Gotta love quick projects

Yesterday I started a Swiffer cover. And this morning I finished it. Sometimes you just need to make a super quick project.

Now, normally I dislike things like Swiffer and wouldn't even think of buying it. The reason is that it's one of those things that they sell you the stuff for cheap, but then make a lot of money on the consumables. In this case disposable cloths you put on the Swiffer for cleaning your floors.

We have a parquet (parket) in our bedrooms but nowhere else in the house. Sweeping them only goes so far, so I thought the Swiffer was perfect to shine them up and get rid of the extra dust, plus it's small and easy to get in and under stuff. But instead of getting the disposable cloths, I wanted to make reusable cloths.

I'd made some for my mom in the past and now it's my turn ;) The pattern was free and I used Sugar'n cream cotton (Green Twist), and voila:







(since I took these photos I added some velcro on top to keep the cloth in place).


Another thing that made this project so enjoyable (and even quicker) was that I tried knitting backwards for the first time. It was much easier than I thought it would be and it made the knitting easier too because I didn't have to keep turning my work. I could just go back and fro and then it's hard to quit. I was a little bit afraid that the tension would be different, but the resulting fabric looks very even. I'm very excited about having this new weapon in my knitting arsenal.

The View from the Clothesline

I've watched and admired the Potholder Swap of 2009 and 2010 (they don't have the 2010 separated out, they are mixed with the 2011 potholders).

I first heard about it through Grumperina and at first was mildly amused that people were interested in making potholder, but was increasingly intrigued by the beauty and quality of most of the potholders. The second year I was basically drooling over the photos, but didn't have the opportunity to participate. This year, the time was right. A local yarn shop had the correct yarn (100% cotton, sport weight). It is called Reynolds Saucy Sport, which is 100% mercerized cotton at a reasonable price and I got a bunch of colors, because I wanted the potholders to be colorful.



I looked at different patterns to try. Originally I wanted to try some vintage patterns but ended up with a pattern I've wanted to do for a while. It's called African Flower and is a fun pattern, a hexagon (always a plus) and has an interesting construction. The back is plain sc hexagon (Ravelry link) (a pattern from Lion Brand) and the joining of the front and back is done by using the Bobble-shell edging from Attic24.



In the first prototypes, I changed color for every line (after the flower), but I didn't like so much how it was working out. It wasn't until I thought off 'framing' the flower with the white background that I was happy with how they were turning out.

These were a pure joy to make. They were quick, maybe 3 hours total, so I could do one in an (long) evening and you don't see the full effect until you do the edging, so you are very motivated to finish all the all-white sc rows on the plain side so you can see how it looks in the end with the complimentary color on the edging.

Oh, and I used a smallish hook in order to make the fabric sturdier. It is size D/3.25mm and the potholder is so thick and scrumptious. I will send them away next week and will be receiving 5 other ones in few weeks time. Exciting.

p.s. the Ravelry group for the swap has all the info.

Hexagon love

I'm halfway done with my blanket. Four skeins out of the 8 I had for the main color are gone and 72 hexagons are done (that is 18 hexagons per main color).



The pattern is from a tutorial by Attic24 (hexagon how-to).

The yarn is Kambgarn - a sport weight merino yarn, processed (dyed? packaged?) in Iceland. They have great colors in this yarn.

The hook is 4.5 mm (US 7). The one I'm using is from Susan Bates and it has a nice wooden handle on an aluminum hook.

I have about 10 colors, plus the main color. It is so much fun to always have different color combination. I don't select the colors randomly so it is a bit of a puzzle to select a color without repeating the same color too much at any one point. At the same time I don't have to worry too much about what all the other hexagons are, only the ones closest to the one I'm doing at that moment. So easy-piecy lemon-squeesy (as my 7 year old would put it - the one in the picture).

p.s. the blanket has been blogged before, here and here.

Periodic table of fibre

The geek in me is thrilled. Click for full size.

The Shopping Socks

I finally got some photos of the finished socks.



You can see that the navy blue that Jodie gave me blends in nicely with the rest of the sock, even if it is obviously not the same yarn, it's not glaringly obvious.



The flash exaggerates the difference quite a bit and the real colors are somewhere in between the photos with and without flash.

Photos of the Tomten

I finally have photos of the finished Tomten, complete with zipper and all. It's been a while since I finished it, but I have not been able to take a photo. First the kids were sick, then the parents were sick and when we were finally all well again, the snow was all gone (I'd hope to get a nice outside photo).




When it came to putting the zipper in, my mom came to the rescue with a link to a Knitting Daily video, showing how to prepare a zipper for attaching it to a knitted garment. You use a knitpicker, and put stitches on the zipper.



This is a bit fiddly, and time consuming, but boy, oh, boy. It's a great way to attach a zipper to a knitted fabric. Sewing a zipper in a machine is hard, because you tend to pull the fabric out of shape. Handsewing the zipper in is better, but it's still a bit awkward, and stiff. By running these stitches up the zipper, the knitted fabric isn't restricted as much as for a sewn-on zipper.

First I marked the location of each garter with a permanent marker (sharpie) and then I made the stitches run up the zipper (using black einband (Icelandic lace weight yarn), which is stronger than the plötulopi) . Then I used crab stitch (reversed single crochet) to attach the zipper to the jacket, using one strand plötulopi and one strand einband, and to outline the hood while I was at it. I think it looks great and I'm very happy on how the zipper is attached.

The younger daughter wants one too, in pink. Oh my, oh my. There is no way a pink jacket is going to look nearly as good as this one. I have the yarn, had planned to use it for a pink dress, but she´d rather have the jacket. Wow, now that's a compliment. Just that she'd prefer this jacket over a DRESS, is saying a lot about it. Of course, she'd also just want what her sister has!

Sam socks finished!

I'm done! Wearing the socks now. The fix using a different yarn really worked. For some reason it took me forever to finish the toe (kept making mistakes and going back), but now I'm blissfully done :)

I hope to get some good pictures tomorrow and also of the finished Tomten Jacket, it has zipper now :) I'll tell you all about it later.

Racing socks

ETA: The fabulous Jodie, AKA Queenie Knits, saved the day (or should I say the socks). She gave me some leftover navy blue fingering weight yarn that blends nicely with the original colors.

Ok, where do I begin. Hmm....

The beginning is always a good place isn't it? Well, the beginning is 3 years ago. Here is my first post from October 2007 about the Woodland shawl and then I blocked it couple of months later. What does a shawl have to do with socks you might ask?

Well, I ended up ripping up that shawl because the size of it wasn't working. it really was too little for me to use it. I've had the ball of the ripped yarn in my yarn cupboard (What! doesn't everyone store their yarn in a yarn cupboard? - and no, that's not all the yarn I have, I have more) for a while, meaning to make one of those one-sock yarn-skein shawls out of it. However, the weekend before Thanksgiving I had the sudden urge to start socks. There were two reasons, one, I want more knitted wool socks for myself, and two, my friend was coming on the Monday for a visit and I knew I'd be taking her shopping so I wanted a very portable project to take with me.

It just so happened that I had two sock books on loan from the library. One of them being Cookie A's 'Sock Innovation'. I chose the socks called Sam (Ravelry link), because they had an intersting leg pattern but then it was smooth sailing for the foot (just plain stockinette). I like to have something interesting but I also love to speed along, so this pattern had both aspects for me.


Believe it or not, but the ripped out ball of sock yarn was the only skein of sock yarn I had (with one exception - Wisdom Yarn Poems Sock, which is a single ply sock yarn and I'm not so sure how it will hold up as socks. It was originally bought for a shawl but might turn into mittens) so I cast on for Sam.

The cable pattern was too complicated for mindless knitting, but it sure was portable. I did have to rip back and tink back couple of times, especially with the first sock, so it started to take a long time to finish. I did, however, finish the first sock during my Christmas break. When I finished the first sock I noticed that I didn't have a lot of yarn left and doubted that I had enought for the second sock.




I started the second sock right away, curious to see how far I would go until I ran out of yarn.


I actually got a lot further than I expected. I was at the start of the toe decreases when I ran out of yarn. I never thought I would make it that far. It was actually very exciting in the end, how far would I go? I was considering taking bets from people ;)




The photo above shows the two socks and how little was left. The finished sock is blocked, and the other one is not.

The photo below shows the pattern off better. The photos above don't do the pattern justice, but the one below should be closer to the real thing.



So what to do now? I have these lovely socks, all but a toe missing. I considered getting another skein, even if I got this yarn 3 years ago it's still being sold (on the Internet), I even saw a skein on Ravelry for sale (much cheaper than the online stores too). But with only a toe left I'm considering using another yarn for the toe, the problem is that I don't have any leftover fingering weight yarn that could do.

So I want to ask around. Do you have a leftover yarn I could use? This yarn is Zitron Trekking XXL color 184. I don't necessarily need the same colorway, but perhaps dark blue fingering weight yarn, preferable sock yarn (so it will hold up to wear and tear). Please look around and check if you have anything I can use? I would be forever grateful.

p.s. The pattern totally lied, the yarn requirements were 383 yards (1 skein Fleece Artist 2/6 Merino) and I was using Trekkin XXL with yardage of 460 yards and still ran out!

Something new today

It's been a productive day. It doesn't hurt that it's a 3 day weekend and tomorrow (Monday) is off too. Often I have the feeling that the weekend ought to be one day longer. I don't know if you can relate to that? Anyways, this one was so I decided to use it for good.

I'm also inspired by my knitting group, who is have decided to pay more attention to unfinished projects this year. So what did I do?

First I put some patches on my kids trousers. It only took about 10 minutes, which makes me wonder why they sat patiently in my room for months and months waiting to be repaired! I even had patches and everything - and they were iron-on!



I'm really proud of myself for finally doing the patches, and it was liberating in a way to finish a task that was just sitting there in the corner of my craft/bedroom. But I didn't stop there. I finally pulled out my 'brand-new' sewing machine.



It's probably been about 9 months since I got it - sometimes last spring, and today I finally used it! I had another sewing machine before that I was trying to use. I say trying, because the tension was all wrong on it. It was probably fixable, but I ended up giving it away. Besides, I would have had to take it somewhere else, since there is no one in my small town that could have fixed it. So I get this brand new sewing machine (at a sale too!), and what do I do? NOTHING

Well, today I finally used it and I couldn't be happier. It's a simple machine, it's even called 'Singer Simple' and I got it at JoAnn's for $100 ($30 off), but it works so much better than my old sewing machine :) I wanted a simple sewing machine because I want to master the basics before I invest in a big, fancy machine (if I ever will). I know I will use straight and zig-zag stitch 99% of the time anyways. There might come a time where I will want a fancier sewing machine, who knows. It depends on how much I will be sewing and what I want to use it for. But for now all I want is as simple of a machine as possible.

Happy, happy, joy, joy (you get extra points for knowing where this reference is from)

The first thing that I sewed was fairly simple. A bib, actually two bibs. The front is a quilting fabric that looks like bandana (kúrekaklútur eða gamaldags snýtiklútur) and the back is a terry cloth (handklæðaefni-frotte).




The pattern was from One-Yard Wonders, a wonderful book with very diverse selection of patterns - all requiring no more than a yard of fabric (and maybe backing as well). I will be making more from this book for sure.



The sewing went well and I love how they turned out. I put another patch on the backside that says 'Crafted with love'. I don't know if the recipients will appreciate handmade things or not (one of them is my husband's sister-in-law - svilkona - and the other is my husband's cousin), but this way maybe they will at least realize that it is handmade and not bought. Not that I mind whether or not they appreciate it. Once a handmade gift is out of my hands, it's no longer mine and I don't worry about it. If people like it and appreciate that's great. But if they don't that's fine too. I make it sound like I don't think that the recipients will like the bibs, but I think that they will. I've just never given them anything handmade before. That's all.

Finish it!

This year in my online Icelandic knitting group Garnaflækja we got fed up with our unfinished projects and decided to give each other a little support to get them finished.



I made this shawl last summer, while traveling from Ohio to California and back again (to Ohio) on a road trip. The knitting was no problem. Shawls are the perfect travel project, especially this one since it has a lot of stockinette stitch. You start with the outer border, which is knit back and forth into a long band, then you pick up stitches on the edge and knit the lace panel. After that it's a smooth sailing, where the frequent color changes keep you interested (mile after mile after mile - 500 miles a day). Top it off with a picot trim at the top and voila, you are done!



However, as smooth sailing as the knitting the shawl was, it's been sitting in a zip-lock bag for 6 months now, unblocked. I even got blocking wires for my birthday 2 months ago and the shawl remained unblocked. Until this weekend, when I finally got it out of its plastic bag, washed it and blocked it. Blocking with wires, rather than pins, is a dream. It still is a lot of work, but once you have threaded the wire through all the picots and tips of the shawl you don't have to adjust all the pins to stretch it, you just move the wire. It's such a luxury :)



I've had the yarn for a long time (well 2 years at least). It was the rare occurrence of me actually buying yarn without having something planned for it. The reason was that the yarn (Dzined- Ravelry link) is from a local independent dyer and she was quitting her dyeing business so it was the last chance to get any. Her yarn was a gem, wool/hemp blend. Not something you see every day. So I wanted to do something special with it and it took me a long time to find the right pattern. For the longest time I meant to do a capelet with it, but then I saw this pattern for Andrea's shawl and I was sold. There's even enough yarn left for Andrea's mitts.

Meet Oscar

I want you all to meet my new friend Oscar.



Oscar is nice little fellow, made out of Lorna's Laces Shepard Worsted. Oh, how soft it is and beautiful and how irresistible it was in the sale bin for 40% off.

Once he was done, I got some buttons for him and then couldn't resist adding a smiling face. Oscar is quite a little charmer.

But Oscar has a secret. He's nut just an adorable green rectangle. Oh no. He is a protector of something very valuable and dear to me. My Kobo e-reader.



I wanted something to help protect dear Kobo and I loosely followed a Berroco pattern, Baobab. I got some buttons for the cover and after I put them in I saw how remarkably they looked like eyes so I couldn't resist adding a nice smile and that's how Oscar was born. Doesn't he just look like an Oscar?



Oscar is a fierce protector of my Kobo as I just mentioned. On Kobo, I can store all my knitting pattern, put journal papers and of course read books. All of this is very handy, and very portable and easy to use. The documents are put on the Kobo by 'drag-and-drop' (i.e. you plug it into the USB port on your computer and copy directly to the Kobo - no special programs needed. It also has a SD slot, so I can put memory cards in it to increase the storage even further (it comes with 1 GB of memory).

The Kobo came in handy yesterday (Friday), when I had to see a doctor and then get an X-ray and wait at the pharmacy for pain killers. Thankfully the bone is just bruised, but not broked, but I had a lot of waiting to do and got through a big portion of the book I borrowed from the library (Marley and Me). What happened was that I fell, knees first, on concrete. I don't recommend it.

End of the year

Judging from Ravelry, I only finished 18 projects this year. This is considerably less than the usual ca. 30-40+ projects I normally do, and I've noticed me knitting far less than I'm used to (0-5 hours a week, compared to ca. 10 hours previously). This year I didn't even make any Christmas presents, even if I started one in July and got the yarn for another one! Ehemm...



I did finish a hat for my husband in November (only just photographed it today). I guess it could have been a part of his Christmas present, but I'm glad I gave it to him right there and then because it turns out my daughters could wear it too and it came in handy in the freezing temperatures we've been having in December.






The hat is actually a balaclava and is made in Cascade220, so it's warm and soft and the pattern is easy to do. This might be one of the few patterns I knit again and I recommend it.




I've been knitting a tomten for my daughter out of plotulopi (unspun Icelandic wool). It's been a great fun making it, as all of EZ patterns are. The problem was that the dog loved the yarn as much as I, or even more, since she tried to eat it every chance she got. I guess it's the sheep smell. She ate through two cords of the needles and quite a bit of yarn. I had to get new cords and more yarn from Iceland. The knitting is all done and when it came to sewing the sleeves up I ran into a little bit of a problem. The unspun wool does not (at all) lend itself to sewing. I ended up using einband, the lace weight Icelandic yarn for the sewing. It went much better, although the einband was weaker than I anticipated. I used a black yarn for the sewing and it doesn't show at all, even with the lightest color. Now I need a zipper and sew it in and then it's all ready to go :)

There are more tomten pictures on Ravelry.

"I wish you would have said something in June"

Check out the video in this blog post .

Never mind that the blog is in Norwegian. The video is in English. If you look at some older blog posts as well, you'll see some awesome knitting.

Yummie yarn

The Icelandic yarn is yummie. I know. I love knitting with it, it's very 'organic' somehow - or I should rather say 'alive'. Especially the plötulopi, or the unspun variety of lopi. On top of all this, the yarn smells like sheep. How much more down to earth can yarn get?

As it turns out, I'm not the only one in this household who loves this yarn. The dog loves it too. But she is sneaky, and pretends she doesn´t care when someone is around, but when no-one is looking she goes and tears it up!

As I mentioned in the last blog post I started knitting Tomten by the great Elisabeth Zimmermann out of plötulopi. I started with the dark brown and Ruby (the dog) got into the cake twice! She did ruin a bunch of yarn, but I still have some left, and I think it will be enough.

Then yesterday morning on a Saturday morning I went back to bed to sleep early in the morning and when I woke up at 10 AM the dog had gotten into the tomten, took it out of the knitting bag and ruined the cable of the knitting needle and torn some of the knitted fabric. Thankfully the knitted fabric is mostly intact and very salvageable. The rest of the cake of plötulopi was ruined however. Thankfully, I have more then enough of this color.




As you can see from the picture above, the fabric is mostly intact. I did unravel few rows to get past a stitched that had been snagged and torn out. There is another snagged stitch in the second part (one dark, one light color) but I´ll have to fix it, it's too far down to unravel.



However, the remainder of the cake of yarn is in pieces. This is how it should look. I can´t use this yarn at all. It is possible to some extent to piece it back together, even if it is in small pieces (8 inches or so), the dog had torn it up so the ends were just shredded, so it´s very discouraging to even try.

As you can see in the photo of the shredded yarn, the dog is so interested in it, I couldn´t even take a picture of it on the floor without the dog coming after it. You can see her paw as she is coming toward it while I try to take a picture.

I´ll have to outsmart her and put the project somewhere she can´t reach it and not forget and leave it out while I'm not looking.

Brown Theme

I uploaded pictures for few of my projects, both finished and in progress on Ravelry. I noticed a trend. They are all brown!

When I was in San Francisco last July, I went to a yarn shop in the Mission (or Castro? I´m not sure where one neighborhood ends and the other begins) called Imagiknit. They had this exotic yarn (Japanese) made out of rice paper. How could I resist? I originally planned to make a basket out of it, but found the fabric too flimsy, so I made these coasters instead. I've made 3.5 so far. They are wonderfully variegated brown color and the texture is very special, almost leathery. The pattern starts with 6 sc in a circle and then increases 6 sc every round.



Another brown thing I'm making is a Tomten. Yes, I'm finally making my Tomten :) Oh, the wonderful, wonderful garter stitch. I can just knit and knit and knit back and forth. I can even read articles on the internet and knit at the same time (hint, it helps to use this: Readability (just click on the badge on the right and drag it up to your bookmark toolbar - top of your browser, below the URL).

I'm making the Tomten for K. (age 7) out of unspun Icelandic wool (plötulopi), double stranded. At the bottom there are 6 dark brown garters, followed by 12 garters with one strand dark brown and one strand light brown yarn and the rest will be 2 strands light brown. By the way, these are natural, undyed colors. Yep, actual sheep colors.




The third brown object coming of my needles is a ball band dishcloth.

It's made with a dark brown (Espresso) Lion Cotton background and a light brown (camel?) Peaches n Creme foreground. (Actually, Lion Cotton is Peaches'n'creme! It´s the same yarn. )



I continued to use the dark brown yarn and made a grocery bag dispenser. It's very quick and satisfying project and in the end you have a very utilitarian object. Anyone that has done grocery shopping in the US will come out with multitude of small little grocery bags and no good place to put them ;)



I wonder what other brown objects are in my future? (if any!)

Floppy Fish

It's been a while since I bought the book Amigurumi Two! , which I got at my LYS. I remember that last summer (2009) I got yarn meant for a project from this book. I loved the little amigurumi toys in there and wanted to make bunch of them. Well, I finally made one.



The yarn is Berroco Comfort with 4.00 mm hook, which is totally fake (i.e. made out of Nylon and Acrylic), but it´s soft, so I wanted to try it for toys. It is indeed soft, and maybe even too soft. The fins are a little floppy for my taste, and hence the title of the post 'Floppy Fish'. But I stuffed him very tightly so the body of the fish is not fluffy.



Now I want to make the little fish out of Cascade 220 and see what difference that will make. Then I can decide for future toy projects (whether or not from this book) what to use.

Here are some picture of the kids and the dog playing with the floppy fish. They like him and at the end of the day, that's what matters most.

Weekend blanket

There you have my weekend project. On Friday evening I bought the yarn on Final Fridays, which takes place the last Friday of the month in Nelsonville, where the shops and the galleries (majority art and craft related) stay open until 10 PM and often have something to eat or drink or special happenings. This time it was the 'dog days of summer' theme and people brought their dogs and they had competitions and such (King and Queen, dress-up, etc.).

The weekend project is a baby blanket for a office mate of mine. She is due in a month and I wanted to make something for her. The yarn is Plymouth Yarn Encore, worsted weight. I've never before used this yarn, although it is the most popular at the local yarn shop (Spinning Turtle in Nelsonville). I can't say I enjoyed working with it a lot, although I loved the colors. The yarn is 70% acrylic and 30% wool and is washable. I didn't want to make the mother-to-be's life too complicated by giving her a wool blanket, so I went with the washable yarn.

The pattern is 'Easy ripple afghan' and is a plain ripple pattern. I love the pattern. It was hard to stop and you just wanted to keep on going, especially with the frequent color changes. But other than that, it is a very easy to learn pattern and consists of only double crochet stitches (dc, stuðull), which makes it very quick.

I used 6mm (J) hook and started with 66 chain stitches. I started out with much more but ended in 66. It ended up as 23"x28" (60x70 cm) or 5 repeats of 4 colors (plus an extra stripe of blue) and used quite a bit less than a skein each of the 4 colors (each skein is 100 gr and 200 yards).

I still have to weave in the ends, and as you can see, there are plenty of them.

Here is another photo with our new dog, Ruby, included. This one has not been altered to fix the colors (unlike the first one).

A thought

I need a portable project.

I'm totally in love with crochet hexagons. I'm up to 38 hexagons on the blanket now (the picture shows the blanket at 22 hexagons). The endless possibilities of color combination and the fact that you never do the same hexagon twice in a row and that the blanket basically makes itself (finish ends and combining hexagons as you go). However, it's not very portable. I'd have to log around all these skeins of yarn, and they would be all over the place.



The other project I'm working on is a sweater I started on March 1st. It's pattern nr. 18 on this Danish site. Yes, it's been that long and I finally just finished the sleeves 10 days ago (while at a knitting retreat with some great (knitting) friends - where the hexagon blanket got a lot of attention) and started the main body of the sweater shortly thereafter, but after I made the whole ribbing (this was during the last episode of LOST) I realized I'd made a mistake. I can't go on and ignore it and the mistake only came along because I didn't read through the sentence describing how do do it :o In my defense, it was hard to concentrate with LOST on, especially the very last episode!



This is not a very portable project either, not until I've finished the very bottom piece with all the color changes. Once I'm up far enough that it's just knitting around and around, it will be a portable project.

I guess I know now what to focus on now. All I have to do is restart the body of the sweater and I'll end up with a portable project.

Problem solved





Of course I could always start a new project.............

Crochet goodness

Do you want to see some crochet goodness. Feast your eyes on these flickr groups:

• Hexagon Love
• Vintage Stripe Blanket


• Crochet Potholders and Hotpads


• Crochet Afghans

'New' fad

It's not exactly new (to me) but I've been bitten by the crochet bug. I mostly knit lately, but crochet once in a while. For an Icelander crocheting is not a craft on it's own, as much as another side of the coin for knitting. No one only crochets there, or at least no one I've every heard off. So I found it interesting that there were people in America that only crocheted and knitters that said they could only knit, not crochet. That's beside the point.

I'm crocheting now.

It started with crochet mittens.



My grandmother gave me a whole lot of Einband, in bright and beautiful colors for Christmas, and I've been wanting to make something out of it. Normally you would make shawls out of this yarn, but it has the potential for much more. It´s gained more and more popularity as a sweater yarn, and I've started a sweater (hoodie even) from this yarn (the never-ending-sleeves I've been working on since March 1st). This idea wasn't mine, I saw a similar project on Ravely, but I made a pattern of crochet mittens from Prjóniprjón, an Icelandic knitting book I bought (from one of the the author) the last time I was in Iceland.



I combined two threads of Einband, pink (1768) and magenta (9142), and used a 4.5 mm hook. I started off with 32 chains for the base and the only changes I did was to do a SC decrease but the pattern suggested to skip a SC for a decrease.

It's a quick and easy project and I basically just 'molded' the mittens to my hand (i.e. kept trying them on to see if the size was correct). They do have a potential for some cool embroidery too, but for now I'm not going to go that way.

---

Before I had even sewn in the ends for the mittens, I had my next crochet project started. One that I'm obsessed over. I'm making another blanket (what is it about blankets and me????) and it's made out of hexagons. I can't even describe how much joy I'm getting out of this project. I'm following directions from Attic24, which are just brilliant (Attic24 is brilliant too, especially at color - take a look at her blog and see for yourself). What is so genius about this pattern is that there is minimal finishing (I'm not too big on finishing). Each hexagon only ends up with one end to weave in, even if I use 4 colors for it! And that's not all. I don't even have to sew the hexagons together, but crochet them together as I go. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.



The yarn I'm making the blanket with is Kambgarn. It's a sport weight yarn, dyed and distributed by Istex (Icelandic yarn maker). I was collecting this yarn, most of it I got gifted to me, but some I purchased last time I was in Iceland. I had intended it for multicolor mittens and hats, but never seemed to actually make these things. The yarn is perfect for the purpose of making a blanket, I have 22 50 gr skeins in 10 colors, thereof 8 in one color (moss green), which I can use for the main color of the blanket. The challenge is that the colors are a bit haphazard (three different shades of red and green), I would not have chosen exactly these colors if I had chosen them from scratch for the blanket, but they are not too dissimilar, so they will work.



I'm going to make the blanket as big as it will get with the yarn I have (or at least that is the plan to start of with). Each hexagon is quick (I haven't timed it yet), so it is a nice project to grab when I sit down and take a break on the weekend (I've only really worked on it over the weekend!) or any other time I'm not sitting down for extended period of time.

I don't know how long the honeymoon will last but at the moment I'm quite enamored by the little hexagons and want to continue with hexagon nr. 9, which I had just started before I started writing this post.