Westbound Car Coat Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Mine was fine, but nothing special. My family is all in Kansas City except for a niece who is a traveling nurse currently working in Atlanta. So I just spent the holiday at home with my pets. It was nice and quiet! We had a family Zoom meeting earlier today to celebrate the holiday and that was really nice!

As usual, I've been doing a lot of knitting lately. I seem to be really into knitting sweaters right now. I finished my Westbound Car Coat designed by Lorna Miser.

I wasn't sure if I would like this style, but it came in a kit that was cheap and a longer sweater (it hangs to the top of my thigh) will be really nice when it's cold, so I made it anyway. I love it! The pattern has you make a belt, but doesn't say anything about belt loops. I knew it would annoy me to have to keep track of the belt without loops so I thought about it for a while and decided to make the loops out of perl cotton. I didn't want to make the loops out of the yarn used for the sweater itself because the yarn is a bit rough and I didn't think the belt would slide through the loops easily enough. The individual strands of the perl cotton were too thin so I braided 3 strands together to make the loops. Here's how they turned out:

I think these will work, but if they don't I can easily cut them off and try something else.

Since I finished one sweater, I needed to start another. I looked through my yarn and decided to try the I See Spring sweater by Joji Locatelli. This is a lightweight sweater designed for spring, but since I tend to be on the warmer side I'll probably be able to wear it year-round. So far, I just have the top part of the sweater back started:

This yarn is a wool/silk mix that I think will be really comfortable to wear.

I also got my Cowl-O-Ween project designed by Amy Gunderson finished.

I love the bright colors! It's also the perfect length of a cowl for me. I can wear it as a single loop when it's warmer out and I just need a little bit of something on my neck. Or I can double it when it's colder. And if I don't have a hat, I can double it but put the second loop over my head to cover my ears. I think I'll be wearing this one a lot!

At the end of October I received my October installment for the Jimmy Beans Wool shawl club. This project uses the Coral Coast Wrap pattern by Ambah O'Brien. I got that installment knit up and now am waiting for the November installment that should arrive any day now.

Although I haven't made it yet, I also received the November Lola's Choice club project. This time it's the Abaclet bracelet designed by Laura Nelkin. With each Lola's Choice project, Laura includes a surprise prize. Here's what was included in the kit this time:

The extra prize is a roll of knitting toilet paper. Each sheet on the roll has knitting information printed on it. So you can either use it as a reference, or it's there for you pandemic emergencies! How appropriate!

My thumb was getting sore from knitting the car coat and I was really needing a change of pace, so I pulled out and finished the cross-stitch that my mom had started before she passed away.

It was nice to get this one done since it's a Stoney Creek design and I usually avoid these. They have a lot of beautiful designs, but they make their designs by scattering colors around rather than using blocks of color. The result is beautiful, but it's really time-consuming to do all of the tedious counting and it's really easy to make mistakes. I'm more drawn to the clean look of the designs that use larger blocks of color, as you'll see with my next project. But before showing you that, I thought I should show you the matching piece that my mom had made and had hanging on the wall when she passed.

When the COVID vaccine becomes widely available and we start to get this pandemic under control, I'll get my finished piece framed to match the older one.

Finally, since I finished my mom's cross-stitch project, I went back to one of my projects that I had started before she passed:

As you can see, this pattern has larger blocks of colors, but still has a lot of beautiful detail. The blocks of color also make the image look cleaner to me. I'm not sure how I'll use this one once it's finished. I'll probably frame it, too, but I'm running out of wall space! But I have a lot of time to think about that since cross-stitch is a fairly slow craft......

Nancy