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!