Finished Slippers

I finally finished my slippers. For a while now all I've had to do is sew up the seem on the second one and they'd be done, and I just haven't wanted to, so they sat doing nothing for a while.

I finally did finish them, though, and put them back on again. They're bigger than I remember in a good way, but the toes are also pointier than I remember. 

I still can't get over the seem in the bottom, though. Maybe it's because of the way I sew things up that it aggravates me so, but I just can't handle it. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them since I made them for myself to use up the black yarn and then I didn't like them, but when I took off my slippers to take the pictures in these slippers and boyfriend put on my slippers. After the pictures I got him back out of my slippers again by offering him these.

He put them on and hasn't taken them off again. He says he likes them, so they're his. On him they look a little like ankle socks stretched a little too tight, but that's fine. He's a little worried about how they'll hold up, but if the seems come apart, I can fix that, and that's all I'm really worried about.

These slippers worked out pretty well for my first attempt, even though I personally don't really want to wear them. From now on I think I'll be making any slippers on circular or double pointed needles.

Happy knitting!

Finished October Knit-Along

I finally went and got some buttons and attached them to finish my Cctober Knit-Along! You can find the pattern here.

I have never attached buttons to my knitting before, so that was a new experience, but after watching a few videos, I felt pretty confident to do it, and I think it turned out well.

 They aren't spaced perfectly evenly, and I thought about moving the center one down a little bit, but I really don't want to.

The fit is good, although the middle button is a little tighter than I would really like. Maybe if it makes me uncomfortable while I'm wearing it, I'll move it, but for now it's fine.

Someone else said that lighter yarn lends itself to this pattern better, and I do see that, but I'm already finished with it, and I'm still perfectly pleased with the results.

And that concludes my first knit-along project. I loved having something that was different than the normal things I knit as well as having a date to have it finished by. All those years of school really have me (and lots of people I know) conditioned to work on deadlines. I can't wait to start November's knit-along!

Happy knitting!

Green Bay Packers Hat

I've been trying to start knitting Christmas presents for everyone, and I do have something for most everyone. There are a few people left I'm still worrying about, but it just occurred to me the other day that I ought to get my sister's boyfriend something. She always wants to get my boyfriend presents, so I figured it was only fair.

Last week I was at Joann's looking for circular needles to knit hats for boyfriend and his friends for Dag anyway, and so I popped over to the Red Heart Team Spirit self-striping yarn. Then I realized that I don't know what teams he likes, so I texted my sister and asked her. I was a little appalled to learn that he likes the Packers and the Cubs, but I grabbed some green and yellow yarn and some Clover Takumi US 9 16 in. circular needles and was on my way. I was a little annoyed with Joann's when I got to the knitting needles section and found they only had two brands of knitting needles and a rather poor selection within those. I wanted some metal needles because that's what I'm used to and they're cheaper than bamboo. Unfortunately, they only had 29 in. and up lengths in the metal needles. I wanted (I was guessing) a 16 in. needle because I wanted to be able to knit hats on it without any fuss. I found what I was looking for in the bamboo  needles, and they were on sale, so I guess it was okay.

Next was for me to ask my sister if her boyfriend would wear a hat or if I would have to make him something else. She reported that he would, but he wanted it to be a sports team hat (check) with a pom pom on it (doable).

Yesterday I actually sat down and started his hat. At first I wasn't sure what kind of hat I wanted to make, and then I really looked at the hat pattern on the yarn, and decided that was the way to go. The pattern said to cast on 90 stitches on US 7 needles, and since I had US 9, I decided to cut it down to 80 stitches. I did check my gauge, but for whatever reason, each test swatch I did came out claiming I had the same gauge as the US 7 needles. I mean, I knit pretty tight, but not that tight. So 80 it was. However, I misread the directions some a little. It said to start the hat on straight needles-no big, I would just start on my new circular needles-and then purl one wrong sided row before switching to double pointed needles. This instruction for whatever reason didn't make sense to me at the time, and I got it into my head that what that meant was for the first row to be purled so the hat wouldn't roll because of the stockinette stitch. I later realized how incorrect I had been, but by then it was too far to go back, and it doesn't seem to make that much of a difference.

Yesterday afternoon I sat and knitted the first 5 inches of the hat, and then did the first couple decreasing rounds. While I was knitting those first couple rounds, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to finish the hat the way it was, but I don't have double pointed needles large enough to swap out, so I thought I'd learn the magic loop. I knew it was meant to be done on much (much much) longer needles than 16 in., but it was kind of late, and I couldn't think how I could get it onto my longer circular needles. So I pushed right on through and finished the hat using the magic loop on 16 in. needles. It was a pain, and then next time I make a hat on these needles, I am going to do something else, but I managed it, and the hat looks pretty good if i do say so myself.

Last night I also knitted the ear flaps onto the hat. I wasn't sure how it was going to work out, but I was really glad I used the thumb cast-on (the first thing she shows in the video-I know she says there are problems with it, but it's the way my grandma taught me to cast-on, and I really like it for hats and things that need a lot of stretch) because those stitches were so easy to see and pick up. They were so easy, and they looks so cute.

So after that, I was finished with the hat for the night.

Not because I actually hat finished it, but because I didn't feel like making the pom pom, and I don't have a big enough crochet needle to do the edging the pattern calls for. I've never done edging on a hat before, so I was on the fence about doing it at all, but I'm hoping it will make the hat stop rolling, so I'm going to set this hat aside until I can pick up the right size crochet needle. Okay, I might make the pom pom, and I did cut the lengths of yarn to make the braids which I can't attach until the edging it done.

Happy knitting!

Boyfriend's Finished Irish Mittens

I finished my first pair of mittens! They went to smoothly, too, aside from I missed a part of the pattern and didn't leave any space between the cuff and thumb gusset. Here's the pattern.

Boyfriend doesn't seem to mind though. They fit him great and look great on him.

Now he has a hat, scarf, and mittens all in the Irish flag colors!

However, it turns out that I still have a ton of orange yarn left. A decent amount of white, too. Unfortunately, I've already put the green into my scrap blanket. So I'm going to pull what I have of the blanket apart, re-ball the green, and make one more Irish project. I think I'm going to try socks, although I've looked at a couple of patterns and they look really confusing. I'm going to keep browsing for a good pattern. I want a magic loop toe up patterns because I want to be able to size it on boyfriend as I go, and I want to learn the magic loop.

Happy knitting!

Sister's Scarf into Sister's Mittens

After deciding that I wasn't going to make my sister a scarf to match her headband, I couldn't decide on what I did want to make her, so I just asked her what she wanted from choices including a cowl, an infinity scarf, and fingerless gloves, possibly with the mitten topper, in other words, things I haven't made before. Much to my chagrin, she wanted mittens. Not even gloves. Mittens. Which makes her mittens the third pair I've started this year and ever. Not that they're hard or anything; it's just that I'm getting a little sick of knitting mittens.

I thought about looking for another pattern so at least there's some variation, but then I decided against it. I want to colors of the yarn to be visible, so I'm not going to work with multiple colors, and I don't want to make patterns all over the hands because I want to mittens to be comfortable and it just seems like a cable or something up the back of the hand would be annoying.

I made a fair bit of progress yesterday. This is the same pattern I've used for all of my other mittens. This is the women's size. The cuff is 25 rounds and the hand up to where the thumb gusset will start is 20 rounds. That's how far this mitten is along: up to where the thumb gusset will start. I think this is a good size so far, and I do like using the bigger needles better than the smaller needles I'm using in my grandmother's mittens.

Happy knitting!

PS. I am going to try to start taking pictures using boyfriend's smart phone because i can't take much more of this webcam.

Dad's Scarf, Restarted

I finally got around to restarting my dad's scarf, and at first I really wanted to do the brioche stitch. It looks gorgeous, it's warm, and it looks masculine enough that I could give it to my dad. However, I don't know if the brown variegated yarn I'm using is just the wrong type of yarn, the needles I used were too big, I was messing it up, or the pattern just looks like that when it starts, but the first couple of inches of the scarf in the brioche pattern looked so bad that I ripped the whole thing apart and tried it twice more before I just gave up on the brioche stitch for now and went hunting for another pattern.

A lot of the other patterns I have in mind are either not great for scarves because they are one sided or they're kind of girly. While I wanted to do something that would be new for me, I also wanted to make something that my dad will actually wear, so I finally decided on a ribbed scarf with garter edges. It's 28 stitches across on US 10 needles and the pattern goes like this:
row 1: k4, p4,* repeat from * to last 4 stitches, k4
row 2: k4, *k4, p4* repeat between * until the last 8 stitches, k4, k4
So far, so good.

The way the ribs roll in as ribs do, I think it'll make a really warm scarf, and hopefully my dad will like it, especially after I've been working on the thing for years. I used a long-tail cast-on for the scarf, and I'm not wondering if that was really the right choice. I mean, it's not as if it can't stretch to the appropriate shape, but it is scrunched together as the end. I guess that'll just  be a problem for blocking to resolve.

Happy knitting!

New Colors in the Scrap Blanket

I've been excitedly working on my scrap blanket as projects have come off my needles leaving me with not quite enough yarn to really make anything else. I have since finished boyfriend's green and white Irish mitten and the black from the slippers, and so I've put those two colors into the blanket.

However, as I started boyfriend's orange and white Irish mitten, I realized that I'm going to have more orange left than I anticipated; way more than I can conscionably put in the scrap blanket. This has left me with a choice: either find something else for the orange or rip apart the whole blanket for the green and make one last Irish themed project. I think I have enough yarn for socks, but up to this point I've been avoiding socks because I'm scared of them. I guess now is as good a time as any to start on some.

And I guess if I rip apart the blanket, I can do a different pattern. I am less than pleased with how this one is turning out. I didn't think about it, and now my edges are curling in. There are also a couple of places where I messed up, and I would like to go back and fix them. Then again, they're places in the green, so I guess it won't be an issue with the green gone.

But then pulling the green out leaves me wondering if maybe I put the purple into this scrap blanket before it was really finished. I'm not sure what I could make with it, but I could probably make something. Should I pull that apart and set it aside, too?

I've got some decisions to make about this blanket, and I'm leaning towards pulling it apart and using the remaining green, orange, and white to make socks, but we'll see if I can bring myself to do it.

Happy knitting!

Progress on My Shawl

I'm still so pleased with how my shawl is turning out. It's almost two feet long now, but that means that what I've been afraid of is going to be true: I'm going to need at least two more skeins of yarn to finish it. That's alright, I guess, but I don't have a lot of fun money to spend on yarn right now.

The inevitable has finally happened as well: I messed up a row somehow, though I'm not sure what I did exactly, so in the next row, I was one stitch short. Luckily, I noticed the stitch was missing in the repetition it was missing in, so the pattern across the rest of the row wasn't off. I looked down at the row below to see if I could find the stitch that I dropped because then I could just pull it back up and be on my way, but I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. So rather than rip back to where I dropped the stitch and probably mess my shawl up more, I just left out the knit 2 together (k2tog) in that row and carried on. For as far as I am in this shawl, I'm surprised that's the only real mistake I've made. Well, once I think I kept using slip slip knit (ssk) after I was supposed to have switched back to k2tog, but when I looked back I couldn't tell, and I couldn't remember, so I just let it be.

I'm so excited about this shawl, and I'm definitely getting faster at the pattern which is nice. I am honestly a pretty slow knitter. Not because I can't go faster, but because I'm not trying to. However, all of this knitting I've been doing as of late has really been helping me to knit faster without really trying.

Happy knitting!

Progress on Grandma's Mittens

I'm pleased to say I've made lots of progress on my Grandma's mittens. The double pointed needles I was waiting for were in the pair of Irish flag mittens when I wrote the last blog, but I finally got them out and got into this mitten in a big way. I also learned in these mittens, as compared to boyfriend's mittens, that the plastic needles in the hand and as a stitch holder for the thumb are significantly superior in that they can bend a little so the rounds above the stitches on the stitch holder can be knitted closer together rather than having this weird slight gap like boyfriend's do.

This is the same pattern I used for boyfriend's mittens, except first of all I made the women's size, and second I decided to use US 3 and 4 needles rather than US 4 and 5 like the pattern says, so I added four stitches to it to compensate. Since I added four stitches to the pattern, I was a little nervous at how the mitten would work out, especially once I got the the hand and decreasing. I added two stitches to each side of the thumb, and it seems to have worked out perfectly. The mitten is a little snug, but in a good, cozy way.

I was a little nervous to do the thumb, but it came together perfectly. It's a good size and fit and looks good. Altering the decrease wasn't really bad. It took me a little bit to figure out what to do, but I managed it, and I don't think you can tell that it's a little weird.

All in all I'm very pleased with how my grandmother's first mitten turned out. There is one more difference between this mitten and boyfriend's mitten that you may notice. When I made boyfriend's mitten, I missed the part of the pattern that said knit until the piece measures x inches long, and then put the stitches for the thumb on the thumb holder, so imagine my surprise when I went back to the pattern to reference for my grandma's mittens and i saw that and realized I hand't done it on his mittens! So I did it here and they fit great and look great, but I don't think boyfriend's mittens fit poorly in any way. They just look a little silly. And of course I caught it before I finished his first mitten, but not by much, and it fit okay, so I decided not to rip out the whole thing. But now I know.

The variegated yarn looks great, the mittens fit great, and I'm getting better at mittens. This year's knitting is going very well!

Happy knitting!

My First Attempt at Slippers

I've been wanting to try a pair of slippers for a while now. I have this black yarn that's kind of beaten up because it's been around for a while, so I figured I could make a trial pair of slippers with this yarn for myself. If there are mistakes, no big deal. I have also been dying to try the magic loop method. I poked around Ravelry, and much to my surprise, all of the types of slippers that I want to make aren't knitted in the round but on two needles. This was a little off-putting, but I don't want to dive into a pair of socks yet, and I did still want to use of that black yarn, so I picked a pattern that looked reasonable in the pattern as well as in the picture and set off.

I decided to practice my long tail cast-on for this project because I've only even tried it once before and then it was for a project that I frogged and haven't restarted yet. It took me three tries to cast on because the first time I didn't use enough yarn for the tail, the second time I felt like I had too much, and the third time I finally got it.

As I was knitting the first 14 rows of the pattern which are all worked in garter stitch, I started looking down at my ball of black yarn and started getting paranoid that I wouldn't have enough. At that point I decided I'd also work in some of the white yarn I have. I know there's going to be more of it than I need after I finish boyfriend's mittens, but I've never made this pattern before, and I wasn't sure how much of the white yarn the slippers would take if I knit the stockinette stitch body of them with the white. I finally decided that I could also start pulling from the center of the skein I'm using for boyfriend's belt since he wouldn't miss just a little bit.

Then I had to figure out when I was going to switch colors. I decided to do all of the garter stitch in the black, and then for the body have 2 rows of black in the middle, 4 rows of white on either side of it so it would really pop, and 4 rows of grey beyond the white on each side. Also by keeping each color in even numbers of rows, I kept the funny multi-colored purl side all on the inside of the slipper, although I don't think it really looks to bad. I almost wish it were the outside of the slipper.

I knitted the slipper with US 6 needles, and when I was binding off, the pattern suggested that I use a size 8 or 9 needle. I took a minute and decided on the 8, and now I wish I'd used the 9 because the cuff is a little tight, but not really uncomfortably so, so I guess it's alright.

I knitted one entire slipper yesterday. Partially because once I start decreasing I don't like to stop in case I get confused, although in this instance I don't think that would have been really possible, but partially because I still have a ton of time on my hands while I continue to look for a job. But I get lots of knitting and baking done.

Finally, I tried the slipper on after I made it and was pretty disappointed with my afternoon of work. The toe is weirdly pointy and there's a seam right up the middle of the sole which drives me crazy. I had boyfriend try it on, and he said it wasn't as bad as I seem to think. Still, I think I am going to give them as a Christmas gift after all. I think they look nice, they're reasonably comfortable, and they don't take long to make. Plus the color changes keep my interest.

There are a few things I'm going to do differently when I knit up the other slipper, but I haven't totally decided what yet because obviously I want them to look the same even if it means sacrificing a better way of making them.

Happy knitting!