Hi all -
I've been going sweater crazy lately and have finished another one. This on is the Hurricane Ridge Pullover by Allison Griffith:
I really love how this turned out! The yarn is so soft and cuddly! This is my first sweater with this ribbed collar with the placket, so we'll see how I like wearing it. But it was fun to make.
This sweater was made with a bottom-up construction. It starts with knitting the bottom split ribbing:
You join the front and back ribbing pieces together, and then you just knit and knit around in a circle until you get the body finished:
That's a lot of knitting, but easy and perfect for sitting in front of the TV. This pattern also had you knit both sleeves bottom-up in the same fashion as the body:
Once the sleeves are done, you join the three pieces together and knit up the shoulders to the collar:
When the main part of the sweater is done, you pick up stitches around the hole left for the collar and knit the collar:
At this point, your sweater is finished except for the holes left in the arm pits. You sew those up using something called the Kitchener stitch. If done correctly, this stitch makes the seam completely invisible. Of course, you have to do it correctly. For the first underarm, I did the Kitchener stitch from the inside of the sweater. It didn't feel right when I was doing it, but I kept telling myself that it was right because in sewing you always sew your seams on the inside of the garment. Wrong! Here's my first armpit seam:
My second underarm I stitched from the outside and it looks a lot better!
I pulled out the stitching from the first underarm and redid it and now it all looks perfect! Whew!
After spending all of that time on a sweater, I decided it was time to pull a quick and easy project out of the closet. So I've started working on my Beachcomber Shawl by Chelsea Berkompas. It's going pretty quickly:
I really love the colors!
Finally, I got my May installment for the shawl club project, the Coral Coast Wrap by Ambah O'Brien:
I was able to get this knit up and the project put away until the next installment:
That's all of the crafting I've been doing.
Another big project I had was to download a bunch of stuff from the internet. Some of you know that Craftsy was a company that started about 10 years ago and had a lot of good craft classes online. They had classes about all sorts of things like quilting, knitting, crochet, sewing and a bunch more. When you bought a class, it was yours for life. About 3 years ago, Craftsy was bought by NBC and was renamed Bluprint. They changed the model so that you could buy lifetime classes, but you could also pay a subscription and have access to all of the classes during your subscription period. With the subscription, you would get coupons to get a certain number of lifetime classes each year. Through the years, taking advantage of all of the sales and free classes, I ended up owning 213 classes. At the end of May, NBC suddenly announced that they are ending Bluprint. They haven't announced when the Web site will officially go away, but it could happen any time. They got a lot of push back from members who are unhappy about their "lifetime" classes going away, so they said they are working on figuring out how people can download their classes so they can actually have them forever. We haven't heard anything from them since the end of May, but I knew that whatever they came up with, I would need a lot of time to download all of those classes on my slow home internet, so when I heard about some software that others had used to successfully download their classes, I purchased a license (very reasonably priced) and started downloading.
At first, I just downloaded one class for testing. It took an hour or two to download since I figured I would want the highest quality of video. The class downloaded as a separate MP4 file for each lesson. I tested playing one of the lessons on my laptop and it worked perfectly. Then I copied the lesson to DropBox and was able to play it also on my iPad and on my work laptop, which is a Mac. So the files seem to work everywhere. Then I started downloading the rest of my classes in batches. I could download about 10 files overnight, leaving my internet clear during the day so I wasn't bogged down when working. With 213 classes to download, this was going to take me about a month to finish. And with 2.5-3G per class, it was going to blow my data overage out of the water. My friend, who is also the SysAdmin at my small company, suggested that I take my laptop to work and use the much faster network there. Since our office is closed and everyone is working at home now, the network at work was just sitting idly anyway. So, I took my laptop in and set it up to download the rest of my classes. That network is 10x faster than my home network, so I was able to get the rest of my classes in just a couple of days! I also downloaded all of the class materials (handouts, eBooks, etc) for all of my classes. All of this content occupies 694G on my laptop. Good thing it has a 1T disk in it! Whew! It feels good to have all of that content saved! I have a couple of external backup hard drives, so I've copied everything several places so I should be covered.
If you own some Craftsy/Bluprint classes and want to download your classes the way I did, here is a blog post that gives great step-by-step instructions:
I followed these instructions and it worked great for me!
Well,that's all for me. I hope everyone is doing well during these trying times!
Nancy
