Lance

 Hi all -

It's with a heavy heart that I let you know that I had to put Lance down last week. He was an amazing dog and definitely a fighter, but it was time. Amazingly, he made it over 16 years! If you've been reading my blog for a while, you've seen pictures of him modeling my knitting creations. I stopped doing that a couple of years ago when he started having mobility issues. I thought I would share a couple of pictures of him. It's hard to believe that he was ever this young!! This is my favorite picture of him, taken the day after I adopted him:

This was taken the same day, when he was exploring his new yard:

He was really good about putting up with the kitties:

And could find the most comfortable places to sleep:

And his favorite holiday was Christmas:

I was lucky enough to spend over 15 years with him and will miss him greatly!!

I did also get some crafting done these past two weeks. First, I got the July installment of my crochet blanket, Juni Throw designed by Katy Petersen:

Juni Throw

Juni Throw - July close-up

I can't believe we are over halfway finished with this project! It's definitely going to be thick and warm when finished!

I also crocheted a 4 Ball Market Bag designed by Lion Brand Yarns:

4 Ball Market Bag

I made this for my neighbor using a free pattern I found online. I really like the design of the bag, but it is a bit small. I looked around on the Lion Brand web site and it turns out that they have four or five versions of this pattern. So I downloaded the largest version and made this Market Bag #70221A for myself:

Market Bag #70221A

Market Bag #70221A

It was nice to not have to do the math for the size change myself! And I was able to use some yarn leftover from a T-shirt that I made a couple of years ago. I like this size a lot better and will definitely be making more of these! I also like the feel of this yarn for market bags. This yarn is discontinued, but I do have a good selection in my stash that I picked up on clearance.

Another gift idea I've been thinking about is face scrubbies. I've never used make-up myself and only wash my face when I take a shower, but one of my sisters and my nieces use make-up so these seem like they would be nice gifts for them. My first sample is a Spring Blossom Face Scrubbie designed by Jenna Yamamoto:

Spring Blossom Face Scrubbie

This uses a very small amount of yarn, so is a good way to use up the leftovers of the cotton yarn used to make market bags. I think it turned out really cute. I'm just not sure how to decide useful these are. But I'll play around with some of the different patterns to see what I think.

I also did some more clean-up and organizing of my stash and came across a couple of kits that I thought I would work up. The first is the Quintessential Slouch designed by Jane Veltenheimer:

Quintessential Slouch

This is a fun project because of the different yarns. The taupe yarn is a cotton and there are four different white yarns: an alpaca silk, a brushed suri, a suri merino and an alpaca merino. The project looks cute in the pattern picture, but I keep going back and forth as to whether I like it in person. I was really iffy about making a garter stitch hat and thought about using stockinette instead, but I thought I should just go with it. I'll finish it up and see what I think in the end. No matter what, it'll be a good donation to the homeless shelter! The other kit I pulled out is for the Arabica Cowl designed by Ann Wicker:

Arabica Cowl

This yarn was wonderful to crochet with! I've been doing most of my crochet with cotton and acrylic since I'm mostly making market bags, so it was nice to use some nice squishy wool for a while! The main cowl is finished, but I still have to add the vertical lines and then seam it into a circle. There were already a lot of ends to weave in, so I lost steam on the embellishment which also has a lot of ends. But I'll pick this up again soon and finish it.

Finally, I'm really enjoying crocheting this Brioche Bun Scarf designed by High Desert Yarn:

Brioche Bun Scarf

I knitted a snood for my sister using this yarn several years ago. This spring my niece sent me a picture of herself wearing it and told me that my sister had given it to her and she loves it and wears it a lot. I knew that I had a lot more of this yarn in my stash so I thought it would be nice if I made an accessory to got along with the snood. I'm continuing to practice my crochet so I searched for a crochet scarf pattern that I might like to make. I found this one and I'm really loving it! I don't like stuff that looks too "crochety," if that makes sense. But I love how this stitch pattern looks:

Brioche Bun Scarf - close-up

I think the colors are beautiful and really shine with this stitch pattern. And the end result is really soft and squishy and should be really warm since the stitches are thick. The yarn is wonderful to crochet with, but the first ball of yarn was a pain to work with. I generally like to pull my yarn from the inside of the ball rather than from the outside. I forgot that I learned when making the snood that it's better to pull this yarn from the outside of the ball. I don't know if I'll be able to describe this well, but this yarn has a halo that feels soft, but when two strands are rubbed together tightly they get tangled. This yarn winds into a very tight ball so pulling the yarn from the center causes the strands to stick together and then I would have to stop crocheting to rip the strands apart and untangle things. But pulling from the outside is working fine and there is no problem with making the crochet stitches, even though I'm having to pull the working yarn through 7 loops at a time. So now that I'm on to the second ball of yarn I'm really loving making this scarf!

That's all I have for this week.

Nancy

Sakura and Stella Market Bags

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! We had some pretty spectacular rain and hail at my house. It's really amazing that we continue to get precipitation this late in the summer! I heard on the news that we are now completely out of our extreme drought that has lasted over 20 years. 

I've continued to work on market bags. I enjoy making them and I think they'll make wonderful gifts! This week I made a Sakura Market Bag designed by K.A.M.E. Crochet:

Sakura Market Bag

Sakura Market Bag - bottom

I really like how this bag turned out! It was easy to make, it's a good size and I think the bottom motif is really pretty. I'll definitely be making more of these as gifts! This was the Jimmy Beans Wool Accessory Club project for June 2022 that I'd been holding on to until I had time to work on it and had some crochet experience.

I also just finished a Stella Market Bag designed by Susy Knotsosquare:

 

Stella Market Bag

Stella Market Bag - bottom

I'm not as fond of the bottom of this bag as I am of some of the others. It's not a pretty, it has larger open spaces that small things could fall through and it doesn't lie flat. The problem with lying flat is probably something that I did, like maybe my chain stitches are too tight compared to my other stitches. I don't know. I made this with some leftover flax yarn that I bought 25 years ago when I first tried to learn to knit. I didn't get very far with the knitting at that time and soon moved on to other things so I lost what little I had learned, but I did make some washcloths out of this yarn. It's a very stiff yarn on the skein so is a bit of work to knit or crochet, but it softens up beautifully with use and washing. It'll be interesting to see how this market bag holds up over time. The bottom motif might even flatten out as the yarn softens. I used up all of my blue and a good part of my red on this bag. I still have some more red and some lavender left. There's not enough for another market bag, but I want to use up this yarn so I'm looking through patterns to see what else I might want to make with it. 

On the knitting side, I finished my Autumn Snow hat designed by Kay F. Jones:

Autumn Snow

I made this hat to use up some of yarn left over from last month's Jimmy Beans Wool Accessory Club project. This was a simple project, but it allowed me to play with knitting "jogless" stripes. When you knit something like a hat in the round, you are actually knitting a spiral rather than individual rounds. If you don't do anything special when you change yarn colors for a stripe, then you will have a little bump or jog in the color at the beginning and end of the stripe. Sorry that I don't have any pictures to illustrate this! There are a couple of techniques that people use to smooth out that transition a bit. I used one of those methods on this hat. I found that it worked well on multiple-round stripes but had problems on single round stripes. Then it dawned on me that knitting an extra stitch in the stripe color before switching back to the other color would fix the problem that I was seeing and wouldn't be a noticeable deviation from the stripe pattern. I tried that on my last stripes and that worked well. Again, sorry that I don't have pictures to illustrate this! Bad Blogger!!

Finally, I started working on Engaged designed by Laura Nelkin:

Engaged

This is the July 2023 project for the Lola's Choice club, Laura's bi-monthly small project club. This project is a cute kerchief knit from a linen yarn. The kit includes an odd-count flat stitch peyote ring that you can slide onto the kerchief for a little added style. I'm knitting the kerchief first, but am looking forward to making the ring since I've never done this before. I really enjoy Laura's club projects because there's always something new and interesting to learn!

Well, that's another week gone by. I'm really enjoying having the time to work on all of these projects, with enough time left over to take care of Lance and still do some clean-up projects around the house! I hope everyone's having a wonderful summer and aren't experiencing too much of the extreme weather!

Nancy

Galette Shawlette Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I just have a few things to share this week. First, I finished my Galette Shawlette designed by Beach Nerd Knits:

Galette Shawlette

Galette Shawlette - final lace section

Galette Shawlette - middle lace section

I'm pleased to say that I also got the shawlette blocked. The blocking is my least favorite part so it's easy for me to procrastinate! But it really opens up the lace so it's important for some projects. This is the project that I had put on hold for a little while to order some more of the white yarn since the pattern indicated that I would need more than I had. However, it turned out that I had had enough of the white so didn't need the extra skein. The extra skein was only $7 and I had a coupon for free shipping, so that wasn't a big deal. I'm working on using some of it up in a project below.

I also blocked my Terra Shawl designed by Joji Locatelli:

Terra Shawl

Terra Shawl close-up

This is the shawl that I made for my niece, Terra. The blocking really opens it up! This shawl design is pretty cool because I can't really tell which is the front side and which is the back, so it'll be very easy to wear!

Finally, I started an Autumn Snow hat designed by Kay F. Jones to use up some of my leftovers from the Galette Shawlette:

Autumn Snow

This is a simple hat with variable stripes that I can donate to the homeless shelter next fall. I wanted to use up my scraps because I did some organizing of my yarn this week and I didn't want to have to find a place for this yarn. The yarn organization project is one of my long-term projects where I'm going through all of my yarn (I have a LOT) and making sure that every usable bit is in my Ravelry stash database (I have yarn that I purchased before I started using Ravelry and before I started putting my stash in there) and all of the information about the yarn is correct (for example, either they didn't have the "location" field when I started using it or I didn't notice it so much of the yarn doesn't have the proper location). I'm also moving smaller leftovers to my leftover jars, which I just started using in the last couple of years. I was never sure what to do with smaller leftovers so they got stuck in a lot of different places. Now, I'm keeping them together so I can easily make my next scrap blanket or whatever. Of course, one of the results of this project is that I'm seeing wonderful yarns that I'd forgotten about and I'm getting inspired to start a million new projects.....

Well, that's it for this week. I hope everyone has a wonderful Fourth!!

Nancy