Creek Sweater Finished

Hi all -

I've really been making progress on my sweaters! This time, I finished my Creek sweater designed by the Berroco Design Team:

I really love this sweater! It's simple, but still has nice texture and is very comfortable! I'll probably make another one someday, but it'll be a little while since the stitch pattern is slow to knit and a bit hard on my hands. But well worth the effort!

After powering through two sweaters, I decided it was time to make a quick and simple project. So I pulled out a kit I had purchased for a simple, sparkly hat:

The pattern is the Magpie Darling Hat designed by Amanda Kaffka. It is knit with a sparkly yarn held together with a regular yarn:

The sparkly yarn is like a thinner version of the old silver tinsel we used to put on the Christmas tree with little sequins attached. The kit came with enough of this sparkly yarn to make another hat and I also bought another kit so I should be able to make 4 of these hats. I think my nieces will enjoy these.

After finishing the hat, I decided to pull out one of my older shawl WIPs (works in progress) and finish it up. I had my Sunshower Shawl designed by Ambah O'Brien sitting around. This was my Jimmy Beans Wool shawl club project from last year. In that club, you get a small ball of yarn and a bit of the pattern every month for the year, and at the end of the year you have a new shawl. I kept up with the knitting all year long, until we got to the December installment where we had to pick up stitches around the perimeter of the shawl and then knit an I-cord bind-off. I don't feel confident picking up stitches, so I just procrastinated instead. I decided to push past the dread and just get the shawl finished:

I like how it turned out, except that the bind off is a little tight so I can't stretch the shawl out to be as big as I would like, but I'm definitely not redoing it!

I got those little projects done, so it was time to start another new sweater! I bought the book and the yarn for this sweater a while ago, and it was just sitting around waiting for me to be ready to make it. It's the Hurricane Ridge Pullover designed by Allison Griffith. This sweater is knit from the bottom, up. The sleeves are also knit from the bottom, up, and then attached to the sweater. I've knit a bottom-up sweater before, but haven't done bottom-up sleeves so that will be a new construction for me. So far, I've knit the bottom ribbing and have started on the body, which is just knit so it's a nice TV project:

The yarn is Knit Picks Provincial Tweed and it is really soft! I think it's going to feel really good against my skin!

I've also gotten back to working on the backing for my niece's wedding quilt. I really hope they can still have the ceremony on Aug 28 and that I can attend! But we'll see how that goes. Anyway, I had started the backing by adding borders to a panel (see here). I was just going to throw together other pieces of fabric to finish the backing, but during the quarantine Alex Anderson from The Quilt Show has been doing live videos several times a week for people to make a wallhanging with her. I decided to copy the blocks that they were making for the wallhanging, but make them bigger and use them for my backing instead. So, I gathered all of the fabric that I used on the front of the quilt and the other fabrics that were possibilities for the front but didn't make the cut, I drafted the blocks by looking at a picture of the wallhanging and I started making blocks:

These are all of the blocks from the wallhanging. I got tired of making the blocks and was starting to add blocks of fabric so I could fill out the quilt backing (the quilt is about 100"x100", so there's a lot of space to fill....) when I realized that I should add a heart to the house block to symbolize the love in their new home (they bought a house last fall):

Love it! And then, of course, I realized that since it's a wedding quilt it really should have more hearts so I made more heart blocks (and another Churn Dash block since I really love those blocks):

Now I'm definitely done with blocks and will start putting it all together. I really wish I had a design wall or some place where I could lay the blocks all out together so that I can see how everything looks and move things around, but I don't have that space anywhere so I'm just going to have to wing it. However it turns out, it's just the backing so it's going to be okay.

That's all of the crafting that I've done. For my fellow crafters, we also got some back news this week. Bluprint, which used to be called Craftsy, is an online crafting class service. Craftsy started about 10 years ago and had a bunch of really wonderful online classes for quilting, knitting, crochet, cooking, painting, etc, etc, etc. You could buy individual classes and own them "forever" to watch as many times as you wanted. Included with the classes were instructors who would answer any questions that you had. It was a wonderful platform. About 2 years ago, NBC bought out Craftsy and renamed it Bluprint. All of the original content was still there and you could still buy new classes, but they also had a subscription membership where you could watch any class that you wanted while you were a member. They continued to make new content, but their classes weren't as in-depth and generally weren't as interesting to me, but it was still a wonderful platform. Anyway, last Friday NBC announced that they were doing away with Bluprint and it only has a couple of months left. It was pretty shocking for those of us who have been using the service for a long time, and there were a lot of people who were upset with the announcement coming out on a Friday before a holiday weekend with no customer service during that weekend. I guess all of the people employed there were also shocked by the news. I feel very sorry for all of them! Anyway, if you are a member of Bluprint, you should download any patterns that you may own on the site because they won't be around for long. NBC posted a letter to the Bluprint home page saying that they are looking into finding a way for owners of "lifetime" classes to download the classes, so we might actually be able to keep the classes. If you own any classes, you should keep an eye on the Bluprint home page in case they come through with this so you can download your classes before they go away. It's sad because this was a really useful site, but these things happen. And I assume it's always possible that someone will end up buying the content from NBC and continuing the site. You never know!

Hope everyone is doing well!

Nancy