I always have a portable project to bring with me on my travels. From October 22, 2022 until July 4, 2023 it was this orange one-skein scarf. I used Anivia by Claire Slade, as my pattern. In order to qualify as a nice travel project, I want a simple repeat that I don’t have to think about too long. The zig zags also really tickle my fancy because I think they are so nicely simplistic but not too monotone to knit.
The yarn, Alpaca 4ply sock from Chester Wool, was dyed on September 4, 2022 with a combination of mostly orange with a little brown. I’m in love with the colour of it. A somewhat mottled brownish-orange with tiny darker orange and brown speckles. It doesn’t photograph very clearly but I think the colour is most true in the picture with the ball and the triangle section below.
The knitting went quite smoothly. The pattern is quite memorable, when the zig goes left, it’s yarn over, ssk, k2 and repeat. For the right zag, it’s k2tog, yarn over, k2 and repeat. To get the zig zag to work, you do a knit stitch more or less at the start of the row. Furthermore, one stitch is increased at the end, and it’s k3, purl to almost end, k3 on every wrong side row. Now, I don’t really like ssk normally, because it gets you out of your rhythm with having to move stitches from one needle to the other. So I did some googling and found a new one step ssk online. I’ve used it from about halfway through and it’s so much faster than a regular ssk.
I’ve not worn this new additional all that often because it’s still been summer-ish since July (wet, but not too cold). However, I hope it’ll be nice!
Made some baby gifts from self-dyed yarn and other happy fabric.
Baby gift time again! First up, dyeing. On the last day of 2022, the second dye project was a single skein of Chester Wool DK 115 (Worsted) 50s. It is 100% merino and has 50 grams in a skein for around 100 meters of yarn. Since I still had soft yellow dye stock left from the other dyeing I did that day, I put 20 ml of the stock in my pot. Then I added several resists around the skein and dropped the thing into the pot. When it had simmered for long enough, I took it out and dyed the resists turquoise. I couldn’t resist adding some speckles and chose orange. All in all this meant that the skein turned out extremely bright and cheerful. If you ask me, perfect for a baby.
Since there was going to be a new baby, I set out to make some baby things and settled on these two patterns: Easy Peasy Baby Ball by A la Sascha and Tiny Tot by Kristen Rettig. One is a rectangle hat with tassels or pompoms and the other is a ball. I used up the entire skein in the making of these projects, so no leftovers!
I’ve also had a bit of flannel in the stash with a similar colour scheme. There’s also some additional red and green, but I wouldn’t let that stop me. The flannel was bought to make some poppies, so I set out to do exactly that. I tried to make these somewhat symmetrical with the plaid, so the scale was based on that. There’s some difference between these two poppies, one has a green stripe near the head, the other green. One has larger hands, the other smaller, but they are still very similar.
Both knitting patterns were quick, easy to knit and went smoothly. Of course the hat is way too big for the recipient, but I guess my track record stays intact on that score. The last item for the little baby was a spit scarf. Now with skateboarders, rope jumpers and a terry cloth back. It feels very soft even if the snap is on the wrong edge.
I hope the little one will have a marvelous and colourful life!
Now that the cold season is over, I finished my neck warmer.
In December, I dyed a skein of yarn (Chester Wool Ultra Aran) in dark blue with orange/brown specks to match my dinosaur coat. The plan was to make a cowl that would go with it, to protect my neck from the cold and wind. There is a lot of wind where I live, so this seemed like a necessity. I did already have a cowl, but it was much wider than this new one I was planning. After searching through Ravelry, I settled on the Whirl Me Away Cowl by Samantha Main.
The instructions indicate to replace the left needle tip with a thinner one, so it’s easier to pick up the stitches. So that’s what I did, the right needle was 6 mm and the left 4.5mm. It actually did help a lot with catching the stitches. I cast on 121 stitches and did the stitch pattern indicated until I felt like it was long enough. This took forever! The stitch pattern is very slow even though you’re theoretically knitting big stitches. Once it reached over my mouth, I started deviating from the pattern and cast on extra stitches on the sides in order to create a sort of flared base. This was pure improvisation, the amount of stitches cast on, the amount of rows between etc, it was all seat of the pantsing.
Once the main knitting was completed, I needed to bind off. I tried at least 4 different methods but they all flared too much and didn’t look good. I didn’t want to do a sewn bind off because they take for ever, and I was at a roller derby game. At some point I decided on the plan, and lost yarn chicken by about 10 stitches. So I took the entire bind off out again, frogged some stitches back and redid the cast off. Project done, you’d think. But no. There were some white spots on the cowl where I didn’t put enough dye on the resists initially. So I dunked the finished project in some water, put new dye on those white spots and steamed the whole thing. It was so much better afterwards. I’ve worn this thing almost every day since it was finished. I’ll definitely call this a success!
Manipulating origami dinosaurs into a new winter coat.
After breaking yet another coat zipper and clearly not learning my lesson, I set out to make myself a replacement Dinosaur Coat. I’d fallen in love with the Momiji walking jacket from Waffle Patterns and desperately needed one with dinosaurs on it. So the internet was scoured again for dinosaur printed softshell fabric and I landed on some from Takoy. I wasn’t fully sure what the colours would turn out to be, but when it arrived on my doorstep I really liked it. Off to the haberdashery for some new zippers! I tried to line up the dinosaurs so they went around the entire coat and almost matched along the zipper. That seemed to work out quite well.
The pattern works in such a way that you pick the elements that you want to include and follow the relevant instructions for those. I chose to use A: Hood, C: Chest pocket, E: Kangaroo pocket + hand warmer and H: Knit cuff. There are only four adaptations from the original pattern, I think. One is to have larger eyelets on the hood because the ones that were the right size just kept coming loose. The second was to do the pleat on the front pocket to the outside instead of the inside, mainly because I couldn’t find a way to have the dinosaurs show nicely with the inside pleat. Three, add some elastic to the inside of the chest pocket to keep my wallet in place, because I didn’t measure it beforehand. And lastly, to add a hanging loop to the inside when attaching the lining hood to the neckline.
The coat is lined with some fairly thick and smooth orange-y fabric that was a close enough colour match to the outside dinosaurs. The pattern comes with separate pieces for the lining. All in all, I’m very impressed with the pattern. The pieces all match up and the instructions all made sense and were very clear. While the project wasn’t even that difficult, it did take me a fairly long time to complete. That was mainly because I was very unsure on how long to make the sleeves. So the two pieces of the project sat on the back of a chair and on the couch for weeks before I decided to just follow the pattern and make nice long sleeves.
There are a few things I would do differently, if I make it again. The first is are to decrease the height of the hood. It’s too big, so I have to scrunch it down a whole lot for it to stay on my head. Second, the pocket opening for the hand warmer pockets is too far down, which means that I never feel secure in putting something else in there as it would probably fall out. The outside pocket pleat also means that if I put stuff in there, I get a massive tummy, but I guess that was all my choice. Lastly, the zipper doesn’t really comfortably close all the way up so it generally ends where the hood attaches to the neckline. The first time I wore the coat, I wasn’t convinced. But it’s been in stable rotation for weeks now and I really love it.
So it did take slightly longer than expected but the Platypumpkin I mentioned last time is now fully formed! This is a pattern that is part of the Patreon rewards of CholyKnight/Sew Desu Ne that they made a while ago and is now in a retired patterns folder. The combination of a pumpkin body and the platypus elements really amuses me. I chose to make it in the same colour scheme as the original was, with an orange body, brown feet, tail, beak and stalk and a green leaf.
It came together easily, as almost all Sew Desu Ne patterns do. You sew the body pieces together but gather them slightly first so that they resemble a pumpkin. The leaf gets incorporated when the body is put together. Then the feet and tail are stitched to the bottom circle which then gets attached to the body in one fell swoop. Then the eyes, beak and stalk get added and the playpumpkin is done!
I don’t generally do anything for Halloween, but I think this guy is going to be my decoration and put a smile on my face every time.
A while ago, I was going to be in the train for a few hours and needed a project to take along. I decided to use one of the new-years dying skeins of sock weight wool for a scarf. After searching through Ravelry, a few good options were identified and I settled on the Stormy Sky Shawl by Ksenia Naidyon. It’s a shawl made with four different stripes with an increase in every right side row. With stripes a maximum of 8 rows it makes it quite easy to keep track off and with sock weight yarn, it stays portable.
Counting is still difficult though, so I resorted to putting in lifelines after every stripe, so that I could easily rip back when I made a mistake or forgot to do the right increase etc. This easy solution prevented a lot of irritation, so that was a win. I think my dropped stitch stripe is different from what they show in the pattern, but it still looks good to me, so there’s that.
This was the first time that I’ve ever blocked a knit. I was first intending to actually buy proper things for it, but then the scrooge in me decided to take some shortcuts. The dollar store nearby was selling ‘pool floor mats’ for about 8 euro for 9 mats, and they look very close to lace blocking mats. Then I started nosing around my stash of supplies and found some stiff floral wire. That seemed to be fairly similar to blocking wires from the few videos I watched on the process. So I chucked the shawl in the washing machine, then threaded the wire through the edges and pinned it down on the mats. It started being much longer than wide, but the blocking made it actually turn into a neat triangle. Such a nice transformation!
I’ve yet to wear it out, but aim to do that fairly soon. I really do hope that the shape holds up, it would be a little bit sad if it started to droop. Knitting a project with the one skein like this is really quite enjoyable and because of the lace design, you can actually get a full project from that one skein. I might now make a scarf from the second skein too…
Experimenting with yarn and different methods of heat setting, resulting in three different colourways!
After not sleeping enough with the fireworks still going for hours beyond midnight, completing the puzzle I started in 2021 and finishing up the last oliebol, I got to work on new years day. I’d been thinking about dyeing yarn all holiday week, and just.. didn’t get up to actually do it. I’d decided I wanted to try a few different things, oven dyeing, speckles and partial dip. I used three different yarns, all from World of Wool in the UK.
The one that I started with was some 56’s English Superwash Aran Weight, I have six skeins and decided to dye five of them. I kept one spare in case the sweater I want to make with this requires more than 5 skeins. I decided to try and oven dye some yellow and orange speckles citric acid speckles on it. The oven dyeing initially came from a blog post by Needles on the Move found here. The citric acid speckles from ChemKnits Tutorials on YouTube. I mixed soft yellow dye in a little pot with citric acid, and in another pot I mixed soft yellow dye and red dye with the citric acid. The yarn was put in a second hand roasting tin and the dye mixes sprinkled on top. Unfortunately, due to the water that needed to be added, this batch turned out a little bit runny, so the colours are not as defined as I would have liked them. Afterwards, I found a blogpost by The Impatient Dyer here, that talks about how to solve that problem.
I wasn’t going to wait for quite some time for the roasting pan to be free again to dye the other skeins, so I just used my dyeing pots for those. One has a steamer insert on which you can drape the yarn and then add the colour. The other has a steaming section for doing the same thing. These speckles turned out a bit clearer. You can maybe make out some small hue differences in the skeins that are hanging above. The two right most ones are more muted with speckles that were less clear.
The next type of yarn was sock weight, Merino Superwash / Bamboo Sock Weight. I decided to go for some blue and turquoise but with lots of white. The dye was mixed with citric acid, put onto the yarn and then the wool went into the steamer pans. I think it looks cute and I am looking forward to see what it looks like knit up into a project. In case that project will be socks, I ball them up into two ~50 gram balls that are still connected to each other, so that I know for sure how long my sock can be without running out of yarn.
This last yarn was an experiment. The base is Merino Superwash Sock Weight Singles. I wanted to dye a skein partly grey with some speckles of orange. So I dumped an amount of grey dye in the water and partly hung the skein in that dye water. The remainder of the skein was draped over a steamer inset and speckles were applied. Some grey with citric acid and to create the orange I mixed some red and yellow dyes in the citric acid.
When this skein was rolled into two ~50 gram balls, it changed the look a lot. The skein has a dark section whereas you can’t really see that in the balls. I’m really curious to see it knit up. To turn the yarn into balls, I use this weird contraption that I got from a secondhand store for 3.50 euro – maybe used for spinning? In combination with a small empty bottle to allow for a centre pull ball. While it takes forever to wind up over a kilometer of yarn, I was very happy once it was all completed. The yellow/orange yarn is already being knit up into a project that’s about 90% complete, so I hope to finish that soon. There are no intentions for the two sock weights as of yet.
I’m still not over the whole ‘make a plushie zoo’-phase of making. So this is another one that got finished recently. This is the Fennec Fox by Sew Desu Ne/CholyKnight. Another nice free pattern that came together pretty smoothly. The eyebrows on mine are a little.. odd looking, but apart from that, it’s all good.
Side
Back
Bottom
Front
I had to make his head a little smaller than the original pattern because I fused his face on a little crooked. If I’d sew him as he should have been, his face would have been extremely lopsided. I also sewed most of his bottom by hand because the pulling by the machine had distorted certain bits along the way. He’s quite soft and has some pellets in a little pouch in the bottom to keep him stable. So now I’m also slowly using up the bag of pellets that’s been hanging out in my sewing room. Maybe, one day, the hoard will be reduced back to a stash size. I just don’t think it’ll be soon.
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.
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.
I’m still trying to get all my yarn, fabrics and sewing accessories into plastic bins that I already own, so wish me luck!
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