a visit from the tiny things

A friend of mine is working on an art project. It involves tiny creatures, and I'm pretty sure that's all I can say. While talking about the project and life in general, he asked me if I had ever knit a sweater before and I told him about the Inishturk, and then I realized he might be scouting for some wardrobe so I offered to knit something up for his little friends. He actually tried to talk me out of it. Haha. He thought it might be too much to ask. But I was looking for a good distraction at that point in life and I was already brainstorming and designing things in my mind. So I said I would just knit something up and he could use it or not. No worries.

After a few fittings and alterations, I came up with these:

The first one is made with cotton-ease. I gave it a rough, tattered look by popping a few stitches out of stockinette here and there.

The second is made with the same wool I was using in the Inishturk. But I had to narrow the yarn down to two strands to make it more pliable.

They are both only 20 stitches around, so it was kind of hard to come up with any special patterns, but I did attempt a couple of cables in front of the wool one. You can just barely see them because they're only one stitch wide. teehee. So this would be like a teeny-tiny Aran sweater. :)

I really enjoyed the unique challenges of working in-the-small. It kind of has an eery look to it in a way, doesn't it? Can you imagine finding a tiny sweater like this in the wall of your house? You'd wonder what else the creatures have been wearing and building! Reminds me of the mice in Cinderella.

Now. I wonder if this will help get me motivated to finish the Inishturk. It only has about 60 hours left on it. :/ Naaah.

Sticks and Stones

Well, here is the sweater so far. What do you think?

I hope you can't see my mistakes in the cables. Haha. I thought about going back and redoing it, but... I think it would be too depressing. It took too long to get here! Good thing they tell you to do the "back" first. I'll never see this side - and hopefully I'll be better at the pattern by the time I get to the front. As some of the Ravelry ladies say, those little mistakes will just be proof that it was knit by a human instead of a machine. =)

Progress is slow not only because of the complexity of the cable pattern, but also because I got sidetracked by a few other things. I decided at one point that I wanted to finish one of my many other undone projects before I really started this new one. So I put the sweater down and spent some time on the baby quilt for my son. If you count the time I spent thinking about it, it's been about 2 years in the making. But I didn't start sewing it until about 8 months ago. The hand-quilting is really what took so long...

Here is a full-length shot. He got excited that the camera was out and wanted to be included. Awwww! ;)

Here is a close up of the blocks. The tan and grey were the original colors. I added the rest to compliment.  

I asked God for a theme or a special blessing I could put into it. He gave the image of Rock and Stone. The colors in the quilt are very earth-toned, the same as stone, sand and rocks. I arranged the blocks in a simple "brick pattern," and used a grey thread to do the quilting, symbolic of the mortor that would hold bricks together. I know the copper satin binding kinda throws the earthtone mood off a bit. Well, it looks brighter in the photos than in real life. And I thought it kinda added some... pizzaz to it.

 I looked up several verses that describe the Lord as our Rock and also His people as rocks or stones. I plan to hide these references within the quilt. I might use a fine-point pen and tiny letters to write them on a few of the dark blocks where you wouldn't really see it right away unless you were looking... maybe I'll just tuck them inside where no one will see.. like a secret prayer. =)  

"Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house... " 1Peter 2:4,5

"The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer..." Psalm 18:2

"...And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it." Revelation 2:17

Inishturk sweater started...

Finally got the yarn on the needles baby. Wasn't as easy as it sounds though.

First the crazy gauge. This is my first Knit-along, so I've been pretty excited about the sense of community and connection with other knitters. And one thing they've all been saying is that this gauge is a joke.

It's suggested that a size 8 needle and 16 sts across will produce 4" in a Double Seed stitch.
With 8s, I got 3" and with 9s, I got 3.5" (Here is the rest of the math, for my fellow Inishturkers)
I thought about going to 10s or even 11s, as some people have, but wanted to keep the definition in the cables. Some people have opted to use the 8s, but make a larger size to compensate. I was looking for the Size Small (40 in chest), but at the gauge I was knitting, I would have to knit what Lion calls a 1x in order to get a size small sweater... really?? Sounds like alot of stitches to me... I made a compromise. I decided to use size 9 needles and knit a "medium," which would give me close to a small size.

THEN, after I finally figured that out, I got to deal with this whopper of a pattern. Whew! Of all the projects I could've picked for my first knit-along, my first sweater, my first real cables... it had to be this one. Nothing like baptism by fire.

The whole process is much more complicated by the fact that for some reason, the instructions are basically given in an UP DOWN pattern, when everyone knows we knit SIDE to SIDE. Who wrote this thing???

So I basically burned 2 or 3 hours of my life on earth converting each cable pattern into its row sequence one by one. I really hope I am not the only one who will ever benefit from this, so I uploaded it to share with the world:
Lion Brand Knit Along Inishturk Stitch pattern Conversion -
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgp76r8n_0czmx5xcw

Hopefully I'll have more progress to show soon. o_0

What the fiber?

I've been thinking about and shopping for yarn for the last two weeks. It's tough to shop in craft stores lately, because my little boy is usually with me and he really loves them. I made the mistake ONCE of putting him down in JoAnn's while I tried to grab something from a tall shelf. Of course he took off for the Frames and All Things Delicate, so I pulled out my mommy voice and told him to come back. He just stood there smiling... until I picked him up and then he made sure that I (and everyone else there) knew that he really wanted to go frame shopping, and mommy was being unreasonable. I've tried to go back a few times since, but the boy is too bright for me - he remembers things. I'm not sure what it is in his mind he thinks he needs a frame for - perhaps he wants to decorate his room with original photography....

Anyway. I'm trying to find a yarn for this sweater project I'm working on (the Lion Brand KAL). It calls for Fisherman's Wool, which looks good and seems very quaint and folksy. I dig it. Really. But wool is always so scratchy, and my skin can be sensitive to things like that. So I thought about doing an acrylic, but I really have never liked the feeling of most matte-finished acrylics at ALL - they just feel so cheap and yucky. The Simply Soft is one of my favorite yarns, but it really just seems too "sheeny" (might have just made that up). I definitely wanted something more natural looking, with natural fibers.

I thought about cotton. The Lion Cotton was OK looking but a little too... dishtowelly. Yeah, that's right. So I got myself pretty hooked on the idea of using Lion Cotton-Ease. It's 50% cotton / 50% acrylic, another one of my favorite yarns and it feels totally YUMMY.

Problem #1 Cotton Ease is expensive - about $6 for 3.5 oz AND I was gonna need about 6 or 7 skeins of this stuff.

Problem #2 Can't seem to match dye lots, especially with the amount of yarn I need to buy.

Problem #3 The color I really had my heart set on was Hazelnut, which of course they don't carry anywhere in Chico.
http://www.lionbrand.com/6030/PictPage/1922242133.html

 Soooo... after a week of thinking and debating and trying to shop for yarn while the baby fussed, and sifting through yarns that were too yucky, too sheeny, or too dishtowelly... guess what? I finally deceided just to get the Fisherman's Wool, which was the yarn the pattern originally called for in the first place. HA! Oh the vanity!

I chose this wool because (A) it comes in nice large balls of 8 oz. (B) the less I have to purchase, the easier it is to use coupons and match dye lots, (C) it's a nice natural fiber that I'm hoping will make the cables in the sweater really come through, and (D) the clencher was when I found it in Nature's Brown, which is a beautiful color that I hadn't seen anywhere else.

I ended up paying about $10 for $18 worth of yarn (coupons), which is way better than $42 for cotton-ease. YAY! They only had two in stock, so I still have one more ball to buy. I can already tell it's going to be a lovely yarn to work with...

Where did she go??

Well, I know it's been awhile! It seems to me that somewhere along the way, I promised to blog more often. Why did I promise me that? I knew the minute i made that promise I wasn't going to keep it.

But the holidays were quite a whirlwind - besides being The Usual Busy trying to find gifts and making travel plans, I also finished a last minute quilt for my mom, and decided somewhere in there that I wanted to get in touch with my "roots" by studying Swedish Christmas traditions. That was kind of a joke. Oh yeah, and I filled about 15 orders on my Etsy page! Lots of Sock Monkeys. =)

The Swedish thing was a joke because I didn't really think of it until a week before Christmas. That's really not enough time to create straw ornaments or find a good gingerbread recipe and about three weeks too late to observe Advent (which is kind of a big deal there I guess). It was frustrating trying to find an authentic Swedish recipe for anything, and if I did, it was in Swedish! I think you lose something in the translation, and of course they use things there that we don't really have here. Lucky for me, a friend on Facebook 'fessed up to being Swedish herself. She kind of took me under her wing a bit, emailed me some of her family recipes and told me alot of ingredients that you usually wouldn't find in the states can be purchased at IKEA. Ikea!! Why didn't I think of that?? I love that place. We take special trips to Sacramento sometimes, just to go to Ikea! Brilliant.

With the holidays upon me, I was not driving to Ikea. But my friend was sweet enough to stop by my house on the morning of Christmas Eve, just to give me a box of Pearl Sugar and one of Swedish Vanilla. Mmmmm. My mouth is watering all over the keyboard just thinking of it.

All that to say: in an effort to squeeze tradition into a ridiculously busy holiday, I have a distinct memory of sitting with my son on the floor of our kitchen on Christmas morning, eating Risgrynsgrot (Rice Pudding) which I had made quite at the last minute, even as Joel was packing our car for a 3 hour drive to my mom's house. We certainly didn't have time to sit around the table and make it A Thing, but I'm proud of myself for making it happen at all.

Here is the recipe if anyone is interested:

Risgrynsgrot
3/4c long grain rice
1 1/2c water
1 tsp. salt
3 1/2c milk
1 piece whole cinnamon
Bring rice, water and salt to a boil. Stir, cover, and boil for about 10 minutes over low heat. Add milk and cinnamon and simmer for 30-40 minutes more, until it is nice and thick and the ricec is soft.
I definitely add a little sugar to it. Other toppings options include butter, ground cinnamon, or a little extra milk.
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It's a Christmas Eve tradition all over Sweden. They like to put one whole almond in the pot, and whoever finds the almond in their bowl will have good luck next year... or get married... or win a special prize (whichever you prefer). =>

Well, I'm off for now. I have SO many ideas for the Etsy shop, it really isn't funny. New designs are on the horizon! For some reason (probably the fact that I can't say no), I've also signed myself up for this knit-a-long. It's a sweater with a weird name. I like to call it the Crazy Difficult Cable sweater that Charity will weep over.

One last note, if you haven't already, please visit this Etsy shop: http://www.heartsforhaiti.etsy.com/. 100% of the proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders for Haitian Relief. I donated my Sleek Black ipod Cozy for the cause. <3