She is finished! I actually completed the last round two evenings ago, but waited for a day off to weave in the last four tails and get pics.
Thankfully it’s a beautiful sunny day today. The previous three days were damp and foggy.
She weighs 6lbs 4.5oz/2852g and measures 80″ across (203cm). I started crocheting her on January 2nd, though I wasn’t monogamous. I had knitting and sewing projects on the go too. She’s going on my bed later.
I seem to be falling into a weekly blog habit. I don’t have a schedule but when a week has gone by without a post I get a niggling reminder in the back of my brain that it’s time to write something.
Do you like the heart? My sister’s stepson makes these, back in Blighty. She sent it to me for Christmas. They are sold to raise funds for Healing Waves in the island of Jersey, which is a charity that takes people with different challenges out into the chilly Atlantic Ocean to surf.
So what are the WIPs this week, I hear you ask!
Version 2 of the Fuck the Cold Beanie. I’m using Lion Brand Mandala for the background and cutting out some of the yarn to make the colours change a little quicker. The gold for the tree and moose is Stylecraft Special DK. Needles are 3.75mm/US5. The gauge is tighter, the stranded colourwork is neater and I’m much happier.
Granny is nearly four feet square. Still lots of yarn left in the bags!
A taster of the sashiko stitching on my denim vest. This has a long way to go but that’s OK.
A small side project inspired by the upcoming Valentine’s Day and gnomie love quilt cotton! Upcycled denim hearts which I am embellishing with fabric, ribbon, buttons etc. I spent a couple of hours faffing about in my sewing room this evening and I intend to complete all six of these before Tuesday.
We had a potluck lunch with friends today and as usual we ate enough that I didn’t need any dinner. So we just wound up our day with a turmeric tea.
I hope your weekend is going well and that you’re making time to be crafty and creative.
The giant granny blanket continues to grow. It’s not much of a giant yet – about 37″ across – but I’m hoping it will be huge. I’m prepared to buy more black and grey if it means finishing up my random colours.
Sadly the beanie has had to be frogged.
At the end of the moose/tree section I knew it was likely to be too big. I forged ahead anyway and completed the text part.
Then, I had to be honest with myself. The circumference was 24 inches, bigger than my head, and with the snowflakes and the crown decreases the total height would have been 12 inches. The design wouldn’t have been visible with so much slouch so I made the decision to frog.
I still want this hat so I’ll look at the DK yarn that I have and use some smaller needles and start again.
After seeing a knitted bumwarmer on Ravelry, I picked up a small piece of jersey knit fabric and sewed a tube. It can be worn around the hips for extra warmth, or even the torso Japanese-style or just as a cowl.
Since the big freeze, we’ve had milder temperatures. Minus 3 feels very comfortable now. So the roads are clear of ice again and there’s been lots of melting, though the piles were so deep they haven’t disappeared yet.
I’m working this weekend so I will wrap this up and take myself off to bed. See you soon
Hello 2022. My brain is having a hard time catching up to the fact that it’s two years since we first heard about The Disease That Shall Not Be Named. It wasn’t last year that my workplace was shut down for 7 weeks, it was two years ago. I feel like 2020 and 2021 have just blended into one long year. A VERY long year!
Anyway let’s focus on the here and now.
Shall we talk about the fact that our winter has been bitterly cold in recent weeks? I think the lowest was -30°C but mostly it was around -17 for quite some time. When it warmed up to -5 the last couple of days it was quite pleasant!
We’ve had lots of snow that’s not had a chance to melt between falls so the roads have been icy and the piles along the sides of the roads and driveways have just got higher.
Mr Fixit is back at work after his week off. Oldest son has had a month off due to his workplace accident but should be back at work tomorrow. Youngest had two weeks off and returned yesterday.
I just had a bonus 4 day stretch – my first New Year’s Day off in 7 years!
Last night three friends came over to knit and drink tea and generally be loud and funny.
The ‘Fuck the Cold’ hat is coming along (pattern is a free download on Ravelry). I cast on on the 1st and I’m halfway through the trees/moose section. Some of my friends are also making this – we are having a knitted colourwork makealong.
And my stashbusting worsted weight granny blanket has grown to 23 inches across in just a few days. My colour order is black/colour/grey/colour. I’m expecting to use up all my random medium weight yarn and hopefully end up with a king size blanket.
As I sit here on the couch writing this before heading down to my sewing room I see snow falling again, the neighbour clearing his drive again, and I’m glad I don’t have to go anywhere today.
Be careful out there!
Honestly, I didn’t need another cowl (or shawl/neckwarmer/scarf/whatever) but I do love making and wearing them. Nobody likes a cold neck, eh!
I joined most of my grannies together and along the way they told me they wanted to be a cowl.
I briefly considered crocheting around the edges but decided not to.
Love the result.
Is it terrible of me to be joining these together without knowing what I was making?! I think it might become a table runner to change up my coffee table for spring.
Waiting for inspiration to strike. Possible layouts for the 94 three-inch granny squares that I made. Still not sure what they will become.
This new Samsung Galaxy A71 takes great photos compared to my older devices!
February 12th I showed you my placemats in progress. They sat in my sewing room for over a week, neglected, as I had work and other things on my plate, but today I dedicated a block of sewing time to them and they are done!
Ta dah!
The fabrics I used are more expensive than I’d usually buy, but I did have a gift certificate to spend. Even though the two main designs were from different groupings at the store, the selvages showed that they were designed by the same person which is why they coordinate so beautifully. I used the geometric pattern on the back to guide my quilting.
It feels good to get these off my To Do list (and onto my Ta Dah list – ho ho!).
What else have I been doing? Well, work of course, about which I have been feeling more relaxed lately, which is good as the acid reflux has subsided, thank goodness. And some play with colourful yarn…
Don’t ask me what these three-round granny squares will become. I haven’t decided yet. I’ve made about 40 of them and will see what ideas come to me when the bag of that yarn is almost gone.
I am excited to say that I am getting a new phone very soon and it will be sufficiently advanced that I should be able to get the WordPress app and post easily and quickly from that. That’ll save me a lot of faffing about. Also I will be able to have Facebook and Instagram on it and a bunch of other stuff, so it will basically replace my current Android AND my old and clunky iPad Mini.
I hope you’re all having a great weekend and staying warm (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere).
It’s blanket season!
I decided when I got back from my holiday that I needed to have something warm to work on so here are my Winter Works in Progress.
The Mindless Use up my Leftovers blanket, using random worsted weight yarn in my stash:
As you can see, so far I have only cast on 370 stitches and knitted a few rounds. Not much warmth there yet!
The Giant Granny:
Getting to be big enough to at least keep my knees warm, this is going to be a snuggly one quite quickly.
And a non-blanket project, the Party Cardi from The Secret Yarnery:
Hexagons complete, backs and fronts extended, pieces joined. The dyelots on these two cakes of Mandala Baby are quite different, and the next sections will probably be different again. I really hope this is a wearable garment when done, as so far it’s reminding me of a bed jacket! And there’s a lot of $$$ in five cakes of yarn, assuming I use it all, so if I hate it I will be frogging, not giving it away.
Those are this week’s WIPs. I have another one planned but I need to start it when I have time to focus, which actually could be right now but I have already made it to lunchtime today without getting any housework done or groceries bought so I really should do that first. I have been fighting off a cold for a few days now so have been practising some self-care (which means I have been making excuses for not exercising) but it is a beautiful day out there and we really need to eat and shopping needs to be done and at the very least I should clean the bathrooms and mop the kitchen floor. Hmmm, how quickly could I get those done?!
Way to go, Nicola! I’m feeling excited to be able to wear my wrap after three and a half months on the needles/hook but in an odd way almost sad that it’s over. How silly, when you think about it – I am very much a product knitter/crocheter and am positively irritated by long term WIPs that sit at the top of my Ravelry project overview page, taunting me with their not-done-ness!
The end of this project came together in the last week, inspired (as I mentioned in my last post) by the CAL in the crochet party group on Ravelry. There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of finishing a project, taking photos and uploading said photos to my Ravelry project page and clicking that “finished” button. And of course seeing the project thumbnail lose that WIP status and move into the realms of Finished Objects.
So that’s 600 grams of random DK weight yarn out of the stash. Most of it is Stylecraft Special DK with some Deramores Studio DK mixed in. I have all my DK mixed together in bags, sorted (or at least it was) by colour. I need to do a tidy up now that this project is off the needles. There are over 20 colours in this wrap, with the plan being to include soft colours that also had some contrast.
I had a little photoshoot out on my deck this morning.
It’s hard to get the whole thing visible in one photo, but you get the idea.
You may also be able to tell that we still have a lot of snow on the garden. We had fresh snow the last two days, though it is getting above freezing during the day now and the end is in sight. I love snow, though prefer it when it’s not on the roads when I need to drive somewhere. This is the scene from my back deck.
Blue sky, sunshine, snow. Gorgeous!
I have two Works in Progress left. A pair of socks on skinny needles and a wrap on a skinny hook. The socks have been languishing for many a month, maybe because I feel like they may not fit well, but I think I need to start taking them out with me as my portable project (and there’s nothing more portable than a sock project, is there). The wrap is one that I started in Switzerland last summer, and I love the stitch pattern (I bought the pattern so definitely want to crochet it up). I think I will frog the few inches that are done and restart with a thicker yarn and bigger hook. The stitches are just so fiddly and my middle-aged eyes were struggling.
Interestingly, I am not desperate to start another bulky instant-gratification crochet project, which is usually my downfall. So I think these two WIPs might just be getting the attention they deserve for the rest of this month.
NICOLA KNITS 