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!!

No Second Sock Syndrome Here..

Blogger still will not allow me to put in a title, so I'm putting it in the first line.


My friend Sallee of KnitNana & Nana Sadie Rose Bags often tells me that I'm a perfectionist. I normally don't agree, but in this case, I think I was and that it worked out fine. Not only don't I have 2nd sock syndrome, they're going to match - even better than it looks here because if I turned the one I'm working on over, that little line of pink from the cast on is on the other side. So far, so good..


Here's another hat from the pattern I've been playing with from Gloria's book. This time, I wanted to see what it would look like if I staggered the nubs instead of lining them up as I did on the last hat plus added an extra row of main color knitting between the rows of nubs. I have an even different version on the needles now.


I decided that I didn't like the way that the top of the blue hat pooched up when I worked the decreases every other row, so on this one, I decreased every row which produced a flat top. That's another one of my semi-messy pompoms - it was almost a disaster as something went wrong when I tied it (still trying to figure out exactly what) and when I cut the side away from the tie, I suddenly had about 150 short pieces of yarn in my lap with no tie around them. Thanks to help from my DH, I managed to salvage the mess.


And, as always, more washcloths for Cloths For Crisis I have one more complete except for running in the yarn ends and two more on the needles - one in my knitting bag and the other here on the desk for when I'm web surfing.

Washcloths, Rag-Tags & Short Row Heels

I didn't feel like knitting anything serious this week so I worked on the epitome of mindless knitting - garter stitch washcloths for our Cloths For Crisis group. I finished nine of them since last Thursday and have another one on the needles.



For "TV Time" - Dr. Who & Little Mosque on the Prairie on CBC; Ballykissangel, History Detectives & Nature on PBS - I worked on the latest rag-tag afghan and finished it. I have about 8" done on another one. After all the afghans I've made, I still enjoy playing with the colors.

My BIG accomplishment of the week was finally sitting down last night and trying one more method of working short rows for a sock heel. This is sort of my own method dreamed up one night when I couldn't sleep and started thinking of ways to do short rows without having holes. The sample looks good, but the acid test will be the sock itself. I picked it up again last night and started working toward the point where I'll start the heel.


The sides don't look identical - probably because I'm knitting together on one side & purling on the other, but it seems to be working!



I hope it does work because I picked up another skein of sock yarn at a garage sale a couple weeks ago and I don't want to feel as guilty about that purchase as I have about the current socks being on the needles for well over a year. After several tries, I found a toe-up start method that works for me, but have been stymied by all the practice short row heels I've sampled looking messy until now.