A Bitter Knitter

Today's drive by blog post features a project that took me over two years to make.  While I blame a good portion of that gap on having a baby, it also was one of the fiddliest projects I've done.   The pattern is " Aster Vest " by Cassie Castillo and I fell in love with it when I saw it because of the beautiful lace and the medallion in the back: Aster I swatched for two weeks and tried two different yarns... I ended up using NaturallyCaron.com Spa (now discontinued).  The yarn was excruciatingly splitty (splity?) but ended up blocking beautifully. Before: After: You really do block the living daylights out of this pattern.  Here's what the fronts looked like before: And after: I changed the back from what was written. I thought it was too narrow and would have required stretching the stockinette more than what would have been attractive in order to meet the pattern measurements. Then I had to assemble.  I'm actually rather pleased wit...

Hello, again!  Here comes another quick blog post.  Earlier this year, I decided to knit a baby doll for my toddler.  She has the doll I made her for her birthday  but I wanted one that was smaller.  Upon searching Ravelry , I came across the Rainbow Babies  pattern by Jean Greenhowe (free pattern). It's written to be knit flat but was easy to tweak to knit in the round.  The end result was: Jo's Baby She's about seven or eight inches tall and she coordinates with the doll (pardon the late night bad flash picture): Then I knit another for her cousin's birthday.  My niece didn't appreciate my nephew using her dolls, so I made him one of his own: Cousin My nephew has sandy blond hair and blue eyes, so his doll is made to look like him.  When he opened his gift and saw the doll, he said "no!" and threw it on the floor. My sister tried to play with the doll to get him interested in it, but he wanted nothing to do with it. ...

Here comes a super quick blog post... I'm going through the WIPs that I haven't blogged yet and sneaking a few minutes to write a blog post while my toddler (almost two!!!) spends some time with her daddy at the park. Today's blog post project started as this yarn: It was a birthday gift from my little sister.  Berroco calls the colour "Dreams." I love aqua.  It was cool to see all the colours in the skein as I wound them into balls.  (You will have to take my word on the colour... it's really hard to capture, in part because of the sheen of the yarn.) And as I wound them, I knew that I wanted to turn this yarn into a drop stitch scarf.  The pattern is " Shimmer Wave Scarf " by Kate Hiester which is a free pattern on Ravelry .  I used all but a foot or two of yarn on the scarf and it came out seven feet long and six inches wide when relaxed.  The colour changes subtly from row to row showing off the contours of the drop stitch pattern...