Long Time No See (aka I've Been Lazy)

Maybe not so lazy about projects, but very lazy about posting. I think I just doubled my old record of four months between posts. Part of the reason is that I just keep making the same things over & over and it's got to be boring on your end to look at lap robes & hats when the only differences are the colors. Anyway, I started out the cooler days of fall crocheting more lap robes for the Veterans' Hospital.

This last one is knit. Our K4 group was given a number of lightweight coned yarns & I knit this one from five strands on size 13 needles. I has royal blue, navy, purple & two strands of black. Still the purple & blue seem to stand out most. Working with 5 strands of lace weight yarn wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done, so I was very glad to bind it off.

We had a request from one of our members for baby afghans for an organization serving families of Down's Syndrome babies in Michigan's Upper Pennisula. We were able to send a dozen including these two which were made from donated granny squares. Carol sewed the squares together & I worked a different color border on each. I only have photos of these two but we had five of them total.

Then my world changed thanks to this little gadget..

My DH bought me a B&W Nook for a belated birthday/early Xmas present around December 1st! With it, I can download books via our library from the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services and I've really been reading a lot - over 50 books since I got the Nook set up & figured out the download process. It's really great because when I finish a book, I can immediately return it for the next person on the waiting list. I've had a wide variety of books to read and it's much easier to balance the Nook on my knees while I'm knitting or crocheting than my old method of keeping a book open on my lap with a clothes pin. Only problem is that if I brush the screen with either my project or just the yarn, I can wind up on a different page so I switched to hats, scarfs & dishcloths - smaller projects that I can normally keep away from the screen. I didn't bother to take a photo of the 50+ dishcloths I finished because they looked so much like the last batch.

This first hat was worked in bulky WoolEase. The band is seed stitch & is worked sideways with the crown picked up and finished.

A hat & scarf set in a bulky boucle. The hat is knit in Quaker stitch & the scarf is simple garter stitch.

This crocheted scarf was made pre-nook. You start with a long chain & then work increasing numbers of triple crochet in each row. I used a narrow ribbon yarn in white. It went on our sale case & was gone the first day.

Another scarf worked in garter stitch, but this time I placed a marker three stitches in from one edge & knit the 4th stitch through the back to twist it. When I bound off, I let the three stitches unravel creating a fringe.

A couple more bulky hats knit in the round with wide seed or moss stitch bands switching to ribbing at the top.

And here again is my "go-to" hat pattern in various colors - I'm trying to work my way through the stash of K4 yarn left over from other projects that has accumulated.

You may have noticed that large orange & white kitty in one of the shots. Remember last October when I told about adopting Quinn and that he was one of the youngest & smallest cats to join our family. Well, he didn't realize that he was supposed to have already reached full size and has expanded like a cactus after a rainstorm. He's now around 20#s, up from 13#s & has grown in height & length as well as width..

And then there's my new "baby". They went & moved the Senior Center from here in the village to out on Joslyn Road about 8 miles away. I haven't had a car of my own since my 1988 Colt kicked the bucket at age 18. I wanted something small, so I've been waiting for the last year while Toyota's Scion IQ made its way from showrooms on the west coast to the south, to New England & finally here to Michigan. I think it was worth the wait. It's 10' long, two doors & a hatch with ample storage room when the back seats are folded down. Four star safety rating with 11 airbags & it's supposed to get 37mpg. The color is Hot Lava!!

Heading For Malta

A couple weeks ago I was contacted by an elderly lady who wanted to order a two shawls to take with her when she moved back to Malta this spring so she could give them to friends who remained there when she moved to the States. She came into the Senior Center a few days later & I helped her pick out yarn from our K4 stash (a shawl needs at least 8 ounces). She chose a taupe & a navy & I started knitting. I used worsted weight yarn & size 15 needles starting with a simple cast-on of 5 stitches for the back of the neck. The first row was K2, YO, K1, YO, K2 with the K1 forming the center of the back & continuing to increase four stitches on every other row. I added some simple lace to the outer sections with garter stitch rows to form a non-roll border at the outside edge.


The lace on the taupe shawl is a 12 stitch repeat of Feather & Fan that I first adapted for socks. The original F&F is an 18 stitch repeat.


The navy shawl's lace is a very simple eyelet that slants into the center stitch by using slip 1 to knit, slip 1 to purl, k2tog on the right side for a left leaning decrease & k2tog on the other side of the center stitch for a right leaning decrease.

Emma picked the shawls up this last Monday and told me that she loved them. Her friend who drove her to the Senior Center was threatening to make off with the taupe shawl so I may get another order in the future. I hope her friends back in Malta like them too.

Lap Robes For The Veterans' Hospital

Since the start of the year, I've been working on lap robes that will go to the Veterans' Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This hospital receives between 30 & 35 military personel a month who have been maimed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The chaplin from the American Legion who picks up the lap robes at the Senior Center where our K4group meets and delivers them to the hospital tells us that many of these men & women arrive with absolutely nothing and the robes help them to cover the wounds thus preserving their dignity. Anyway, here are the latest ones that I've turned in. All are crocheted in the brick (box, brain-dead) stitch using leftovers from last year's hats & scarves along with the creams, whites & beiges that our group has in abundance.











The day I took the photos of the finished robes was brighter than I thought & the flash on my camera didn't go off. The photos above show the center sections quite well but the darker colored ends sort of blur together. The following swatches match the order of the above photos and, with the flash, give a better idea of the colors I used although they're actually darker than shown - somewhere between the two sets of photos.











I'm already working on the next lap robe but I need to take some time to knit another pair of Fuzzy Feet as DH has already worn holes in the pair I made him in January.

Lots of Knitting, Very Little Blogging

Yup, I did it again - over three weeks since the last post - but I'll try to make it up with lots of photos. I mentioned last time that I'd been concentrating on making fancier than usual items for our Xmas Craft Show at the Sr. Center (proceeds will go to buying machine washable yarns for our K4 group's charity knitting). These also qualify for the Winter Warmies KAL over on the Knitting Purls group on Ravelry.

First of all, three hats all basically the same design with rolled brims & a purl row before flat decreasing the crown by working the decreases every row. The red & green ones are adult size while the purple one is for a child as there wasn't enough of the ribbon yarn.



Knit with a strand of bright red sayelle and one of ribbon yarn to add some sparkle.



Again a strand of mossy green sayelle combined with a double strand of variegated green mohair.



A ball of striped blue & purple ribbon yarn combined with the purple sayelle.

I'm awfully glad that Zarzuela started the cowl craze over on Plurk - I've been making them for our Xmas Craft Show at the Sr. Center and have already sold a couple to staff members who saw them (no photos of those, sorry). Here are the latest ones - and the biggest reason why I haven't been blogging:













Two of them are the Birthday Cowl from Nova Made, one is a 12 stitch Feather & Fan repeat, two are plain because the yarn is so pretty in person and the last, the rust ribbed one, doesn't look like much laying on the floor, but it's cute under a denim jacket.



Yes, more cowls - this one of light blue mohair with a simple YO, SSK pattern every other row and garter stitch top & bottom to keep it from rolling.



These last four cowls are worked in simple stockinette with garter borders as the yarns carry the design without adding lace or cables (which would probably have been lost anyway). This one is solid black with red threads.



A pink mohair yarn carried with a variegated slubbed in pink, grey & purple created this look.



A grey feathered yarn carried with a strand of black sayelle makes for a chenille look.



My personal favorite - the fancy yarn was sport weight with large unspun slubs of color that I worked with a black sayelle to add warmth.

These have been so much fun to make and there will be more coming as the craft show doesn't start until the first week in December. Back to my needles!

See Why I Love This Guy??

We went to a lot of garage sales yesterday and had planned on doing it again this morning, but I had trouble sleeping last night and wasn't ready to greet the rosy fingers of dawn until almost noon. DH left a note and went without me which was fine, but just look at what he brought back!! Four large bags of yarn all for $4 for our K4 group!!


This pile is baby & sport weight yarn that will be given to Pat. Pat crochets the most exquisite baby sets & blankets so this will give her a lot to work with over the summer.


This pile is worsted weight so it's destined for hats, scarves, shawls & afghans. Our usual yarn supply store, Meijer's, seems to be going out of the yarn business and only carries about 1/10th of what they used to, so lucking into all of this for less than what it would cost for two skeins regularly is great. And I wasn't even along {bg}..


At K4 yesterday, we found that someone had dropped off a couple bags of yarn including one of fancy stuff. I combined a navy with slubs of rainbow colors with a ball of purple Fun Fur and came up with this hat.


The bag also included a number of unusual yarns in shades of green so I'm making this fashion scarf for our craft sale later this year. I think the flash missed going off so I apologize for the dark picture. Once it's completed I'll try to get a better shot. This is being knit with one strand of a bluish green worsted worked together with the fancy stuff on size 19 needles. Next to it you can see the smaller selection of reds that I hope to use for another scarf.


Here's my latest sock! Knit with Vinca Colorway #10 on size 2 Harmony double points. My usual pattern with a simple K2, P2 ribbing for the leg.


It turned out way neater than I'd hoped seeing the yarn in the skein. Instead of "garish" as I described it in an earlier post, it's "vibrant" and I love it.