Friday, May 10, 2024
Shawl Project, Family Visit, and a New Treasure
Friday, April 12, 2024
A Minor Setback
I finished the body of the chunky cabled cardigan I showed you a couple weeks ago and it is too small. By a lot. I either entered something wrong in the grading spreadsheet, or I am cursed. The sweater is currently sitting in time-out, because I need to get a longer needle to reknit the body.
To make myself feel better, I cast on a shawl.
Assuming it all goes to plan, it will be very charming and a pleasant little knit and just what I need as a little break from the cardigan of doom.
Friday, April 5, 2024
And Now We Are Ten
Good news, I managed to get a replacement needle for the sweater I shared last week, and last night I reached the divide of the fronts and back. It's looking like a large blob right now—the craft store didn't have a 36-inch needle, so I'm making do with a 29-inch one, and I also never move front/back stitches to holders or waste yarn, I just keep everything on the circ. In the meantime, Coleslaw did manage to get a hold of another sweater WIP, but she only managed one or two chews on that needle, so it's still useable.
I realized as I was sitting down to write this post that this year marks my tenth anniversary of designing. In fact, I blew past the official tenth anniversaries of my first blog post and my first pattern just last month. We were all, of course, very different people in ten years ago, but I do look back at the Kat of 2014 with a great deal of fondness. I certainly wouldn't be the person I am today without her, and I'm glad I took the plunge into designing.
Anyway, here's some photos from the past week. My mother visited last weekend, which was really nice, and we got me a new Raggedy Ann and Andy at the antiques mall.
I've also been dyeing some bare yarns I had lying around my stash—this one was dyed years ago with red cabbage and turmeric, but I hadn't used enough dyestuff, so the skeins were very faint. I overdyed these with even more turmeric last night, and they're hanging in my shower to dry now. I think these will become a shawl sample, once I've finished up at least one of the sweater samples I'm currently knitting on.
Speaking of sweater samples, here's the WIP that I managed to rescue from Coleslaw before she did too much damage. I had to rip out and re-cast on this piece eight times because I kept messing up the stitch counts, but I have now made it through all of the ribbing and TWO (2) full repeats of the cable pattern, and I'm smitten. The yarn is a worsted weight mystery wool, and it's lovely and rustic and crunchy—exactly what I'm into right now.
Friday, March 29, 2024
Coleslaw Strikes Again
While I am fortunate enough to work from home about half the week, I do have to go into the office a few days, and my office is, frankly, freezing. I've been re-evaluating my sweater collection lately, and I decided I could use a big, chunky, cable and moss stitch cardigan, and I figured that it wouldn't actually take me too long to knit. So I picked up some Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick in Oatmeal and cast on in mid-February, thinking I'd be just a week or two away from a new layer in my office arsenal against the cold.
Enter Coleslaw.
She is the light of my heart and an absolute menace.
This was the third set of needles she's eaten from this sweater, so it's on hold AGAIN while I wait for a new set to arrive.
She's lucky she's cute.
Friday, March 15, 2024
Tale of a Sweater, or, Kat Can't Count
Last summer I started knitting a pullover out of some vintage wool I'd picked up at a church bazaar a couple of years ago, and back in October I finally finished the back and almost immediately realized...I hadn't counted the stripes correctly.
I have one skein of the brass, two skeins of the orange, and five skeins of the yellow, which means I need to use twice as much orange as brass and twice as much yellow as orange, and then use the rest of the yellow for the ribbing and collar. Pretty straightforward. So I thought and thought and thought and decided that I could do two rows of the brass on either side of four rows of orange, because four is twice two, and then twice four is eight rows of yellow (except for some reason I decided to do twelve rows of yellow?? I don't know what Past Kat was thinking).
Except if I'm doing two rows of brass on *either side* of an orange stripe, then that's actually four rows, and the orange stripe needs to be eight rows. Which means the yellow stripes need to be sixteen rows.
(I am famously bad at arithmetic. One of my sister's favorite things is asking me things like "what's eight plus five" and watching me get more and more flustered.)
The good news is, I am much happier with how the new back looks. I love the wider stripes, and it's really matching the vision that I had in my head when I first came up with this sweater.
In non-knitting news, I finally got a spot in the Rancho Gordo Bean Club after about two years on the waitlist, and I am thrilled. I eat a lot of beans, and while I've ordered Rancho Gordo beans in the past, they've always been treated like a special treat instead of a pantry staple, because I absolutely cannot be counted on to remember to place a regular order.
Upon securing my spot I immediately dove into my remaining stash of beans to make a batch of red beans and rice and a batch of white beans with diced tomatoes, roasted garlic, and Italian spices. Truly, I have been eating like a king for the past week and a half, and earlier this week I got my first Bean Club shipment. I am so excited to try some new beans and explore some new recipes!
Monday, March 4, 2024
Antiquing and Heirlooms
My dad also brough me several boxes of things from his side of the family, including a baby quilt that had belonged to his sister and several figurines, but the main thing he brough was an incredible collection of glass that had been displayed in his house growing up.
Friday, March 1, 2024
A Sweater, a Quilt, and Several Mugs
Anyway, Dziadzi (Ravelry project link) is done, and I'm smitten. I really enjoyed knitting this, and I'm very excited to have a neutral wool pullover to add to my wardrobe. This was also a pretty quick knit, once you set aside the month and a half break to work on xmas knits and the days I lost when Coleslaw got her mouth on it and ate the needles, forcing me to wait for new ones to arrive.
(I have lost count of the number of sets of knitting needles she's eaten. It's at least thirteen. She is a menace. I love her.)
In other news, I finally had the money to order mugs for my beloved mug collection and I got them all unpacked and set out. I love my mug collection, and it's been very difficult to have them packed up and stashed in a closet for the past year. (Since unpacking them, there is now room in said closet for my mops and broom, so they aren't just leaning up against the wall of my living room anymore.)
I was afraid that hanging the shelves would be difficult—I really struggle assembling flatpack furniture, so while I do order a lot of things from IKEA, it always fills me with a bit of dread. Fortunately, these went up incredibly easily, and I actually had a lot of fun hanging them. The shelves are the Mosslanda picture ledge, which I chose because of the lip along the front edge.
Another thing I did this week was pull my current quilting project out! A couple months before I left South Dakota, I tripped over a chair and fell on my quilting frame, breaking it, so for my birthday last September I asked for a new one. The past few months have been crazy, so I only just unpacked and assembled the new frame this week, but it's been so nice having a quilt out to work on.
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Xmas Knits, Finally
Friday, January 5, 2024
Goodbye 2023
Hello friends! When we last met, I was gearing up for a very busy three weeks, but between work and some things in my personal life, it was nonstop crazy up until Christmas. I'm just finally pulling myself out of the fugue I've been in for the past couple months and trying to find some kind of feeling of balance.
Coleslaw continues to be a perfect puppy, and everyone adores her. She'll be seven months old tomorrow, and I can honestly say the past four and a half months with her have been a nonstop adventure. She continues to be intelligent and curious and excellent at finding and chewing on things she oughtn't. We celebrated her first Chanuka and I managed to get one (1) decent non-blurry picture of us:
Because of the things in my personal life I alluded to above, I was traveling for most of Chanuka. We celebrated Night One on time, but then I decided to pause and we celebrated nights two through eight when I got back home.
While I was out of town, her groomer/boarder/daycare did Christmas photos as a fundraiser for new playground equipment, and they are the best fifteen dollars I've ever spent:
Probably my favorite one is of her doing a perfect Kubrick stare: