Summer projects

Most of the summer I spent holed up in my bedroom (the only room with sufficient A/C). Even there, it was too hot to work on my biggest project most of the time. I was working on this wonderful knot-pattern scarf for my father-in-law's birthday in August. Sure, August seems like a strange time to give someone a thick, wool scarf. But it was my husband's idea (and he was so very excited about it), and well, he won't be receiving the scarf at Christmas after the ridiculous Lake Effect snow has already begun. My FIL was very pleased with the gift and said he looks forward to using it the next time his snow blower breaks in the middle of a blizzard. Hehe.

I called it the Mariner's knot scarf because he really likes to take his boat out on the lake with the entire family.




Here's a close up of the knot-pattern:



The knot was a little difficult to work with at first. If you use this pattern make sure to make all of your knit rows loose! Otherwise you won't be able to get the needle through three stitches three times in the next row. Once I figured that out it was a breeze to knit.

Also, for the cast-on method I found this video very helpful:


She goes nice and slow so you can actually see what she's doing. :)I like this method for casting on bigger projects. Once I learned it, it went by so very fast! Though I did not do the correlating bind-off, and you really couldn't tell.

My other project, when it was way too hot to knit with wool was this neat little tea wreath:

(Please excuse the glare... the lighting in our home is a bear to work with).
I had been trying to come up with a better way to offer the variety of tea I have to guests. Flinging open the cabinet always kind of intimidated them, and all the tea was high above the stove. Kojodesigns solution works out perfectly. I put the rest of the tea bags in little baggies in a drawer. No more boxes filling up my cabinet! Which is nice, since our kitchen is very organizationally space challenged.

Ok, I've rambled on enough. I am working on some Christmas projects that I'll have to wait to share. But I also just got a dress-form, so look forward to some sewing projects coming up!

Sticks & Stones Scarf and the Dread Pirate Gloves

My husband likes different. And I can't blame him. I wouldn't want a plain old boring black pair of gloves and scarf either. And that's mostly what is out there for men. But this past winter was freezing, and even winters before I couldn't bear seeing him go out without a scarf and gloves. So we picked out this fun (yet subtle) Sticks and Stones yarn by Caron Simply Soft Paints.

I started with the scarf, the basic Ribbed scarf pattern from Deb Stoller's book. I opted to use size 13 US needles instead to give it a kind of lacy openwork kind of feel and made it plenty long for him to wrap around several times.



Then he asked me to make gloves. His scarf was only my second project, so I said, wait and we'll see. Everyone I had ever talked to said to stick to mittens or fingerless gloves. Gloves sounded horrible! Well, here's a little thing about me. I don't tend to stick to what people recommend and I always like a challenge. So after knitting the booties (see previous post), I was ready to try something new. I decided to try the Ken pattern by Berroco.



Since the project turned out to be a surprising success despite all the warnings I heeded not, I named them the Dread Pirate Gloves.

I did have a few snags. The first few rounds on DPNs is a bear. There was no mention of how to add yarn when you move on to the next finger. I finally found a how-to somewhere online, but it didn't warn about it creating holes between the fingers. I found that if you thread the yarn through back and forth with a needle a few times before knitting there really wouldn’t be much of a gap. Don’t know if that’s the best way to do it, but they look good! And I learned it is much better to use the person's actual hand (if available) instead of the measurements in the pattern. The second glove is little wonky (one of his favorite words) because I failed to do this.

All in all, I enjoyed taking on the challenge of "the dreaded gloves," and Ben is pleased with his new gloves (and has been wearing his scarf all winter). I look forward to scaling more knitting mountains. :-)

Oh, a funny little bit! I finished all of this with two skeins. I really thought I wasn't going to have enough for the second glove so I went all over to find another skein. My Jo-Ann's was out of it, and I ended up driving 45 minutes to get a third skein. I never needed it. In fact, I had this much of the second skein left:



So, for next winter, I think a matching hat?