Noro Fingerless Gauntlets

               


I was on a knitting hibernation for the longest time. In fact, the last time I finished a knitting project was more than a year ago. I got so lazy, I didn't pick up the needles nor go yarn shopping at all. I still bought knitting magazines but they were just for collection purpose.

The first time I stepped into a yarn store this year was to buy yarn for my friend's mitts but I didn't have the mood to knit until I saw these mitts from the latest issue of the Noro knitting magazine. I've always had a love/hate relationship with Noro yarns. I love their colorways but they do not make the softest yarn in the market. In fact I find most of their yarn scratchy and do not feel soft at all. They aren't the cheapest yarn in the market. At that quality, I do find them being overpriced but they do have amazing colors in their yarn. Other self striping yarn just can't beat Noro in their colors.
             

When I saw these I had to make them. I'm never a big fan of knitting nupps as they take forever to make but I love how these mitts turned out even though they are a little too big.

I did modified the mitts to make them a better fit for my hands. I have to say the instructions are written for people with very big hands. I followed the instructions and made them and my friends with large size female hands still find them too big. So if you have average sized hands, modification is necessary.

I made it smaller by casting on 40 stitches instead of 44 stitches. I also increased less stitches at the thumb gusset. I did a 16 stitch increase instead of 20 stitch increase. But these mitts are still a little too big. If I'm making them again, I will cast on fewer stitches, using smaller needles and I will also make them shorter. 

FO: Cabled Cowl

I know this is not the weather for knitted objects but I was looking through my stash of knitted items to get an idea of what to make for a friend and I found a cabled cowl I made some time ago.



This is still one of my favourite cowls. This is a pattern taken from Vogue Knitting 2009 Holiday issue. When I saw this from the magazine I knew I had to make it since the sample was in pink and I love pink and I do have the perfect yarn for the project. I just happened to have several skeins of cascade 220 lying around the house. I got them at 70% their original price and the cowl seemed like the pefect project. Since I had enough yarn so I chose to make it a little bigger than the pattern. I knitted the pattern repeat for 4 times before I did the ribbing.

The cables were fun to knit but the ribbings killed me. It was super boring to do the 1x1 twisted ribbings. It tooked several hours to finish the ribbing.

The cascade 220 was the perfect yarn for the cables. They are stiff but not too stiff and helped the cables and cowl hold its shape. This is not the softest yarn in the market but I always find it doing an amazing job when it comes to knitting cables or when you need the knitwear to maintain its shape. The yarn is a bargain when it's on sale. Even at its regular price, it's still worth using. It's cheaper than a lot of yarns on the market.

I don't exactly remember the colorway of the yarn but all I remember is it's from the pink family. For the cowl, I knitted more of the cabled pattern but I didn't knit as many ribbing rows as the pattern indicated since I found it too boring and I think that the cabled pattern is more important than the side ribbing in a cowl. I used US size 8 needles for the ribbing and I went up a size to US size 9 for the cabled pattern. I used right under two skeins of yarn for this cowl. I still had around 20 yards left once I was done.

FO: Echo Flower Shawl

This was one of the shawls that was made for a friend of mine. It's another one that got lost in the mail. The more I think about it, the more pissed I am with the terrible postal service we have in Canada. Postage is expensive and it's unreliable. I still don't understand why can't we get registered option for regular parcels. If we need to have it signed for we must shipped it via express. That's just stupid. 

This is one of the many projects where I'm knitting something I don't like- aka nupps. Nupps and bobbles are just something I hate making. I can't make them round enough. They just don't look even in my knitting. Some are always bigger than others. 

The yarn chosen here is a yellowish, orangish hand dyed yarn from Dream in Color. the colorway I used was butterpeeps. I bought this yarn a long time ago always wanting to find the perfect pattern for this lovely yarn. It's not the softest yarn in the market but it's just a lovely color that I wasn't willing to part with. My friend loves yellow so I chose to use this amazing yarn for her shawl. 

I would say the color in the first picture is the closest to the true color of the yarn. I made this during the winter so I couldn't take any pictures of it under natural sunlight. 

Apart from the border, the entire piece is constructed by knitting the same pattern stitch. It's the blossom stitch and the increases are made using the Estonian star stitch which I love a lot. I've made a few shawls using the same technique before namely the Laminaria shawl by Elizabeth Freeman. The main difference would be the Blossom stitch was used as the border in the Laminaria while it's used as the main stitch pattern in the Echo Flower Shawl.

I don't overblock the shawls. I don't like to over stretch the knitting. I'm not an expert in blocking as I still have problem blocking a perfectly straight base edge. I often knit full size shawls and given the knitted size I don't find the point in heavily blocking and stretching the piece when it's already big enough.

This is not super airy because of the yarn choice and needle size. Dream in Color Baby is labeled as lace weight but I find it to be a heavier lace weight or a lighter fingering weight. It's in between lace weight and fingering weight. I don't like to have super airy shawls so I often use smaller needle sizes than recommended. 

The nupps don't look so bad in the pictures but there are some that I had to use a tapestry needle and some yarn to sew them and make them rounder so they will look better in the shawl.

This is one of my all time favourite shawl pattern and I will make one for myself. I have a thing for Estonian stitches. If there are Estonian stitches in a pattern, the chances of me making it is a lot higher. 

Pattern: Echo Flower Shawl by Jenny Johnson Johnen

Yarn: Dream in Color Baby in butterpeeps

Needle size: 3.5mm

Yardage: 560 yards ( 0.8 skein)

blocked size: 135 cm X 68 cm

FO: Gail Shawl

This is a shawl that had been on my knit list for the longest time. I wanted to make this every since the pattern was released in September 2008 but I had a hard time trying to understand this pattern. I had trouble understanding the chart written by the designer. This is a free pattern so I don't complain about anything. The designer is already generous enough to provide fellow knitters with a free pattern. It's my job to figure out how to read the charts. So it annoys me when people complain about the charts not being properly written. 

I had a hard time understanding the chart because of the double yarn over in the middle. I always thought I was making a mistake as it didn't seem to line up properly with the chart. But once I talked to my friend and found help from fellow raveler, I decided to start making this shawl. It didn't take long to finish it, probably took me around a week to finish it. Once I got through the first repeat, it wasn't hard at all. There are more complicated patterns out there that required more time to make!  

The double yarn over at the base of each leaf. Different from other shawls I've made before. Most of the ones I made before all had increases in the center panal creating a straight line of increases. This shawl was a shawl made for my aunt as I promised to make her a full size shawl.

The shawl is only made up of branching out leaves as its motif. Simple yet elegant. I do love this pattern but there are other patterns that I want to make first. If I ever make this again it will probably be a last minute gift to friends and family.

The yarn used was Rowan Pure Wool 4 ply. It was yarn I received from my fellow ravelry yarn swap. It's a 100% wool fingering weight yarn. It's not a color I will ever wear so it's good for making shawls to give away! The yarn itself is very warm and it's great for cold winter nights for keeping you warm. It also felt soft enough I will purchase again in another colorway.

Pattern: Gail Shawl

Yarn: Rowan Pure Wool 4 Ply

Yardage: 696 yards

Needle: 4.5mm

Snow Day!

Had an unexpected long weekend because of the snow. Received a call from my coworker that morning telling me to stay in. She called before I got out of bed so I was able to sleep till noon! But with the amount of snow on the driveway, there was no way I could leave the house. My neighborhood is always one of the last to get shovelled.

this was the amount of snow in the front yard in the afternoon. You could hardly tell the driveway from the grass. They haven't shovelled the streets yet. 

three hours later the rock in front of the house was completely covered in snow

streets were finally shovelled but driveway wasn't so couldn't go out at all

Finally stopped snowing on Saturday

So I was stuck at home during the weekend. I did manage to get things done. I managed to get some knitting done. I'm almost done knitting Chart A for my Guernsey Wrap. 

This is the WIP on thursday night. 

The WIP after Friday night! This is the true color of the yarn. dark purple tweed yarn. Not the softest yarn available but I do love tweed yarn!

FO: Liliiflora Shawlette

Who doesn't love a little lace? I love lace. I've always have a passion for lace knitting. To me lace is the prettiest thing to knit. Whenever I get to choose a project, I always choose lace. Lace patterns are always challenging, it's never boring, you're always learning new techniques to make it perfect. With all the patterns out there and with the limited time, it's always hard to choose the perfect pattern. I made this shawl for a good friend even though she NEVER received this shawl. It was one of the two shawls that were lost in the mail.Canada Post wasn't able to track it down for me. All I knew was it NEVER left the country and NEVER arrived in Hong Kong.  Don't ever let me find out who stole my parcel I'll be so pissed. 

When my friend knits lace, she always chooses mohair yarn for her projects and mohair yarn are mass produced so when I was making a shawl for her, I decided to use something different. Different fiber and I opt for hand dyed yarn which is an all time favourite of mine. Ever skein of hand dyed yarn are different which makes them unique so every shawl will be a little different. I received this yarn as part of my yarn club subscription from Tanis Fiber Arts. The colorway is Cranberry. It was a yarn club subscription yarn so I only had access to one skein and I used it on a project that my friend never received. 

From the indoor lighting in the living room you can't really tell the yarn is variegated, it looked like a boring red yarn, it was actually a semi-solid red yarn. You can only tell the reds apart in the blocking pictures.  

This is a crescent shape shawl and had open lace work throughout the main body while you use short rows shaping.  This shawl is a little different from the ones I normally make. I normally start from the middle and work my way out to the edge, but for this shawl, I started from the edging and worked my way in. This was different from all my other projects. 

close up on the border of the shawl. the border is made up of vines and nupps. I'm not a big fan of nupps knitting, I often replace them with beads as I find them time consuming but I do find that nupps are great in this project. 

blocking of the lace border.

There were a few sizes from the pattern, since I only had one skein of yarn, so I chose 15 pattern repeats. From the instruction I should have enough yarn to work 16 pattern repeats for the edge nupps and vines pattern, if I started with 16 repeats, I would never be able to finish it. I started with 15 pattern repeats and I barely had enough yarn to finish the project. I only had a few yards left. 

Pattern: Lilliflora Shawlette by Lily Go

Yarn: Tanis Fiber Arts Blue Label Fingering Weight in Cranberry

Needle: 4.5mm

Yardage: 420 yards 

rowan magazine 50

 I finally received my subscription copy of the Rowan magazine. With the post office just finished going on strike, I'm surprised I get it this quickly. There are still mail from June that aren't here yet. What makes this issue special, this is the 50th issue of the Rowan magazine and as the 50th issue since publication, subscribers get the limited hardcover version of the magazine. I have to admit I love hardcover books. They are more durable than paperbacks. And this is better than the silly reusable knitting bag rowan gave out last year. The bag was worse than my sobeys reusable shopping bag, totally not worth the subscription value. The book they later gave out, winter kids. Seriously? A kids pattern book? Does it look like every single knitter have kids? It's just not useful for everybody. I still prefer receiving yarn plus a pattern. Even if I don't like the pattern, I still get to try out new yarn. I know I don't get to choose the color of the yarn but it's still better than receiving patterns you don't like. I can swap yarn with other knitters. 

Rowan 50 in hardcover. 

cabled cape jacket and mitts that appeared in the alternate paperback cover. I like both of them. I'll probably make the mitts as presents for my friends. I'll probably make it for my friend that is leaving for Luxembourg in August for a year.  

cabled cape jacket. I really want to start making it even though what I should really be working on is my assignment that is due on Thursday. It requires 17 skeins of Rowan felted tweed aran for the smallest size. I checked my stash and I don't have that much yarn in aran weight so I'm thinking of getting new yarn for this project. Biggest dilemma i'm facing right now is what kind of yarn should I use, tweed or regular yarn and what color should I use. If I'm using tweed should I use Rowan or other brands. If i use Rowan, the cost can easily come out to over 200 canadian. If I choose other brands, cost will be less. Should I go the cheap way and get cascade yarn instead. If i do the cheap cascade way, it will be 8 dollars a skein and I only need 8 skeins of cascade 220 wool and it will come out to less than 70 bucks for the jacket. I should make a trip to romni this saturday to look at the yarns and make my decision or I might order some yarn from knitpicks. Never ordered anything from them before. There is always a first time for everything. 

one of the more feminine designs in the book, reminds me of some of Kim Hargreaves's designs.  I'll make it if I have yarn and time on hand.  

Shopping spree

I know I shouldn't be buying new yarn this year. I just added 100 skeins of yarn to my stash since the year started. 62 skeins of new Japanese yarn I bought from Pierrot Yarn and the remaining 3X skeins are from my boyfriend's mom. She had all these Patons yarns from the 80s that she doesn't use and she gave them all to me. I'm still trying to think of ways to use up all these yarns in my stash. I had over 100 skeins of yarn in my stash before the year ended so right now I have over 200 skeins of yarn sitting in my closet and suitcases so I really shouldn't visit my LYS. 

I picked the autumn kit

Just by looking at the yarn, you know you can't resist this gorgeous four seasons hat kit by Tanis Fiber Arts. After I saw the kit on her website, I know I have to go pick up the kit. 

Sea Mineral mitten pattern available free on Ravelry.

I also had my eyes on the Spilly Janes Sea Mineral Mitten kit with Sunday Yarns. The Sunday Yarns are so soft to touch. I can't wait to wind them into balls of yarn to start knitting. 

So along with the two kits, I also picked up a skein of the Tanis Green Label in velvet for the Tilted Duster. I also got myself my first set of knitpicks Harmony needles. Another thing I shouldn't be getting as I just ordered a set of addi lace clicks for myself. 

flower shawl

This has to be one of my favourite finished projects because it's my first Japanese knitting pattern. It won't be the last. Never thought I could manage knitting a Japanese pattern without anyone to help me. Saw the store sample at a Chinese mall in Toronto and I instantly fell in love with it. The yarn the store model used was a 100% merino yarn with glittery threads. They also changed the cast off edge into a nice ruffled edge. It just looks special as I've never made any shawls like this before. All the shawls I've knitted have airy lacy edges. This is just a change for me. 

This is a pattern designed by Hitomi Shida for Couture Knits 11: Elegance knits エレガンスなニット. You gotta love all the lovely designs from Hitomi Shida. However, with my current skills, I don't think I can knit one of her sweater patterns. 


As this is a Japanese pattern, I chose to use Japanese yarn with this pattern. I've used Nikke Victor Subtle yarn for this project. I've used 8.5 balls of yarn for the actual shawl, and another 2.5 for crocheting the ruffled edge. 

close up on the flower motif.

lace edge chart and ruffled edge

Pattern: Flower shawl by Hitomi Shida

Yarn: Nikke Victor Subtle

Yardage: 1232 yards 

Needle size: 4.5mm