Day Three

Knitting is going well. Knitting in the round is working very well. I have 160 stitches. I cast on 16, knitted the 32 from one of the ears flaps, cast on 64 stitches and knit the 32 stitches from the other ear flap, then cast on another 16 stitches for a total of 160. Each row has only 2 colors, traditional fairisle I guess. So I am holding the more common color in the row in my left hand and knitting continental and the other yarn in my right hand and throwing the stitch American style. It is working very well. I got 14 rows completed. In reviewing the pattern I see that I made a mistake at about the 8th row, so half way today. I am not ripping it out. It will be my flaw in an other wise perfect hat! Well, I will sleep on it and make my decision tomorrow.

Second day of competition

Ok. I got the other ear flap completed. Watching the olympic games the knitting went faster then yesterday. I guess getting a load of laundry completed and makeing some apple bread and frosting and cutting up the protein bars that I did during the knitting so Casey would have food to take to the wrestling match today. may have made the knitting take a little longer.

Now, I will cast on for the hat and add the flaps and work in the round. Yea - no purling.

Apollo Ohino just won the silver medal. JR Selsky won the bronze. Wow! What a Race.

Casting On ceremony

Well the cast-on of the project went well. Four Stitches didn't take long.

I watchted the entire ceremonies and was able to complete the left ear flap for the hat. I only made one mistake and had to frog just one row.

So, If I work on it every day, the prospects of meeting the goal of a Gold seems feasible.

Knitting Olympic Participant

I have decided to join the knitting olympics. Check out the Yarn Harlot here for more information. I plan on knitting this Andean Chullo Hat. It is a knit that I bought last year from Knit Picks. They don't have the kit anymore. It will be a challenge for me for many reasons.

• I have to use size 3 needles
• There are 9 colors
• It is Fair Isle knitting
• I have to really pay attention to the pattern
• I have only 17 days to complete the hat

The idea of the knitting olympics is to cast on during the opening ceremony. Knit for 17 days. And Either cast off during the closing ceremony or have it completed by then. So, the opening Ceremony is tonight, the kids are at sleepovers and I should be able to get a good start.

Another fun day with my girl Friends

We had another fun day together. And very productive. We met at my house and started with Show and Tell. Pam had several purses and some of the box bags we were going to make today. She had perfected the pattern and eliminated the center seam. So we are going to follow that today. She also had made another apron. See picture below.

Sandy had a wonderful show n Tell from the Black sheep Weavers Guild meeting that she went to. It was crayon batik fabric. So cool. We are going to have a day where we get to have Sandy teach us how to make the cool fabric. Sandy brought Shannon's apron that she finished from our past gathering. Here are Sandy and Pam modeling the new aprons. Pam's apron has chef's on it, Bon Appetite. Soo cute. Shannon's has these cute buttons that are centered on the front. The back has this cute heart fabric.

I showed all the knitting I have been doing. Posted on the blog already. We proceeded to get sewing. Pam did a quick test of the new version of the pattern and then we all got cutting and Sewing, with Pam giving us the step by step process. We all finished one of the box bags, link for the original pattern found on provious posting. We added a handle and a praire point on the ends of the bag to allow for gripping the bag to pull the zipper open and closed. In the photo below, Pam's bags are on the left, Sandy's on the right in the back and mine is on the right in the front. They are so simple and quick and Cute!

Pam brought some prepared fabric and supplies for making the snappy bags. So Sandy and I picked out fabric from Pam's collection. We chose the same fabrics for the main body but different for the accent. Pam again gave us the blow by blow steps to complete the bags.

I love this button fabric. I chose the green accent and Sandy chose the red.

I just love this fabric. Sandy chose the dark pink on the right and I chose the lighter pink on the left.

We had lunch. I made a quiche, Sandy brought a salda and I made a rustic peach pie thing. It was very good. Here are the left overs.

I had the leftovers for dinner. Yum!

We then went to the laundry room and dyed wool. I had some sock yarn that I needed to make black. Sandy brought some of her socks, yarn and roving. So We dyed and Dyed and Dyed. Here are the socks. They were grey and now they are cool colors. She gave me and Pam a pair. Ohh Yea!

We over dyed some grey yarn. She had several weights. Fingering, Two ply and Three ply. They overdyed pretty cool.

Then it was on to the roving. The colors turned out really nice. I wish I had some of each of the color ways that were dyed.

More

And finally

Such wonderful color.

We had a great time and got a lot of great thing completed.
After they left I went down stairs and made one more of each bag from the same fabric.

I am sure that I will be making more soon.

Time to Knit

I have had time to knit reciently. I have been trying to use up some of the one ball wonders that I have. Sometimes when I spin yarn it only results in 1 ball, 200 yards or less. I have not had success getting those one skein/balls sold at the guild sales. So I have decided to knit some hats and scarves. I knit at lunch at work, at home in the evening, and during my sons wrestling games. I knit one of the entire Noro hats below at one of his meets.

These are from balls of Noro. Really easy pattern can be found here.

This hat is from some handspun Merino. The Pattern is "The Republic" by Nicole Reeves. Here is her blog. It has a band at the bottom that overlaps and you sew on a button. I am knitting a scarf like the one below to match.

The scarf is some hand dyed and hand spun Blue Faced Border Leicester. Wonder wool to spin. The scarf looks really complicated because of the multi-colored yarn, but it is just an Ann Norling pattern #69. I knit is 20 stitches to get the width and knitted until I ran out of yarn. It is 3" wide by 62" long.

Last night I got several projects to the portable stages. Two more one ball hats. I knit till I can put the stitches on a circular needle. Then it is portable. All I have to do is knit till I run out of yarn and It is done. I also started another scarf like above, that will use two balls of Noro Kuregon. Lunch time at work and another wrestling match this week. I should get more projects completed.

My goal is to reduce my stash. Not that I don't want more wonderful yarn. I have a couple of fleeces in the garage waiting to be taken for processing and plenty of yarn waiting to be knitted. I just don't want to be the one with the most yarn at the end. I would rather be the one who made stuff out of their stash at the end. I guess it boils down to changing my ways. I need to get the satisfaction from completing a project not from buying stuff make projects. The time and place of the satisfaction needs to change.

Sew productive today

Directions for this cute bag can be found here. Easy to follow directions. They are easy and the product is so cute. It took more time to pick out the fabric then to sew it. I added a ribbon on the zipper and added a button on the end to help open the zipper.

Couldn't stand it any more. Had to go make another one. This time I added a small loop at the opposite end of the zipper tab and added beads and ribbon to the zipper tab.