the end is nigh

It is the last day of November! I didn’t feel as much franticness about my posts this year but I also let it go when I didn’t manage to post on some days. Today was a pretty nice Sunday in spite of, or perhaps because of, the rain. We definitely need the rain but I didn’t need to manage to go to the Farmer’s Market during the worst of it like I did. I tried to capture a picture of the rain but that is hard to do without a fancy camera.

I did capture the beginning of the hat for my niece. 2×2 ribbing is so exciting!

And I finally blocked another hat.

Red is hard to capture too. I think you can see the stitch pattern better in the black and white filter.

I started this hat for a friend undergoing cancer treatment but it turns out she doesn’t need chemo so she doesn’t need chemo caps. I gave her a silk cowl instead and am going to give this hat to a friend’s sister who is collecting for a cancer resource center that needs manly chemo caps. I don’t know that this hat is particularly manly but it isn’t particularly feminine. If I can manage it, I will knit another for her before my friend goes to visit her sister.

Happy December folks! I will see you 11/1/2015! Kidding, I hope, I hope to keep posting occasionally but we all know how well that has been going.

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a couple of quick finished objects

I finished two quick project this week. First, a hat for a dear friend’s mother who has had to have brain surgery. I hope the cotton is soft enough but also warm enough for her head.

This is the yarn I was saying I’d like to weave with. I did finish with just one hank so I need to take that yarn with me to Stitches and look for a color of mill-dyed Sock Candy to coordinate with it. I hope Blue Moon brings their mill dyes this year, I don’t think they did last year.

I also finished a cowl for myself from that ball of Remix that Juls brought back from Tahoe for me.

I love it already.

The pattern is Cowl de Printemps (Ravelry link) by my friend Jeni. It’s free from her site or from Ravelry. It’s a nice pattern. I used a thicker yarn than she called for so I adjusted the stitch count and the number of repeats down, which was simple.

I hope to make some mitts from the rest of that ball of Remix. I don’t know if have enough yarn. I weighed the ball and am estimating about 90 yards left. We’ll see if that’s enough!

NaBloPoMo Day 10: finishing, warping, failing

I had some success and some failure today. I finished the cap I started yesterday.

chemo cap with flower

I found another hat that I made for myself last year that I never wear and I think will suit my friend's needs. At least, it will keep her head warm and it will be large enough! (She says she has a big head.)

slouchy copy cat hat

I learned to use a warping mill.

borrowed warping mill

And to thread the Beka Child's Looms that we have for school.

threading the beka child’s loom

You may also be able to tell that I got my card reader to work again and was able to get photos off of my camera rather than just using my iPhone. The iPhone is great outside but inside it basically stinks.

I am thinking now that I should reassess my summary statement. I really only had one failure. The yarn I used to warp the loom is far too think. It gets caught on itself when I try to move the heddle up and down to, you know, actually weave. I have to say that I found measuring warp on the mill and threading the heddle one strand at a time with a dental floss threader to be surprisingly meditative. I was resisting doing it because I thought that it would be horribly tedious and much more complicated than warping my cricket loom which is done with a warping peg and the warp is measured directly onto the loom, basically. That way gets it all down to one step, more or less, but this was less stressful, perhaps because I could do the steps sitting down either in front of the mill to measure or at the table with the heddle propped between two books to thread. Having my friend Victoria's mill was key, clearly, as was her advice to use the lease sticks (the sticks you see in the above photo between where the yarn crosses itself) to maintain the cross. Excellent advice!

Tomorrow I hope to obtain thinner yarn and rewarp the loom I threaded and warp another one. I might have to give up on the idea of exclusively working with our school colors because I do have some cotton yarn that was far too thin for the Cricket loom which I think means it will be just right for the Bekas.

I have to say that I was worried that this month being our Arts Focus workshops at school was going to interfere with my daily blogging but it's actually given me more to talk about! If you don't mind reading about weaving, of course.

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