Knitting Fun

Hi all -

Sorry it's been a while since my last blog post. The holidays got me off track, but I'll try to do better now. I had a really nice holiday with my family. We had to delay our celebration because one of my cats had hurt her leg and I had to wait for it to heal before I could leave. But she's a miracle healer and we ended up being able to celebrate only about a week late. The rest of my family are procrastinators so they were very happy with the delay and some are asking if we can do it again next year! Anyway, we had a wonderful time and I hope you all had wonderful holiday seasons as well!

Since I got back, I've been on a knitting kick. I still consider myself a beginning knitter, but I'm a member of Laura Nelkin's bi-monthly knitting project club. For $28, every other month Laura sends me a new knitting project. The project includes the pattern, yarn, beads (most of her patterns include beads), a gift (like a measuring tape or stitch markers) and a piece of candy (yum!). I like this club because I really like Laura's designs, which tend to be modern and unusual, and because it pushes me to try patterns that I might feel are a bit beyond my abilities. So far, I've been able to handle every one of these patterns that I've tried, but I still get a bit intimidated and have a bit of a backlog of these projects that I need to catch up on. But I'm working on it!

My first project for January was the knitting club project that I received this month. This time is was a hat with a cabled band with beads:

This is from Laura's Lurra pattern. To make this hat, you first knit the band and seam it together, then you pick up stitches on the edge of the band and knit the hat in the round until you end with the I-cord on the top. The band was the more difficult part since it had 6 different cable stitches and half of the stitching was done through the back loop, but it was completely doable as long as I paid careful attention to what I was doing. I did somehow pick up an extra stitch in the part of the band that ends up right in the middle of my forehead, but it's not very noticeable so I'm okay with it. I love how the pattern uses slipped stitches on the side of the band, making it really easy to pick up the stitches for knitting the rest of the hat and giving it that cute round that looks like lace between the band and the body of the hat. I really like this hat and am keeping it for myself!

My next project was a very simple hat from the Bankhead pattern by Susie Gourlay:

When I started knitting, I had decided that I would knit a bunch of stuff that I could donate to the homeless shelter to help keep people warm. I did a good job at first and was able to donate a big bag of stuff a year ago, but then I slacked off and have very little for them this year. So I'm trying to do better and this is my first homeless shelter hat of this year. At the end of the year, Craftsy had a big sale on yarn so I bought a bunch of nice yarn in more muted and neutral colors that might appeal to men since I tend to be attracted to the more bright, colorful yarns. This was made from some of that yarn. This one is a really soft alpaca/baby alpaca mix.

The project I'm currently working on is another Laura Nelkin pattern. This one is the first project from her 2018 N Club. The N Club is another program where you don't know what you'll be knitting when you sign up, so I'm more likely to push myself. It consists of 3 larger projects and Laura has groups set up in Facebook and Ravelry so that the members of the club can knit the projects together. We just got our supplies for the first project this week and the pattern kick-off was yesterday so we're all just starting the knitting now. We were given 2 different patterns that we could use for the supplied kit. One is a cowl-topped poncho and the other is a https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/flowsaic-shawl. They both feature the same Flowsaic stitch designed by Laura. I love both of the patterns, but decided to make the shawl because I'm more likely to use the shawl. But I hope to make the poncho, too, at some point. These projects are made with some specially dyed color-changing yarn that has some beautiful colors. I didn't think to take a picture of the skein before I wound it, but here is the wound ball with the start of my shawl:

You can get a peek of some of the beautiful colors in this yarn at the center of the ball. The shawl is knit so that it starts with a very narrow end and then continues to grow into a very wide end, so the colors are dyed accordingly. Here's a close-up of my shawl so far:

I really like how it's looking! But I have a long way to go still....

Nancy