gnoah the first

You guys. It happened! The gnome workshop this weekend was so. much. fun. And look at the little guy that came home with me - so much whimsy packed into this little dude. 

Sarah was friendly, well spoken, and has a knack for teaching. A lot of techniques are packed into this pattern, and I was able to follow her instruction quite well and was grateful for the chance to see it done in parallel and hear her useful tips along the way. Her love of the craft and of the little personalities we were bringing to life was apparent, and I was charmed both by her designs and her reflections on how magical her path had been to bring her to the point that she is doing and loving what she's doing now. 

It was a companionable experience to sit in a room full of knitters all puzzling over the same pattern, helping each other with questions, and generally cheering each other on. Marinating in the atmosphere of Just Having Fun was a wonderful way to spend the afternoon. I have been enjoying social knit nights at the shop for a few weeks now, and this experience was right in line with the supportive community of women I have met there. This place is a gem and a gift to my crafty heart. 

As to the project, I was intrigued by the clever use of i-cord, the relative ease of sewing all the bits on (despite my normally extreme dislike of fiddly bits like that), and the many ways a bobble can be fashioned to make a nose. Gnoah came together relatively easily for me, and I am definitely planning on enjoying and being challenged by each of the patterns out of Sarah's book. 

When I got home and started messing around with his hat and stance, I decided what he really wanted was a walking stick. I had cut some rosemary for a flower arrangement on my way inside, and one of the leftover twigs was the perfect size. He makes me smile! Which is of course the point of it all, isn't it. 

trippy tropical table runner, finished

Having started this the last day of my winter time off I am pleased to say that it did not take me too long to cross the finish line. It hung around on the wall for a few weeks while I procrastinated backing, basting, and quilting, but of course none of that was nearly as cumbersome as big quilts are. I took some brain breaks from work yesterday and quilted squiggly lines using a preset stitch on my machine with some pretty deep turquoise thread. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to do those lines across the width or down the length, but I'm glad I chose the long dimension. I think it plays with the movement of the hexagon braid nicely. 

The backing I pieced from a combination of Folk Song and Loulouthi fabric from Anna Maria Horner - I have always loved her designs! That striped wallpaper-like floral was a leftover from a quilt kit that mom and I finished up together for her birthday in 2015, and the blue floral is the sister print to the green border print on the front. 

Whenever I have looked at this piece, it has brought my mind to flip flops and summertime. The combination of colors reminds me so much of being at the Caribbean Resort at Disney World, so I'm dubbing it the Trippy Tropical table runner. Pretty soon I'll be packing it up and sending it off to brighten my mom's table! 

kaffe the red

I'm very excited to have splurged on myself for a workshop early in February to learn to knit gnomes. Mom and I walked into my LYS in November and were greeted by the most. adorable. knitted gnomes who were scattered among the shelves. A few weeks later I noticed the pattern designer was going to have a workshop to teach gnome making. The folks that run the store are really friendly, so it seemed like a great way for me to continue exploring town and perhaps meet a few new people. I signed up. Fast forward a couple months and I saw an announcement on instagram (totally serendipitous, I spend like zero time on that platform) that the designer is having a Year of Gnomes to-do on her Ravelry page where the idea is to try to make one gnome a month. That seems fun and achievable so I figured I'd give it a shot. I want to wait until the workshop to learn how to make the 3d gnomes, so I bought her pattern for a cute cup cozy. It turns out that the YoG only counts for the 3d guys, but that's ok. I can do the rest of the months and this was a fun thing to knit! 

I dug through my yarn stash to find some leftovers that I thought had enough contrast for the gnome to show up and went to work. It was so fun I had a hard time putting it down - thankfully a lot of my work that day was able to be done with yarn in hand, so by the evening I had a cozy finished and ready to block. This was a fun, low pressure way to remind myself that I need to be careful about how I tension yarn when I'm doing color work and trying to hold both colors at once. The yarn in my right hand ends up tighter than the one I hold in my left, and things get a little out of whack. It's nothing that made the cozy not coze, but something I definitely messed around with while I was blocking. 

The end result is super cute (here finishing blocking on a cup), and if I make more I might consider going down a needle size to make up for my looser knitting. It fits on my travel mug, but is a little bit big likely because I was trying to knit loose enough that I didn't have my floats too tight. No big deal. I am calling him Kaffe the Red because the orange beard obviously means he's a redhead. 

Pattern: Gnome Need to Thank Me by Sarah Schira (my Ravelry page)

Needle: 2.5 mm and 2.75 mm

Yarn: madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light in Terra, Berroco Ultra Alpaca in Blueberry Mix, and Greenwood Fiberworks Yakity Yak in Lime - three animals in one cozy! 

glamour shots to catch up

While I was out photographing my North Sea wrap yesterday, I decided to take advantage of the beautiful day and great lighting to take pictures of some knit pieces that I have finished since 2021 (and also a way better picture of my Shetland shawl than I had).

Shetland shawl August 2017 - June 2019. Literally one of my favorite things I've ever made and I never took very good photos of it. It's 6 feet square, so that's a challenge. It's folded in half here the way I've been wearing it. 

Phoenix started week 22 of pandemic, according to blog post titles (August 2020) and finished Aug 16 2021which is the day after I went back to work.

This is a pattern out of my Colorwork Shawls book by Melanie Berg and made with some beautifully hand dyed wool and silk yarn from a woman I met at Stitches West the one time I went. The stripes between the green and blue yarn didn't workout quite as well as I imagined, but the wash of color against the bright orange is still pretty and you can still see the interesting geometry of the sideways construction. 

Scarf of my own design Feb 20 - Mar 27 2022. Very cozy yarn from Monarch Knitting in Monterey. I can remember purposely choosing a combination of colors that I don't normally wear. 

Unlike many of the wool-based knits I make, this one feels good on my skin and doesn't seem to irritate it if I wear it a long time. It's extremely soft, and I wonder if I'd ever be brave enough to knit a sweater with it. 

This crochet blanket was a fun thing I made in April of 2022. I can't remember how, where, or why I got this yarn but I suspect the pattern may have been something from the label. 

I made the blanket shorter than was called for and got to play with making some wonderfully dense pompoms to add onto the ends using the rest of the yarn. It's a great blanket for the couch, and those pompoms never get old. 

Fractured is a cowl that Dave picked colors out for a while back on one of our trips down to Monterey. It's Brooklyn Tweed yarn from Monarch Knitting, and I finally cast it on this past year and worked on it sporadically from January to December.

I started it in January intending to have it done for his birthday in February, but it was slower going than I hoped. I blocked it out over the holidays and am amazed at how much everything evened out. It looks great and I'm hoping it suits his oceanside lifestyle.

North Sea Ombre wrap finished

Today is a banner day! Yesterday I finally soaked and stretched this wrap, and this morning I was greeted with a dry, fragrant (thank you Soak yuzu...) and finished piece. 

I cast on in late June 2022 and bound off the last stitch on a train somewhere between Chicago and home on July 14, 2024. That isn't a terribly long time for something like this, which is 1100 yards off light fingering weight yarn contorted into beautiful lace, and certainly not the longest I've taken on a project. The interesting thing about this is that aside from a quick hat and a julekuler, I did not work on any other knitting project while this was going. I really felt like I wanted to stick to one thing and get it done. Problem was, I definitely got bored along the way. The first section of green especially seemed to take forever. Lamenting whether any color changes were actually going to happen before I got to the end of the written pattern, I kept chugging along. Then I got to the end of the written pattern. And I had a lot of yarn left, and no navy stitches at all. What to do? The pattern, and a bunch of things on Ravelry, gave me the impression that I had the perfect amount of yarn. It's a gradient, I don't want to split it up and use it on something else because I think it will look half baked without the full swoosh of colors. So, I did what any stubborn knitter would do - I added a whole extra repeat of the geometric center panel and then knitted the waves until I ran out of yarn. 

I'm pretty thrilled with the end result. It measures 22" wide by 110" long. The pattern indicated 72" in length, which indeed my "end" of the actual called for pattern does coincide with that length. I like the extra though. Is it maybe a foot too long? Yeah, probably. But it wraps comfortably, I can move in it without it unwrapping, and when I let it hang off my shoulders it makes me look elegantly tall. 

The book it came from is a compilation of folk shawls from around the world. The Shetland shawl I made also came from there. I am certain I will be making more pieces out of those pages; these are two of my favorite pieces now that they are finished. The making (of both) was sometimes tedious, but the end result is well worth it. 

Pattern: North Sea Shawl, by Cheryl Oberle (my Ravelry page) 

Yarn: Scheepjes Woolly Whirl in 'sugar sizzle'
Needle: US 5 (3.75 mm)
Size: 22" wide x 110" long

just one more thing

Winter Closure this year has been a wonderful time for sewing, likely fueled by too much YouTube and many quilt and sewing videos. As I'm wrapping up the final weekend before heading back to work I've gotten one more thing accomplished in the craft room. This Fractured Half Hexagon table runner was inspired by a video tutorial from Missouri Star Quilt Co (it starts at about 13:00 in the video). 

I woke up Saturday morning thinking about hexagon math after having watched that tutorial recently. Literally, the first thing that popped in my head when I woke up was trigonometry. That's someone's definition of crazy for sure. I was trying to figure out what size I needed to make the sides of a hexagon to make a template that would play nice with 10" squares rather than waiting to buy and have a template shipped. Turns out, I can do math, and making one out of cardboard worked reasonably well. I'm not saying I didn't occasionally shave off a sliver here and there while cutting, but cardboard still makes for a solid template material. 

The fabric may look familiar; many are leftovers from the fence rail quilt top I just made. And the comments in the tutorial are spot on - it may seem complicated at first but once you start actually doing it everything makes sense and comes together pretty quick. I didn't even mind the one-inch strips of white. It still needs to be trimmed, bordered and finished, but so far it's looking pretty great.

using what I've got

I'm feeling like I'm winning at quilting this month. I'm pretty jazzed about this latest milestone because it took no time at all. Except it did. A lot of time. These French braid blocks have been around since before I moved to this house. That's at least 5 years, probably longer, languishing in a "to be dealt with later when inspiration strikes" box. I can remember making them with no particular plan in mind, just wanting to play with the braid pattern to see how it works.

Well, since the flurry of making with my mom in November I pulled these out and threw them on my wall. Then they sat, and I wasn't inspired. Again. Still. I thought about adding a bunch of negative space in navy, some blocks with cute appliqué mushrooms, make a big big quilt. Then I realized I didn't want this one to be a big quilt; it doesn't rise to the level of "I want it on a bed" for me. And then I realized I didn't have any fabric on hand that would match to make any mushrooms out of - not a scrap of these to be seen. And then I realized what was feeling really good lately was being able to use what I had on hand to make things, without going out and getting more stuff. So. They got put away again, and I made a whole different quilt top. 

Directly after finishing that project, I realized I had hit the jackpot. The jelly roll jackpot. Similar to how easy it was to sash the stacks of bricks, it could be just as easy to do that here. What an elegant solution. I debated cutting strips of gray instead, but the gray I have on hand clashes with the gray end pieces I added on (a continued design regret since I did it, but one I am choosing not to remedy). It took a little bit of finessing because the bias edges had all stretched to different degrees over the years, but I managed and it took just an afternoon to get this albatross taken care of. 

 

Now of course, there is the question of backing the thing, but the decision of what to do with the braids has been made, and it will end up being a fun summery throw quilt.