Snowed In

So basically, I haven’t left my house since I got home from the gym on Friday.

  This is the part of our deck that is under the roof.
Since then, I’d estimate we’ve gotten at least six inches of snow. We took some time out this morning to shovel the driveway, but because there were plenty of reports of just how terrible the roads were, we decided to just not go anywhere.


A friend of mine went to church this morning with her family. Roughly a mile away from their house. It took them almost an hour to get home, so I think we made the right choice! Since I stayed indoors, I did a few small things in my weaving room that I’d been meaning to do for a while. The first was that I took the screen off of a side window in my weaving room and put up two pieces of stained glass that I got in Ireland last year.


I also got out my hammer, and hung a piece of art that came from my mom’s sewing room. It’s titled “She Works With Quills,” and the joke that the last word was “Quilts.” Mom was a quilter, which is what made me start. And I liked it, so I re-homed it.


And then, I got a warp under tension and started to weave.


It’s rep weave, so it’s weaving off very quickly. Which is great, because I have several more warps just waiting to jump on the loom. And since we’re looking to have more snow followed by Polar Vortex temperatures, more weaving is just what Old Man Winter ordered. I love it!

WiP Thursday

So I kind of missed yesterday. It was a busy SpaceCadet day. I took this pile

  That’s a black-and-white photo, folks. I can’t spoil the surprise!
Matched everything up with a “shiny” and dyers notes and got rid of this mountain.


The Yarn Alliance is on its way today!

Yes, this was Polar Vortex Week here in the East. The Hubster was out of town for the first half of the week, so I took a pic of our indoor/outdoor thermometer for him on Tuesday night. Just FYI, the clock is set to Daylight Time, and since it sits right next to a correctly-set clock that’s easier to see, I never bother to change it.


And, in other news, I was in a hurry yesterday, but I did snap a picture of my Leftie-in-Progress:


The color from last week is actually true. The above pic is way too blue. But you can see how much progress I’ve made! My main skein is looking a little thin, so we’ll just see where this thing ends up.

Lintilla

I’m not much for pastel colors. But then a funny thing happened at the Pittsburgh Knit & Crochet Festival way back in March.

I was working the SpaceCadet booth on Friday, and I needed something to wear during the show. So I grabbed something out of the sample pile. It was Peacethrufiber’s Lintilla shawl.


I’ve never gotten so many compliments on a knitted item in my life.

So I decided pretty quickly that I needed to make one for myself. Fortunately, I know the dyer of the yarn, and she was willing to dye two skeins of Lucina (our sparkly base) in Usui for me to use for this shawlette.


She even through in a tiny bit more color than normal, including a little extra purple. Yay! The yarn landed at my house for my birthday, and I started it shortly after I got home from Oklahoma in mid-June.

My summer was full of lots of things that weren’t necessarily knitting-friendly, but I had a deadline. I needed a finished SpaceCadet knitted thing in time for Indie Knit & Spin in November. Especially since Peacethrufiber has moved to Hong Kong and taken her Lintilla with her!


I knit the increase pattern to 30 ruffles, if I remember correctly, then started the endless short rows. I had plenty of yarn, but because of how the shawl is shaped, it was gonna get really funny-looking if I kept going before I started to decrease.


All in all, I’m pleased with the project. I love knitting garter stitch, and this was no exception. Yay having a work-appropriate “thing” to wear at shows!

    Lintilla    Pattern: Lintilla by Martina Behm  Size: Shawl-sized  Yarn: SpaceCadet Creations Lucina  Color: Usui  Amount: Roughly 1.3 skeins  Needles: US 3 (3.25 mm)  Started: 10 June 2013  Finished: 29 October 2013  Mods: None, other than freestyling the number of ruffles before I started decreasing.

Jazz Reprise

I knit my first Shawl That Jazz a couple years ago, and it was both a really fun knit and a shawl I use fairly regularly. Win!


So, when I stumbled across two skeins of Blue Moon Twisted at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival back in May, I decided to jump back in again. (and I kind of enabled two friends along the way. Oops?)


Once again, the pattern knit up really quickly, and I like the finished shawl.

Thanks much to my friend Stephanie for putting a fresh eye behind my camera. And provided the mannequin. Yay! 

The Twisted is extremely squishy and makes a nice garter stitch fabric. Picking up the wraps to create the ruffle is the only mildly complex part of the process. All in all, I wouldn’t be surprised if yet another one of these winds up on my needles eventually!

Shawl That Jazz, Volume II 

Pattern: Shawl That Jazz by Samantha Roshak 

Size: Shawl-sized 

Yarn: Blue Moon Fiber Arts Twisted 

Color: Pussy Broadway 

Amount: 2 skeins 

Needles: US 10.5 (6.5mm) 

Started: 10 May 2013 

Finished: 26 May 2013 

Mods: Knit the ruffle until I ran out of yarn/had barely enough to bind off. Yay, scales!

Actually, I Don’t Love It …

It was Thanksgiving Day 2012 when I got a text from my dear friend Sara saying that her knitting pattern, Love Actually is All Around had been accepted to Knitty.

There are many reasons I decided to knit this cowl.

Support my friend Sara by knitting her pattern.

Support another friend by using SpaceCadet Yarn.

Have a clue what was happening with the KAL that SpaceCadet hosted on our Ravelry group, since I’m a mod over there.

Learn a new technique (that’s always a good idea!)

 I had taken Sara’s pictures for her submission to Knitty, and I’ll admit that those are much better than the two I snapped of my finished cowl before it went off to live in the SpaceCadet samples bin.


Double knitting is a cool technique. It yields a two-sided tube that is identical on both sides in the way a negative is identical to the photographic print it creates (Yep. I’m old. I used to develop/print my own pictures!) I had a few hiccups on the “inside” of the cowl. Once I figured it out and had hit the halfway point of the project, I was ready to be done. But I persevered, and finished it anyway.

Yay, learning a new technique! I doubt I’ll run to double knitting any time soon, but hey, now I know how to do it!

Love Actually Cowl 

Pattern: Love Actually is All Around by Sara Bench 

Size: Cowl-sized 

Yarn: SpaceCadet Creations Astrid 

Colors: Heartbeat and Torment (both were Poor Plutos, having small flaws) 

Amount: One skein of each 

Needles: US 8 

Started: 15 February 2013 

Finished: 9 May 2013 

Mods: HAHAHAHAhahahaha … No mods. Just mistakes!

Last Year’s Projects

I’m going to tackle these unblogged finished projects in the order in which they were completed. I figure I may as well pick an order that makes sense!

The oldest finished project on my list (nine projects. This is going to take a little while!) is a Christmas gift that just went out to its new home a little over a week ago.


I’ve been working with Jeff, my personal trainer, at my gym for several years now. Not only does he help me keep this aging body in one piece and in good working order, he’s become a damn good friend.


Jeff is a Penn State grad, and was on the Pirates bandwagon earlier than anyone else I know (we’re talking 4-5 years ago. When that was just nuts.). When he and Kate got married a few years ago, I wove a blanket for them, and of course I ordered extra yarn to make sure I wouldn’t run out.

The navy in the blanket bled like it had never been set. So my good friend Stephanie offered to set the color on two of the leftover skeins of Cascade 220 so I could knit a scarf for Jeff. She couldn’t believe how much they bled either!


From there, it was off to the races. My usual 70 stitches in the round, 20-row stripes, cut the fringe before I start, and knit until I run out of the end-color. Zoom. Jeff and Kate both liked the gift. Probably because it means they can dress like the Nittany Lion for football games now.

Nittany Scarf 

Pattern: House Scarves, Year 1-2, from Charmed Knits 

Size: Scarf-sized 

Yarn: Cascade 220 

Colors: Navy, White 

Amount: 2 skeins of each color 

Needles: US 8, 16” from my KA Switch set 

Started: 16 January 2013 

Finished: 24 March 2013 

Mods: I don’t count stripes, just knit until I’m out of yarn. Is that a mod? Probably not.

A New Year

So it’s January 1, and it’s been radio silence on the blog for quite a while.

I’d at least like to wrap up the projects that I finished in 2013, and then I’ll hopefully be back in the blogging groove! That’s a long list, and I’m chipping away at getting those posts in the bank.

But meanwhile, today is Wednesday. So let’s start off the year right, with a WiP Wednesday post!

My Swirl is still languishing in a corner. If I sat down and actually, y’know, worked on it, I’m pretty sure it could be finished in short order.

Instead, I’ve been working on a Leftie shawl, knit with a SpaceCadet Creations Leftie kit.


It had a false start when I decided that even though I was two leafs into a 1-5, 1-5 repeat (light to dark every time), it would be better if I went light-to-dark-to-light.

A Twitter-encouraged frogging of about two inches and a re-ordering of leaf colors, and I’m off to the races.


I wasted a perfectly good warp-the-loom day on Saturday, so I’m officially committing to my next weaving project. This really narrow warp will go on at my next opportunity, and will hopefully weave quickly.


It had better weave quickly. I have two tencel warps ready to roll waiting in line behind it!