random round-up.

We had a primary election this week. I knew it would be a slow day, so I brought some knitting. Each of these items was barely started at the beginning of the day.

They grew a lot.



The scarf is in stripes, yes, but notice how I am weaning myself away from my solid stripes in the fingerless mitt. We've got a bit of colorwork going on! This mitt was the perfect thing to knit on Slow Election Day. It was just complicated enough that it was interesting (gotta love variegated yarn for that) but not so complicated that I couldn't figure out where I was when I picked it back up after registering a voter.



And I made a wee nerdy Green Lantern case thing for my brother's birthday. It's pretty cute. I didn't have time to block it, or it wouldn't look so squiggly. :)

Orange! (And perhaps some stripes. Because.)

Yeah, I say "orange" and then the first thing I do is fake you out with some blue. We'll just all have to live with it. Anyway, this is my wool/silk laceweight from NeuroticKnitterz. I dig it, and I think my mom will too. I'm trying to decide what sort of lacy thing I want to make out of it. Right now I'm thinking a half-circle shawl, but I haven't found one that I really, really adore.



The yarn is actually a good bit brighter than in this picture. It's sooo pretty.

Ok. On to the orange segment of the day! (Ha ha, get it? Orange segment? I just made an awesome salad with quinoa and cilantro and scallions and oranges, so I may have oranges on the brain.)



This is from my second-ever adventure in dying. I was overdying some light brown--it is now a coppery brown, which is much more me--and thought what the heck, I'll toss in some of this white Knit Picks Palette I have leftover from Christmas. I had three extra (more or less) skeins, and I really don't think I need that much white. I dig this orange, though. I think I also dig this dying thing, though I do not have a precise nature and will therefore probably never be very good at it.



And here we have some stripes! This is stripey yarn, in my defense. I saw it lying there a few days ago, and there wasn't enough to make into anything, not even a baby hat, so it became this wee little pouch. I don't know what I'll keep in it, but it sure is cute.

The Promised Hat

It's big, it's red, and it's snoodly.

First we have an up-close shot of the stitch pattern, which is your basic Zigzag Lace from the first Barbara Walker book. I happened to have it out of the library. The hat used about a skein and a half of Knit One Crochet Too's Tartelette.




The hat, which was made up as I went along, turned out pretty much how I wanted it to. It's very slouchy and very very red, though, and I have not had the guts (or maybe just the occasion) to wear it outside the house.



In other news, I finally bought the 'treat' yarn I had been promising myself for months. I'd been looking for a lighter orange, but I finally found some blue laceweight that was almost exactly what I wanted for a shawl for my mom, so, to save on postage, I bought some orange yarn from the same shop.



I liked it pretty well in the pictures online (duh, or I wouldn't have bought it) but I LOVE IT in person. Like, LOVE IT. It looks way better in person than in my pictures, too. It's kind of a glowing rusty orange-brown, and I don't know how I'm going to choose a pattern for it.

That's a nice merino/nylon fingering weight in Rust by NeuroticKnitterz , y'all. It's good stuff.



I'll show you pictures of the blue laceweight later. Right now it's in a bit of a snarl. I had some winding issues. But the color is awesome!

check this out!

Get ready, friends, for I have several non-stripey things to show you this week! (Don't worry, I'll probably have to have a Stripe Day soon, because I've got plenty, but first, some other stuff.)

Remember that grey laceweight yarn I did my Vernal Equinox Shawl out of? It used to be a Gap turtleneck? I had a goodly amount left, even after the shawl, and let's face it, I love grey knitwear, but grey is not my best color. I really don't need two grey shawls, you know? So I dyed it green!



This was my first foray into the world of dying. I used good ol' Paas, because there was some in the cupboard left over from last Easter. It turned out a nice uneven mossy green, which was kind of hard to photograph, but you get the general idea from these pictures. I think next time I will remember to stir the yarn a bit when it's in the pot, but I think the erratic dye job will actually look really nice when it's knit up.



And yeah, that's right, I said 'next time.' I've done my best not to get started with any dying or spinning or any of that, because the last thing I need is another hobby or something else to spend money on, but it's kind of fun to make yarn be the color you want it to be. I've got some white yarn left over from my mom's Christmas sweater, and I might have to turn it some kind of orange. Just because you can never have too much orange yarn.

Next up (oooh, a teaser!) we will have a big red hat made out of ribbon yarn. I kind of love it.

cables!

I've been working on my cabled vest sort of sporadically. Sort of an every-other-day thing. I should really just print out the damn chart so I can work on it while I watch playoff hockey, but so far I have been too lazy. Anyway, here's where we stand:



And a dramatic closer shot! It's almost impossible to capture the actual color of this yarn. It's a dark teal with purple flecks.



And the start of a pair of red-and-blue stripey mitts, because you know I can't help myself.

more baby hats!

So this year my knitting creed seems to be "roll with the obsession, kid." First we had the stripes, and now we have the Baby Hat:



They're so darn cute! And they knit up in, like, four seconds! And you can put dangling leaves on them. Believe me, I did not make just one of the leafy yellow ones. OMG. Luckily these baby hats will be able to do some good: they're all (or most, I'm sure someone I know will have a baby eventually) headed off to the NICU to make worried parents smile a little.



But don't think I've forgotten the stripes. :)



Last year my mom mentioned that red-white-and-blue potholders would be nice for the patriotic chunk of the summer, so that's what she's getting for Mothers' Day. I just wish I wasn't so terrible at embroidering stars. I can do freestyle cute flowers no problem, but my stars always look like they've been melted or squashed. Or both. Sigh.

some stripes, some not . . .

This will be a bit of a scrambly sort of post, but hey, I'm not one of those marvelous sorts of bloggers whose posts are nearly works of art, so I suppose we're used to it. :)

Behold some things I've been making!

A small green hat. I am smote with the cute of this hat. I want to make more cute green hats with flowers on them, but I don't know any babies small enough to give this one to, so I'm trying very hard not to make more. Sometimes you've just got to knock out a cute hat, though, you know?



This will (hopefully) be a cabled vest with (hopefully) a hood. I am hoping I have enough yarn for the hood. I'm very much enjoying knitting this. I feel like I haven't done real cables in ages! Oh, right, the pattern is this Lion Brand Cabled Vest Thingie. (Not the official pattern title.) I'm doing the small size for the back, and will probably do the fronts as a medium and fudge the decreases so the shoulders are the same sizes.



And then we have the stripes. Yeah. I think the obsession may be fading a bit, but here's the current stack:



I did a whole bunch of singles for a while, and now I have a rule that I can't start a new one until I've made one of the singles a mate. I finished a mate yesterday, sooo . . . I do have to have a Thumb Day sometime soon, though. Three or so of them need thumbs.

You will notice the red and rainbow gloves are no longer in the stack. I gave them to a friend--I made them for her, after all!--and she was pretty stoked. Yay stripey mitts!

Here's one of my current singles: a laceweight stripey elbow glove. I wish it were pink and orange, but I didn't have any pink or orange wool sweaters in the 90's, and so I can't unravel them now.



I kind of adore this glove, but I might not be cool enough to wear it. I might have to find someone more goth and make their day.