It's a Break, Not a Breakup

I am not knitting till the new year. I am pooped from Christmas knitting and quite frankly I don't have anything that I can sit with quietly and just knit. The sleeves need to be joined to the body of my bottom up baby sweater which requires scrap yarn and and lots of loose ends and my French Press Slippers need to be seamed and there's a lot of ends and parts for those as well. The only other thing I have with me to work on are socks which I have to restart. I got to here before I tinked them. I was using this fake cables pattern but the yarn makes me want plain vanilla ones so I decided to start afresh. We are going to head back to DC soon so I think I am just going to stay still for a while.

pre-tinked sock

Holiday Homemade

It's funny that I am making a big deal of these stitch markers since they were probably the easiest thing I made this week and took the least amount of time. I really love them, however, because I did not have any fancy dangly-ish stitch markers like the ladies in my knitting group or like ones I see in Ravelry pictures of WIPs. So now I have some. And it only took an evening to make around twenty. And it was a very inexpensive project!

I had these beads sitting around in my bedroom (most of them from high school) so all I needed was some beading wire, little jewelry loop things and crimping tubes, all of which I found at JoAnn Fabric. (Side note- it was my first time at JoAnn's and I want to live in that store. I would have so much fun!) I stayed up (maybe till 3am) making these while my little brother played video games in the adjoining room to keep me company and it was nice to see my little pile of markers grow. Now that I have lots of leftover wire and crimping tubes (but no more beads) I would like to make these again maybe even fancier when I go home, but this was a good way to use up the beads I had and make something I am going to enjoy using.

Knitting in a Holidaze

My dad noted that I hadn't been posting a lot lately. And this is true. I have been busy with work and I have also been working on Christmas knitting gifts so I haven't wanted to spill the beans (not that any of the recipients read my blog). Now I can tell a little bit because I have given one knitted gift already, to my friend Stacey. She runs, and I thought this would be nice on cold days:

I used the Braided Ear Warmer pattern in Rowan Lima and it knitted up pretty fast on the metro and home after work. It is super soft and feels like it will keep her ears nice and toasty. I was worried that the cables wouldn't show up but they ended up much more defined than I thought.

Another gift I just finished and can share here is the Zelda Cloche from the most recent KnitScene magazine which I made for my husband's aunt using Karabella Soft Tweed. I loved the colors used for the hat in the magazine and the model totally worked it! I felt like my aunt-in-law would like something a bit more neutral, however, so I used a brown color for the contrast stripes. I absolutely love this yarn. I have several skeins of it hanging about and I want to make a Turn a Square hat in it for my husband, but the way my holiday knitting is going, I think this is going to be a 2012 project.

So here is the cloche. I will be replacing the button for a toggle button because I don't like the way this button looks. I was just curious to see how the loop worked.

Yarn Kitten!!!

I am still a little traumatized by my summer working at Old Navy and I don't know how I feel about this grandma-bot machine that churns out knitted items while I spend days working on a single sock cuff but I love the knitty kitty so much I had to share:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CinTc-8vdaQ

I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season and that your knits, whether bot-made or handmade, are keeping you warm!! 

Drop and Roll!

SO many updates but it is pretty late so I will just post the main one- I am a spinner!! Thanks to my wonderful husband I was able to take a spinning class at Fibre Space. I already had a drop spindle (which I had tried to spin with but couldn't make it work) and I took it to last week's class expecting to come out of there spinning nice, even, lightweight yarn.

That didn't happen, which was disappointing, HOWEVER, two things:
1. The instructor said my yarn was lovely and in the beginning everyone's always looks like that. She also said that if I kept practicing, pretty soon I would long for the days when I could spin a natural looking thick-and-thin yarn. Maybe.

2. The yarn I spun today came out much better. I really liked it.

So...moral of the story? If you complain about something a lot and think it isn't for you, maybe you will really like it? That was how this was for me and I can't wait to spin more and try different fibers, and make stuff from my own-spun yarn!!