posts tagged: 15 FOs

comments-icon9

tags-icon Tags

, , , , ,

fraternal baby quilts!

| 9 comments

pepperknit | twin HST quilts

I know that every new quilt is my new favorite, but truly: I love these quilts. I love them because I think they look pretty cool, but I also love them because they are exactly what I intended.

See, these were made for a close friend and coworker. Four years ago I was tasked with working with her team as a sort of adjunct help, and I didn’t know how I’d mesh with her, their leader. But it turns out we see eye to eye on so much—we approach the world in similarly straightforward, logical ways—and now I’m a full member of her team. I feel confident in saying that we trust each other completely, as colleagues and as friends. So when I was thinking about quilts to make for her upcoming twins, well, I felt as if the pressure was on.

pepperknit | twin HST quilts

I wanted clean, geometric shapes. Sharp angles seemed appropriate. Solids, definitely. The design needed to be a complete quilt—not made up of different discrete squares. I want to say “no creativity” but that feels too stark… except it’s exactly what I wanted. They needed to feel logical and sharp, but of course I wanted them to be interesting and attractive. I wanted the two to coordinate in gender neutral colors, even though I knew pretty early that it would be two boys. HSTs were clearly the answer.

They were also so easily executed in a completely logical way: One night, I selected fabrics from my stash of fat quarters and cut all the squares for both quilts (actually, the day she told me she was pregnant with twins). Another night, I sewed the diagonals of all the squares (that’s 128 diagonals—and epic chain-piecing evening!). A few nights later, I cut the HSTs apart. A few days after that, I ironed them all open, etc. It was just so… straightforward. Perfect. The only fussy time was spent arranging, and rearranging, the HSTs until I liked the look.

pepperknit | twin HST quilts

This might all sound weird, and maybe it’s not giving the right impression of my friend. Maybe she doesn’t even see or get what I was going for, but no matter—the babies will have cute little blankets to drag around, play on, or even sleep under!

For the backings I bought a gray gingham that was crazy off-grain or I don’t even know what but it made basting and quilting them absurdly difficult. (And was purchased at Purl Soho, so… that was exceptionally annoying.) A friend who is an experienced quilter was over the day I basted them and she was the one to point out that the fabric was causing my problems, not my skill level. For the labels, I wanted two matched phrases but came up blank. My friend Holly suggested these two sweet thoughts, so I embroidered them and sewed them on on opposite corners (because they’re fraternal! get it?).

pepperknit | twin HST quilts

comments-icon4

tags-icon Tags

, , ,

garter rib hat

| 4 comments

pepperknit | garter rib hat

There are a lot of amazing hat patterns out there, from people who understand shaping and texture and all that. But somehow, I have not a single “normal” hat in the basket near the door. I have a little beaded slouch, and a great not-knitted store-bought fake-fur-lined hat that I rely on to get me through the coldest days, but I didn’t just have A HAT. One that I could pull on and just wear, no thinking. I wanted to knit it the same way—no frought process, no fussy stitch pattern. Just a hat.

It’s funny, I used to knit basically nothing but hats. When I rekindled my love of knitting in college, it was with a group that knit hats for the homeless. We knit all-stockinette hats with a curled brim or k1,p1 with a folded cuff, and I made a ton—for the group, family, and friends. But that was fifteen years ago, and I don’t know what happened to all the hats I’ve knit myself in the meantime. But all that changed last week!

pepperknit | garter rib hat

This yarn, Primo Aran, was actually given to me by Plucky Knitter herself, when I bought some other yarn. She’d seen me holding this color for a while before deciding to go in a completely different direction. I had made it pretty clear that this was “my color,” and she insisted I take it with me. It was so so nice of her. Last fall I started a hat with it but I picked a pattern that didn’t exactly work with my gauge and stitch count, so I was fudging it as I went. I got into the decreases and it got confusing, so I set it aside.

When I picked it up two weeks ago, I had no idea what my intentions had been with the decreases. So I ripped, cast back on, and planned something simple and dead easy. I grabbed my size 8s, did a tubular cast on, rearranging the 96 stitches to a 2×2 rib, and worked that for 2 inches. then I switched to 2×2 garter rib. No increases after the ribbing, just the pattern shift. When I deemed it plenty long (longer than to be worn tight like a toque, but not too long as to be a giant slouchy thing) I decreased it away. I had a system at the time, one that I surely could not recreate, that involved decreasing evenly within the purls, then in the knits, then pulling it all together. But no matter: it’s a finished hat! A hat!

pepperknit | garter rib hat

In the end, I started the hat on a Thursday and wove in the ends Friday night (after movie night with friends). I blocked it that weekend and the following Thursday, Pamela Wynne took these pictures of me on a cold, slightly snowy day on the Lower East Side. Easy-peasy.

comments-icon4

tags-icon Tags

, , , ,

crocheted amish puzzle balls

| 4 comments

pepperknit | crocheted amish puzzle balls

Despite the couple of sweaters you’ve seen lately, I really prefer making toys for babies. They have a longer life, given how quickly babies outgrow garments, and they allow for some fun and experimentation. They also are great for using up leftover bits of yarn and they’re just darn cute. I’m always favoriting toy patterns on Ravelry, and recently I came upon the Amish Puzzle Balls.

pepperknit | crocheted amish puzzle balls

I’ve seen these puzzle balls as sewn projects as well, but I had a feeling crocheting them would be a million times easier than sewing one up. And I was right—these are mindless fun to make, and the results are so lovely. I had plenty of leftover Mrs. Crosby Carpet Bag yarn after finishing the entrelac bolster, so I made two, one the inverse of the other (color wedges or gray wedges). They’re not very large (they’re about 5 inches in diameter), but hopefully that means they’re good for little hands. The only “tricky” part of these is figuring how densely to stuff the wedges, and trying to put the same amount of stuffing in each. I definitely just did it by feel and it was fine. And as a note: These do not make for good group stitching nights. The wedges are made by increasing in every row, which basically means you are constantly counting. This was my plane crafting on the way to TNNA, but I discovered quickly there was absolutely no way to work on them while trying to have a conversation. I can watch TV with them, if the TV show is mindless, but anything requiring additional brain power rendered me useless. No Jeopardy while making these, for example.

(Though, I posit that trying to count while also trying to recall trivia might be the best kind of brain exercise there is! I was shocked at how difficult it was, actually.)

pepperknit | crocheted amish puzzle balls

Sadly I used up all the gray I had, but there’s still plenty of the 4 other colors, and I’m considering some two-toned balls next!

comments-icon7

tags-icon Tags

, , , ,

weaving into the storm

| 7 comments

What is it about natural disasters that makes me want to weave? I broke in my 10-inch Schacht Cricket during Hurricane Irene a few years ago, and I haven’t touched it in a while—but I feel as though I’ve only pulled it out during long stretches forced at home. (Let’s not talk about how often I normally have long stretches at home—it’s not as if an incoming storm really changes things!) But the threats of a blizzard—complete with a total subway shutdown and a ban on all cars on roads after 11pm—got me itching to use it again.

pepperknit | woven scarf

This time, I turned to the space-dyed yarn I bought from Jill Draper Makes Stuff while at Vogue Knitting LIVE two weekends ago. I recently saw a few examples of deliberate-pooling woven scarves that were truly gorgeous (this one in particular has me swooning), and I wanted to play with the technique. The colorful skein of Hudson that I got (colorway Deep Breath, Cold Air) was not actually a palindrome skein; two patches of gray were divided by one dark teal and one light. But I went forward, matching the teal sections and the gray sections for the warp. I used this technique and it was quite easy, but I forgot all the steps of warping exactly, and a few strands got quite askew before I started weaving them up (not that anyone would notice).  For my weft I used a solid gray (Mourning Dove) in the same yarn; the result in the color sections is very gridded, and I like it a lot, even if it wasn’t what I’d envisioned happening.

I kept the tension on the warp and the weft rather even, and the end result is maybe a little light and loose—the sproingy yarn didn’t bounce back as much as I thought it would when it was taken out of tension. I really have no clue what I’m doing, but I think I did a good job of keeping my “gauge” even. However, I prefer a heavily beaten look—when the weft is scrunchy in the warp. I think in this case that would have highlighted the weft (solid gray) too much, though, so it’s all well and good that it worked out this way.

pepperknit | woven scarf

I started warping this around 4pm or so the night the storm was coming (I think), and I hemstitched it at around 10pm, including a break to cook and eat dinner (but no other real breaks). I still marvel at how fast weaving can be!

I went the full width of the 13″ loom, and ended up with a scarf 8 inches wide by 64 inches long. Kind of an awkwardly wide scarf but I didn’t want it to be narrow, either. This used up nearly all of each skein of yarn, too, so that was satisfying. The next morning we woke up to find that the blizzard had been all talk and no action; we had a nice good snowfall and some wind but not the three feet of snow that was predicted. I took the scarf with me while we went on a photowalk and set it in the snow to shoot it. Because the snow is so light and fluffy and the temp still so frigid, giving the scarf a good shake removed all the snow from it—and I set it down, snow-free. It was so windy and snowing so hard during the few minutes I was shooting that it ended up nearly covered in snow!

pepperknit | woven scarf

 

comments-icon8

tags-icon Tags

, , , , , , ,

the year of the sheep!

| 8 comments

The year of the sheep is coming up in February! Starting Feb 19, it’s the year for yarn-lovers of all kinds, and for those who honor the Chinese lunar calendar. One of my cousins on my Chinese side is expecting her first baby in March, and so I felt that this little girl needed something sheep-themed.

pepperknit | year of the sheep sweater

I used the basic formula I’ve done before for another cousin’s baby: the Placket-Neck Pullover from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts (the pdf is available free online here) with some charted colorwork. I actually sketched this little sheep while at lunch with Amy Herzog at TNNA; I wanted the sheep to have a “puffy” feeling to it. I marched them along the bottom edge (facing each other at the middle front and back to back in the middle back), and added a little contrast band underneath. Because of the legs and face, there was some juggling of 3 colors in a single row for a few rows, and I did normal Fair Isle for the legs, twisting the floats in the gaps, and then when I got to the heads I just cut the yarn and did each face as its own little patch of intarsia. Intarsia in the round normally wouldn’t work, but because the bottom row of the faces is just one stitch, I just pulled the yarn back behind to start the 3-stitch top of the head. A little bit of just “making it work” and it worked pretty well! Here’s the chart I used (using green for the sheep body because I didn’t want to color in the background!).

pepperknit | sheep chart

I knit the six-month size, so hopefully she’ll be able to wear it in the fall, while it’s still the Year of the Sheep. The background yarn is Cascade 220, the sheep’s fluff is Manos (from my Stonecutter), and the legs and face are Universal Deluxe Worsted. I did a three-needle bind-off for the underarms and everything else was done according to pattern. Oh, and I added that sweet little flower to the front in Mrs Crosby’s Carpet Bag.

pepperknit | year of the sheep sweater

pepperknit | year of the sheep sweater

Do you want to knit something sheepy, too? I’ve marked several great patterns on Ravelry and I’m sure I’ll be making more during the year. Obviously you’ll see similarities to my color choices and those in Julia Farwell-Clay’s Welcome to the Flock. I can’t resist all those little stuffed toys too. How will you celebrate the year of the sheep?