Diversions

Here are two non-knitting bits, just for fun.

The first is from Christmas. I had this idea for a pompom tree. So I made a bunch of pompoms from my leftovers bag.

Didn't they turn out well?

The idea was to make a tree where the bottom layer was 4 pompoms, the next layer 3, the next layer 1, and the top a smaller gold pompom. In theory, it was perfect.

In reality:

Not so much. It just looked like a yarn blob, very home-crafted. The pompoms lost their uniqueness, and they just looked like one large mess. (I think the tree even looks a bit nicer in the picture than it did in real life--why can't all my pictures look that way?)

So I took it apart, but I still have the pompoms. They are sitting in a bowl until I come up with a better idea of what to do with them, something that shows them off in their own uniqueness more clearly.

The second crafty attempt was inspired by this Christmas gift received by a wonderful blogger. I fell in love with it, so I got this hand from Amazon (it is slightly smaller than an adult hand, which makes it perfect for jewelry), and ordered these from Wishy Washi Tape.

I'd seen washi tape from other craft blogs I follow and from Pinterest, but had never used them before.

And here is the result.

Quite a bit more successful than the pompon tree!

Once I realized the tape would slightly wrinkle as I tried to fit it around the curves, and that it didn't matter, I relaxed and just kept adding tape bits until I was satisfied.

I love it, and as a bonus, I have a lot of tape left over.

There may be some plain flowerpots getting some decoration in the near future.

Stolen Hours?

Lately I've been interested in stoles -- long rectangular pieces. I've been using Kim Salazar's Kureopatora's Snake pattern as my basis, on size 15 or 17 needles, just under or over 40 stitches wide.

Here is the latest:

That's a yardstick, so you can see that it is over 6 feet long.

I used two of my magic balls, alternating rows, for a random but organized look.

The edging was one of those tubular yarns, mean for ruffles. I did a couple of rounds of crochet, then attached the tubular yarn in a bind-off stitch.

I don't know why I am finding making these stoles so compelling, but I do. You'll be seeing several more here.

You Can't Step in the Same Stream Twice

I gifted one of my creations this last Christmas, and just got some pictures of what was done with it.

The creation was Stream, from 2011.

This one had always slightly fretted me, because it came out heavy for an afghan, but what else do you do with it?

This is what my friend Dee did:

She made it into a wall hanging! And it looks wonderful, doesn't it!

I feel like I'm seeing it for the first time. The slight ripples really do make it seem like water.

Darn Good Scarves

I've shown these types of scarves before, but here are the latest two.

They both have multicolor silk ribbon yarn from Darn Good Yarn as the center, and then stitches picked up around the edge, with a yarnover between each middle arm.

The middle yarn does the talking, so I make the hairpin lace wide and just edge it with a couple of rows of knitting on large needles.

For the end parts, I picked up some stitches for the edge, and then increased before and after each corner stitch on every other row (the 'right side' of the garter).

These scarves are rather long, at least 6 feet. The ribbon yarn works up fast when doing the hairpin lace part. These are best suited to be worn doubled.

The edged hairpin lace scarf is now one of my go-to patterns.

Happy 2014!

It's going to be a good year.

I started something new a couple months ago. I had several things that I wanted to do, and it haunted me to have them undone. I don't mean chores, I mean ongoing projects.

In November, as a sideline while a friend of mine did NaNoWriMo, I worked on editing one of the fiction books I wrote in the past as part of NaNoWriMo. My goal was a half hour a day (on average--I banked a few half hours for the Thanksgiving holiday), to keep it very achievable, and I made it.

In December I resolved to knit at least one ball of yarn a day, because my stash had gotten larger than I was comfortable with, given our small apartment. I like to have a palette of colors and textures available, but when I was getting to two large plastic storage bags of some colors, it got to be too much.

As you can imagine, I concentrated on thicker yarn and large needles, but since I needed to knit a slew of Christmas scarves for people I work with, it was all good. I only counted balls that either were completely gone, or reduced enough to go into my scrap bag (for making magic balls). I didn't count any yarn I used that I didn't finish, so I knit far more than I counted.

I made it to 40 balls! And as a bonus, I gave away all the scarves and a few hats I had accumulated. It makes me feel free, and they were all well received.

The odd thing is that knowing I was making progress on even one project freed up a lot of energy. I no longer beat myself up about wasting time, and enjoy myself more in the evenings. I feel more peaceful.

January will be about catching up on blogging and Ravelry. I didn't take pictures of all the scarves I made, but I have a bit of a backlog on other things, especially shawls. So this month I take or find the pictures and edit them, and then post. It also includes fixing the blog format, and maybe organizing my Ravelry favorites, things like that.

(That's my friend Jen at Halloween, in front of the Raven Shawl.)

But no matter what the month concentrates on, I don't stop all the others if I feel like doing them. In other words, I always knit!