Category: Knitting

Stegosaurus!

Do you know what happens when you end up with an overworked arm while knitting the body of a Stegosaurus? Said Stegosaurus ends up in a corner, in a plastic bag, for quite a long time…

A, mounted skeleton in right lateral view and B, laid out with missing elements reconstructed before mounting. Images copyright The Natural History Museum.

I did work incrementally on some of it’s yellow parts, the big purple parts mostly being completed in the session that finished my arm. It still took over a year to complete this Jurassic monster. According to the Ravelry, I started it in August last year. However, after knitting a big scale here and there to get back into knitting, I finally managed to get all 35 parts finished today! Then it took all afternoon to stitch the scales to each other and to the body of the purple giant.

Since it didn’t seem to be completely symmetrical, stitching on those scales was quite.. annoying. It felt like I stitched each one on at least twice, to much chagrin. However, they are fairly equal now, even if you can’t really see that on the pictures. I think a real Stegosaurus is also not supposed to sit like a dog, but since its legs move, I wanted to position them in an alternative way. It’s still pretty cute, so perhaps I’ll start a new dinosaur in the future still.

Warm and Cosy Bunnies Hat

This year I went on an organized five day sailing holiday in September. Since I don’t particularly like travelling, find food scary and am not necessarily a fan of meeting new people that I cannot escape, this was a huge personal accomplishment. The water and the boat were very enjoyable but after a while, I really wanted to knit. Now, I hadn’t brought any knitting, because I probably shouldn’t knit with a crappy arm. However, I decided against being smart and bought a ball of yarn and a set of needles and started knitting a hat.

Now, a simple hat would also be boring, so I decided to add a feature. The feature would be two cable bunnies that I found on the Studio Knit website. I wanted them to mirror each other, so I figured out how to do that. Now, the project wasn’t finished on the boat, but I did finish it. There wasn’t really a hat pattern that I used since I just started knitting. At the end the back needed some pleating, so I pulled the bottom together at the back to create some pleating.

A friend of mine had her birthday, but I couldn’t make it to the party. She has two bunnies, so I figured the hat would be a good fit. It was sent via the post and it did arrive (always a bit scary). She said she liked it, but even if she doesn’t I had a good time knitting it.

Baby Phoenix

For another friend I made a mini phoenix. He wanted a phoenix at some point, so I started collecting phoenix pictures on a pinterest board. I don’t think this was the thing he was expecting, but that’s fine, right? This bird was inspired by this baby Articuno by Ganjamira.

Anyway, I knit the start of a monster chunk  by Rebecca Danger (free pattern here) without the feet from a yellow fuzzy yarn. Before finishing the top of the chunk, I stuck feathers up its bottom and sewed them down. Then I added some feet made from red pipe cleaners. I cut some wings from orange felt and coloured the edges with a red fabric pen. Then I made a fimo head based on that Articuno.

To make the head, I used a toy eye on which I built the head, and then I stuck two toy eyes in for well, eyes.. I baked it in the oven, which may have glazed over its actual eyes a little. It was then attached to the bird. The bird was then stuffed and the hole closed. I quite like this critter. Look at his face! I’m not sure if it is fully in proportion, but at least it was nice to make.

Baby Booties

(This post was written on the 25th of March. Since it is a gift, I waited until it was received to post this account of the project)

You may or may not know that I have not really been able to knit for a long time now. My arm starts to hurt and it’s just not fun. So when a friend had her first baby, I wanted to see if knitting would be possible again. What better way to test than with a small project: something for baby. I searched ravelry for some baby booties patterns and eventually found one for Baby Hausschuhe. Now, just a boring booty wouldn’t work, you understand. I needed to.. do something to make them stand out just a little.

Cue some dinosaurs! What else?

I’d found a chart for a cute little dinosaur that I figured could work here. It transferred it to an excel file so I could work it. The dinosaur would be on the left outside of the first booty, facing backwards (otherwise he would get caught up in the toe decreases). But before I could start on the body of the shoe, I had to work on the bottom. So I cast on two booty soles in yellow and started knitting. Once the soles were done, I followed the first rows of the pattern until the purl how, then I knit 6 stitches and started my dinosaur pattern there. It all worked out pretty well. After following the pattern for the toe decreases and about 5 cm of ribbing, I was bored. My arm also hurt again – stupid.

On Saturday I felt like working on the second one, but I wanted a different pattern. I’d first looked over ravelry for a fun dinosaur chart, but I couldn’t find one. So on to google I went. Eventually settling on a pterodactyl. I found this picture of a Pterodactyl slipper that became the basis of my pattern. I made something resembling it in Excel and again kept my fingers crossed. This one also worked remarkably well. I knit until I got to the same hight as the other one and then transferred them both to a circular needed so I knew that they were the same hight. A few more rounds, some stretchy bind off and two booties were done! I think they are cute, but I hope the new owners also like them. We’ll see.

Finally Finished

Sometimes you have these projects that are nearly done, so very nearly done, but not quite. This was one of them…

Back in the day (summer 2015), I’d just finished the Winter Sweater in Summer and had quickly cast on a kangaroo sweater with a similar yarn (here is my project). It was dutifully knit all the way to the top, adding some additional shaping here and there. I struggled with the collar a little but got it all worked out in the end. There were seven buttonholes, about a million ends to weave in and I just didn’t want to do it. I didn’t feel like it at all. Into the box it went, and it stayed. It came out occasionally only to go back in when all the hairiness from loose ends kept going on. Pure drama.

Cue the house move in December. With the project so close to completion I didn’t want to just throw it away. I also didn’t want to finish it just for the second hand store. I’d since figured out what my problem with it was; I chose the wrong pattern. I don’t do large collars very well, nor do I do semi-long length sweaters very well. I just wasn’t going to wear it, even if it was finished, hence the back burner. But, my brother’s girlfriend was coming to help with the move, and she is skinny, although quite a lot taller. I asked her if she would like it. If I only had a target to finish it for, I might even get it done, or so my thoughts were. We chose some buttons from the stash, which meant I had to close three button holes, but that was fine.

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I realised a little while ago that the holiday which was my deadline was approaching quickly, so I sat down on a Saturday and Sunday to weave in all the ends, to put on the buttons, to finish the button holes and to just make it presentable. The project was finally completed, the relief was palpable. This is the project on the receiver, marking the end of a struggle!

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More Miniature Dinosaurs

I’ve discovered the benefit of preparing to move to a different house. You find all the unfinished projects languishing in a box. Some are a quick stuff and finish, like the mini dinosaurs I’ll show you in a minute, some are a case of straight into the old rag bin and some may be salvageable with time and effort. I have by now managed to reduce my stash of 6 boxes of scraps and UFOs to only one box. I’m quite proud of this actually. It also, in a way, frees you to put your mind to other things than the old projects still hiding away in a corner.

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During the big clean up, I found a bag with some old knitted mini-dinosaurs parts in it. Back in the day (here), I finished three of them, but apparently I didn’t complete the last two. So I took an hour or two and stuffed and sewed up that last pair. They are just the simple version of a toothless T-rex, but I still think that they are quite sweet.

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I’m still trying to get all my yarn, fabrics and sewing accessories into plastic bins that I already own, so wish me luck!

Knitting Tiger, Hidden Dinosaur

Some people experience the growing up stages in a different manner than would seem regular. I have not yet exited the ‘why’-phase that toddlers usually go through. I also entered the dinosaurs phase a lot later in life that one would deem appropriate, i.e. last year or so. It all started with that ‘knitting dinosaurs’ book. I knit a dinosaur, knit another dinosaur, and another, and some more.. I took some courses on dinosaurs on Coursera (an online platform with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on different topics). Collected the local supermarket ‘dinosaur stickers’ (still missing 89 by the way) and browsed ravelry on ‘dinosaur’.

Now, I never figured I would be able to wear something with a dinosaur to the office. So when I found the Dinosaur Illusion Sweater, I was both ecstatic and scared. Ecstatic because I’d found a way to wear a dinosaur, legitimately! Scared because it’s for kids age or sized 4 (I’m not sure), now, I can wear children’s sizes sometimes, but even I’m not that small. I’d have to resize it and since it is knitted from side to side you have to do it right immediately. Moreover, sticking to gauge seems to be difficult for me. However, I knit a test swatch and got to work with the calculator. This was my pattern eventually.

Dinosaur

The technique is called illusion knitting. What this means, is that ridges and troughs are knit in the main and contrast colour. To create the picture, the main colour ridge becomes a trough and the contrast colour trough becomes a ridge, such that from the side, the picture appears. From the front it just looks like strips, but from the side, the above dinosaur appears.

The original sweater has sleeves with footprints on it, but after finishing the body, I wasn’t interested in sleeves anymore. After a couple of weeks of resting, I decided that it would be a spencer. I three needle bound of the sleeves on the outside with blue yarn. I quite like that detail. It was knit from one ball of blue and one ball of grey yarn, below you can see what was left over. 

Left overs Side

Above is the side view too. What you may notice is that under certain angles you can see the dinosaur in the stripes, if you look at the back picture, you can see that the tail appears more clearly when it curves around my body. The same in the side view and when you look at the front view, you can sort of see the outline of the dinosaur. It’s impossible to take pictures of this by yourself, so this is what you get.

Front Back

I’ve worn it twice now, and it’s been enjoyable. Up to many more wears!

Gaia in Red

You are by now probably aware that I have a box of projects that I gave up on partway through. Some of these projects have been in there long, others shorter. Today I’ll show you another saved project that entered the box at least two times. It’s a cotton cardigan and the pattern is called Gaia.

Gaia is a free pattern by Kristen TenDyke that features a button closure and a lacy bust section at the front. Originally it has fairly short sleeves and a band of different stitches beneath the bust. Since I don’t generally wear short sleeved cardigans, I lengthened the sleeves. The instructions were fine, it did take me a while to figure out how to increase to the bust, but the knit-along on ravelry helped me out.

I first chucked Gaia in the box when I had the body done completely and one sleeve set up. It was winter and I subconsciously knew I was never going to wear a cotton cardigan in winter and therefore there was no hurry to finish it. I think it again went in the box with both sleeves partly done and it stayed on my ironing board waiting for some anti-gaping ribbon to be installed on the button bands for quite some time too, I sort of chronicled that in the ravelry-project.

This shape!

When even the model picture shows gaping in the button bands (and only two buttons buttoned), I guess that there is something to worry about. This is the one real negative I have about the pattern, that the button bands gape so much, even after I tried reinforcing them with ribbon. Below you can see the before picture.

Front

There were some really nice matching buttons in my stash that were also the right size, so that made me very happy. I have worn the cardigan a bit since I finished it, you’ll see it in a MMM round up at some point. It’s not perfect, the sleeves have become shorter than intended and there is still some gaping, however, it’s not uncomfortable to wear so it might see the daylight more often.

Sweater Sweater back

I have also finished some socks, so you’ll see those soon.

O.O. the Octopus I

Sometimes you (re)find something that you just cannot ignore anymore.

Eye Right Eye

This happened to me at the start of April. I had found the free Octo the Octopus pattern on Ravelry (posted on Knitty here) way before this time, but I was afraid that it would take too long and would be too many stitches for me to actually finish. Since the first discovery I made some dinosaurs, some dragons and some other large projects.  Then, my office wanted to have a knitting project for themselves. They really liked the Allosaurus even though it looked quite angry and wanted something for their own office that could be a group project. I suggested this Octopus that I’d found ages before. Everyone can knit a leg and I can join them to a head at the end with Kitchener stitch.

Starting this project in the office gave me some real craving to make one for myself. I didn’t want to make it in the same colours as the office one, but they had picked all the fun colours: blue on top but the entire rainbow for the bottom of the – legs? arms?  – tentacles. This meant that I had a choice to make!

Flat Spread

I decided to buy a grey and brown ball of yarn and make a striped octopus. I googled ‘striped octopus’ after I’d already knit 4 stripes and found that there is a striped octopus, but it has white too. So off to the shoppy I went again and got some white. The stripes at the top were very regular, so I sewed in a line of white stitches to break it up a little. Then I just went and did completely irregular stripes. All the tentacles follow the same stripe composition and the bottom of the tentacles and his belly are blue. I followed the pattern closely (including errata), however, I did not want to knit with fingering weight yarn. So I substituted with some thicker yarn not knit double and changing the knitting of the eyelids. Google pictures told me that there is an octopus with white eyelid edges, so I chose to do that to get an even edge.

It went a lot quicker than expected. I finished him in under three weeks with most of my free time knitting him. You can find my notes on Ravelry here, they are quite limited *cough*. The reason why this post is posted a little bit after he was finished was mostly because he didn’t really have a name yet. After extensive discussion, we have come up with something…

We are pleased to hereby introduce O.O. Octopus I, Otto Octopuff Octopus The First, to the world. He was finished on April 21, weighs 539 grams, and measures 88 centimeters from head to tentacle. He will rest throughout working hours.
  

To scale

Otto will live on a stool in my living room, actually the black one you see on the left of the picture above. In the picture I’m holding him for scale (note, I am 1.58 m tall), he is quite big! Right now, I do believe that O.O. and the Dragon tie for first spot of most awesome knitted animal..

Triangle Scarf – Maimu

Scarf

A triangular scarf is what I have also been working on the past couple of weeks. I started it on April 1st and dumped it in a corner on April 6th when I wanted/needed/craved knitting the Octopus. After finishing the Octopus, which still needs a name and has not yet gotten a blog post because of that, and going on public transport for a trip in the weekend, I knew I needed a project. So I grabbed the 2/3 finished project from the corner and put it in the bag.

Scarf

I found the pattern on Ravelry, it was free and created by E. Pauwels and you can find it here and my ‘notes’ here. It’s a really quick and easy knit, and you only have to think at the beginning and end of a row. Which is pretty nice when you are knitting on public transport. The pattern did state that it would curl, and it really does curl. This is why I’ve been attempting to block it, which seems to have worked out fairly well. It does not curl up nearly as bad anymore. The pictures above and below are taken with the thing spread out and pinned to a spare bed-chair.

Scarf Scarf

It’s clearly not symmetric in colour stripes, and I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. This is why this may become a present at some point..