Started Iva Sweater

Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I'm happy to report that Lance is all better! He got his stitches out Wednesday last week and has been completely free since then. No more torture devices! No more house arrest! Complete freedom! We're back to doing our daily walks, building his back legs back up again. Arthritis and old age (he's 13.5 years old) have made his back legs grow a bit feeble so we're working on keeping them going as strong as possible. We're going to start doing some acupuncture to see if that will help, too. It's amazing how he keeps going strong!

We had an interesting walk today. Wesley (one of my cats) decided to join us. We've never done a walk with one of the cats before, but Wesley caught up with us after we started and he's pretty stubborn so either I had to let him join us or we weren't going to be able to do our walk. So I decided to push on and see what he did. For our normal walk, we go up my road (which is fairly busy by rural terms, but not busy at all by town terms) then take a side road to the National Forest. We wander around on the limited trails that we have, then come back home. It's probably a total of just 2 or 3 miles, but it takes a while with Lance's slower pace and his sniffing detours.Well, it takes a LOT longer with a cat along! Have you ever heard the saying about "herding cats"? Well, if you've ever had a cat, you completely understand what that means! But it sure was cute to have him following along! I was just really worried that we'd come across someone else walking their dog who might not be as friendly with cats. But we ended up having the trail all to ourselves so it worked out well. But I'm hoping that Wesley didn't find it to be a fun outing so he won't come along again. I'm just too worried about something happening to him! Sorry that I didn't have a camera with me so no pictures to share.....

Now, on to my crafting. I've started working on another sweater. This one is called Iva and is designed by Rita Maassen. I bought it as a kit from Craftsy several years ago for a really good sale price (I think you know by now that I'm a sucker for sales....). Here's my progress so far:

For this pattern, you start knitting at the left side of the yoke, knitting the yoke from the left side to the right, leaving an opening for your head. You then leave a certain number of stitches on the needle and start knitting the right sleeve in the round. Here's what the arm looks like:

The pattern has you bind off the yoke stitches below the arm and then seam the sides together, but I've decided to keep these stitches live and connect them with a Kitchener Stitch instead. I think that'll be a smoother way to put it all together. After the right sleeve is finished, I'll put the left sleeve stitches on the needle (they are live since they were cast on with a provisional cast-on) and do the same on that side. Then I'll pick up stitches around the bottom of the yoke and knit the body in the round. The pattern has the body taper a little bit as you go down, but I might knit it straight down. I'll decide that after I finish the sleeves and see how it's fitting and how much yarn I have left. The last step in the pattern is to finish the neckline with a single crochet stitch. I'm liking the feel of this yarn so far and think I'll really enjoy wearing this sweater!

I also have some knitting that I've finished. Some of this was finished before my last blog post, but I went into a lot of detail in that post about my niece's wallhanging so decided to save all of the other projects for this post. The first finish was my Hiberknitting Hat by Stephen West. I've been wanting to knit a Stephen West design for a while, and the Grocery Girls (the knitting podcast that I watch) had a Stephen West knit-along, so I decided to join in. Stephen West is known for his innovative designs and interesting use of color and he has a lot of incredible shawl patterns that I want to try, but I was feeling short on time with the wallhanging so I opted for a simple project:

This hat doesn't show what Stephen does with color, but it has a lot of interesting texture and it was knit with two yarns held together. The pattern was written really clearly and I'll definitely be trying more of his designs in the future!

I also knit a couple of different market bags. The first is the Market Bag designed by Emily Kintigh:

The second is the Farmer's Market/Produce Bag designed by Monica Dewart:

There are a lot of free market bag patterns on Ravelry and I need to try a few more and test them out to see which patterns I like the best.

I also worked on my Coral Coast Wrap designed by Ambah O'Brien:

This is my monthly shawl club from Jimmy Beans Wool, where you get a new section of the pattern and little ball of yarn each month. I've finished the July installment in the above picture. I received the August installment, but haven't knit it up yet since I've been enjoying working on my sweater. Here's what I got for the August installment, to give you an idea of what the club's like:

The metal tin that the yarn came in has a magnet on the bottom and, at the end of the year, we'll get a metal sheet that hangs on the wall that we can stick the tins to for storing little doo-dads and stuff.

I also knit up a quick and easy shawl as a break when my hands would get sore when knitting the cables on the yoke of my sweater. I knit the Jodi shawl designed by Joji Locatelli. Here is my favorite model wearing it:

The colors are a bit dull in that picture, so here's a picture before I got to the purple border to give you a better idea of how bright the shawl is:

I still need to block this shawl to show off the lace better, so I'll try to get a better picture after that is done.

That's all the knitting that I've finished, but I wanted to share some fun knitting stuff that I just got. This year Jimmy Beans Wool decided to do a couple of Halloween advent calendars. These "advent" calendars have little packages that you open every day and a little project that you knit to count down the days until Halloween. The bigger calendar has 31 packages which include the yarn needed to make the Cowl-O-Ween cowl designed by Amy Gunderson and some other fun surprises. The little packages came in a coffin-shaped box:

I'm going to save these packages to start opening on Oct 1. The other "advent" calendar is smaller, with 13 little packages stored in a trick-or-treat bucket:

This calendar includes the yarn needed to make the Haunted Handwarmers designed by Amy Gunderson to match the cowl. I've already opened the first package, but haven't started the project yet:

I think these will be a fun little distraction for October!

Finally, I've been doing a little bit of sewing. I decided that I wanted to make a project bag out of the fabrics that I used for my niece's wallhanging as a little reminder for me of her wedding (which was incredibly beautiful!). I pieced the fabrics together in the gradation that I used in the wallhanging:

I pieced the colors in the opposite order on each side so that the same colors would meet at the side seams to give a continuous gradation around the bag. I stabilized the fabrics with some horsehair stabilizer that I had bought a while ago but hadn't tried out yet. This stabilizer is commonly used in making bags:

I really like the feel of the stabilizer! It gives the bag a lot of body, but is still really flexible. I wanted to get some white onto the bag so decided to hand embroider circles on top of the sage gradation. To mark the circles, I used a cool trick that I learned from a Craftsy class. I used the holes in a plastic canvas circle and marked where to make my stitches with an air-erasable marker:

That worked really well! I used a variety of embroidery stitches for the random circles:

I'm finished with the embroidery and now just have to sew my bag together. I hope to do that this weekend.

That's about all for now. I hope that everyone is doing well!

Nancy