Finished Objects!
First up is the one with a picture that can be shared. This is the Rain On Notre Dame cowl by ImaginedLandscape on Ravelry and Instagram, Sarah Sircha elsewhere.
The shapes on the left of the bottom picture are the steeples of Notre Dame and the shapes on the right in the bottom picture are of Raindrops on window paines and also stylized Eiffel Tower shapes in the same stitch design.
I also worked on a couple of my own designs. One is a yarn cake holder that can clip to a belt or belt loop with a carbine clip, which I own way too many of those clips for a non mountain climber, they are just so darn useful! And, as a key ring can't be beat, just open the clip and slip off the keys in need. I'm going to switch the hard rings for ribbons or yarn for actually holding the keys on the clip in the next few days.
WIPS
I'm also working on a hat test knit for dogyarns on Ravelry, Elizabeth Ravenwood elsewhere. I can't share pictures of this one yet as it has not been released, and I'm not quite done with the knitting of the hat. I have a funny story about the knitting of this project.
I went to pick up the project and my cable needle, a fancy toothpick, skewered my mound of the moon on my right hand. OWIE!!! Did that hurt. But, thankfully that is an area with thick skin and the puncture didn't bleed when I finally calmed down enough to pull the toothpick out of my hand. It was my own fault for not dulling the end of the toothpick with an nail file board, and for using the fabric of the hat to hold the needle, as either dulling the end or using a different home for the needle would have prevented the accident. Needless to say, it took a few days for my hand to be comfortable with knitting again. Even without any blood coming out, there is still a bruise in the muscle where the puncture happened.
As a friend said when I told her about learning a lesson about knitting, "Sometimes the lessons stick!" She later amended her reply to mention that she didn't intend any puns, though I was the first person to tell her I thought her reply was funny.
Frogging Pond, or evidence of creativity in progress!
So, I've been wanting to make the Everyday Hermione Socks for a long time now, and when I saw a pair from The KnitGirls podcast, I knew it was time to start the project. Maybe I misread the directions or something, but it wasn't coming out how I wanted to have the pattern on the leg look, nor what the pictures looked like or the sock from the podcast. So, I frogged that project, and I used the yarn in a plastic canvas coaster. Who says you can't use fingering weight yarn on plastic canvas? Does it have to be heavier yarns all the time? It was fun to break the rules and do whatever for once in a long time. Then, through that I realized that there are no rules in art/crafting and that I can do whatever the hell I want to do with the supplies I've procured. So, refreshing!
I also had been participating in the Sock Madness fun that started in March and had made it into Round 2, but the project and real life just conspired to be too much at the beginning of April, so I frogged that 3/4ths of a sock and removed the beaded cuff gently, so I could reuse the beads too. This was the Rose and Thorn pattern, which is lovely, just not meant to be then. But, I got to reuse this yarn in the Hapiness Shawl I mention in the Designs on the Needles section.
Designs on the Needles
Happiness Shawl.Like I mentioned above, I wanted to make a pair of socks out of a pretty and popular design on Ravelry, the Everyday Hermione Socks, but I frogged that project since it wasn't what I thought the actual design was going to be. That then led to me using the pattern I thought was in the socks in a shawl I'm designing as a rip off of Elizabeth Zimmerman's Square Shawl from the Knitter's Almanac. This project isn't going to be done soon as it is my passenger in rides project and I have yet to get half way through. This is my Happiness Shawl project.
The first yarn for the Happiness Shawl came from a pair of socks I talk about in the Frogging Pond section, which came from boutrosbabe on Ravelry, or Heather of Highland Handmades on the web. It is fingering weight and herSugar maple base in the I'll Make My Own Sunshine color, which just inspires happiness in me, hence the name of the pattern. The next yarns will be from the Rainbow minis kit from Cauldron's Path on Etsy that I bought many moons ago. This is Shayla's Sunrises base, and the rainbow kit, which has over 300 yards of black with a mini skein in the ROYGBIV colors. The yarn I'm debating about for the edging is the Unwind Yarn Company, Journey Sock base, in the Re-Entry colors. With the addition of the rainbow kit and black, I'm thinking this might interest folks who would like to make a project that is inspired by the solar system, with the ROYGBIV being the orbitals around the sun with black in between the sun and the different colors, and then the multi color at the end to show the complexities of space beyond our own solar system. The red in the Re-Entry yarn also makes me think of the infrared spectrum of noise in space, plus the name screams Space!
I also recycled the wave cast on from the Sock Madness Round 1 pattern, Slip Stitch Spiral, which is a recycling of Cat Bordhi's Footprints cast on, to start the project, only by doing 4 waves instead of three. Then, I worked stockinette for as long as I could with invisible increases at each corner. Then, I used the pattern I thought was in the Everyday Hermione Socks pattern, with all of the excitement on the increase rounds, like Elizabeth Zimmerman mentions in her Square Shawl instructions, not the pithy ones, but the other ones. Then, I got bored of that pattern, so I went to the next step up in difficulty, and that took some puzzling to get the corners right. I actually started using stitch markers for this pattern then. After I'm don't with this, I will add in the rainbow minis and start with a wave style pattern in lace to go from there to the end of the project.
I have some yarn with a lot of the shawl colors mixed into it. I'm thinking of using that to do something on the external edge, maybe a picot bindoff, or something.
This design is heavily inspired by colors and textures.
Yarn Cake Sacks
I'm also designing what started out as playing with yarn, and then progressed to yarn swatching, then went on to a finished object using loads of techniques. The finished objects could be baby hats, or the parts could be stopped at various steps to be a headband as well. But, I added a drawstring to make them into yarn cake holders that can clip to belts or not, and keep the cakes from imploding on themselves on a shelf. These also make good project bags, and yarn based yarn bowls. Extremely, pretty and practical. I'm just charmed by them!
They also make learning advance techniques easy because they are not very big, and I don'tknow about others, but cup cozies just don't do much for me, though they are really pretty too. Just not my cup of tea.
Anyways, hats and bags though are really useful for me, so that's what these are. I will be sharing more pictures as the release date for the patterns approaches.
For now, these are inspired by textures and techniques, then color, but that's my way of seeing them, your's may differ!
