Monday, February 18, 2008

merry christmas, mom!

how sad is it that i'm just now getting around to finishing up the last of my christmas knitting?! i guess the important thing is that it finally is really and truly done.

this is the montego bay scarf, from the the summer 2007 interweave knits. i used a skein of handmaiden sea silk, in a pretty ivory (with overtones of gold here and there), that i picked up at last year's madrona fiber festival. i wanted to use it for something special, and finally decided that my mom was a worthy recipient. i thought this pattern made for a simple but sophisticated scarf that would really suit my mom. so i cast on in OCTOBER (!) and still...i wasn't done by christmas. crazy, i know, but this scarf and i just never did get along. first off, i had a hard time with the slickness of the silk. that, paired with the mind-numbing boredom i experienced whenever i worked on the project, meant that i never worked on it for more than a few rows at a time. once i was done with the knitting, i still had to do the fringe! i actually enjoyed this part better, but it was still tedious: cutting over 200 pieces of the yarn, slipping the strands through the loops of the cast on and bind off edges, and then braiding each and every piece. i spent, in total, probably ten hours on the fringe alone over the course of january. that just seems insane! but now it really is done, and i feel such relief, as well as pride for the fact that it turned out great. and my mom loves it! still...i think next year, less christmas knitting for me.

speaking of madrona, i went this saturday with jenna and karma, and i had a great time. we all fell hard in the fleece artist/handmaiden section of the village yarn and tea booth. much damage was done to our wallets, but we all picked up something pretty. i got a kit for lu, which seems to have gotten me out of my knitting funk that i've been in for the past month. it's knitting up very fast, so pictures of a soon-to-be-done lu coming up!

Saturday, February 09, 2008

baby legs

yikes! sorry for the long absence. not much knitting going on around here - or rather, i've been working on lots of projects, so progress seems slow. i've also been spending a lot of time focusing on the presidential election. i've become totally consumed with the whole process, and it's both exciting and totally draining/stressful. but i caucused today, for the first time. go obama!

anyway, i just wanted to pop my head in and say hi. i'll be back with some more knitting content soon. for now, here's one little project that i finished up last week: baby leg warmers! i used some crazy rainbow yarn that kristy gave me last year in a swap - the yarn is cleckheaton merino bambino
, from australia. i figured if anyone can pull off rainbow leg warmers, it's a one-year-old, right?


i cast on 52 stitches, using size 1 addis for magic loop, and knit an inch of 2x2 ribbing, then knit till they looked about long enough, then did another inch of ribbing. i think they are slightly too small - i probably should have gone up to 56 or 60 stitches, but perhaps they can be worn as arm warmers when they get too small for legs. besides the pooling, which isn't so bad, i'm pretty happy with these. baby leg warmers! too cute!