WIPWed #25: Knitting All The Things

I hope your weeks are going well! I had an unpleasant dentist visit yesterday and consoled myself by knitting whatever I wanted for the rest of the evening. Turns out, what I wanted to knit was everything, as I made quite a bit of progress on a variety of projects. Here's what I've been working on lately.

Tiny Turn-A-Square:

SG Bugga, colorways Box Jellyfish and Common Emerald Moth

Technically, my baby-sized adaptation of Jared Flood's Turn A Square hat is finished (and adorable!), however, I'm not counting the project as done until I complete the matching socks:

Because why not?

Itty bitty socks are just too cute.

Budding Lintilla:

BMFA Socks That Rock Mediumweight, colorway Budding Twig

My socks-that-rock-tastic Lintilla shawl is growing slowly longer and wider. I wish I could show you how it looks dangling from the needles, it twists and curls in a long ringlet of colorful wool quite charmingly. Very pretty.

Spring-y Socks:

Play At Life gradient dyed sock yarn

I made a tiny bit of progress on my spring crocus socks. The pattern defies memorization so this is a sit-and-concentrate kind of knit that I only get a chance to work on sparingly.

Beautiful Briny Sea:

SG and CY Bugga, colorways Box Jellyfish and Blue Ringed Octopus

I'm happy to have finally resurrected one of my ancient WIPs, Stephen West's Flamboyan shawl, although I must admit it is an exceedingly tedious knit. It's a simple, attractive, striking design but there's no getting around how much I dislike actually knitting it. For half the shawl you're juggling three balls of yarn and switching back and forth between garter and stockinette, so you never develop a good rhythym. Then you finally get through all that and are like "yes, one color, simple ribbing!" exscept it turns out it's not so simple as all that. The first row is ribbing with increases every few stitches with lots of stitches on the needle already. That is a recipe for a miscount and I had gotten off by one stitch... and then the shawl sat for months and months, waiting for me to find the patience to tink back stitch by stitch and pick them all up again. Apparently, a side effect of novocaine is lots of patience? Not sure if that's true, but either way I fixed the mistake and even progressed through 2 more rows of ribbing. I feel like I'm in the homestretch but looking at the size of the ball of yarn left over, I think this ribbing is going to be endless. Just 3 more inches to go!

Purple Squishy:

Lots and lots of scraps.

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with opinions on my big idea, I decided to go ahead and cast on this big squishy blanket, craziness be damned! I was highly amused by the number of comments that went along the lines of "I think it's great but don't listen to me, I'm crazy, too". :) I went through my stash and pulled out all the little bits and bobs I plan to use up throughout the course of this monster. Don't worry, there are no deadlines for this and I won't let myself stress out too much about planning where every single colors goes. The goals of this project are to have 1) fun with colors, 2) soothing knitting, and 3) a big cozy blanket at the end. The one thing I did decide, though, was to use up some extra-soft, fuzzy skeins of an angora mix (the blue and white balls in plastic) by knitting them with the purple mystery wool (on the left) that will serve as the alternate to the purple malabrigo (to the right). The mystery wool is a bit scratchy so pairing it with the angora blend should soften it right up as well as ensure some larger areas of consistent color, so it's not too stripey crazy.

Phew, that's enough out of me, I think! Check out some other WIPs by clicking the image below.

Thinking Big (and Crazy?)

Guys, I have this crazy idea. I suspect it's crazy because two of my closest friends, who also happen to be knitters, responded with much less than their normal enthusiasm when I ran the idea by them. Katy said something like "I don't know, the combination might be a bit much" (which it could be) and Bridgit's comment was "That looks like the most boring knit ever" (which I really can't argue with)... and yet I think I still want to do it.

Copyright westknits

That is a photo of Stephen West's simple and free Garter Squish blanket pattern. It is, indeed, just a big ol' rectangle of garter stitch. However, there is beauty in its simplicity and as I sit shivering in front of my open window (it's spring already) refusing to put on a sweater (I said spring!!) I'm kind of wishing I had a big wool blanket to snuggle in right this very minute. What makes this blanket extra squishy is that it is knit with two strands of worsted weight wool held double on size US 15 (big!) needles. There are three things that are really drawing me towards making this project:

1. It's about as instant-gratification as a knitted blanket can get, and I do not have a knitted blanket, and that is a shame.
2. I'm intrigued by the opportunity for lots of fun color and texture effects by mixing up different kinds of yarn.
3. It'll eat up yarn like whoa. The pattern sample took 3200 yards combined. I might have a spare skein or two of yarn (hah!) that could use knitting up. Especially leftovers.

My mom accidentally bought 5 skeins of Malabrigo in a purple color (Uva) that she thought was brown online, which she gave to me that I'd like to use up:

Malabrigo Yarn Worsted, colorway Uva

That's about 1,000 yards right there, plus I have approximately another 600 yards of purple mystery wool that the Fiasco's mom gave me for Christmas last year, would would bring me up to the required 1600 yards of solid color yarn for the blanket:

Mystery wool

I think the two purples would match well enough. So I knit a swatch with some of the leftover bits and bobs I had handy:

Crazy, beautiful, or crazy beautiful?

That swatch is just about 20 sts cast on and I changed color every three garter ridges. The bottom stripe is some of that Zaftig Bugga I used for one of my three cowls. The next stripe is a deep olive green colorway of DK weight CY Traveller yarn and the teal is a bit of VG Mondegreen, both leftover from my Beribboned Hat samples. Next up is some more Traveller that I had used for my Beribboned Wrists. Then there's some bright green Malabrigo Rios from little Lyra's hat and a bit of variegated Zen Yarn Garden yarn I used in my aunt's Christmas cowl. They're all very different yarns but I think they all work when combined like this... what do you think?

How does it look?

The back of our dusky-teal-with-goldish-tan-accents couch is where I envision this blanket living, how does it look there? As I look around the room the primary colors I see are teal, sky blue, dark blue, bright green, hunter green, seafoam, brown, and a tan/mauve-ish carpet. I'm just not sure how a giant purple blanket will fit in. It certainly wouldn't match, but would the contrast be cool? I kind of think so but would love to hear your opinions. If I use purple as the base color, I would stick to blues, greens, and greys for all the scraps I used... maybe a natural offwhite every once in a while, we'll see. My stripes would also probably be a lot thinner than the ones in the project pages on Ravelry because I won't have full skeins for most of my colors, just partials, and I'm wondering if that will make the colors blend together better OR be too much of a crazy mix for the eyes. Decisions, decisions...

Had any crazy ideas yourself lately?

New Toys

Here's another better-late-than-never Christmas gift hat:

Malabrigo Chunky, colorway Bobby Blue

The pattern is the free and lovely Robin's Egg Blue Hat that I modified slightly. I know I like my Mal chunky hats knit on size 10 needles to be 60 stitches around to fit right, so I cast off more stitches on the seed stitch flap to end up with 60 for the body of the hat. It's a very simple pattern with stylish results. This hat is for my cousin, Megan, to match the neckwarmer I made for her. Perfect set for a teenager, I think.

I received a new digital camera for Christmas (because my old one went swimming in a river while I was kayaking) and it has some really fun settings, like this:

Where has all the color gone?!

As you're taking the photo you can choose the color you want to keep (bright green) and the rest of the photo will be B&W. You can see that parts of the candle in the background still show up green. Pretty neat, huh? So you can expect the photo quality on this blog to vastly improve now from the cell phone shots that I was managing to make look halfway-decent before. While I was at it, I figured I'd show off my mini-skein collection:

As an aside: that candle? $1 at a yard sale. I love it. It is the candle we will use when the Fiasco and I finally tie the knot.

The top left container holds my STR Lightweight minis. The top right container is all Bugga. The bottom one is a mix of STR Mediumweight leftovers, large Bugga minis, and the tiny "emergency skeins" that come with the BMFA Rockin' Sock Club shipments. I like having my minis on display. I found the containers for something like $8 each at Michael's, not too bad. Someday, these minis will grow up to be a mitered square sock yarn blanket. I have almost 60 squares done, but I started in June, so at this rate it will take forever to finish. I'm hoping to get back into the habit of working on it regularly in the near future. As soon as I get to a nice stopping point I'll take a picture and post it here. I'm excited to start the middle portion of it, for which I have an interesting (read: hope it works) plan.

Finally, check out this little gal:

Cuteness!

My future mother-in-law gave me it for Christmas, and I think it's just too adorable. I've started reading an an interesting book called "Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet" by Catherine Friend on my Kindle (another new toy I'm addicted to). The book is sort of a sequel to a memoir about a city couple who start a farm and encounter wacky setbacks along the way. I haven't read the first book but I'm still enjoying this one. The author is clearly not entirely enamored of farming or sheep and she refers to people who really love wool/yarn/the fiber arts as "fiber freaks" but I'm only in the beginnings of the book and I feel a conversion to our woolly ways might be in the works for her later. This book might be dangerous for me to read, as I'm already a fiber freak and have pipe dreams of quitting this whole academia thing and getting some land somewhere remote and becoming self-sufficient. Just me, the Fiasco, and a bunch of livestock and crops in our own little happy place working hard, outdoors year-round... it's difficult to resist, even though we would have to start from scratch, both of us growing up in suburbia. But I'm not writing it off entirely, yet. What are dreams for, right?