Needles & hooks

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Can I wind that for you?

My husband looked at my wish list and got me a ball winder and swift for x-mas. I’m a little disappointed in the swift. It’s wooden and clunky and doesn’t spin without a lot of help and encouragment. But I LOVE the ball winder. It’s so fast and amazing. It’s so much fun that I’m looking through my stash for frogged balls I can re-wind.

And I might even start working on balls that came as pull-skeins. That way I’d never have to worry about being surprised by a knot again.

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Merry Christmas!

Despite my hopes, my ornament got finished at the last minute. Three were finished in time to mail off to their recipients. Mine was started at 8pm last night. Fortunately, it’s a quick pattern and it was on the tree before midnight.

For my NYE project, I selected Knitty’s Zaftig. I’ve finished both cups and I’m working on the band around the midriff. That should be finsihed sometime today, and then I just have to make a couple of eyelash scarves to go with it.

I have news on a couple of other projects as well, but those will have to wait.

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Hooray for Stash!

Okay, so not the yarn part of the stash, but all the knitting magazines I compulsively buy. Last night, I was tasked with wearing a knit bikini top to a New Year’s Eve concert. My magazines will give me a wealth of patterns to adapt. I’m thinking something shiny, with silver and purple eyelash yarn. Stay tuned….

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Elves abound

Here’s my full elf set:

The stocking caps were adapted from a pattern I found online. The shrug I’m wearing is all mine. I took advantage of the hat while I was making it to gauge how many stitches around my arm was at various points. Working each arm separately, I cast on for the cuffs and increased as needed up my arm. I tried it on frequently to make sure that it was fitting properly. When I got to my armpit, I stopped knitting in the round and knit flat until halfway across my back. Then I kitchenered both arms together. If I were to do it again, I would decrease along the flat portion along my neck so that it doesn’t bunch up there. It fit perfectly in the end and also doubled as a convenient scarf.

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Elves Unite!

I finished the elf hats I was working on, as well as the secret companion project. One hat was for me, one hat was for my friend Emma, and the secret project was a striped shrug to match the hats. We wore the hats to see Barenaked Ladies tonight.

Afterwards, some of the band came out to pose for pictures and sign stuff.

Here we are with Ed (lead guitarist and singer). (from left: me, Ed, Emma):

And here we are with Steve (lead singer and guitarist). Of course, while digital photos are instantaneous, you don’t always know until you upload the shots to your computer that someone was mugging for the camera. (from left: Emma, Steve, me):

I didn’t get any pictures of the striped elf-shrug tonight (it was cold!) but we have two more shows in the next two days and I’ll make sure to take one.

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Ooooh, look at that shiny thing!

So I’ve gotten so caught up in my spur-of-the-moment elf-hat project that I’ve totally neglected my other projects. Some of which have holiday deadlines.

As of last night, I finished principal knitting on two elf-hats (still need to weave in ends and make tassels) and I’m half-way through a secret companion project. All this elf stuff has to be done by Wednesday night for it’s big debut on Thursday. I think I can make it. And then I’ll have a really long car trip this weekend to finish the Squiggles sweater.

No elf pictures until I have them in full modelled glory.

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Never trust the pattern

I settled on making my elf hats in red and green (I’m making 2, as well as a secret matching project) . The red and white looked too Seussian, the tri-color looked too Italian or too Irish depending on the lighting. And in Real Life, the red/green doesn’t look that odd. At least no more odd than it’s supposed to. And it’s all for a silly costume anyway.

So I sat down last night and worked out my gauge and decided that my swatch was a little bigger than the pattern gauge. So I reduced the number of cast on stitches appropriately and worked several inches of 2×2 rib for the bottom.

Then I tried it on. It fit, but it was stretched out just about as much as it could. And I don’t have that large a head. So I ripped it out and prepared to make the size the pattern actually called for, when I noticed that the number of stitches called for isn’t divisible by 4 - the number of stitches in a 2×2 pattern repeat. So I cast on 6 more than called for (it tapers by reducing by 6) and hopefully it won’t be woefully large. I tried it on after I worked a few rows and it seems to be fine. I guess the real test is when I start doing the non-rib stripes.

The thing I don’t get is how the instructions could be so wrong as to tell you to do a 2×2 rib for a number of stitches where it won’t work out evenly. There were photos with the pattern, so presumably it was taken from the worked piece. Oh well, the pattern was free.

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