Dragon Rambles

Thanks everyone for your input. Derelict daughter brought in four votes, midnight had three and bramble got two. The basic feedback was all the colours rock. Yes, yes, they do, that’s why they were in the list to choose from

I thought about it, and yo-yo’d back and forth then I finally put some logic to it.

I’m planning to order derelict daughter in the merino/silk 4ply to knit this sweater in a couple of months (ok, so origninally it was supposed to be my Feb project, but Spring madness changed that tune).

It’s Blumchen, by Anne Hanson. I borrowed the photo from ravelry. Click on the photo to go to the pattern’s page, where you can get the pattern if you want to knit it too .

And I have some deep purple-blue gossamer yarn to make this shawl. Pinched off flickr again, and funnily enough the same knitter of Spring. Told you she was talented.

It’s the wedding ring shawl by Heirloom Knitting.

So I figured that left bramble. No hardship at all. But midnight and gothic will be up my sleeve for future projects. Once I’ve knitted my way a bit through the ones I’ve already got organised. Or not, as that’s probably five years of knitting, and I don’t think I could be that good.

Ok, so a few years ago I started knitting because I was seduced by lace knitting and wanted to do that. Fast forward a little, after getting bored with the easy projects I was knitting to ease in, and after moving to the UK and being exposed to Heirloom Knitting (somehow), I jumped in and knit an heirloom shawl/blanket for a friend’s first baby. Dodgy pics can be found here.

Then work swallowed my life and knitting was forgotten. But I’ve (obviously) gotten back into the knitting groove lately, and everything I’ve worked on has been easy. Well, we won’t talk about the seaming of cardis and coats…

Anyway, where was I? Oh, easy. Now some of you may know that easy just isn’t me. Sure, it’s great to have projects you can work on when you’re tired, but I like something I can really sink my teeth into. And the list of Heirloom Knitting projects I want to make has been howling.

So now we come to the point of this post. Lilith, of Old Maiden Aunt fame, has announced the Feb KAL theme: love. Basically any project that you love but haven’t had the time to do, any yarn you’d love to try… You get the picture. At first I thought this’d be hard to narrow down. Until I decided that Feb should be a two-theme month, and the second theme should be: insanity.

Have you guys guessed where I’m headed with this?

I have decided to start the Spring shawl from Heirloom Knitting. I’ve swiped this photo off flickr, hope the owner doesn’t mind, but really I’m using it to show you one beautiful rendition of this shawl, and why I want to make it. As always, clicking on the pic will take you to its flickr home where you’ll get to see more project pics by this very talented knitter.

But the question is… What colour? I’m going to knit this with OMA merino/silk lace. Here are the colours I’m thinking of.

Bramble..

Derelict daughter..

Gothic…

Midnight…

See… Tricky. I’d love them all. Which would you choose?

Oh, and maybe you’re wondering where the insanity comes in. Well, this is a month-long KAL, so I’ll start it on the 1st of Feb and try to finish it by the last day! Just as well Feb has an extra day this year. I may need it

Could be better, could be worse, but he’s done.

And will be delivered tomorrow. I hope the little two year old boy, who’s favourite colour is blue, likes him.

Back to working on my Get a life quilt. Just the one block this week, Country Path.

The photo’s not the best, it’s difficult to get the colours showing in artificial light, but I wanted to post this tonight. Back to work tomorrow

I had a plan this year to try to start to read more. Not heaps, just start making my way through the list of fantasy novels I have that I want to read. But it seems I forgot why I had to ration these in the first place. I have obsessive reading disorder. Start a new book and it’s hard to make myself do anything else until it’s done. I started A Song of Ice and Fire two days ago. Five books in the series have been published so far, and many people have said they should be on my reading list. Well, I’m now about 80% through the first book, A Game of Thrones. Oops. Everyone was right though – great books.

This of course means that everything I was supposed to be doing the last couple of days has fallen by the wayside. Ah well. It is the last few days of my holidays after all

But I did revisit my softie making. I decided to go back to disaster 1. The only thing I kept from it were the ears, everything else I started again. And it’s half finished now.

I’ve got to add the eyes, nose and collar then it’ll be finished. I’m supposed to take this in to work on Monday. But I was reading this morning instead of going to buy buttons, so I may have to get them on Mon after work and take him in on Tues instead.

Yesterday evening, I also undid the section of sock I needed to to make the foot shorter, then finished the first sock of my purple Kwallas.

Tomorrow is Farmer’s Wife day. Yep, I’m starting that back up again. No, I’m nowhere near half finished, but I should still get most if not all of the remaining blocks done this year. For the first few weeks I’ll just be doing one block a week, as I’m a few blocks ahead of Nicki. She’ll be doing two to catch up, then I’ll probably be back to two a week again.

I finished my xmas socks on New Year’s day. Well, all except grafting the toe closed, which sat around waiting until yesterday. But here you have them, my first pair of socks and my first finish of the year.

I wasn’t in the mood for sewing together my cardi (well either of them or my coat), and I need to finish it before starting my throw, because I need one of my long cables for my interchangeable needles. Actually, all bar a short one are now being used by the three pieces waiting for me to sew together. So since I didn’t want to do that, and couldn’t start my throw, I cast on another pair of socks on Mon night. I thought I’d be able to show you the first sock all finished tonight, but the foot is too long, so I need to undo it a bit and start the toe shaping again. Here it is before I knit back.

It’s Kwalla by Alice Yu (AKA Socktopus) and is knit using her beautiful Sokkusu yarn. This yarn is very deceptive in the skein. I remember not being impressed with the feel of it at Knit Nation, which is why I didn’t take any home, even though I loved some of the colours. But after hearing how nice it was to knit with, I thought I’d give it a go. Wow, wind this into a ball and start to knit with it and it definitely becomes a swan!

So I’ve tried two different patterns to make softies and I still don’t have anything to show. I prefer to sew by hand, but of course making softies is more of a machine sewing thing. Which I’m not that good with. Combine that with vague instructions, then stabbing myself with a pin resulting in blood all over the half made mess and you have failure number one.

Move to a different pattern, and decide to ignore the machine and hand sew instead. But fleece is too thick to hand sew, so back to the machine. These instructions also require some guess work. I particularly like the instruction, “starting at the smaller end”. What smaller end? Both are the same size! So we have a head that will in no way resemble a head, no matter how creative I get with the stuffing, and there’s failure number two.

I’m giving up for today, and going to do some knitting instead. At least there I know the instructions make sense. I’ll decide which failure I revisit tomorrow.

The first of the year, so time to look back on the last year. It started off great with a visit from friends from Australia. Then on the night they flew home, I flew to Iceland for 2.5 days.

Unfortunately after that, work took over. But in August I decided to claw my life back. And I started crafting and blogging again. Got quite a bit done too. On both the sewing…

and knitting front.

There’s another knitting project I did this month that I can’t show you yet, because the friend I made it for hasn’t got it yet. Ok, I haven’t posted it yet. I was waiting for the xmas – new year postal break to be over so it didn’t go missing.

And of course there was the big decision to change career path. So that wraps up 2011, and 2012 is looking to be a great year. So hopefully, in a year’s time I’ll be here showing you even more craft and have had a good 6 months or more under my belt in a new job, new town, and be very happy. Happy 2012 all!

I’m linking this up to Fresh Sewing Day at Lily’s quilts again.

On Boxing Day, Laura at Quokka Quilts set us the challenge to build our own cordinating fabric bundle from all the fabric available at the fat quarter shop. You can read about it here.

Well, this was fun. Especially as I’ve had an idea in my head to do a quilt in a limited colour palette. The very one I’m about to show you actually. You had to pick 12 prints and 3 solids. Now, some of you will know that I’m a little more traditional in the print department prefering textures and prints like Jinny Beyer’s that are used for shading. So I’m not sure if my choices properly fit in with the rules. But there ARE just 3 solids here. So here’s my selection that I’m considering putting together for a very eye catching (in my humble opinion) quilt.

They are (left to right, top to bottom)
1. Little Gatherings raven tendril
2. Calypso Swing grey
3. Black Tuxedo Batiks raven iron gate
4. Nature Elements charcoal
5. Kona coal
6. Michael Miller Silver Fairy Frost
7. Palladium gray gridlock
8. Calypso Swing pink shadows
9. Together mauve dotted plaid
10. Michael Miller eggplant krystal
11. Kona eggplant
12. Moda bella solids aubergine
13. Nature Elements orchid bloom
14. Oval Elements juicy grape
15. Moda Marbles cranberry

Of course, as luck would have it, I can’t actually put this bundle together. Because between the time of me downloading my large number of fabric pics, and finally narrowing them down into a bundle, one is no longer available and one is marked down. Must be a discontinued line. These would of course be the calypso fabrics. None of the others on my original list have that right mix of black and grey to replace the one, or the mix of the three colours to replace the other. So this will require much more research. But I have until the 10th when the challenge closes. And for now, I like my first choices too much to go looking for their replacements, so I’ll leave them in.

Yep, I know I was going to pop in yesterday to post feast photos and recipes, but I’ve been distracted. I got a great ball of yarn for xmas from Granny. And since I was planning on starting my first pair of socks this xmas, it seemed kismet. So this first sock was cast on xmas day after I’d finished feasting, and I finished knitting it last night. Grafted the toe closed today, and voila, I show you what has kept me distracted the last couple if days.

Now to make the second one

ETA: What WAS I doing with my foot?! It looks very oddly shaped. I assure you, my foot is really quite normal