ENTRELAC

I have discovered the COOLEST knitting pattern ever. ENTRELAC.

It makes your knitting look like weaved strips, but actually it's just all one peice. I should have taken a picture of the wrong side. Oh well.

HOW COOL IS IT??? I'm obsessed. I started this little sample swatch just to feel out the pattern, but I loved it so much that I kept going, and now I am not entirely sure where I'm going with it. I might try to make it into a backpack somehow. It is just SO awesome. My eventual goal is to make an afghan with the pattern, but that would take many years, so I'm not ready to commit to it, but I'm in love with entrelac.

Mom's socks:

Finished them yesterday. I made a little mistake, I forgot one thing, which makes the leg a little looser than it should be, and they're kind of big on me but my mother has bigger feet than me so hopefully they will fit her. I really love the striping yarn.

IDEAS FOR FUTURE PROJECTS:

--Entrelac hat

--Sock-yarn skirt made up of geometric shapes

--Wedding dress.

Sock and purse and scarf in action

Hello all!

Here is a picture of my new scarf in action:

It's very warm! Thick and cozy. Though, as I mentioned, the curling edges are unfixable and annoying.

This next thing doesn't look like much yet:

It will eventually be a purse. The windowpane pattern is from my new knitting book. (That's the black, white, gray and purple thing.) The checkered fabric will be the lining, and the long narrow strip at the top will be the strap of the bag. That thing is really annoying because it uses three different colors and the yarn keeps getting badly tangled. So I can't take it places and work on it on the go. And I have to make TWO of the straps which are 21 inches each and right now I only have one that's about 10 inches so I see myself not finishing that for quite a while.

This next thing is a sock for my mommy, pictured in several sages of completion:

I love the self-striping yarn! You never know what color's coming next. (Well, once you go through the pattern once you do.) It's exciting and pretty. I love making socks. They are easy to make and they look so professional. This picture shows the sock right after I've turned the heel, which is not the annoying part. The most annoying part is then picking up the stitches to connect the heel to the top of the foot part because it ends up being so obvious. But when you're actually wearing it, the change isn't too noticeable.

Stage two:

Almost done! About ready to start shaping the toe.

Stage three: All finished!

Toe is finished, ends are weaved in. Isn't the color pattern awesome? Now I just have to make the other sock. I started this sock earlier in the week, Sunday or Monday I think, and finished it today. So they really don't take long at all. Although making pairs of things is always a little annoying, socks aren't too bad.

I finished another thing!

The cable scarf I started over winter break!

I finally finished it, and I stayed up till three in the morning adding fringe and weaving in ends. It looked great, but there was one problem. The edges kept folding in! It makes it impossible to see the whole pattern. So I decided to block it because I've heard that blocking knitting helps fix the shape of the thing. So I got it wet, pinned it to a garbage bag on my carpet (see above), and let it sit there for a while. Today I thought it was dry enough so I unpinned it and the edges CURLED RIGHT BACK UP. Blurg!

See? I have to hold the edges flat or else they fold.

Uncool, scarf.

i FINISHED something! finally.

Two things actually. My aunt's legwarmers, pictured here, and the sun pillow, which did not come out as stellar as I'd hoped.

The legwarmers look good though-- the only complaint I have is the weird color patterns. The one on the right came out really cool looking I think, with regular white twists up the whole thing. I expected the other one to come out looking the same way since I used the same yarn,

but these varigated color yarns are tricky... It came out in huge swabs of color. Still, I think it looks purty good and they are mighty warm and comfortable too. I mailed them out today. I hope she likes them! I did get some good feedback on the socks I made for my cousin:

Apparently she likes them a lot! Keeps her toasty warm.

And the pillow.

Disappointing. I machine sewed the seams. They came out nice and tight, but they still had that weird sticky out corner thing. And when the knitting was stretched over the pillow form, every flaw became visible. It's okay for a first try, but I will do better next time.

Recent Knittings

Things I've made in the past week!!


Child's hat.
I just made this tonight actually. I was experimenting with some techniques from my new knitting book The Essential Guide to Color Knitting Techniques and it looked really cute so I decided to turn it into a hat. It would probably fit a child but I have no idea what age group that would be. Maybe like... four or five?



Half a pillow.

Cool right? This is another new color technique, intarsia knitting. I call it the SUN PILLOW. I'm going to finish knitting it in red, and then sew it together and put in a pillow form.

A leg warmer.

Half of the pair for my aunt.

A glove.

Half of the pair for my friend. Oy, this was annoying to make and it's pretty small. Luckily she has tiny hands... it might possibly fit but I wouldn't hold my breath. I don't care though because I'm not making another pair. Now I have to knit the other hand aargg annoying.

Lots of projects, keeping busy.

ARG!

Oh friends, what a frustrating hour I've just spent. To start from the beginning: I had a flash of brilliance yesterday while thinking of how I could start my Etsy store (Etsy.com is a place where people sell their handmade things online). My flash went like this: Pillows!! For all you who have seen my name pillows, you will agree that they are pretty cute.


I don't plan on selling name pillows, though, because that would cater to too small an audience, unless I want to put up custom postings, but I don't want to do that just yet-- I'd rather put up stuff that I have made and are ready to be mailed. Anyway, I started doodling some designs for pillows. Standard stripes, bubbles, hearts, plaid, diagonals, a sun, a rainbow, a star, a smiley face... the possibilities were endless! I was so excited that I rushed right over to A.C. Moore to stock up on lots of different colored yarn. I bought a few small skeins and a pillow form to make a test pillow. I wanted to start with the SUN one, which would be a series of circles within one another, i.e., a yellow circle in the center surrounded by an orange one and all of that on a red background.


I got home, did some calculations for the gauge, and happily cast on. The method I used for changing colors was standard, carry-alongs, that is, when I was knitting with one color, I simply carried the other color yarn along behind the row and knit it into the stitch I was working on so that it would stay snug. This is how I've always done color-changes, like for the name pillows. But it didn't take me long to notice that it looked like crap. If I'm going to be selling these things, they need to be perfect, and this clearly was NOT. The knitting where I had carried yarn behind was all bunched up and scrunchy, it wasn't smooth or professional looking, and it was making the knitting all tight. In short, it looked amateur and bad. I ripped it out. I looked up "knitting with colors" online and read about intarsia knitting, which is a different kind of color knitting all together which I will not explain in detail here-- suffice it to say, it looks a lot better though it is a little more complicated.


It also required a tool I did not have: KNITTING BOBBINS. So I went to A.C. Moore today to buy some. Or try to. They didn't have any. I went to Wal-Mart. They didn't have them either. I went to Michael's. THEY DIDN'T HAVE THEM. I am starting to suspect that these things do not really exist. So I bought at Michael's some clothespins, which one website had recommended as a substitute, and some other stuff that I didn't need (can't walk out of that store without spending money). And now I am going to start this intarsia method. I think this will be a long and frustrating road but I must walk it.

Slow knitting day

Didn't get much done today. I was going to finish that stupid glove/mitten thing, but I realized it was pointless. It was just way too big. So I bound off around the first knuckles and now I have a really dumb-looking, useless pink thing. It would only fit a large man, and it's pink. And it's half of a pair. So I have no idea why I didn't just rip it out. I'll probably just toss it...

Anyway, I have to start the gloves again, obviously. But now I don't have any yarn to use for it that's not sock weight or medium weight. I need something in between, maybe weight 3. I don't know what to do with this pink sock yarn that I made the first glove with. I don't think there's enough left to make socks-- maybe ankle socks, but who wants knitted ankle socks? Oh well, add it to the stash.

I tore out the leg warmer that I'd started and began again with 48 stitches instead of 64. First I did a k2, p2 rib for two inches, then a k4, p4 rib for the leg, but it looked dumb so I tore it out and started again with stockinette. Oy, this project is going to annoy me.