Number One is a secret because it's a present that has yet to be gifted, although if you looked at it you would be forgiven for calling it Number Two. (It's the thought, right? They'll appreciate being My First, right?)
Number Two, then, is the mittens and hat and scarf to which I alluded back in December - my belated Christmas/early New Year's present to PomWonderful! I cannot adequately describe how pleased I was with myself for actually completing a craft project for once. Or how burned out they left me (don't tell Ace; he already knows I spent an unseemly amount on the yarn that's multiplying above the washer and dryer).
I made the moebius scarf on the planes to and from Chicago over Thanksgiving, I made the hat over Christmas in Idaho, and I made (and remade) the mittens in between. I assume she's got them by now. Oh! Another excuse to call!
She looks better in green than I do.
For knitters only:
As a person new to this field of endeavor, I find myself super interested in the details of projects on other people's knitting blogs. Therefore, if it helps you:
For all three things, I used Sensations Angel Hair in the color that's not bright lime green, but a little softer. It feels delicious. Apparently you can only get it at JoAnn's, that boutique of exclusivity. It's 22% wool and 88% fake. I haven't heard whether it's warm but will try to get a RealFeel review.
The scarf is wicked easy, the pattern was on the wrapper of a Wool-Ease skein. I can't believe they're selling the pattern when it was free on a wrapper!! (As I was looking for the link, well, tell me if this one makes you laugh.) Anyway, it's all garter stitch. You just knit back and forth as wide as you want and as long as you want, and then sew the ends together - giving one end a twist before you do so. I reckon it took me somewhere between 3 and 5 hours over the course of a week, and maybe two thirds of the skein. It's pretty floppy.
The mittens, as mentioned previously, were from the Stitch n Bitch book. It's unfortunate the title includes a word I hate saying out loud, it's otherwise a very friendly book. As also mentioned previously, the first one I made according to the pattern turned out huge. I thought my gauge was correct, but who knows. It turned out it was really easy to just approximate the pattern, fitting it to my hand as I went. The pair (not including the misfit one) took me two or three weeks' worth of odd moments (six hours? more?) and nearly a whole skein.
The hat used this Vogue pattern. It took a while, but the satisfaction of figuring out three different types of cables made it well worth it. It took maybe six to eight hours of knitting, and 3/4 to close to a whole skein of yarn. It turned out too small at first- that is, it wasn't long enough to pull down securely over my ears. I don't think I have a huge head. You knit from the bottom up, so I had to unravel nearly half the hat to add more length (I added about an inch) to the wide part before re-doing the part that slopes in. Our plane back from Idaho was delayed for a couple of hours, though, so this didn't bother me too much. Especially in combination with the $3 shot of Disaronno.
Ha! I love it. Nice work and good job for finishing it. I know how intimidating it can be to finish projects.
Posted by: Kelli | January 27, 2009 at 12:41 PM