FOs: End of Year Edition

It occurs to me I finished quite a few things in the last couple of weeks and months. Granted, most of them where fish or rectangles but thanks to swaps and NerdWars, there's still some pretty stuff!

Lots of blue and white things for the Odd Ducks Oktoberfest swap on Ravelry:

Belle Ruffle Gloves

Bavarian Mittens

I didn't take very good photos of the bodice and project bag I made. Maybe I should make it a New Year's resolution to take more and better photos. I should also mention I got the most amazing package in return.
Nerd Wars highlights include, but are not limited to...

... Meisi gloves! Ok, these really are the only highlight. I do wear them all the time now. Comfy and pretty, what more could you ask for? I'm not sure I'd have enough patience for more gloves, the fingers just about killed me. To be fair, I did get it into my head to have as few ends as possible, so at the tip of each finger, I threaded the entire skein back to the hand and knit the next finger without breaking the yarn. Yeah... it seemed to make sense at the time.

Stash busting grannies.

Stripes make everything better.

Yarn wrestling.

Some people are yarn whisperers. I don’t remember where I first read the term, but the generally accepted definition seems to be: people to whom yarn speaks. It tells them what it wants to be and they go on to knit projects of intricate beauty in a perfect blending of material and pattern. Now I’ve never personally been to a yarn store and heard a skein going “Hey mate! Blimey, I’d be ever so chuffed if you could make me into a pair of lacy legwarmers and no mistake.” Because yarn, like most things, becomes twice as awesome with a fake British accent. I sometimes hear a voice in yarn stores saying it wouldn’t be a crime if I broke in at night and rolled around in the cashmere so long as I didn’t take anything and maybe dusted the shelves before I left. It’s the same voice that tells me to argue with people complaining about the disagree-button on Ravelry, so I know it’s best to ignore it.

I wonder if there is a word for people like me. I buy yarn and it will try to beat me into utter submission with a blunt object. But since I don’t speak its language, I do not know what it is trying to tell me and eventually, I have to admit defeat. I struggled like this with the Schoppel Turandot that would not work for anything. (Incidentally, how has no one else on Rav stashed this yarn yet? Despite my complete failure, I still think it was rather nice.) Eventually I gave it away – after making a sort of ok-ish hat to retain some knitterly pride.

Today I had to surrender to another yarn. It’s strange because I love Miro - it’s machine washable, it’s a cotton blend, it’s reasonably cheap, especially since I live near the factory outlet. But I think the point has come where I have to admit that Miro and I, we just don’t get along. We got off to a bad start when I decided that a newsboy cap was a perfectly reasonable item to knit. After all, I don’t think the only right a hat has to exist is to keep my ears warm and I am clearly an orphan boy in a Dickens novel. So yeah, my first Miro knit gathered dust for two years before I finally ripped it to make baby hats. (I’ve realized now that making baby hats is my version of throwing a yarn away.)

I bought the green Miro at the same time as the brown and to be honest, I didn’t even love the colour then. But it was on sale for something like 15 bucks for 10 skeins and I was still a pretty new knitter who hadn’t yet realized that yarn stores will gladly store (hence the name) the stash for you until you actually need it and that there wasn’t any real risk of the yarn supply running out in the foreseeable future. Anyway, I bought it even though the colour was something I can only describe as “depressed moss” and it even became my first sweater. It also became my first frogged sweater. I blame my poor choice of pattern. I didn’t really understand them at the time, but I think I should have noticed that horizontal slits probably don’t make for very comfortable armholes. Or that my failed Turandot projects came from the same book of patterns and clearly, nothing in there worked for my particular brand of curvy. Well, I’m nothing if not resistant to insight, so my next project was Juliana. Again, this is something I think looks beautiful, but I would never pick it out in a clothing store and I have nothing in my wardrobe that remotely matches it. But I found it before the whole rectangle with two sleeves = cardigan became popular and it looked so good on the mannequin, so it would look good on me, right? Now, I’m not only curvy in weird places, I’m also quite tall. That means I need a loooong scarf-with-sleeves to wrap a sufficient part of my torso. Which means I’d need about twenty strategically placed shawl pins to hold something like Juliana in place. I don’t own a singly shawl pin. On a positive note, I didn’t have to knit the whole thing to realize it wouldn’t work – only about half of it. See? Progress!

This April I decided that the problem with my pound of dying-Kermit-coloured yarn was in fact its colour. I’m no Lady Gaga, I can’t pull off frog genocide as a style choice! So I went and dyed it all black.

Before.

After.

It did become horribly entangled in the washing machine and untangling all of it was probably the most satisfaction this yarn has given me to this day.

Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a sure sign of insanity. But my yarn was black now! Surely, knitting a third sweater was the right thing to do! My third Miro sweater was Spring Fling. It’s a cute little cropped cardigan and up to that point, Knitty patterns had never not worked for me. I feel I repeat myself here, but I don’t own a single cropped cardigan, cute or otherwise. In fact, when extra long shirts became fashionable a couple of years back, I thought it was the best trend EVAR! and threw out all my old pullovers which didn’t provide at least 50% butt-coverage. I also think cropped cardigans only really work with dresses. (HA! I do have dresses! I just never wear them.)

The body of my Spring Fling had been done for a while and after completing all my Nerd Wars projects last month I decided to finally do the sleeves. It only took me 75% of the sleeves to realize that I had made the armholes way, way too big (clearly, I’m still compensating for my first sweater experience) and that I would basically end up with a cropped kimono if I wanted sleeves that fit.

So that’s it. Moss-coloured, black Miro, you have finally beaten me! I’m sure there’s a perfect pattern for you out there and even though you still hold up remarkably well after all the ripping and dying, I just can’t keep looking for it. I’ve learned a lot of things, mostly that I cannot be trusted to make sensible knitting choices and also that it is possible to feel personal resentment towards crafting supplies. I’ve already started on the first hat:

Through thick and thin.

It's funny how all this time I tried to get my spinning as thin and even as possible just to realize that I've completely lost the ability to spin thick yarn. Well, I say lost. While my first skein was considerably thicker than what I do now, it probably wasn't very even either. However, I clearly remember it being better than this:

Fiber: Süddeutsche (South German) from Wollknoll. Yay for local products!

If I were a whimsical Etsy seller, I would now write something about how the yarn has retained a lot of the sheep's character and that I've created an interesting organic texture to bring out the natural colour. No. It just turned out very wonky. I wanted to try fulling a single, so I thought it would be better to make the yarn thicker. No wonder most commercial yarns are plied rather than singles! Still, the fulling was fun and not too bad, BUT even though every tutorial said not to be scared and that the individual strands wouldn't felt together, they slightly did for me. Not too badly, just enough to make them stick a little to one another. Maybe I overdid it? It does make the yarn soft yet very sturdy though, so I'll definitely experiment some more with it.
Characterful yarn aside, I did spin up some BFL that I'm very pleased with:

Pink and purple BFL from Das Wollschaf.

I had 100 grams of each, yet for some strange reason I was left with quite a bit of purple after plying. If I wasn't so lazy I'd meassure the WIP, but it's approximately a light fingering weight. ... Sometimes I wonder who came up with these names, frankly that sounds more like foreplay than fiber. But I digress. Aaaanyway, I had both singles wound on knitting needles for a while before I plied them, only to find that the yarn on the inside had already set and lost all its twist. Is that a normal thing to happen? So while plying I had to add a lot of extra spin again, which I couldn't entirely get rid off during finishing. It was mostly even, just had a few twisted bits. So against my usual preferences, I wound it into a ball in the hopes that it would set some more, much like the singles did:

I've very much taken my cue from the Zauberball school of yarn winding here.

Maybe I just tend to wind my yarn too tightly, but that 200 gram ball is only very slightly bigger than an average 50g ball of sock yarn. I do like the colour and it's as even as I've managed to spin thus far. It'll probably become a shawl in the future, something simple since the colours would probably eat up any intricate lace patterns. I quite like The Age of Brass and Lazy Daisy. Or I could just make a Baktus or one of its many variations, which have the advantage of rows that don't take half an hour to finish. Herbivore looks lovely as well, but I've grown a bit weary of shawl shapes that aren't just plain triangular.

The Discworld Bag.

Just because it took so much trial and error (mostly error), the Discworld Bag I made for the swap package gets its own damn post. You see, I had this beautiful vision in my head of a fully formed, perfectly detailed Discworld. Except it would be a project bag. How clever am I? ... yeah, not very.
People make Discworlds all the time. They crochet them, they sew them, they even bake them! They do not, however, assume that a good idea is an appropriate substitute for experience and/or talent in their chosen craft. I'm not saying that I'm horrible with a sewing machine, but working with fabric has one disadvantage that knitting usually doesn't: you just cannot fix some mistakes. This means you generally should know exactly what you want to do. Once the pieces are cut, you cannot undo them. You can only redo a seam so often before it looks shabby. That's fine for bags, which are usually simple geometric shapes. Tiny plush elephants? A bit more challenging. I sewed about 10 of them, ranging from horribly disfigured creatures of the night to the stuff of nightmares. And there are lots of cute elephant patterns to use for reference! The problem wasn't so much the technique as it was the size. I'd already bought an adorable turtle plushy so I couldn't just make the elephants bigger. In the end, I did something I'm more than a bit embarrassed about: I just glued shit on. There, I said it. I believe glue and fabric aren't two things that should go together, ever. But I was starting to panick and had a deadline and decided the elephants would just have to be 2-dimensional. Oh well. At least that meant that the bag was resting on the turtle itself, which made it a little bit bigger. It's still tiny, but maybe just big enough for a pair of mittens in progress. Maybe.
The inside of the bag has two pockets for needles and various stuff, plus the planet XXX on the bottom. I only later realized that it's actually XXXX. It really helps to look up book references if you read said book 2 years ago...

It's just about impossible to make a round map fit on a long square with any accuracy at all. I meant to sew the mountain range to the blue part as well, but then noticed I kind of like the 3D effect of it standing up even when the bag is closed. It's made from felt so there should be no fraying:

I couldn't bring myself to take photos of the disfigured elephants. These ones only have 2 legs each, but at least the ears make them somewhat recognisable. I experimented with horns, but they looked kind of odd. This is definitely the evil one, just look at that evil eye:

Maybe he's just grumpy. And this is my favourite. He looks almost like I wanted them to look originally. You know, just slighty worse:

I had planned to embroider the map onto the green part. I have access to a cheap Singer Edition which I believe was purchased at Aldi. Which really tells you all you need to know. Suffice to say that didn't really work out either, so I drew stuff on with a pen. I try not to think about it too much.

It still turned out alright I guess. The recipient seemed to like it, which is really the only thing that counts in the end.

Nerd Wars Swap.

Yep, more Nerd Wars. What can I say, my non-competetive crafting has been a been a bit lackluster this summer. The NW swap was great fun and small enough for me as a first time swapper to test the waters. I'll be honest, when I first read that my swap partner was KokoCat, all I could think was: "I can't possibly spoil this woman! For Bob's sake, she has her own yarn store! She's been knitting for longer than I've been alive!" But that's what happens when you hang out with a bunch of knitting nerds, they are awesome and you just have to deal with it. This is what I ultimately came up with:

I actually had to buy the seeds and sweets to get above the minimum amount to spend. Thrifting, Ebay and handmades are real budget savers. I included three knitted items, although I had a lot more ideas (but not the time).

Crivens!

A tiny Nac Mac Feegle. Incidentally, I finally bought a copy of I Shall Wear Midnight which arrived yesterday. The Tiffany arc is one of my favourite since Wintersmith was the first Dicworld novel I read.

It's the Doctor's name. We think.

A cowl inspired by Doctor Who. Not a Doctor Who scarf, though. I may be an ambitious swapper, but I would have needed a Tardis, time-turner or other nerdy device for time travel to pull that off. I wasn't a bug fan of cowls before, but now I can see the point of them. Well, at least the longer ones you wrap around once or twice.

Mio pattern.

These didn't come out as nice as planned. It's a cute enough pattern, but in 100% cotton (Schachenmayr Cotton Eco) they lacked a bit of stretch and the rolled-up thumb edging is a bit bulky for my liking.

I was alternately hating and loving the colours as well, but didn't have a suitable backup yarn. I hope it'll wear better than the first blocking suggested. Argh! This is why I don't gift hand-mades! (That and I've embraced the principles of selfish crafting(tm).)

Nerd Wars Projects.

The 3rd Nerd Wars round is almost upon us, so it's high time I shared last round's projects! I have yet to find a better way to stash-bust and get motivated than these challenges were. All in all I completed 12 out of 18, which seems like a good if slightly obsessive quote. Some of them were really boring, but the results I quiete liked are:

This lightning scarf wouldn't have come out half as nice
if I hadn't run out of red yarn halfway through! (Pattern)

Bookmark. Although spinning plarn makes it a lot nicer to work with,
crocheting is still easier than knitting. (Pattern)

It may not be the cutest kid's set out there, but I love the hat pattern.
I should make one for myself some time.

These are easily my favourite two projects.
Plarn Cthulhu and Tiny Old Spice man.

Starting Saturady, I'll play for team Shady Cells (comics, animation, etc.) which should be fun because there's very little in popular culture that hasn't had its own comic at some point.

Stimulating the economy.

I certainly did my part last week. Other than swap goodies, I also went on a shopping trip extravaganza down south. First stop: Wollmeise summer sale. I really was a picture of restraint; the plan was to get two or three skeins.

The colours are really much brighter but hard to photograph.

From what I gathered, it's important to know which colourways you have. I haven't really checked, I just call them Shiny 1 and Shiny 2. Or the green one and the blue one. Really, if you only have two skeins, a nominal system isn't necessary. So now I know what that particular craze is about. Kind of. The lace was pretty tempting as well, I figure I'll try to get a skein of that once I'm finally able to make cardigans that fit. There was a whole shelf of some lovely lavender sockweight as well, but I just keep chanting "stick to colours you'll wear" over and over. Well, not out loud, just in my head - I'm not that crazy. Same for the very colourful skeins. "Yes, it looks lovely in the skein, but will it still do as a scarf?" So I went for a very subtle semi-solid and a slightly more colourful skein to test the waters. It's odd, it feels both very underwhelming (because by definition, if *I* was able to aquire it, it can't be that terribly rare or special) and daunting (you need to think of something extra special for these immensely precious treasures) to have they laying around. Also, it's the most expensive yarn I've ever bought. Don't get me wrong, 13€/150g is good value for money, especially for handdyed yarn on what feels like a very high-quality base. It's certainly crazy cheap for such a popular product.

Since it wasn't a huge detour, I also visited the Buttinette store on my way back. Last time I was there with my mom for a birthday present and I forgot half the stuff I wanted to buy. So this time I had a list with article numbers and everything. It'd probably have been cheaper without, despite the many bargains they have.

I got some fabric, party swap related - I especially love the dark green one at the bottom. I found it at the bottom of the leftovers bin and it has lovely drape. I'm worried the crappy sewing machine won't be able to handle it though. Also some embroidery thread and a hoop. No, I don't know how to embroider - yet. If my mantra in the Wollmeise shop was to stick to my favourite colours, here it should have been to stick to crafts I know and have the necessary equipment for. Which really only leaves knitting. I got a skein of Opal Regenwald in Caterpillar (did I mention I love the Regenwald line?) and Addi lace circs in 2,0. Yay! Can't wait to try them out. Finally some fabric paint and plastic buttons so I can have matching buttons for that cardigan I shall knit someday which will actually fit.

All in all, a very successful trip and certainly a good investment of my birthday money.

Handspun Hat.

I'm currently busy with my first swap, so there hasn't been a lot of other knitting this month so far. I did finally get around to using my own handspun in a project though.
I used the very first yarn I ever made, which presented two challenges: There wasn't a whole lot of it, and it was really uneven and bulky. I'm not good at bulky, I never know what to do with it. A hat seemed a logical choice though, because it requires very little yardage and you can adjust the size if it turns out there isn't enough. It still took a bit of trial and error and playing with different patterns, but here we are:

Shiny!

Seriously, taking a photo of my own head was almost as difficult as knitting the thing. I've never had a MySpace, so never perfected the art of taking photos of myself from slightly above (duck-lips optional).
I started out with the idea that somehow, lace and eyelets were a good way of saving yarn, which is very much not true. What does work though is knitting with a larger needle size. This hat was done on 4,5 needles, which is the biggest I own.

In the end, it became a very simple top-down stockinette hat, no pattern and no fancy bits. Surprisingly, I like it quite a lot. I used up every last bit and it fits perfectly. Surely, that's a sign that I should keep it for myself!

After a half-hearted attempt at blocking - how do you actually block a hat? - the stitch definition is not that bad and it's certainly not as uneven as by rights it should be with such a thick-thin yarn.

My only concern is that after that first blocking, the hat took almost three days to dry. So probably not a good hat for rainy weather, but we'll see how it goes. It might be fine as long as it isn't soaked completely.

Taking Stock.

I'm currently in the rare position where all the stuff I own is in the same place. I also feel there's too much of it. That also goes for my stash, although I realize it is tiny compared to a lot of people. Still, it was time to take stock. As of yesterday, I own 7.3 kg of yarn and fibre. It's not as much as I'd feared, but it's still a lot. This lot:

Click on image for bigger view.

On the left: Fibre, reclaimed yarn and a bit of Tshirt yarn.
In the middle: Sock yarn on top and inherited acrylic in the bottom. I've already knit up a lot of the acrylic, especially really small amounts, for some charity-ish baby clothing.
On the right: Assorted other yarn on top and cotton bits in the bottom. The huge white cone is crochet thread I'd like to make shawls of and dye them. The orange cone is the still very much unfinished Dragon of Happiness. That one alone is more than a kilo...

I can't remember the site, but I recently read another blog with a neat system of stash reduction: 2:1 - for every 200 grams used up you're allowed to buy 100 gram. I think I'll stick to that, roughly. Except for next week, when I reaaaaally want to visit the Wollmeise summer sale. I'm not a fan (yet), I'm just curious. I already have a couple of pattern ideas if I end up buying a skein or two.

Catching up - sock edition.

To be honest, I more or less lost track of blog-able projects of the last weeks. There was some crafting in between, but not a lot actually sticks out as noteworthy right now. When I said I would lay of the socks for a while, though – yeah, that was apparently a lie, or a massive miscalculation at least.

The second-newest pair are pretty basic arch-shaped socks, more or less this pattern, incidentally the same as my first pair ever, which also got me back into knitting. It was a lot easier the second time around.

The very new, very loose socks:

I love this yarn. It’s 75/25, but cotton instead of wool. I love it the way I think some people feel about Wollmeise. If only it came in more than six colours, I would never need to look for another yarn ever again. So far I’ve chucked it into the wash at 40°, which was no problem at all, it is virtually non-scratchy and I think it would have the perfect drape for a shawl. It is still cotton, though, so there’s not a lot of stretch and it would probably sag like a bitch as a loosely knit cardigan. Still, much, much love. At this point, maybe I should mention that it’s Schoppel Sport Cotton. I’d like to say it’s also dirt cheap, but really it only was for me because I live reasonably close to their factory outlet.

In retrospect, the colour would have been the perfect for a pair of Dr. Who socks. Oh well, I shall call them „stylised Tardis“. There are a ton of Harry Potter-themed socks that, in my opinion, have an even less obvious connection to their namesakes. I like to think of these as well as my own socks as nerd knits incognito.

Speaking of nerdy knitting, I recently discovered the joys of competitive crafting via Nerd Wars on Ravelry. I’m not on any team, so there’s not actually a lot of competing going on for me, but it’s great fun so far. Lots of small projects, which is nice for stash-busting. Because it thus turned out I’m apparently a team-crafter, I also, on a whim, joined this year’s Tour de Fleece. Well, I say joined: so far I spun on four days of… the very many that it’s been going. It might actually already be over, I don’t know. As mentioned, I spectacularly failed at it. Maybe I’ll try again next year with a bit of preparation and more clearly defined goals for myself.

Spinning licorice.

Thanks to some awesome people on Ravelry I was able to get my greedy little fingers on more fiber. I got two individual batts of alpaca and one lovely merino/silk blend. Silk, people! I've given that one a little test spin, but I can't quite get the hang of it. There's tiny bits in it that just mess me up and it's not the long continuous hank of fiber that a newbie like myself seems to need.
The first skein of alpaca, however, is already finished:

Hanks make every yarn prettier. I don't know why.

Spinning alpaca is, for lack of a better word, different. It's sort of smoother, yet harder to pull out. And once that yarn rips, connecting it back to your spinning is hard! If spinning was a candy store (spinners will agree that it elicits similar feelings of giddyness), then what I've spun so far would be candy cotton, but alpace feels like licorice. It's a bit rubbery, stretchy, but only to a certain point, and a bit of an aquired taste. That's my analogy and I'm sticking with it. Does licorice shed though? Probably not.

Oh, I almost forgot, the second colourful fiber has been spun up for a while as well, I just never got around to plying it. I feel about plying the same way a lot of knitters seem to feel about sewing sweaters together. I'm quite happy to have my singles lieing around in the closet for ages if it means I don't have to deal with the horror of plying. I imagine it'll be less tedious whenever I get a bigger spindle.

Two balls, both strands broke halfway and reconnecting them seemed like an impossible chore at the time.

Dragon of Overconfidence

One of my favourite features on Ravelry is definitely the queue. I try to keep mine reasonable, meaning knittable within the average person’s lifespan and every now and then, I’ll find a pattern I thought I wanted to knit four months ago but don’t really fancy anymore. There’s another kind of pattern as well. These I usually put in my favourites because no way could I ever knit something like that / it’s not something I could wear on a day-to-day basis / it’s just a bit too difficult or expensive to get the actual pattern. Dragon of Happiness ticks all those boxes. Anyway, I’d been looking for a lace project for a while, just for variety’s sake. This month I posted a wishlist on the European RAK forum and the very next day, I received this pattern.

CRAZY!

I couldn’t even take a picture of the whole thing without climbing onto a chair. I realized this would be huge at the suggested needle size, so I opted for a finer gauge. Well, I didn’t even own anything smaller than 2.5 circulars, so I bought something else I’ve been pining after for a while. Really tiny needles. Namely HiyaHiyas from Tichiro’s shop. If you’re in Germany, I highly recommend her, the shipping was very fast and the postage is a lot more reasonable than for most online shops. I got the 80cm circs in 1.2 and 1.75. 1.75 for my pattern and 1.2 because I was curious. They are insane. I predict I’ll seriously hurt myself when I first knit with them. Still, looking very much forward to it.

Pattern: check. Supplies: check.

I’ve had this huge cone of thrift store yarn for a while now. It was only 3€ and is either acrylic or some sort of blend. Probably for machine knitting, because it’s really, really fine. I tried that test where you burn a bit of yarn to tell the fiber content, but it’s quite tricky. I might have an underdeveloped sense of smell, but that didn't give anything away… Anyway, it’s very reassuring to know that I definitely won’t run out of yarn for this shawl.

So, I’m all prepared for this massive project. It’s one of those things I don’t expect to finish quickly, I’m aiming for some time around Christmas. The first couple of rows went really fast, but I haven’t gotten to the tricky parts yet. Did I mention it's 23 pages of pattern. What the hell am I thinking? This will be fun.

More spinning.

I’ve finished my second handspun yarn a while back. I can’t remember where I bought the roving, it was a stand at the Ravelry meeting and if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably 100% Merino. I am in no way an expert though, so the only thing I can say for sure is that it was very soft and the colors are fun. You learn something new with every project, this time it’s that with multicoloured fibers are probably best spun thickly if the individual colours are very different. It’d probably keep them a bit more separate and retain more of the effect that the roving has. Anyway:

It’s not nearly as pretty as the dyed roving was. =(

Confession: I didn’t bother washing or setting the yarn after plying. I probably should, but meh. It didn’t seem to make much difference the first time and it looks quite alright like this. Not sure yet what to do with it, but King of Confidence seems like a good project for beginner’s handspun. I’ll just have to try to spin more at about the same weight. I have no idea how to do that, here’s a comparison between my first two yarns:

It’s getting thinner at least, if not any more even.

Bad mittens, good mittens

Well, you knit and you learn. At any rate, you knit. 2011 seems to be my year of failing badly at a lot of things I try, but occasionally I also learn from my crafting blunders. Hopefully colorwork is one of those areas. The endpaper mitts were one of the first items in my queue after joining Ravelry, but mostly I was enamoured with the Bird and Vine spin-off. I'd done one pair of colorwork socks in the past so I felt confident I could do this.

My attempt was not entirely horrible, but the white yarn poking out everywhere bugged me too much to keep going. The tension was all over the place as well and I just can't handle long floats. If it's more than 2 stitches, I have to weave or it makes me seriously twitchy. Anyway, I wish I'd read the Knitting in Color blog more frequently, it might have given me a hint that such high contrast colors with a pattern that had long flots would not work particularly well. I opted for the plainer original pattern instead and it was mostly a breeze:

I did one more pattern repeat after the thump to make them longer.

Other than the lenght, my only modification was to not break up the pattern with a purl stitch on the non-thump side. The yarn is soft and lovely Omega by Lang Yarns. I'm in love with microfibre lately.

I still like the bird mitten pattern, but am pleased enough with the final outcome anyway. I'm not sure I'll keep the mittens, they don't stretch a lot as is the case with most colorwork and I don't like stiff fabric around my hands, it feels too restricting because as a knitter, I want to be able to move my fingers at all times! I might make these mittens part of a future RAK parcel, but can't quite part with them yet.

My first handspun.

Nearly six months after learning to spin, I finally finished the yarn I started at the German Ravelry meeting. I'm still amazed that it is so easy to make your own yarn, now to actually get good at it. Anyway, my first skein is all you would expect from a first attempt: messy, uneven and way too thick. It's a skein only a mother could love and I sure do.

The colors are actually a bit more vibrant in reality.

I've already started online window shopping for more roving and spindles. The second roving is already 1/3rd done and I have one more after that, so no actual buying until those are spun up. Unless I find a really good spindle...

Socks and socks.

Yep, just that. Plain, colorful socks. All top-down with 80 stitches on 2.0 needles, because I like my socks loose around the leg.

Made from Regia World Ball in Brazil. Already got a bit of wear.


Brand spanking new socks in Opal Rainforest. Next is either zebra or ladybug, methinks.


Ohh, a bit of variation with the arch-shaped socks.

I'm not sure what the yarn for the last pair is. It says Socken-Effekt-Strickgarn on the label and is the usual 72/25 mix, but there's no brand name. I got it as a gift and am pleasantly surprised. These aren't colors I would usually have bought but I adore the finished effect.