Sunday, March 23, 2014

Another week...ish, another post.

I've been pretty busy with both crafting and class lately. I'm only taking two classes this semester, but I'm up to my eyeballs in work. Granted, one of them is cross-listed with a grad course. It's all biochemistry, all physics up in here, all the time, though. Such an exciting life I lead.

Since I'm still working on looking for another job, I have a lot of spare time. Yaaay. On the bright side, it means that I have so much time for crafting, it's ridiculous.

Since the last time I posted, I finished two more pairs of fingerless mitts.

Hello, plaster hand. We meet again.


These are a DIY basic mitt pattern, knit with Knitters Nightmare Batty Sock in the colorway Sugar Skulls. I used 2.00 mm (US 0) DPNs and sized them to fit my very tiny wrists, as you can see in the photo. The Ravelry project page for these (which includes the "pattern" I "wrote" to make them) is over here.

Here's pair #2:

These things are bulletproof. 


No, your eyes aren't playing tricks. One has horizontal chevrons and the other has vertical.
My favorite shot of these gloves.

These are the Wellington Mitts from the Knitscene Accessories 2012 issue, by Rebecca Blair. They're knit in Lanas Stop Bambini and Oso Blanco Amore. Lanas Stop and Oso Blanco are two Spanish brands of yarn, in case you couldn't tell from the names. I picked the yarn for these up about two years ago when I was visiting my parents. They're knit on 1.75 mm (US 00) DPNs (No, seriously.) and worked at about 11.5 sts/inch in order to size them to my hands. My project page with more notes can be found here on Rav.

I'd like to state that these were a pain in the everloving ass to knit, by the way. Not due to the pattern, which was both clear and simple, but the fact that this was the first time I've ever knit anything on 00s. The stitches were almost painfully tight to work, and I had to add an extra 3-4 repeats in before I had enough space in the thumb gusset to finish these mitts. I'm happy with the end results, but friggin' A, man.

That's pretty much it for my knitting FOs. I have a crochet and a cross-stitch project done that I'll be posting in another entry a little later, mainly so the size on each of these is a little more manageable and a little less pic-spammy.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

Am I really going to try blogging again? Really?

I'm hoping it may encourage me to explore things other than knitting/spinning/crochet, at least.

I've taken up cross-stitch lately, and I'm really hoping to get back into making art soon. I don't think sewing will make much of a reappearance, since it's probably the most spendy thing I could get myself into right now. I have a yarn stash to last me for years, art supplies to match, and I've found that a cross-stitch project usually clocks in at $10 or less for materials. Since I'm currently on a ramen-level budget, less expensive is definitely better.

The awesome, money-saving thing about crafting, by the way? You're spending all your free time making things and not on buying stuff. :P I know it's an oft-repeated trope about the ratio of entertainment to materials cost, but there really is something to it.

My last (which was also my first) cross-stitch project took me about 15-20 hours. I paid $5 for the pattern and used both floss and aida cloth I'd bought at garage sales over the past few years. Total investment, more or less? $10. Which comes out to about $0.50 an hour.

Honestly, one of the biggest problems I'm running into at this point is an excess of knitted goods just lying around. I have 8 or 9 scarves. I don't really need to knit more when I already have 1 for every day of the week and then some.

On that note, let's move onto the knitting content. I'm not going to try and catch up with my project backlog of the past year and change, so we'll go with what's being worked on now.


To start with, an FO.

Hopefully the nail polish helps disguise how jacked my hands are. I mean, jeez, one of them is made of plaster. 



Here's a better view of both gloves.

These are the Celtic Knot Fingerless Gloves, or, as I like to call them, my "Seriously, is it spring yet?" mitts.

Full details are on the Rav project page linked above. I'd give the FO about an 8/10 on the happy meter, and the pattern about a 6.5-7 out of 10 in terms of clarity. These are knit from the top down, which is not immediately obvious when you read the pattern. It's on there, so I'm not docking points for my inability to read all the way through. A little bolding of that info and a chart legend for the cabling would have been nice, though.


Okay, enough talking for my third inaugural blog post. :P I'll post WIP stuff later, as there's a lot of it. A lot a lot. Axolotl.