Friday, August 14, 2015

FO Friday: Shades of Purple Blanket with a bonus spectacular moustache (2015 FO# 12)

This FO Friday post is one day late! I have a (not very) good excuse - I took all the photos yesterday but then I had one glass of red wine while I was cooking dinner followed by another one while I was eating dinner and then I was completely cactus for the rest of the night. I ended up in bed by 8pm watching a delightful film noir (Somewhere in the Night (1948), starring John Hodiak, who wore one of the most fascinating moustaches I've ever seen)



What even is the purpose of a moustache that size? I could not take my eyes off it. Anyway, it was a really nice night and I feel relaxed and refreshed today. However, I did not get any writing done (#noregrets).



This blanket is one I finished a while ago. In August 2013 I started knitting this for a friend's baby. I liked knitting it and thought it looked nice but the edge seemed too unfinished for the blanket to be given away as a gift. I tried a few borders but none of them looked right so instead I blocked the blanket to see whether that would fix the edging issues.

It was promptly adopted by Lucy, and the rest is history (I bought a nice baby blanket from Target. It was the right thing to do).

Mine, all mine.

The pattern is an easy one: cast on three stitches and increase every row by knitting into the front and back of each stitch. Continue to knit until you have used up almost half of the yarn. Knit three rows without increasing, then decrease by knitting the second and third stitch of each row together until you have three stitches left. Cast off.


The yarn iss Patons Soft Haze, which is lovely (although almost impossible to rip, so try to avoid making any mistakes!). It has sadly been discontinued. I used six balls to make a decent-sized blanket.


I still think the blanket needs a border - maybe a knitted-on icord? I would definitely make one of these again but this time keep it hidden from my mischievous cat.


Hey, what's my blanket doing outside? (I suspect that Lucy and I might spend too much time together...)


Monday, August 10, 2015

Hello Monday and a pair of true monster socks (2015 FO# 11)

Last week flew by in a massive deadline blur. I honestly didn't even realise I'd missed a week of posting until I sat down now to type this. That's hopeless! The days and weeks feel like they're zooming so fast at the moment I can't even keep up. I am seriously tempted to buy one of these gorgeous colouring books to help me be a bit more mindful and slow down. (haha when would I find the time to do that. Bluergh.)

I did take a few minutes time out today to take pictures of my latest pair of socks. These are full-on monster socks, made out of the 5-10g balls of sock yarn left after a pair of socks have been finished.



To make these, I collected all of the similar weight and feel sock yarns I had and divided them each into two balls. I then cast on and spiralled two at a time all the way up the sock, using an afterthought heel.


One thing I didn't do which I probably should have was weigh the itty bitty balls. Although I followed the same yarn sequence for both socks, since some of the balls were much bigger than others, you can see that the colour changes occur at different places in each sock (the right one becomes a lot more blue faster than the right one does, for example).


These taught me a lot about coordinating colours in scrap yarn. If I were to do it again, I'd divde the balls into 'warm' and 'blue' and spiral accordingly, so there would always be a bit of contrast, rather than what I did which was randomly pick the closest ball to me whenever I needed to add a new yarn.


That said, they are super warm and comfortable and when they're on, the colour discrepancies aren't really obvious.

I have now packed these socks up with the helical stripes set and will drop them off at KOGO, hopefully tomorrow.




In other news:

I know I am not alone in feeling like this winter has been going forever. However, I was ecstatic when I popped outside to observe that some of the coriander seeds I planted before this recent cold snap have come up! I was certain that they would have been destroyed by the frost.


So, although spring hasn't actually sprung yet, there are signs that it might be coming soon. 

Hopefully, very very soon - I'm done with the cold (and so is Lucy).