I did manage to whip out a quick pair of basic fingerless mitts with some super soft, nice yarn I got a couple weeks ago, I think they turned out pretty cute:

The yarn's interesting because it's almost variegated, but not quite.

That's my digital camera case for size reference at the top.

I also finished the Summer Flies shawl that I started while I was on vacation at the end of July, though I haven’t blocked it yet.

I used just under 2 balls of (about 300 yards) Classic Elite Yarns Fresco, which is a 60% Wool, 30% Alpaca, 10% Angora mix DK weight yarn, and lovely to work with. I loved the stitch definition I got with it too, I’m looking forward to seeing how it blocks out.

I don’t think I’m going to block it too aggressively, as it’s a pretty nice small scarf size now, so a light blocking should bring it to decent scarf size. It’s a little smaller than the pattern said because I used a DK weight instead of a worsted, but I think the size will work out in the end.

Still on the needles are the baby booties for my sister’s friend’s baby shower, which I hope to finish tonight since the baby shower is in two days! I also have my Spectacular Sightseeing Sunset Socks on the needles, but those are currently my in-the-purse-to-work-on-on-the-go project, so they don’t get a lot of love at home.

Speaking of purses, I got my Namaste Monroe bag last week, a birthday present from my parents! I love it, I’m using it as my regular purse plus knitting. It’s got 2 huge side pockets and one big center section, so I have plenty of room for all my purse things, plus a knitting project or two, and I don’t have to worry about my yarn snagging on my car keys, or falling out of my bag. Oh, and did I mention it’s purple?

Isn't she beautiful?

Looking ahead, I’m working on my plans for the upcoming House Cup term. I was leaning toward doing an Arithmancy OWL (at least 8 of the same object) and doing 6 pairs of fingerless gloves, but then I discovered The Beekeeper’s Quilt, and may change my plans. I’m currently debating how I want to tackle the term, I might do the quilt as an OWL instead, and do the gloves for classes, or maybe do the gloves for the OWL and do groups of hexagons for the quilt for classes. I definitely have a lot of thinking to do, lol.

Image courtesy of tinyowlknits on Ravelry

Happily, I did finish it!

It's finally finished!

I started the shawl as my Spring 2011 HPKCHC OWL, and while I didn’t finish enough in time to get the 50 mid-term points, I did finish in time to get the 100 completion points. Plus, I was just proud of finishing it in general. It’s the most intricate, complicated thing I’ve ever made!

I did have to give myself a break from the tiny yarn, tiny needles and tiny beads occasionally, though, so I did work a fairly quick test knit hat that turned out to be perfect for some llama yarn I had, and almost in Gryffindor colors too!

Now I just have to decide how crazy I am for next HPKCHC term, which starts Sept. 1. I’m thinking an OWL of 6 pairs of fingerless mitts as Christmas gifts, plus a small shawl for an Order of the Phoenix mission, and blanket squares for classes. But we’ll see. In the meantime, I’m just trying to clear my needles.

With the new month come new HPKCHC classes, and new plans.

First, let me recap my June progress, which unfortunately wasn’t near what I’d hoped thanks to a combination of startitis, carpal tunnel, and overambitious goals, lol.

I did get my little CMYK made for my sister, which I think turned out cute, even if she didn’t get the joke immediately.

My favorite project I finished (not that there was a lot of choice, I only finished two!) was my Cotyledon Hat, which I did as a test knit. I was happy about it because it finally gave me a great project to use my madelinetosh tosh dk that I bought on an HPKCHC WEBS trip in March. I’d been looking for the perfect project, but I only had one skein. Let me just say, this yarn was awesome to work with, it was very soft and had great stitch definition, which worked well for the hat.

I was worried at first that my hat was going to be too big, but it turned out perfect for use as a spring/fall hat. It’s not tight, so it won’t be windproof, but it looks cute and will work for those cool-not-cold days.

As far as plans for July go, I’m keeping it pretty simple: I’m planning to work exclusively on my Aeolian in an attempt to finish it before my vacation later in the month. I figure I can do some smaller projects for classes on vacation, but I can’t really finish and block a huge shawl in a motel room!

You get almost a week of no knitting time, that’s what.

I think the fact that I was knitting lace on tiny needles (My Aeolian and My Heaven, both lace on size 2s, and a sock also on size 2s) didn’t help either.

Let me just tell you, you know your hands need a long break right. now. when your thumb starts involuntarily shaking whenever you bend it, so much so that you can’t type on your phone with it. Ask me how I know.

As difficult as it was, I did make myself rest from knitting for several days. I was able to alleviate some of the restless hand-ness by spinning on my drop spindle, something I haven’t done in quite a while. I spun some gorgeous chocolate brown alpaca top that I had gotten at WEBS a few months ago, which proceeded to shed all over me. (Have you ever cleaned up after an alpaca? I have. It. Was. Awesome.)

Granted, I should have seen this coming. Let’s think about what I’ve been knitting over the past several weeks…

You can see where the sunset part comes in.

Spectacular Sightseeing Sunset Socks

Why yes, I am a fan of alliteration, how did you guess?

These socks actually came about for exactly two reasons: 1) I wanted to try Michaels’ new Loops & Threads Luxury Sock yarn, and 2) I wanted something small and mindless to knit on a trip to New York City. I figured a pair of plan stockinette socks would be the perfect travel project, and would allow me to try this new yarn (which is very nice, I might add, I just wish it came in solid colors).

Over the course of two days, these socks were knit at:

• Car ride from CT to NY train station
• Train ride to New York City
• NYC subway station while waiting for the train
• Central Park bench
• Yankee Stadium while waiting for the game to start
• Train back from NYC
• Car ride home from NY
• Car ride to the beach
• On the beach
• At the outlet stores waiting for the rain to end
• On the way home from the outlets

That’s a lot of tiny needle knitting.

That red is my lifeline, juuuust in case.

Aeolian

I’ve blogged about my Aeolian before, it’s my Ancient Runes OWL for the House Cup. In order to get “midterm credit” for it, I need to have it 50% done by the end of the month. My goal was to get out of the yucca pattern repeats (there were 12 repeats of 8 rows, and with each row getting longer, those yuccas seemed to go on forever).

On the morning of June 7, I had it at 15.10% (thank you handy Google spreadsheet). By the end of the day on June 11, I had it at 25.83%. That means I knit 7,332 teeny tiny stitches, complete with a whole lot of teeny tiny beads, in four days.

This is the edging as it'll look on the shawl.

My Heaven

For some reason, I’ve become addicted to lace, and decided a couple weeks ago that I just HAD to find the perfect lace pattern for some gorgeous red baby alpaca yarn I have. I decided on a My Heaven (Ravelry link), as I had done a search for red lace shawls and saw a project page for a My Heaven done in red, and absolutely loved it. I haven’t been able to work on it much yet, because I want to get my Aeolian to 50%, but I’m trudging along on it.

The colors are a little richer than this photo shows, but you can see the stitch definition.

Cotyledon Hat

This hat I’m doing as a test knit for another Raveler. I’m using madelinetosh tosh dk, and it is sucha lovely yarn to work with. It’s super soft, but it has a fairly tight twist and great stitch definition for the knit-through-the-back-loop ridges and the cables in this pattern.

She didn’t get the joke until I explained it, which makes me wonder if I’m not as clever as I thought.

So, those of you out there who know about graphic design, or computers and images in general, do you get the joke?

I had a scary moment while knitting the other day, though. I’ve decided to put lifelines in every 4th yucca  chart repeat (there are 12 total) and every chart repeat after the yuccas. I was almost to the point where I could put in my second lifeline, when this happened:

Begin panic mode now.

I don’t know exactly how many stitches slipped off the needles. I just sat there staring in horror at it. Luckily, I was able to pick up the stitches and resume knitting with no major mishaps. Once I got my second lifeline in, and got 4 rows into the 9th yucca repeat (so that I could mark it as 15% on Ravelry), and put the project away for a few days so that I could breathe.

Wanting to give myself a break from the tiny yarn and tiny needles, I decided to start a pair of worsted weight fingerless gloves (I know, May isn’t exactly glove season).

I was debating what colors to use; I was originally thinking purple and black, but the purple was too dark to differentiate it from the black. I found some bright blue yarn I had, and decided to alternate it with the black instead.

I played around with a couple charts and settled on a pair of black mitts with blue dots placed throughout. I’m up to the thumb increases, and plan to make the pattern available on Ravelry once I finish one glove and get it test knitted.

Here it is right off the needles, with a water bottle for size reference. You can see why I needed to block it:

See the ruffly edges?

Here it is blocking. Let me tell you, pinning out a shawl with a rounded top edge is a huge pain in the rear:

It took forever to pin out.

In the end, it turned out very pretty, and my mom loved it. It barely even lost any size after I unpinned it, which surprised me because I tend to be pretty severe in my blocking:

It's so pretty!

This is the shawl that never ends

And it goes on and on my friends

One day I started knitting it not knowing what it was

And I’ll continue knitting it forever just because

(repeat x infinity)

Since I tend to only have a couple hours per night to work on my shawl, I’m only getting a couple rows done at a time, which means it’s taking f o r e v e r. I want to get it off the needles and on the blocking mat already! Hopefully this will happen tonight, and I can have blocking photos for tomorrow.

In the meantime, I did take a break from the neverending shawl (how am I ever going to get through my Aeolian? XD) to do another quick test knit crochet (I always default to knit!) for the Eye of the World Stole.

Patterns like this work well for short-repeat variegated yarns, I think.

The test only called for a 3-repeat swatch, washed and blocked, which I was able to complete in just about an hour. I think I’m going to rip out the swatch, cut the repeats in half width-wise, and crochet it as a scarf, using the Cascade Heritage Paints I have in my stash, which I what I used for the swatch. I think it’ll make a pretty, lacy scarf, what do you think?

First up were my yarn dyeing experiments. I got a skein of Lion Brand Fishermen’s Wool and two skeins of Patons Classic Wool at the store, split the Fishermen’s Wool into two hanks, and prepared to dye.

My main goal was to get a nice semi-solid purple to make a bag using the Endpaper Mitts design, paired with black. I wanted some blue undertones, so I decided to try a couple different methods of dyeing to see what I could get.

If I was going for pastel blue and purple, this would've been perfect!

For my first experiment, a skein of Classic Wool, I tried putting purple dye (I always use food coloring, in this case it was a mix of Wiltons gel dyes and concentrated liquid dyes) in the entire pot, putting some blue in one side of the pot and quickly dumping my yarn in. I’d pre-soaked the yarn in warm water and vinegar, and brought the water in the pot up to a gently boil before adding the dye, in order to get the yarn to soak up as much dye as possible as soon as it was put in.

It sort of worked, in that I could see the difference in where the blue dye was, but it turned out to be purple in some spots, and baby blue in others. Not exactly what I was going for.

I ended up *taking out the yarn, adding a bunch of purple dye to the pot, putting the yarn back in, letting it soak up the dye,* repeat between ** ad infinitum.

I was going for a semisolid bright purple, with lighter and darker shades throughout. I had Wiltons violet gel dye and liquid neon purple dye, and alternated between the two. I ended up taking the yarn out after maybe 5 rounds of just-purple dye, and let it cool. After it cooled a bit, I decided it was too slate-colored, and gave it a few more dunks. I wasn’t so sure how I felt about it while it was drying, but after it dried and I twisted it into a hank, I decided it was *perfect* for the bag I want to make.

You can see some of the tonality here, it should make a pretty bag.

My second hank was the other Classic Wool skein. I wanted to try making a blue and purple hank with the color placed so that I could make one of the deliberate pooling scarves on Ravelry. I planned to dye the middle purple, the ends blue, and the in-between a blue-purple.

It all started so well...

...until it went oops.

It started off well enough. I folded my skein in half and dipped the center into the purple dye, keeping the water hot but not so hot that I got burned. I figured I’d pull it out, then dip in the blue ends. I realized, though, that it would be difficult to dip the in-between parts, so I dipped more into the purple, thinking I’d dip the ends into blue up into part of the purple, turning it blue-purple.

All was going well, until I dropped half the yarn I was holding. I ended up dunking the entire hank in the blue dye, then in purple to try to even it out. It turned out okay, if a little pastel (but I ran out of blue so couldn’t really change that). I’m still not sure exactly where I stand on it.

I don't know, what do you think?

I decided to try the whole half-and-half pot again for my third skein, which was half the Fisherman’s Wool.

You can see some of the tonal right in the pot.

I filled the pot with blue dye, then put green in half, gave the pot a small stir, and dropped in the yarn. This one didn’t work as well as the first attempt; the entire skein turned a blue-green color. I did like the color, though, so I decided to try making it tonal a different way.

Using my tongs, I separated out parts of the yarn and put a single drop of blue or green food coloring into the little “hole” I’d made. The dye soaked right into that section of the yarn, giving it a pretty nice tonality with small areas of slightly darker blue or green. I was pleasantly surprised with the overall result.

I like it!

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my fourth skein, as I’d run out of blue dye, and didn’t want another purple. I thought about trying for a dark green yarn, but the last time I tried that I ended up with bright fluorescent neon green.

I used the tongs to keep the yellow out of the dye.

Thinking about turning my dye jobs in for HPKCHC classes, I decided to show some House pride and do a Gryffindor skein. I put about 20 drops of yellow and one drop of red food coloring into the pot, and dipped a little bit of the skein in. The one drop of red was enough to give me a nice, non-Big-Bird yellow.

For the rest of the hank, I put just red dye in the pot, and dipped the bare yarn in. It turned pink. I added more red, it soaked it up, but still wasn’t the red I was going for. I tried adding a tiny bit of black to the red dye in the pot, and the yarn soaked up the red, but left the black in the pot! I just kept adding red dye as it got soaked up.

The yarn ended up more fire-engine-red than scarlet, but it’s not too bad. I may try looking for a dark red food dye and re-dyeing it, but I think I may be okay with it. I’ll have to see how it knits up.

Gryffindor pride!