So far I have managed to finish a pair of socks…
And wind some yarn.
With that, I am ready to start my Christmas knitting.
What have you been doing this weekend?
Sunday morning productivity
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Monthly Archives: August 2014
So much going on…
And so little I can really show or write about 🙂
I have a freebie sock design completed, photographed and laid out, and being test knit as we speak. A second design has been drafted and test knitters are all lined up!  A few more designs are spinning about in my head and will have to wait just a little longer.
While all this is ongoing, most regular knitting has been suspended with the exception of my indigodragonfly No Purl Monkeys. These things really just knit themselves!
Sock 1 complete!
I am actually ready to start the heel flap on Sock #2 and plan to have these done soon so they will be ready for when the weather turns. Until today’s 30 degree high, there are many that might have argued that had already happened, but I digress.
I have also done little to no spinning. That has to be remedied soon so as not to lose the consistency I have gained. Plus I really miss the soothing, zen feeling that it brings.
What have you been doing now that autumn is just around the corner?
Road Trip!
On Saturday, at some ungodly hour, my dear friend Caryn and I set out for a day trip. Destination? The wilds of Haliburton and the home/studio of indigodragonfly yarns, for their 5th Annual Highland Fibre Fling.
Kim and Ron open up their home on the third Saturday in August each year for friends and strangers alike to drop by and visit. There is food, and drink…and this year, in celebration of their 5th Anniversary, there was even cake! But, of course…it’s really all about friends…and the yarn. Oh the gorgeous colours! So many to choose from!
Marit, the creative mind behind Gobstopper, was in attendance, with a selection of her “cake-dyed”, gradient yarns. Such lovely colours!
And of course, no Fling is complete without the requisite piñatas!
Jenn (with Kim, right) holds the Elmo and Minion piñatas, moments before their untimely end!
Sadly, this year we didn’t get to take them outside…it was quite the rainy day.  But it turns out that modern day piñatas are rigged with handy ribbons and no longer require baseball bats, golf clubs or other bashing implements. So fun was still had by all on the piñata front!
I had to have one of the 5th anniversary goodie bags:Â a project bag containing a skein of CaribouBaa in a limited edition anniversary colourway called Cinco de Mine!, and some other goodies that included buttons, stitch markers and soak wash packets.
Days with my knitting peeps…definitely fewer and farther between that I’d like, and totally worth the hours behind the wheel!
Exciting Times!
These past few months, my creative brain has been in overdrive. I credit some of that to hanging out with the multi-talented Shireen. Spend a few evenings creating new things with her, and you start dreaming of what else you can accomplish.
In the past twelve months, just from a fibre standpoint, I have dyed some of my own yarn and fibre. We started off with just experimenting with fabric dye, but since then I have played with acid dyes and have created some spin-able and knit-able pieces. And I sincerely doubt I am done yet.
I have picked up spinning again and gotten surprisingly good at it, if my spinning teacher, Leslie is to be believed (and I believe she is). In fact, she even thinks a couple of my skeins from Tour de Fleece should be entered in competition. Took a while for my ego to come down off that one, let me tell you!
I have gotten a loom and done a limited amount of weaving. That is the activity that logistically is hardest to do just anywhere due to the need for a prop for the loom, so it tends to get ignored when I am deciding what craft to pursue in the evenings.
I have also self-published my first sock pattern. Admittedly, it started out as a tool to help Shireen knit her own socks, but it was still a fun exercise and it encouraged me to keep going and create more designs.
All this is in addition to the (obviously decreased) knitting that I have been doing. Since both of my parents have jumped on the “we love hand knit socks” bandwagon, and my husband has also decided that hand knit socks are something he was missing out on, socks have been practically the only things I have actually been working on. In fact, I just finished my first pair for hubby and he loves them! (More on that and my second pattern release soon!)
I have had several other patterns floating around in my head, based on somewhat of a theme; two of those have made it onto needles and one of those two is a bit behind schedule, but picking up again now. I am enthused about that one for a number of reasons, none of which I can really talk about at the moment.
All that being said, changes are coming, and I won’t lie; I am pretty excited about them!
The Quest to Finish…Something
A few weeks ago I looked at my list of projects that I have cast on in the last *mumblety-mumble* months and found the number to be more than a bit jarring. I seem to have “knitting ADD” lately…the minute something new and pretty comes along, I am off and my lovely WIPs are left languishing. Right now, OTN, I have a collection of three fingering weight scarves…one of which has the distinction (?) of being my oldest WIP…cast on in January of last year. There is my Colour Affection, which for some reason I never really got into, and another shawlette I was super excited about (love the pattern, adore the OOAK Tanis Fiber Arts yarn) and just put it down last fall, never to resume. On and on it goes.
Shockingly, I only have two pairs of socks on needles, one of which is on 2mm needles and I think it intimidates me somewhat….again, a pattern I adored (Margaritaville by Adrienne Fong) but it has a 72-stitch cast on, ergo the small needles. (I have little-ish feet).
The second pair is a pair of No Purl Monkeys in indigodragonfly MCN Sock (since renamed to Mergoat Sock) in “Don’t You Have An Elsewhere To Be”. I cast these on last fall for the wedding of the indigodragonfly couple, Kim and Ron. (The invitation said knitting was encouraged…I HAD to bring something!) I knit the cuff and a single repeat, then put them down to knit socks for my parents for Christmas, and that, as they say, was all she wrote.
Kim and Ron are hosting their Annual Highlands Fibre Fling this coming weekend and I figured I’d resurrect them to bring as my “sit about and chat” project. I dug them out of my WIP tote yesterday morning and started them up again.
It seems my finish-itis is in better shape than I might have thought. By dinner time last night…the leg was done.
And before I went to work this morning, the heel flap was done, the heel was turned and the gussets stitches were picked up. By the end of the evening, I am hoping to have all the gusset decreases done and be on the foot.
I am suddenly glad this is the first sock so I can have a second one on needles for Saturday.
On a not unrelated note…I wonder if this is the reason why, of twelve WIPs, only two are socks.
Is it just me….?
Or does summer crafting just seem to go a lot more slowly?
Admittedly, this summer in Toronto is uncharacteristically cool…but I still can’t seem to find the energy to do much in the way of, well, anything, to be perfectly honest.
I have been doing bits and pieces of a scarf for my mom, and last week I cast on a hat in MadTosh Vintage for a colleague at work. He has proven himself knit-worthy by wearing (and gushing repeatedly over) a cowl I made him last year.
Watch Cap in Madeline Tosh Vintage in “Baltic”
I did put a new braid of fibre on my wheel – a braid of SweetGeorgia BFL in my favourite of her colourways, “Stormchaser”. (I also have this colourway on Tough Love Sock which I will eventually get to.) I am alternating this with a bobbin of the Humpspun that I started during Tour de Fleece, and my spinning progress seems to be much slower. That is to say, it seems to take a LOT longer to get through a braid. This might be a symptom of finer spinning.
“Stormchaser” BFL
In any case, I am not even through the “fractal” half of the braid yet. But I love the colour so much that I don’t care how long it takes. I want this on every base!
So even though this looks like I am doing a lot, I am really not. My heart’s not really in it and when I am too warm, my energy is just tapped out.
Maybe this boredom is what’s feeding my start-itis that I am fighting, quite valiantly, I might add.  Something to consider. What do you do when summer is here or your mojo is just plain out of whack?
Shoulda, woulda, coulda…
I had an interesting conversation with Shireen yesterday that made me stop and think. I mentioned that I was battling a severe case of start-itis, and that the main reason I was not casting on a new Trillian was because I already have three scarves on needles, never mind the two sock designs that I started but have left languishing of late. I said that “I had other things I should be working on”.
Shireen responded to the effect of “that there’s where I went wrong…crafting has become something I should be doing and not always what I want to be doing.” (I am paraphrasing here.)
And I realized that somewhere along the line, I seem to have strayed into that mindset. I think that (for me) it’s that I promise someone I will make them something, and then I feel guilty if I do anything else. I just finished socks for my husband (which have inadvertently turned into a free pattern I am now writing up) and I have promised my mom a fingering weight scarf that I am less than halfway through. By the time you factor in the other half-completed projects that I somehow feel guilty about letting sit in project bags, I feel rather like a Catholic school girl in confession.
I frogged a couple of those WIPs already and I keep looking at the others on my project page, wondering idly “If it’s been on needles for 18 months, am I ever really going to finish it?”
Does it “bother” you to have multiple projects on needles? Or are you the type that never does? (My girlfriend, Caryn, somehow never seems to have more than two or three things on the go at any point, and not shockingly, actually seems to finish things.) If it does bother you, what’s your solution? Do you buckle down and finish them? Or frog them and move on? Do you have an arbitrary time frame in which you know that if it doesn’t get finished, it never will?
Inquiring minds want to know.
First Light Handcrafts 