Fellow Needleworkers of Magical Things

‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through the house of needle arts…

we were getting our gifts together, wrapping, mailing and making new starts.

Ethel’s poncho ready for mailing

You can see here that Ethel crocheted a scalloped edge around the knitted poncho. Beautiful!

Ethel’s Christmas hat ready for mailing

These knitted things have been whisked away into the postal service, but she is not finished yet! There’s a dog bed for Murphy and another hat, this one with a jaunty little brim on it. See free Red Heart pattern here.

cable newsboy hat with brim, almost finished

Lois came in wearing a pink seed-stitch derby with a ribbon hat band.

Lois and derby hat

Lois working on a shawl for the shoulders

I still worked on the white shawl. Making progress: trying to do 4 rows of pattern a day at the very least. DH, who always wants to know what and how and when, calculated that it will take me 36 days to finish at the rate I’ve been going. Thirty-six days is doable, in my opinion. Don’t want to get in a rush, now. HOLD ON, I forgot to tell him that I decrease 8 stitches every 3rd round. He might need to revise his calculation, although the number of rows per day may not change, given how busy I’ve been. I thought I had about 800 yards in this humongous skein of Sensations yarn from JoAnn Fabric, but having lost the sleeve describing the yarn, I consulted my yarn database, and the skein was 615 yards. Worried that I might run out before I get up to the neckline, I went to JoAnn’s to get some more but alas! Our local JoAnn’s is moving to another location, although it won’t be finalized until February. But the merchandise in the store was, as Uncle Si might say, “he GONE.” There was scarcely a skein on the shelf. This was the only thing I could find that might serve as a stop-gap in case I run short.

White Vanna White yarn

I love Vanna White, but this lone skein, one of just a few stragglers left on the bare shelves in the store, looks ratty, battered and worn. If I still come up short and Ethel talks me out of using the ratty replacement, I can go to the Joann’s in the next town south and hope they have a comparable skein. That’s the downside of yarn hoarding; by the time you get to whittling down the stash, the dye-lots you bought in the bygone days are history.

Happy week before Christmas, fellow needle-workers of magical things!

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Halloween Eve at Knitting

Ethel started it off with a giant purple shamrock.

Oxalis regnellii

The cats were acting up, especially Pauly and Grayzie, who were making such pests of themselves I had to shut them away. Is there strange magic in the air?

Halloween has lasted for weeks, it seems, but I just now found the first magazine of Christmas Knitting projects that looked irresistible to me.

Special Christmas issue of Simply Knit

This has a separate booklet of awesome little projects that are perfect decorations and stocking-stuffers. The Alan Dart attraction in this is a unicorn with a little gnome at its side. Adorable! And the apparel! How does a girl’s A-line shift dress with an intarsia fox face sound to you? A lacy sweater dress in a vertical leafy chain pattern and the waistline panel in the same pattern, but horizontal. My words aren’t adequate but the photos are fabulous. We sighed at the lovely, warm knitted items that would certainly cause us Floridians to sweat our way through the holidays.

I finished my picot-edge shawl, the one that sort-of matches the purse that was a gift from my son and his fashion-astute wife. I think I might have included some light silver or gray in it, but it is what it is! The outer row turned out to be a worsted-weight 100% merino yarn, while the other stripes are from Berocco Captiva metallic (the gold and lavender), Berocco Fuji (the purple), and Maggi Knits Irish Linen MK (the orange).

Fall colors shawl and purse

Ethel’s finished white shawl

Ethel finished the white shawl, and it is beautiful and soft. Someone is going to love throwing that over her shoulders in a chilly room.

Lois started on her version of the shawl, making the neck a little wider than Ethel’s. You have to realize theirs is a very intuitive take on a pattern; practically improvising in process. They are good at just getting busy and ending up with a beautiful finished article as if by magic!

Lois’s version of the shawl

By the way, Lois is back on a hat again. I was tickled, thinking about the old song lyrics “OH, the cat came back, he couldn’t stay away, he was sitting on the porch on the very next day…” but with Lois, it’s “the HAT came back…”

Lois with new hat of sea-foam green yarn

I love the color of that light green yarn!

Trish with afghan

Trisha joined us and told some funny stories about her dad and his crocheted hats. He started crocheting when his old hat fell apart and he needed a new one but was too cheap wanted to make one that was more economical than the ones he saw in the store. And once he made the hat for himself, he made hats for EVERYONE else! They are trying to get him to face up to his hat-making addiction and move on to afghans or something, but he seems good with the hat thing right now.

Ethel and alpaca hat for DIL

Ethel worked on a hat, too, to match a scarf she’d made for her DIL last year. She brought along her entrelac purse for BOB, who was thrilled. He’s recovering from his pancreatitis but having to take lots of medicine, which has resulted in my DH having a number of new fang-holes in his thumbs. Sigh. The cat came back.

wool-worshiping Bob

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Keep the [center-pull yarn] ball rolling at WNK

It was anniversary night, of a sort, at Wednesday Night Knitting. I looked back over the blog and found that we’ve been meeting [and I’ve been knitting and blogging about us] since February 2011. When I looked back over some of our projects in the past two years, I was really pleased with us! Happy blogiversary to us! This calls for a real celebration.

Last week, while Ethel’s family was visiting, she took her daughter-in-law to our LYS, Yarnworks, and asked her to pick out some yarn and a pattern that she would like Ethel to make for her. What a great idea!

Ethel’s daughter-in-law’s yarn pick

Ethel’s daughter-in-law’s pattern pick

Since the yarn for this project was held double, I saw that Ethel had wound the doubled strands ahead of time into a sort of coil, rather than a ball. She was worried that the halo of the fuzzy strands would make them stick together and tangle but it was all good.

And here’s the WIP:

Ethel’s alpaca hat, in progress

Very nice alpaca! Soft and fuzzy.
Ethel also took her to a bead store where they bought the components for some earrings, and made them. Nice way to get in the running for Best Mother-in-law Ever, Ethel!

Meanwhile, Lois says she wants to join Hat Knitters Anonymous to try and cut back a step at a time. She brought along some bright, springy pink yarn and the beginnings of a feather and fan stitch afghan. Great color and motif for ushering in spring, Valentine’s, possible new baby girl great-grandchild?

I did another version of the Beginner’s Socks pattern by Heather Storta that was furnished with Sock-it-to-Me 2013, the ravelry KAL group I’ve been following.

house socks in Ella Rae Amity Print

Now I’m working on the February pattern, the International Sock of Doom. They also have an additional February free pattern from Susie Q Knits for Valentine Worsted socks, with an adorable raised heart at the ankle. I’ve also started the Craftsy Mystery Knit-along, which turned out to be the Laera Shawl by Grace Akhrem. So far I’ve done a gauge swatch in prep for casting on —what? 361 teeny, tiny stitches!

Grayzie, ready to roll with the Schoppel Laceball 100

We are going to a chili cook off and talent show this weekend. Ethel is working on a rat to enter in the show.

the rat so far

She’s a Norwegian rat [like Ethel :)] and this will be her cute little costume, as planned by her maker.

Norwegian rat in folk dress, Ethel’s drawing

She’s using an Alan Dart pattern for the body and adding her own costume design! So much fun!

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Meanwhile, Knitting

It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood as Lois and Ethel came by to knit.

I worked on the shawl, which is starting to get rather boring: garter stitch over and over. It makes for good TV watching, though; no counting, no pattern to worry over.

garter stitch shawl

the yarn for the shawl

The strands of yarn are not twisted together at all, they’re just 5 straight strands together.It doesn’t seem to make a difference in the knitting, except that once in a while a strand gets pulled out in a little loop.

Lois and Ethel

Ethel worked on a seed stitch slouchy celebrity hat to match the purple and gray sweater she’s knitting for Claire. Lois worked on a complex pattern, re-doing some parts to make it all fit.

We were waiting for word on Debbie’s new grandbaby Izzy. She finally did arrive, but way late in the night.

Meanwhile, Ethel showed off some new stash acquisitions from our almost-trip to the Florida Fiber In 2012. We had every intention of going, and we did go to Orlando. But we first wanted to stop at the Tuesday Morning in Ocoee, to check out the yarn, like we did last year. After spending almost my whole budget there, we decided to go back home, stopping at the big, nice, Joann’s in Ocala. It’s all gooooood. Oh yes, as Ethel mentioned, we did have lunch at the Yellow Dog Eats, which was quite an experience in itself. I’d been there years ago but it’s different. One of the employees had a microphone and was just chatting to whoever about random things all throughout. Ethel got a Waldorf salad, which was beautiful but very short on apples, and I got the Beast of the Middle East, a tabouli sandwich with a side of pita chips

Ethel’s Rozetti fuschia with sequins

A beautiful blue

Guanaco in blue denim

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Knitting away the August heat

What does an August evening in the middle of the week bring to you?

My DH decided to do some yard work, and I went to the gym, then stopped at Ilene’s Gator store to look at the Gameday Dresses they’ve been advertising. Yes, hard to believe as it may be, football season is beginning to blip ever-so-slowly but surely on our radar here in Gainesville. Watching Gators perform at the Olympics is a cool alternative at the moment! While sweat poured freely down my face and neck (Ilene keeps the door open and racks of clothing outside for you to fumble through) I was looking at the mesh inserts, the hemlines, and the absorb-ability of the orange-and-blue dresses with an eye for: how see-through will this be when soaked with sweat or rain? Will my underwear be visible while tromping through the stadium? How much of an idiot will I look like? — not, Will I? but How much? LOL

I left without buying anything, feeling ill, and took a long shower and got ready to knit. You can go under the knife and have surgery to stop excessive sweating. Never mind, you do not want to go to the web site that advertises this and get inundated by their tracking cookies so I won’t even present it here—but you know it exists. Me, I’ve gotten to appreciate sweating more and more, as long as I have a shower and a knitting project to cool off with afterwards.

My project of late is this Fun and Funky Shawl from the Spring 2012 Love of Knitting. They used 3 colors but I used 5 colors of the vast amount of yarn given to me by Billy and Joann.

I get by with a little help from my yarn-conscious friends!

This yarn is mostly acrylic, but has some cashmere and wool. None of the skeins, if they even had a label, list the yardage, only the weight. So it was a good guess to start out with the 5 different colors instead of 3! Then I started on a hat in Remix, a Berroco yarn made from recycled fibers of all sorts.

green in more ways than one, Remix

Ethel continued working on the purple and gray sweater from earlier this summer, and the Pima cotton/Modal lacy sweater in Knit Picks’ Shine, shade Cosmopolitan.

Sweater of Shine Sport Yarn

The pic does not do justice to the feel of this wonderfully soft, gleaming yarn!

Lois, Queen of Hats, worked on a hat in a neon-colored yarn.

Lois and day-glo project

Great for hunting season!

Although she didn’t sit in with the group, Lisa (remember Lisa?) did come by one day with one of those cute cupcake hats that needed a double-crochet ring of “icing” around it. She knitted the hat in chocolate brown with light green mint icing, with a pom-pom cherry on top. Adorable! See some patterns for cupcake hats on Knitting Paradise.

So, here it is August, with school and football season just around the corner! What are you up to?

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