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A few weeks ago I’d asked for suggestions on what to make for a baby girl in a hot place. This was the compromise solution I arrived at.
Thread: Anchor knitting cotton (I think it is bedspread weight) in cream, about 3 full balls.
Hook: Clover double-ended hook, with 4/0 on one end and 6/0 on the other. I assume those are size numbers rather than mm. I got two of those in a CAT PAC. They’re wonderfully light. I’m all about lightness in hooks. I used the 4/0 end.
Pattern: From Crochet World June 2005. Toddler’s Spring time dress. Errors found.
Time: A while.
Size: About 14″ long and 22″ wide.
Extra: #1 There was a row count error in the back instructions. It should read Row 44 instead of Row 43 (and so on). I found the pattern stitch instructions quite confusing and it took me several attempts to get it right. In Row 1 of the skirt part, it should read “Work 66 sc … ch 6… ” instead of ch 3. There was also some problem about right and left, which I don’t recall now.
#2 I left off the sleeves and improvised on the edging. (ch3, sc around for 3 rows). I was afraid I was running out of thread and didn’t want to buy any more, since I was stash-busting.
#3 My first dress.
I agree with Sara about finishing. Mine is very, very poor.
Thank you everyone for your responses so far on my sappy (soppy? sloppy?) question in my last post. Let me be clear, I am not at all the sort of person to keep it all in, as those who have known me for any length of time will testify. Rather the opposite, frequently latching on to unsuspecting passersby to upchuck all my current troubles. Oops.
But sometimes no one is handy, or you feel you need to give your current recipient a break. Or sometimes it just feels as though things are the same, although troublesome. Then I feel like I need a Scream Room™. Do you have one? Or any personal space where you know you won’t be disturbed (intruded upon)? Let me know.
Meanwhile, here is a bag I rescued from UFO-dom and finished to send off to my Crochetville Notions Swap partner. This picture was taken with my last bookhaul in it. Amazingly, both of us have received our packages intact and promptly. Only, mine has gone to Hyderabad in anticipation of our moving from here. So no pics.
And guess what? The husband’s transfer has been deferred indefinitely for two months. The boss at the other place, who was on leave until a couple of days ago, returned to office and realised he’d lose his deputy if the transfer went through (the husband is too junior to fill that particular position). So they’ve asked for a postponement of the move until they figure out what to do about a deputy. Ha. Suspended animation. It’s nice, have you ever tried it? Anyhow, I present to you, The Frugal Bag.
This was a pattern from Frugalhaus.com, but I can’t find it there now. Googling produced a pdf link whose legality I’m not confident of.* Since I forgot to measure this before sending it off in the Crochetville Notions Swap, let’s get the details in an ugly format. The yarn was GUM and unknown (probably RHSS) purple, with Denise 10 1/2 circulars. I started this bag so long ago, I don’t even remember when. Some time last year. Nice and sturdy. For the bottom, instead of using the garter stitch recommended, I used linked dcs (US) (this link shows a linked treble (US) but the principle is the same). Also try this Crochet Me tutorial. The stitch produces fewer holes than simple dc (US).
You could use either of the bag’s sides (inside or out) and in fact the stockinette side looked interesting, like fairisle or something. However, the purl ridges defining the sides weren’t clear enough so I turned it this side out (according to the original pattern). And now the sides of the bag are well-defined. Ugly but functional. That’s me 😀
* ETA: Heather very nicely found me the link to the pattern from archive.org. Thank you, Heather!
Something. Another FO.
In an effort to finish things and see what can be gifted/mailed away before we move, I finished this blanket. As usual, here are the details:
Yarn: I’ve been told it is Lion Brand Woolease, by Cordelia, who gave it to me. (I think it might be the discontinued sportweight variety). I used three full skeins (with about 3 yards left over).
Hook: Clover Soft Touch F/4.00mm
Pattern: Pattern stitch for Block and Offset Shells from Harmony Guides. Mindless. Reversible but not upside-downable, because the top of the pattern scallops. Also, I didn’t do an edging. It didn’t appear to be necessary. (Plus I was too lazy to try and figure out how to unscallop the scallops for edging). So the baby gets a sorta symmetric pattern. Do you think he’ll care?
Time: I began this a month ago, but obviously it goes much faster than that. Around a week would be plenty.
Size: 41″ square (should be good for a toddler, right? And please, no one tell me it’s too hole-y)
Extra: #1 Quick and easy.
Up close and personal with the pattern stitch:
The pattern is a multiple of 11 + 4 (plus 2 for the base chain). I made a mistake in the starting chain, but recovered by adding dcs (US) a la filet crochet. Now I need to pop it into the wash before packaging it. It’s been washed. Also, the same friend for whom this is intended tells me her next baby will also be a boy. How boring. I’m thinking I shall make something else for that baby too, and mail it to aunty (her mom) to take with her when she goes to the US. Might save on postage!
There’s another wedding coming up this week, so I made another doily and got it framed. This is it before framing (and after impaling blocking).
It’s been framed against an off-white background and with a dark brown frame. Maybe I will take pictures later. Some of the specs:
Thread: Red Heart 100% mercerised cotton from Madura Coats. Size 20, I should think. The balls give amazing yardage.
Hook: Nameless 1.75 mm steel, probably Pony (could be Tulip also)
Pattern: Berka Shell doily from Southmaid Timeless Doilies to Crochet. (Someone will please explain what a berka shell is.)
Time: A day or so.
Size: Forgot to measure it before framing. I might measure it before wrapping it.
Extra: #1 Quick and easy.
#2 I used Pony Pearlised pins to block this and found they didn’t rust! Yay! Normally when I leave my doilies to dry overnight, I find the pins have rusted. Of course these could just be slow rusters, but maybe not. I shall have to buy lots more of them. This was only a small doily, so I didn’t need too many.
#3 I seem to have found my thread mojo again. Actually I was planning to make a couple more to frame as gifts for the husband’s hospital/mess, but he told me they aren’t classy enough. Ah well. That’s put me in my place, proper, it ‘as.
The dotty thing of two posts ago has morphed into this:
Yarn: The pink is Bergen, apparently a German yarn (possibly East German) made of WolPryla (mit anderen faserstoffen – with other ingredients). It is showing quite true on my monitor. The purple is Pegasus, also of the same origin. It is less blue than in the picture. Both yarns advise using 2.5 mm needles, but while the pink says “3”, the purple says “2”. Neither has a st/row count gauge indicator. The white is Cactus from Taiwan (why would you name a yarn that?!) with no indication of content, but also advises 2.5 mm. The gauge indicator for this yarn says 32 st/46 rows to 4″/10 cm. All yarns are slightly fuzzy but soft enough.
Hook: Easy Tunisian Hooks N/10mm and M/9mm, Boye K/10.5/6.5mm
Pattern: Loosely based on a Crotiques pattern. I changed st counts, row counts, button bands, and the collar pattern, as well as adding that holey lacy row in the middle. I used a Tunisian double crochet(US) for that. The body was worked in Tunisian knit stitch. Changed colours when I felt I couldn’t go further without compromising on the yarn for sleeves. The button bands and the bottom were worked together in seed stitch (sc (US) in both loops, sc in back loop only and then reverse order for next row) and I quite like how it worked out. To make the collar longer, I added a few rows of sc through both loops on top of the collar area. Instead of poke-through buttons, I plan to put snaps, and use the purple buttons for only aesthetic effect.
Time: About a week.
Size: Hopefully to fit a 6-month niece (cousin’s kid) I’m going to meet in a couple of days. She was a big baby. The size sweater is about 24″ wide and 12″ long, with the sleeves at 8″ long. Her next winter will be obviously when she’s older (a year), so this needs to fit her then.
Extra: #1 I love how neat the raglan shape came out. My knit raglans are never so good.
#2 All three yarns were very grippy. I don’t think I like that. This was true on both the plastic Easy Tunisian hooks as well as the metal Boye. I plan to use the rest of the yarn to make a hat or booties, and will check how they act with my Denises and Pony hooks. Slightly slippery is always better than grippy.
#3 The German yarns say “Altenburger Wollspinnerei” which I think refers to some sort of spinning cooperative. The Bergen also says “50-PAN-f-TDI/50 Wo” which could mean it has some wool content, but I’m not hopeful. The Pegasus says “30 PAN-f-TDI/70 PAN f ” which completely baffles me.
#4 The Bergen yarn says “100 tex x3” while Pegasus has “110 tex x2” which makes halfway sense, because the x3 has 3 strands plied together while the x2 has 2 strands.
#5 Bergen came in a 100g ball of 280m, while Pegasus had 50g to 190m. No size/weight indication on the Cactus.
#6 All this documentation for all-acrylic (probably) yarns is because I didn’t find any information on them when I googled.
#7 Shh! I haven’t yet seamed/sewn in the ends or the buttons/snaps yet. The garment has just been skilfully arranged for the photo session.
I trust you dutifully squinted for the first picture so you didn’t see the boo-boos and ha-has. Now I shall reward you with a close-up of the raglan which also shows the button band, main body and collar up close.
Not a party, sorry. Just this Trish Kristoffersen doily that I made to give a neighbour. She’s going to visit her sister in the US and I offered to make something for her to take. She asked for “something to put on the table”. I think this qualifies, don’t you?
Here are the specs:
Thread: DMC Baroque size 10. White.
Hook: 1.5 mm Tulip steel
Pattern: Diamond Landscape by Trish Kristoffersen, from Southmaid Masterpiece Doilies, Book 1411.
Time: A day.
Size: 13.3″ across from picot to picot.
Extra: #1 I used the thread weight recommended and the hook size recommended. Wow. At least it wasn’t the same thread brand.
#2 This was my third attempt after I tried an oval doily (the one on the cover) and another round one from the same booklet. The oval doily was ruffling. I kept at it to see if it would straighten out after a few rounds, but it didn’t, so I frogged it. The round doily had a bit of slip stitching to the required stitch, which I tried to do differently (join with ch, dc instead of ch 3), and then I got confused with what I’d done and where I was supposed to end up. Plus the thing was cupping slightly. I think I make my chains too tight. That would explain why the oval doily ruffled (because it starts with a base chain, obviously).
And here’s the salsa. With red capsicum, tomato and spring onions. Now I have to make something to eat it with.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to throw a whine-fest and vanish. My internet gave out on me on Wednesday afternoon and was only restored last evening. I had to reprogram my wireless router after a year and that took me some figurative hair-pulling before I managed to hit just the right keys. We changed our internet plan from dead-slow unlimited to promised-fast limited. Let’s see how good that is, and whether having a limit on the downloads will reveal just how much flotsam I accumulate each month.
Thank you everyone for your comments on my last post. Ordinarily I would respond by email to each commenter, but this time since it’s been a while, I’m doing this wholesale. Thank you for all the offers to swap. Let me hasten to add that most of my swaps have been excellent and deeply satisfying (for me). Even the ones on Knitty where people haven’t bothered to comment on the swap satisfaction thread.
Also, I think I might have, even with my comparatively measly stash, reached SABLE (Stash Accumulated Beyond Life Expectancy) status, purely because I often sit on my bed (which is my knitting/working on laptop spot) and just stare bemusedly at the general one-skeined, rainbow-hued, variedly-weighted and grossly-mismatched collection.
If it were all cotton, for example, I might open a store for handmade dishcloths (this might not be such a bright idea, because my aunt whom I bestow my works on thinks they are way too beautiful to be used as intended and instead drapes them on her telephone or in the showcase. There’s a limit to how many surfaces can be draped).
If it were all wool, I could neatly pack a few essentials and get myself admitted to the nearest mental hospital for thinking of wool and this climate in the same breath.
I have such things as two skeins of this yarn, two of this one, assorted Indian fun fur and acrylic, two disparate skeins of “Jiffy” and so on. What could I possible make that would reduce this stash? I do like just possessing these things, but in the interests of space and marital harmony, I’d like to diminish this stash before acquiring any more. As it is, the husband makes snide remarks about my “handiworks”. Mustn’t give him any more fodder.
We are waxing really eloquent once again today, aren’t we (and how often, Mrs S, do you find yourself unable to stop this verbal diarrhoea, he asked kindly as the tape recorder whirred in the background and she lay on the black faux leather couch in the sound-proofed consultant’s office. The brown fan had lashings of dirt, she noticed and worried it would affect her allergies. She’d have to weigh the benefits of the weekly shrink visit against being rattled by sneezes the whole of the next day, she decided.)
I thought I’d show you some bright things today. More dishcloths! In yellow! So here goes.
Click through for more views of the lacy diamonds and the cables. The dishcloths are both from the Monthly Dishcloth Yahoogroup. In my forays into these and other patterns, I have rediscovered Judith Prindle. She used to be active on one of my crochet mailing lists. She now has a collection of free patterns for dishcloths and other things up. Nice stuff.
Here’s something a little bit different.
That, me darlings, is a swatch of Crochet on the Double (or Croknit), with standard issue acrylic and a double-ended hook. I love the drape of this, so different from the can-stand-up-by-itself nature of my other Tunisian trials. I must see if the drapiness will transfer productively to a garment or a slip-on potholder or something. For garments, nothing less than thread will do, I should think.
I have lots more to tell you, but I shall spare you for this post and come back later. The ‘more’ will involve screwdrivers, sewing machines, ugliness, books and cats.
Check out this link for one (my) interpretation of “All this and Heaven too”.
Warning! This post is whiny! Also there is Too Much Information. So the squeamish/fastidious/constructively employed amongst you might want to go away and come back another time.
[Removed to protect the er, innocent.]
On a completely different note, here is a view of a dishcloth I finished from the archives of the Monthly Dishcloths group at Yahoogroups. I joined up in January so I could use my lovely (yes, I’m serious) stash of Lion Cotton and Sugar n’ Cream that I got from a very satisfying swap at the Ville. No, I don’t use dishcloths and no, I do not intend doing all the KALs.
The pattern (Smocked Dishcloth) can be found here. Someone over at Flickr thought it looks like an army of spiders marching. Suits me. It’s the reptiles I can’t stand.
I must be peculiar, but I like knitting with cotton. The stitches are firm and well-defined. Perhaps it reflects on how slowly and how little I knit. Because everyone else complains.
Just about a year ago, I made a hexagonish doormat/rug that was more pie-like than anything else. I remained unhappy with it, but being the lazy sloth I am, I’ve been using it folded. Finally last week I got up enough energy to frog it and remake it. Originally, a wise person suggested if I made it with one section less, it might be more semi-circular, and I was planning to follow that advice. However, trying to modify the pattern was too much for the state of mind I was in, so I simply made an sc hexagon using the same yarn, but a smaller hook. It looks much better now, even if it’s a half-hexagon rather than a semi-circle.
Details:
Yarn: Frogged from the previous avatar of the rug, hence the same yarn, probably RH SS, in a dusty rose and an aran fleck. Dusty and fleck are good for floors, don’t you think?!
Hook: I think a P hook. It’s grey plastic and a friend brought it for me from the US along with a blue Q. She couldn’t think what I’d do with such a gigantic hook. :p
Pattern: Followed the directions for the semicircle from this Crochet Me pattern. I cannot even create a simple shape without having my hand held.
Time: About 4 hours. Began it at home, but took it to the radio studio and finished most of it in between announcements.
Size: 16″ x 37″ (Shouldn’t it have been something like 16″ x 32″ for perfect symmetry?)
Extra: #1 I’m now loving it. The P hook wasn’t as bad as my memory of the Q hook was, but perhaps this was because I was careful to use the knife-hold almost throughout, only switching to pen-hold when I forgot.
#2 I have a rubber mat under it so that it doesn’t slip and slide.
#3 I’m thrilled I shall be able to wash this thing.
#4 Yay for redux!
——–
On a bookish note, I finished my Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club, an Isabel Dalhousie mystery, the first time I read one. You must understand that reading the Scotland-based books of McCall Smith is more for the language and literary moments than the actual mystery. So it will be a slow read, as this was, being my bedtime read for the past few days. However tired I am, I feel unable to sleep without reading at least a few pages of something. I resort to re-reading old favourites if I cannot find something new. This leads to clashes with the husband, who cannot sleep with the light on. Now he’s got an eyeshade from the hospital, so everyone’s happy. 🙂
I brought back from Hyderabad the copy of Anne Fadiman‘s Ex Libris that I had given my sister for a gift. It’s a wonderful book and I can’t recommend it enough to Readers. There’s a lot to agree with and to spark one’s own memories. She writes of how her family is a family of Readers and so apparently is her husband. The chapters are actually different columns she wrote. One of them is on difficult words, and coincidentally, I was reading a Reginald Hill which had several sesquipedalians. I shall have to reread that one (or at least skim it) and then I shall hold a mini-quiz on this blog. Someone (sorry, my brain forgot) said she likes to show a picture of what she’s reading, so you know what to look for. I seem to find, however, that most of my books have different covers which are not easily available to show. This might mean that showing the cover doesn’t really help someone not in this country. And some day someone is going to sit me down and explain why books have to have different titles and covers in the United States than they have everywhere else in the world.
Some day, also, I shall figure out how to make the text in my posts flow around the pictures so we do not have a school project type of post to read.
Wipe your feet as you leave, please.
Well, sort of. I took some very bad pictures (are there any other kind I can take?) of a cardigan I made for my niece when she was born, as well as a UFO I finished and gave her in my recent trip to Hyderabad. (Yes, I’m back now in Vizag.) First up, we have the cardigan:
And here are the details.
Yarn: Acrylic from the Munirka market in Delhi. Look at my list of yarn stores in India for the exact address. The link is over on my sideboard.
Needles: Who remembers? I made it in 1998! Probably 3.75 or 4.00 mm
Pattern: Fleisher pattern book from the 1960s, it was my mom’s but I have had it now since 1998 (or earlier) since she stopped knitting.
Time: It was a labour of love. I don’t have the faintest idea now how long it took. As usual I didn’t have the time to find nice buttons for it.
Size: Totally forgot to measure it
Extra: #1 What a pathetic set of specifications I’ve given! Might as well not have written anything down. I have better (somewhat) specs for the next project, I promise!
#2 This was in the days when I used to twist my knit stitches (by knitting them through the back leg). I found the mini-cables hard going, I remember.
Next up we have the bag I finished from my mountain of UFOs.
Specs:
Yarn: Mainstays from Walmart (I don’t remember now who sent it to me). Two strands held together.
Needles: I am growing old. But perhaps they were my favourite size, 4.5 mm (or should that be 3.75?)
Pattern: Coats & Clark free pattern (Mine is supposed to be the blue bag)
Time: It was a UFO! The longest part was actually making the handles (strips of hdc) and deciding on and sewing the zip for closure. I’d actually bought the zip ages ago.
Size: 9″ x 9.5″
Extra: #1 I wish I had better options for handles than the tacky round plastic ones (or the tackier odd-shaped steel ones). I should have explored stores in Hyderabad, but what with the auto strike and the absent driver and various other distractions, I didn’t. Thankfully my niece isn’t very discriminating in her taste yet.
#2 The bag isn’t lined either.
#3 If you click through, you’ll find a couple more pictures of the bag in my Flickr photostream.
Right now I have no mojo. I badly want to have something going but have been in a sort of depressed state the past few days. Let’s see.
Next up, I’ll do another post rounding up the books I’ve read between my last book report and now.
swakrta.com 