. Pretty insane, huh!
At least until now I'm keeping up. I've started a few bigger things I know I'll be able to work on in the train (I'll be travelling a bit the next few weeks), and lots of small ones (I mean finished-in-one-hour small ones!) This post is about a small one and a bigger one.
Once in a while my attention gets drawn to the misccellaneous bags in my stash closet, the ones with yarn ends and half balls, the leftover yarns from bigger projects and maybe a few full balls with yarn I don't really know what to do with. To be honest, my attention is actually drawn to the fact that the bags are packed if not overflowing. This is usually the time I take out the bags, take a look at the yarns inside and decide to start a stashbusting project.
This time I decided to knit some simple striped scarves. I've knit stashbusting scarves before (examples here and here), but none in the last year or so. So even though the summer is coming, I picked up my woolen yarns and cast on.
I'm not sure what to say about this shawl. Take a look at the pictures. You can see it's rather long. Like, three meters long! I never intented to it to be that long (according the pattern the shawl should have been ca. 160 cm / 65 inches long, and I followed the pattern)
What do you think of it? Would you wear it? If you would, where and with what? I like the drape and the feel, it feels luxurious but I'm not sure if it's practical to wear - anywhere! Here are the specs:
Oh, the Travelling Woman! Remember how I blogged about it a few weeks ago, saying "I'm certain I'm reading the pattern right"? Yeah, right. See, the pattern says "The charts do not contain the garter stitch border or the yo at the beginning and end of each row. Instructions are provided in the lace charts section. In the stocking stitch portion on right side rows, you increase four stitches. On wrong side rows, you increase two stitches." Guess who didn't make ANY yarn overs on the wrong side? Throughout the whole shawl (OK, except the last maybe 10 rows when I finally understood what the problem was)
The Knitting & Crochet Blog Week is over, and as much as I loved posting every day, I just can't keep it up. So here I am returning to my 2-4 posts per week.
I'll start by showing a recent, very happy FO or actually two - the recycled green baskets! Why are they recycled? The yarn which I made them from is called Novita Flip Flop and it's made out of 80% recycled plastic bottles! The rest is acrylics. And why are they green? Well, because they're recycled - and beause they actually are lime green! Here are the specs:
