Checking in on my long-in-process cross stitch! I keep forgetting I even have this WIP, so I also keep forgetting to document it. I often take it with me when I travel, especially if I don’t have a good, consuming knitting WIP, but then it stays in my suitcase when I get back. I think I started it more than a year and a half ago! This past week, off and on, I’ve been working on this little house.
It’s definitely slow progress, but I’m totally fine with that. I love the process of cross stitch, and it’s fun to see it start to come together. I admit I wish there were more areas of solid color, rather than, say, the trees, where I have to bounce around all over the place, so I’m vaguely on the hunt for another project that’s more filled in with solid stretches. Here’s a pic of the whole thing as it now stands (I don’t use a hoop because, well, I just never did when I was a kid and I honestly can’t imagine it making a huge difference for me). This is worked on linen and the pattern says to hold two strands; I wish it called for 3 or I could be sure I’d have enough if I did because I hate how not “full” the Xs are.
Hopefully I’ll make more regular progress so there’s something to check in on soon!
When I bound off my Color Affection the other day, I did it with loathing. I had been working on this pattern since March of last year. Every row was a small torture—the final length is something like 7 feet long!! Now that it’s done, though, I must objectively admire its beauty. The colors are just what I wanted.
But I’m ambivalent. It’s a million miles long, so it can be wrapped around and around, which I like to do with scarves, but it’s unwieldy. I don’t understand how to wrap it successfully like a shawl. What have I done??
I kind of can’t believe I knit something so enormous; it’s no surprise it took so long. I know I went too far with the first color and decided not to rip, so I actually made it longer than the pattern expects. Despite my lack of affection for it, I’ll tell you that I saw so many Color Affections in the aisles of the Vogue Knitting LIVE Marketplace this past weekend, and every time I did I thought to myself “I made that too!” It made me feel as if we were all in some club, like those who’ve climbed Mt. Everest or survived a harrowing experience together. We’re the war-worn, the triumphant, the ones who made it to the end. And for that, I do feel pride and kinship. (Don’t even tell me how much you adored knitting it and disagree with it being a torture, ok? Let me pretend we all feel the same way.)
Details: Light gray is Hazel Knits Artisan Sock yarn, which I bought at Twisted in Portland. Dark gray is Periwinkle Sheep sock from Rhinebeck, always my first stop at New York Sheep & Wool. Green is Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock that Felicia kindly gave to me when I told her my whole whiny story about choosing a third color (my first color, a mustard yellow, turned bumblebee with the grays and I hated the look, so I frogged). I used a size 6 needle (though I wish I’d used 5s). This was technically cast on in June; the one I started in March did not use any of the recommended methods you’ll find on Rav to make the edges looser (ultimately I wrapped the first stitch twice, which made a huge positive difference), and I was unhappy with the color. So it took about six months in all, with a ton of breaks.
Photos taken by the fantastic Kriegs, on a walk we took down to the Verrazano Bridge to see—or, rather, not see—it in the fog.
Big changes today! If you only read the site via your RSS reader, please click through and take a peek: We’ve redesigned! We’ve changed the layout and colors, added some fun features, and best of all: The entire site is now responsive! That means that it automatically looks awesome no matter what kind of device you’re reading it on. My analytics tell me many of you come here on a tablet—no worries, the site is already resized for you. Need to take a peek on your phone? No problem.
My web designer is available—that is, he’s in the next room—to fix any bugs that might arise, so don’t hesitate to let us know if you catch any problems. Plus there are still some tweaks we might make in the coming weeks. Hey, why not use the new contact form that we put on the About page! And if you’re curious to see what it used to look like, click here. (Every time someone does a redesign I immediately forget what it looked like before, and I wish they would show me! It’s like when you walk by a storefront you see all the time and there’s a new business but you can’t for the life of you remember what was there previously.) Let us know what you think of the new look, and stay tuned—I have a post waiting in the wings.
I almost didn’t do a wrap-up this year, but I just realized that I have done one every year for many many years now and why should I suddenly stop? First up, my knitting accomplishments for the year:
Who knew I was able to complete so much while at the same time whining about not being “able to knit” because of my thumb pain? There really isn’t such a dearth of knitting, is there? There are two missing projects: one is a design I did for a book that’s not coming out for a while yet so I probably shouldn’t show it to you anyway. I also knit a hat for a work giveaway that I didn’t document at all. Those coffee cup cozies were a little thing I did for Knit Simple magazine. They assigned me cozies, and I couldn’t decide which pattern to submit, so I showed Editor in Chief Carla Scott all of them, and she said “yes! we’ll do all three!” Ha.
I like that you can see how I used the same yarn for my Buckwheat as the hat for Carol; I should start making hats out of all my leftover yarn! Thanks again are due to Caro Sheridan for the photo shoots we were able to do this year, for Buckwheat, the Bulky Topper, and the green hat!
I’d declared 2012 “the year of the quilt” and I wasn’t wrong. It was definitely a year of sewing. With my injured thumb, it was far less painful to sew, so our entire dining room area was pretty much unusable as a place of eating. (“Be careful! Don’t spill on that!” gets old fast.) Here are all my quilty endeavors (plus an embroidery project that I never blogged):
That lion embroidery? I made that for my dear friend’s baby; because mom and I met while taking yoga together 6 days a week for a few years, I added “simhasana” to the embroidery (the Sanskrit for lion pose) and stitched the little lion’s tongue sticking out (like you do in the pose). Just a little touch of something personal, and a really cute result. The one in the lower right has yet to be shot in daylight, but that will come soon, and the one in the middle on the bottom actually is basically finished and has been in use but has never been photographed! I need to get on that. The quilting that I did this year was mostly on my tiny machine, but I did do a mix of machine and hand quilting on the star quilt that hasn’t been blogged. I feel really confident in my skills as a quilter now, too, so I’m really happy with what I did this year.
Earlier in the year the last of my bees finished up, so I have some bee blocks in my catalog of finished stuff:
I wasn’t good at documenting these, actually. And in fact, I may have never fully finished the Dresden plate in the bottom middle, but I don’t remember where I put the blocks-in-progress! (This is what happens when I actually clean the apartment.) I’m so glad that I participated in a total of 3 bees. You really gain so much skill and knowledge so quickly. I know that bees are tricky—I mean, you’re trusting other people to have the same standards and skills as you—but I also enjoyed being exposed to so many different kinds of blocks and ways of approaching a quilt. Actually, in my finished quilt mosaic are two of the bee quilts that I had made: the picnic blanket came from my Twitter Bee, and the stars (the unfinished one in the mosaic) was from KBeeC, a bee among my KBC friends. The third bee, the Solid 6, comprises most of my finished bee blocks in the mosaic above… But I picked a block for everyone to make that it turns out I really don’t like very much. I’m torn as to what to do with the blocks that were made for me, so I’m sitting on them until the right idea comes along.
What’s up for this year? Well, the month of January is going to be basically a rest from quilting. I’ve got two business trips, we have houseguests, and I’m just, I must confess, tired. I like having a clear dining room table! I’m enjoying just sitting on the couch watching TV when I get home—plus lately I’m so busy I get home late from work. But I’m sure when I’m back from TNNA things will come back—I intend this to be the year of sewn clothing! (Something that, despite having taken classes on the subject more than once, I am still quite intimidated by.) But I still have a bunch of quilt ideas swirling around in my brain that I can’t wait to make real. There will always be knitting, too, of course, don’t worry. Just this morning I bound off on a long-suffering project—stay tuned!
We spent the day on a snowy Christmas Eve with my friends and their kids, so in the days before I knit the kiddos hats–the pattern is called Poppy!
They are the speediest knits and so adorable. I love Aviatrix, by the same designer, but the chin strap is an ever-so-small pain to make, so Poppy is right up my alley. I didn’t even bother with the provisional cast-on, I just picked up the stitches over it. For Eleanor’s, I used a skein of Noro leftover from the mittens I made for Pam. For Henry, I honestly have no idea what the yarn is; I found it in the free bin at the office. It’s blue. Each one took less than two hours to make, but the response was worth even more than that!
Two little kids given hats who don’t take them off for the entire duration of the visit? Unheard of.
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