More knitting reminders
Just as the yarn editor on Ravelry reminded me of my poor, unassigned yarn, Yarn Harlot has reminded me of a pattern I want to knit. Back in July I queued the
Hibiscus for Hope sock pattern. The designer is asking for donations for the Toronto Weekend to End Breast Cancer in order to receive the pattern. I queued it in Ravlery with the intention of making a donation to get the pattern and then promptly forgot about it. Luckily Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has been knitting it while travelling through Newfoundland and has reminded me of my forgotten pledge to - well - pledge. So that has been done and I should be receiving the pattern soon; although it will be a while before I will be able to knit it.
Which brings me to elaborating on some of the things I mentioned in the last post. I not only post on this blog, but also on Stashalong and Homespun Helpers, so I sometimes write on this blog and mention projects without realizing that I haven't spoken about them here before. :) So, about these dog sweaters. On the long weekend recently my parents flew me to Nova Scotia so that I could participate in the tasting for the wedding caterers, as well as a few other wedding things and just to generally get out of the city and relax for a few days. While there, I met my brother's new girlfriend (well, new to me, anyway, since I hadn't met her before).
Although it had been absent from the public view for some time, and it is well out of season for it, my brother has recently been proudly displaying a shadow scarf that I knit for him a number of years ago. It's one of those scarves like the Alien Scarf in
Stitch 'n Bitch, where head-on it just looks like stripes but at an angle you see a design. For a while I was making these custom on consignment and it had all started when I made that scarf (with marijuana leaves as the hidden design) for Tim for Christmas.
Just as before, the presence of that scarf is generating interest in my knitting among friends and family. Tim's friend who is in sales and marketing expressed interest in marketing my knit designs. When I went home, I suggested to Tim that if his friend wanted to market something, that we consider working on dog sweaters knit in traditional fisherman styles. Not only do we have a friend in marketing, but we also have a friend who runs a pet store, and traditional fisherman styles in anything is generally a hit in the Maritimes. When Ally heard my suggestion, she got very excited. It turns out, her family once found a group of 4 chocolate lab puppies abandoned on the side of the road in Arizona. They divided the puppies among her and her siblings, who live all over North America, and there is a very good chance that all 4 puppies will be reunited in Nova Scotia this Christmas when the siblings and their families come together. So as soon as I'm finished knitting for the wedding, I have to immediately cast on to make 4 dog sweaters for rather large (now full-grown) chocolate labs! What do I get myself into! :)
Until next we knit!
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Ravelry does it again!
There is no end to the ways that Ravelry helps me with my knitting! If only I didn't have this damned day job, I could stay at home and knit up everything in my queue! What magic has it performed this time? Well, let me tell you.
I decided to go on the computer while Nyron was playing Soul Caliber IV, which I attempted to play with him, but all that mindless button-mashing started to hurt my hands, so I gave up my controller and now he's trying to see if he can put together the most ridiculous costume possible in the Character Customizer. So, obviously, I needed something to occupy myself. After checking my email, I went on Ravelry, as I do almost by reflex now when I find myself online without a specific goal. In the upper corner was the welcome flashing that indicates that I had a message. One of the lovely yarn editors had been editing the entry for Fleisher's Shetland Floss and was asking if she could use my stash photo, since I'm the only person who has it stashed. It's a discontinued yarn that I received in quantity from a woman on Freecycle. It has been sitting in my stash since last fall without even a thought to what it could become.
Seeing the yarn's site on Ravelry got me thinking about possible patterns for it. Since no one else on Ravlery has this yarn (which makes it feel kind of special) I couldn't go browsing through the projects as I normally would. Ravelry hasn't yet added a feature where you can look up the yarn patterns that a yarn has been published in instead of just what it's been used for so I decided to do a quick google search. It wasn't long before I found a website on vintage patterns (just one) that mentioned pattern that this yarn company published to go along with this yarn. It's quite cute, too, and because it was published in the early 1920s it's in the public domain (in the US, anyway, which is where the blog is published) so she posted the pattern. I've queued it so that when I'm done the wedding flowers and the socks for Yarn Smackdown and the dog sweaters that my brother's girlfriend commissioned (I think I'm getting ahead of myself, I'll go into detail about these in a later post).
When next we knit!
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The post with lots of pictures
My first charity sweater is now completely finished. I also did my first button holes that weren't just K2tog YO. I just cast off some stitches and then cast them back on on the way back. Of course, they didn't look so good at first:
I had to go over them with some crochet stitches to straighten them out:
There, that's much better. Here's the finished sweater.
For some reason, it's not uploading to blogger very well so It's hard to see the stitch design. You can check it out on
Ravelry.
I've also go some spinning done lately.
With some help from Spirit, of course:
What a good little spinner kitty! I've drafted my next batch, some lovely purple top my mom bought me in Nova Scotia (although the fiber is from New Zealand). The different colours came apart so neatly that I decided to draft them individually and then spin them together randomly to see what kinds of purple stripes I get when I ply.
Updates coming soon on the Baby Surprise Jacket and my wedding flowers.
Until next we knit!
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