Poor Lance

Hi all -

I thought I should get a post written since a lot of my friends love my dog, Lance, and want to hear news of him. Poor Lance somehow got an infection in his left foreleg a week and a half ago. His whole leg got really swollen and the callus on his elbow blew up like a balloon. It was literally the size of a Clementine orange before it popped. I took him to the vet and they aren't sure what caused the infection. The first thought was a snake bite but that was ruled out by blood tests. Snakes are extremely rare where I live (8500 ft altitude), but I guess there are some up here, although I've never seen on in the 20 years I've been here. The other thought is that maybe it was a spider bite. There aren't any tests for that, so that's what we're going with. (My vet actually said that if it's not a spider bite, then it's something really bad.) Anyway, he's had several vet visits. He wasn't doing well at first -- he stopped eating and was unsteady on his feet. You can guess how nervous I was since he's at least 13.5 years old now! But after a couple of days, he turned around and got a lot better quickly. It looks like the antibiotics they gave him are right on! There was a lot of damage to the skin around his elbow, so much so that there's not enough healthy skin to be able to close the wound by surgery (and you can actually see the bone there), so we are going to have to wait for his body to do all of the healing itself. So, this is Lance's life for the foreseeable future:

I know it looks like he's been in a car accident, but I promise he hasn't! The black sleeve is a recovery sleeve made by Suitical. Luckily, I already had a couple of these at home to keep the wound fairly clean and contain some of the oozing since they couldn't bandage the wound out of fear of the leg swelling more and making the bandage cut off circulation to the leg. The thing around his neck is a BiteNot collar, which I also already had. It's an alternative to a "cone of shame" for keeping him from licking the wound. And he's on house-arrest, so can only go outside for bathroom breaks and short walks up the driveway, since that's the only flat area around here. The vet he saw today said that she had successfully treated a dog with a severe elbow injury like this using fish skin as a kind of graft. My regular vet is out of town until Monday, so she's going to talk to him about it then to see what he thinks. If that works, it could reduce his recovery time considerably! Here's hoping that's an appropriate treatment!! Otherwise, everyone here is fine. ;)

I haven't gotten much done in the last week, but I was pretty productive before that. First, I finished my Beachcomber shawl, designed by Chelsea Berkompas:

This was a kit that I bought on sale from KnitPicks a long time ago, but hadn't gotten around to making. It's made out of a cotton/linen yarn and the colors are gorgeous! Here is Lance modeling it in his happier days:

Oh, how I miss those days!

I also made a Bless Your Heart scarf designed by Laura Nelkin:

This is a beaded scarf knit with incredibly soft Suri Alpaca/Silk blend yarn. You can't tell from the picture, but it's a short, narrow scarf that is just perfect for keeping your neck warm. This was the May 2020 project for the Lola's Choice club. Lance also modeled this in his better days:

What a good boy!!

And I received and was able to knit up the June installment of my Jimmy Beans Wool shawl club project, the Coral Coast Wrap designed by Ambah O'Brien:

We're halfway there now!

I also started and finished my Farmstand Sack designed by Laura Nelkin:

This was the July 2020 Lola's Choice club project and is knit using Pima Cotton yarn. I really love this project and had been looking for a pattern for a bag like this that was knit rather than crochet, but hadn't found anything that I liked. I really like this one and ordered a bunch more yarn to make these for my family for Christmas presents.

Finally, I've been knitting on a Hiberknitting Hat designed by Stephen West:

You can't tell yet from the picture, but this hat has a lot of textural designs knit into the top using just knits and purls. It's knit holding a soft, thin Mohair yarn together with a thick wool yarn to give it an incredible softness and warmth. I haven't decided yet whether I like the colors that I put together, but if I end up not liking them I can always give the hat to the Homeless Shelter to keep someone in need toasty warm this winter!

That's all that I've accomplished since my last post. I've been talking to my sisters, and I'm definitely not going to my niece's wedding because of the virus. I don't feel comfortable traveling right now anyway, and the sister that I usually stay with has a husband who is very high risk who I would hate to take any chances with. She isn't going to the wedding, either, just because of the risk to her husband. And, with Lance's injury, it probably ends up being the best thing anyway. On the positive side, that gives me lots of time to finish her wedding quilt since it's too big for me to want to mail it anyway. Instead, I'll be making a little wallhanging in her wedding colors to send for the wedding and will bring the big quilt with me the next time I visit.

I hope everyone is staying safe and happy!

Nancy

Hurricane Ridge Pullover

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:

https://sewmodernbags.com/how-to-download-video-classes-from-bluprint-or-craftsy/

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

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

Pacificus DK Sweater Finished

Hi all -

I hope you are all doing well! We continue to do well here. Besides working, I've mostly been knitting and TV binging. I watched Season 2 of "Dead to Me" on Netflix last weekend. I had originally just meant to watch an episode or two while I ate lunch, but I got sucked in and had to watch the entire season. I hope they make more seasons of this show!!

I'm excited to have finished my Pacificus DK sweater designed by Laura Nelkin:

I love how this sweater feels when wearing it! And the bright color! It's interesting because this sweater is made with the same yarn and in the same construction as my Novel-T sweater (also designed by Laura Nelkin) that I describe here, but it's knit at a looser gauge (larger needles so more space between the stitches) and you can really feel the difference in the weight of the fabrics. The Novel-T sweater feels kind of heavy when I wear it, but this sweater feels a lot lighter! This sweater is knit side-to-side, from the edge of the right sleeve, across the body, finishing on the edge of the left sleeve. The sides are then knit together with a narrow panel:

The side panel adds another pretty detail to the sweater.

I've also made good progress on my Creek sweater:

The stitch pattern for this sweater makes it slower to knit (and my large size doesn't help), but I'm getting there. As you can see, the body and right sleeve are finished and I just have the left sleeve and neckline to go. This one should be finished by my next blog post! I'm knitting this sweater with a yarn that is a cotton and wool mix. I'm really liking how it feels when I try it on!

I also received the April installment of my shawl club project, the Coral Coast Wrap designed by Ambah O'Brien.

This month's section of the pattern was really easy so I was able to knit it up in just a couple of hours. Now it's put away, waiting for the end of this month.....

My sewing machine was also calling to me and I just had to take a break and make a new project bag with some fun knitting fabric that I have:

I used the Finch Bucket pattern to make this bag, but I increased the size of the bag so it has plenty of room to hold a large sweater project with all of the needed supplies. I made another bag of this size a while ago that I'm using for my Creek sweater project and it's perfect for that, but the pattern has you make a single handle on one side of the bag. With a weighty project, if you pick the bag up by the handle then the weight of the project can cause the draw string to open up a bit. It dawned on me that I could change the design to have two handles at the top of the bag, like a tote bag and I really wanted to see how that would work. Here's what I came up with:

I think I'm going to really like this design, but will have to wait for another big sweater project to see how it works out in practice. Inside the bag, the pattern has you put in a bunch of pockets, which I love. I also added a length of ruler twill tape, which is handy when knitting, and a lobster hook so I can attach a little bag of notions for easy access if I want.

I think I'm going to love using this bag!

That's all I've been working on lately, but I thought you'd also enjoy a picture of a pet using poor judgement:

Yep, that's Buttercup curled up with the iron on my pressing table. Luckily, the iron was not plugged in at the time! (I do always chase the cats off of the pressing table whenever I'm sewing, even if I'm not using the iron, so they are less likely to jump up there when the iron is plugged in....)

Nancy

Pacificus DK Sweater Progress

Hi all -

Although we've continued to get snow up here, it is starting to feel a bit more like spring. I'm really ready for it! We got over 3 feet of snow last week: 1 foot early in the week and another 2+ feet on Thursday. It was really heavy snow, but I got it shoveled. Here is what it looked like in the middle of the second storm:

I try to keep the little deck at the front door shoveled since Lance likes to sit out there, but it's not easy in these big spring storms. And, yes, he does sit out there in the snow and then come into the house completely covered! It's too funny for me to be bothered by it! We've had warm weather this week with just light snow showers every once in a while so about 80-90% of the snow has melted. Hopefully, this is the last big storm! My hammock is just begging to get some use!!

I've also been doing some knitting. My main project is the Pacificus DK sweater designed by Laura Nelkin. Laura is having a knit-along for this sweater right now so that's keeping me on track. For her knit-alongs, Laura defines goals with deadlines and everyone who meets the goal by the deadline gets put into a hat for a nice prize. I haven't won any prizes, but I've kept up and should have a completed summer sweater by the end of May. Before knitting a sweater, you always want to knit a swatch with the yarn and needles you plan to use. You then measure the swatch and compare it with what the designer got. If your swatch isn't the right size, you change needles until you get close to what the designer got. If you don't do this, your sweater won't be the right size. Here is my swatch being protected by Buttercup:

Since I grew up with a thrifty German mother and I don't have any use for a bunch of squares of knitted fabric of different sizes, I leave my swatch attached to the ball of yarn and unravel the swatch to use in the project once I get gauge. For this sweater, I knit 4 different swatches before getting the right size so I would have wasted a lot of yarn if I hadn't done that!

The Pacificus DK sweater has an interesting side-to-side construction. You start knitting at the edge of the right sleeve and continue across the sweater until finishing at the edge of the left sleeve. Then you knit a narrow panel from the bottom edge of the sweater up to the underarm edge of the sleeve to attach the front of the sweater to the back. You can see that in this picture which shows my current progress:

The right sleeve is at the bottom of the picture, the neck opening is in the middle, and the bottom edges of the sweater are on the left and right in the picture. Here is a picture of it folded to what it will look like when finished:

In this picture, the right sleeve is pointing to the lower-left corner of the picture, the bottom edge of the sweater is on the right side of the picture, and the neck opening is pointing to the upper-left corner of the picture. I've just gotten to the left edge of the neck opening, so the next section will be the left side of the sweater and the left sleeve. When that's done, I'll just need to knit the side panels and then fold up the hem on the bottom. Those parts shouldn't take too long. Here is a close-up of the lace section at the top of the sweater:

I really love how this lace looks! And here is a picture of one of the cute kitty stitch markers I'm using:

Isn't that adorable??? For my non-knitter friends, the stitch markers sit on the cable between my knitting needles to show me where the plain knitting ends and the lace knitting begins so I don't have to keep counting stitches. The cable connects my two knitting needles and holds the stitches that I am currently knitting, effectively giving me one long, double-ended knitting needle.

I've also made some progress on my other big project -- my Creek sweater designed by the Berroco (a yarn company) Design team. This sweater is knit from the bottom up, so it's easier to see how it goes together:

I've got the bottom of this sweater done and have split for the sleeve and started up the front. This is a slow stitch to do, but will hopefully feel like it's going faster now since I'll be working on narrower sections of the sweater. I really love how this sweater feels and can't wait to wear it!

Those of you that have been reading my blog for a while know that I hate blocking my knitting, but you really have to block lace items in order to see the lace. I finally made myself block the two lace shawls that I finished earlier this year. The first is the Fraser's Ridge shawl designed by Rachel Roden:

The shawl really looks so beautiful and feels so ethereal after blocking that it's really worth the effort! And here is my gratuitous Lance picture for my good friend who is always nice enough to ask for pictures of him:

The other shawl I blocked was my Easy Goes It shawl designed by Finicky Creations:

And, of course, Lance had to model this one, too!

Lance actually loves to model my stuff because he knows that he's going to get a treat when we're done. And he's incredible about being patient while I take the picture. What a sweetie!!

The only sewing I've done is to make a couple of accessories for my masks. First, I made a band that I can hook my elastic to if my ears start to hurt from the elastic:

This will be nice if I have to wear my mask for a long period of time for some reason. The other thing I made were some filters to put inside my masks:

These filters are made out of Oly-Fun and will slide inside of the mask. I tried to show you how they fit in the mask, but it's a little hard to see. I made 4 filters since I have 4 masks so I can easily wash the masks between wearings. Oly-Fun is a 100% polypropylene fabric that a lot of people are using for mask filters. I haven't done the research myself, but feel good about the group of people that I've seen using this fabric so I'm going to use it, too. According to the Joann's web site:

As a non-woven it is similar to the material used in surgical masks, however, OLY-Fun has not been tested or approved for medical use or filtration capabilities.  A one-ply sheet of OLY-Fun is a non-woven 65GSM, whereas commercially manufactured surgical masks are typically made of 3-ply 25GSM non-woven with additional filtration added.  Please note, homemade masks are not a substitute or replacement for N95 medical equipment.

It's the same fabric that is used for a lot of reusable shopping bags. It's easy to sew, but I'm not sure if it can be washed. The care instructions on the package say to "wipe clean" and that you can use an iron on low heat with a pressing cloth, but doesn't say anything about washing. I'll probably try blasting the filters with steam from my iron to disinfect them between use. We'll see what that does....

Well, that's all the crafting for now. The stay at home order for the state of Colorado is lifting tomorrow, although they're still asking people to stay home as much as possible (calling it "safe at home"). Boulder County has extended the stay at home order until May 8 so people around here should still be hunkered down. I hope all of you are doing well!!

Nancy