Busy Day

Today was pretty busy. In addition to some shopping and taking Mom to bingo, I managed to finish up quite a few projects.

First off, the Feather & Fan vest for the Knit Red KAL:



This was made out of Bernat worsted weight acrylic and took about 3/4ths of an 8 ounce skein on size 8 & 11 needles. It's small on me, so it should fit Mom just fine.

Next up, the results of flying needles while watching NCIS & House this evening - all these are for charity via our K4 group. The pale pink baby afghan is out of two skeins of Bernat Lollipop, 75 double crochet with a size K hook. The rainbow hat is from Red Heart Mexicali worsted weight, 64 stitches on a size 10.5 circular needle, finished with a straight 3 needle bind-off and the two corners tacked together. The booties are from the yarn Heather sent a few weeks ago. I've been knitting them right along with the other projects and sewed these up tonight - notice anything strange??



Yup, I seem to have an extra.. I was sure that I had knit six of the variegated ones, but right now I can only find five of them. I was getting pretty worried until I realized that I still have a full skein of that yarn. WHEW...

That leaves the Clapotis which is getting quite near the decrease section and the adult sized rag-tag afghan as the only active projects on the needles at the moment. But I have yarn for more hats, more booties (including the missing one) and at least one more baby afghan. Decisions, decisions! What am I going to start before bed-time? Stay tuned for further developments ...

A Clapotis Update

I've been working on my #2 Clapotis off and on over the last couple weeks. It's going a bit slower than #1 as I've been taking more time for the charity knitting, but it is coming along. I'm just getting ready to drop the 9th stitch and I love the drape that I'm getting with the size 10.5 needles. This one is going to be a *LOT* bigger. The first skein of yarn is almost gone and when I had to join the second skein on #1, I was at the point of starting the decreases - or 4 more dropped stitches along.



At the K4 meeting today, Diana - who has started her own Clapotis - gifted me with 30 "bone" rings to use as stitch markers. They do slide along more easily than the elastic bands I was using and seem to work just great. Thanks, Diana!!



Here is a close of the dropped stitches - you'll notice that the spread of the bars is about twice that of the ones knit on size 8 needles and that where it isn't stretched out for show & tell, the ripples close up nicely.



Right now, it measures about 28" on the narrow side and 55" on the long side with another 32 rows or more left before the decreases start. I noticed on #1 that the decrease end is more pointy than the increase end. I'm not sure why that should be as for the increases, it's one stitch increased at the end of each row and for the decreases, it's one stitch decreased at the end of each row. Logic says that the ends should turn out identical, but they're not. I'm not the only one noticing this as it's been mentioned on the KAL. When I get to the decreases, I'm going to take a long hard look at what happened with #1 and see if I can figure out a way of making the two ends match.

In other non-Clapotis news, I worked on the pale pink crocheted baby afghan, finished off another bootie and have a rainbow colored hat with black ribbing all ready to finish. Our K4 group had a request from the local FISH organization for more winter hats, especially for men, so Virginia was going to drop off a dozen caps and six scarves today or tomorrow. Oh, and you'll notice over in the side bar that there are buttons to two rings that I just joined. The Knitting Bloggers is huge with over 600 members. If you want to spend an enjoyable evening sometime, just keep hitting the Random button on the main site and you can travel the world. Thrifty Knits is a brand new ring, dedicated to finding sources for reasonably priced yarn.

Fabulous Finishing Friday

Arrggg.. a long, long post just disappeared!.. Friday is suddenly looking a little less fabulous!! I'm going to compose this one in EditPad and paste it in so I have a backup just in case Blogger burps again.

Anyway, I did finish quite a bit today, so that part of the title is correct. The socks for the 1st Sock KAL are finished, finally. I don't know if I'll ever become a sock addict. It's not that I didn't have fun knitting them, but I found myself putting off the grafting of the toe for days and days. I finally forced myself to sit down in front of the computer and pull up the directions for the chimney toe grafting. I found that it's not as easy as the pictures make it look as on the site they used a contrasting yarn for the graft and it was easy to see where the last stitch and the next stitch were. Using the same color yarn as the sock was more confusing and I think I missed a few loops or grafted to a stitch below the one I should have used. I tacked those stray loops down on the inside with the yarn ends (3 of them - both ends of the grafting yarn plus the yarn tail from the sock). Here are the finished socks plus a close up of the toe grafts.





I also sewed up the latest two pair of baby booties from the yarn that Heather sent. I've found that the best way to have the seams look neat is to use the mattress stitch on the back seam then turn the bootie inside out and overcast the cast-on stitches of the sole from the inside.



The purple & lilac baby afghan is complete and as I have enough of both yarns for a second one, I started it this evening.



Finally, I joined the Knit Red KAL hosted by Sallee at Knitana The goal is to knit anything you want as long as it's RED symbolizing the National Heart, Blood, and Lung Institute's Red Dress Campaign to publicize the fact that heart disease is a woman's issue too. This afternoon I cast on stitches for a sleeveless vest in the brightest red yarn I could find in my stash, a Bernat worsted weight. The vest is a lacy feather & fan pattern, originally designed to be knit as a front & a back and then sewn together at the sides and shoulders, but I'm going to work it on circular needles up to the armholes and use a 3 needle bind-off for the shoulders. The armholes have garter stitch edging that's knit along with the body, so I should only have to run in a few yarn ends to finish it.