Finally, A Finished Object

Too bad the color of this afghan doesn't seem to photograph very well because it looks so  much better in person.  There are several shades of pink and one variegated yarn with a pop of orange.  It is a nice lap-sized blanket.  I was really really tired of working on it by the end, though. The mint green yarn was a little hard to crochet, but it did wash up nicely.

 I finally went with a simple shell edging which looks pretty good.  This was the first time I have used the 'crochet-it-together-as-you-go' method, and it sure is better than hand sewing all the motifs together.

My unfinished sweater inventory is getting bigger since it is still too hot to have a lap full of sweater, so at present I have three sweaters that need buttons and one sweater to sew together, and about three sets of ribbings ready to be made into sweaters.

July Knitting

If the temperature hadn't spiked to 111 degrees for two days and stayed in the 90's until now, there would be a lot more knitting going on.  As it is, my projects are languishing until the temperature goes down.  In the meantime, all the fruit ripened and had to be put up (and the extras taken to the Food Bank), and the first batches of pesto were made and frozen.  My basil crop is fabulous this year, so lush and plentiful.  I buy souffle cups from the restaurant supply store, little 2 oz. plastic cups with lids in size P325, and freeze the pesto in them.  So far I have made over 75 cups full, and it's only July.  I like to supply my daughters with enough pesto for their freezers, too.

There are several sweaters in the works.  A lovely yellow cardigan just needs assembly:

 

There are only two more rows to add to the afghan:

The ribbings are hand knit for a purple pullover, and the first one is hung on the machine:

 I want to try something I've never done before with this pullover.  I am going to add lace panels up the center front and have them curve along the V-neck with the decreases on the outside of the panel.

There's also a new cardigan draft to test out in red yarn for my daughter, and some teal ribbings being knit.  All the unassembled sweaters shown in my last post have been sewn together and just need their buttons sewn on.  It's too hot to have a lap full of sweater though, so that will have to wait.

Today will not involve any knitting since the 4th of July is tomorrow and we are celebrating my daughter's birthday, too.  I have some macaroni salad to make today and some cucumbers to marinate.

Three New Sweaters in the Works

I've never grown Amaryllis before, but since we grow Resurrection Lilies, which are really a kind of amaryllis, I think, I decided to give it a try.  Here they are, blooming away by the birdbath.  I don't know if they will live through next winter, but this is an experiment.

There are three sweaters in various degrees of completion at the moment.

These two cardigans will be jackets like my pink one.  The emerald green one has the same garter/eyelet borders, but the navy blue one has plain garter borders.

This cardigan is just for fun, to try out a variegated yarn.  This colorway looks pretty layered over an aqua tank I have which tones down the flashy nature of the yarn.

This is what happens when you produce sweaters so quickly -  you end up with several to sew together and do all the finishing.  We'll see how fast I am able to get them done.  The variegated cardigan is the latest draft of my raglan sweater with a few extra stitches added to the sleeve top.  It seems to fit nicely but you can't really tell until after the first washing.

The leftovers afghan is stalled at the moment though, and the gray and gold sweater is still waiting for its buttons.

Variegated Yarn

After I used up my red/yellow/orange variegated yarn (leftover from an afghan) to make the Flashy Cardigan to wear to Stitches, I was pleased at how well the raglan sweater draft fit.  During a recent  sale at the fabric store, some more variegated yarn was purchased, mainly because there was aqua in the colorway.  I could visualize a cardigan over an aqua tank worn with my tan trousers.  The color repeat is larger in this new yarn, so I was interested to see how the color sections would pool or stripe. The Flashy Cardigan yarn had very short color sections.  Who knows, maybe these fun yarns will come back into fashion!  I doubt it, but who cares?

The Flashy Cardigan

The only thing I wanted to change on my raglan pattern was the top of the sleeve.  There's supposed to be about an inch of stitches left that become part of the neckline, but because the gauge is only 4+ stitches/inch, the seam allowances used up about half of that, so I wanted to add a few more stitches.  Here's how my patterns look when I'm ready to use them:

 All the numbers with circles around them are row count numbers to tell me when to make increases or decreases.  This is one feature of a knitting machine that is great, but you can get the same effect with hand knitting by putting a safety pin every 20 rows or so.  That way you can get the row count in a few seconds instead of having to count every row, every time.

The ribbings are knitted ahead of time by hand and are hung on the machine instead of a cast-on.  This gives a more hand-knit look to the garment, and besides, I get to use the cast on that my grandmother taught me.  This picture shows the sleeve ribs waiting in their bowl.

 

 

 

So far I've finished the back and front:

Look at the funny pooling on the upper back!  You can never tell ahead of time what will develop.  As usual, I am wondering if there is enough yarn, since I only have one and a half skeins left, but time will tell.  It's not as if a dye lot difference will be noticeable.

Socks!

The afghan I am working on is proceeding slowly, but in the meantime, I finished the first pair of socks I have knitted in over a year!

The repeat was so large in this yarn that I would have had to splice the yarn somewhere, so I just knitted an asymmetric pair.  The yarn is some Sockotta I picked up from a sale table at Stitches about two years ago for only $5 a skein.  Sockotta can seem hard to knit unless you have the right needles (bamboo or wood are horrible for this) since it has a lot of cotton in it.  I've used it to make several pairs of socks for the girls, and they say it is comfortable to wear.

In future sweater news, the two sweaters that I have enjoyed the most out of the 9 or so sweaters I made recently are the pink jacket and the aqua lace.

I have plans to make more of these.  The aqua one would look nice in a purple, and I want to make the eyelet jacket in a cocoa brown and other colors.  The aqua one could be done in different lace stitches so I will have to look through my stitch dictionaries and get some ideas.

Vegetable Garden

This year we are expanding the vegetable garden.  Most of the new space came from back of the yard which used to be covered in awful ivy.  It took months for the spouse to dig it up and take down the old fence it was growing on, but now it is wide open and sunny back there.  There is a chainlink fence dividing us from the back neighbors, and they have said that they hate the fence and will replace it at some point, but in this economy, that may take years.  I've always wanted a chainlink fence to grow things on, so this year I'm planting the squashes and some sweet peas (flower) along there.  The added benefit is that it may shield us from the attempted attacks of their dog, Oscar.  Maybe if he can't see us, he'll ignore us.

Yesterday I got started on the seed starting.  So far, there are sweet peas and lettuces sprouting, but today I'll get going on the squashes and cucumbers.Here are some views of the garden in its wild spring state before the weeding and plowing.

The first climbing rose of the year bloomed this week. I think this is Pinata.

Projects in the Works

Sometimes it is Spring here, and sometimes it is rainy winter, so not much happening on the 'getting the garden going' front.  I have all my seeds but need to get them started.  Inside, there are lots of projects continuting:

The 'Use Up The Leftovers' Afghan

Trying to be efficient about it

A Dark Orchid V-Neck pullover

Socks for A

  It's been a long time since I felt like knitting socks but I'm on a roll now.  The second pair were originally a 'toe-up' pair with the first sock half completed.  I guess I wasn't in the mood for toe-up because those poor socks had been sitting untouched for over a year.  Since it was time to be ruthless, I ripped them out and started again.  I'm a little annoyed with this Sockotta color because the color repeat is so large.  Maybe that was why it was on the sale table at Stitches. I decided not to stress over it and just make some mismatched socks.  My daughter doesn't care, and you can't be perfectly symmetric all the time.  Or so I am telling myself.