Zipper!

My tomten has a zipper! I'm so delighted by this, I can hardly contain myself. It took two weekends to sew in - one to baste the zipper into place and the other to actually do the backstitch seams to secure the zipper to the sweater. But it's done! And, I didn't give in and use buttons when my initial installation attempts were less than successful.

I must have looked at five or six different zipper tutorials before diving in. First, I thought the stitch marker idea sounded best: you attach the fronts with stitch markers, then pin the zipper in place, then sew it. The stitch markers (i.e., paperclips, since that's what I use) didn't hold particularly well and pinning the zipper to garter stitch was an exercise in poking tiny holes in my fingers, not attaching a zipper. Then I realized that I really should baste the fronts together. It took a while but seemed to work swimmingly.

Then came time to attach the zipper to the sweater prior to sewing it in. Pins were clearly out at this point and I was very tempted by Brenda's suggestion to use a glue stick. But somehow I couldn't quite bring myself to touch glue to fabric. So I ended up whipstitching the edge of the zipper to the garment, eyeballing the placement and pushing here and there to make sure everything lined up just right. It was the perfect technique for this project. At that point, it was really just a matter of sewing the seams.

I certainly can't complain about the result! This Tomten gets the tadpole seal of approval - she wore it pretty much all day long. Even the hood (and that is saying something).

Sketches

I'm always amazed by people who can create fashion sketches. I really admire their ability to capture the essence of a design with just a few strokes. I am not one of those people, but I have a lovely little iPad app that lets me pretend that I am. For example, I saw this pattern on ravelry several months ago and was taken by the subtle cable pattern on the body. I had a single skein of pale blue Dream in Color Smooshy - a gift from a good friend - that would look lovely in that pattern. So I jotted down this little sketch:

There was, indeed, not enough yarn for sleeves. If I remember correctly, I bound off the edging with inches to spare. A vest it is!

Little buttons at one shoulder help to ease the piece over disproportionately large toddler heads.

And the stretchiness of the knitted fabric allows for room to grow. That was June, this is early September:

And late September:

They really are a fetching pair, aren't they?

Sadly, the little vest had a close encounter with some red pasta sauce (and is likely too small now anyway). But I have another sketch - and the knitting to go with it - still to share.

Un-resolutions

Happy New Year!

It's been a little while (ok, a long while) since I've blogged here and I really meant to kick off the new year with a post outlining my goals and resolutions for the new year. I still intend to do that, just not today. Life happened and somehow my goal from last weekend of "finally come up with actual goals for 2013 and blog about them to hold yourself accountable" stretched to be this weekend's goal and then morphed into "write a blog post because you've been meaning to do that for a month."

Blog post it is.

In honor of the season, here are the last FO of 2012 and the first FO of 2013:

(Yes, I did hand my daughter an iPhone to see if that would help her sit still long enough for me to snap a non-action shot. We haven't quite gotten the hang of modeling for the camera yet.)

The last FO from 2012 is Rossbeg from Carol Feller's book Contemporary Irish Knits. The pattern is clear and well written and, most importantly, the book is available as a Kindle edition! This is great for me since I rarely use paper patterns anymore but usually have a device with a Kindle app nearby.

I had some gauge issues but that's not the fault of the designer or the yarn (Malabrigo Twist - lovely, lovely stuff). I (cough, cough) didn't bother swatching (the pattern is quite forgiving and lets you get away with this as long as you are shooting for the general ballpark of small ambulatory person). But tadpole is much bigger than I think she is so what I thought would be an enormous tent of a sweater actually fit reasonably well - not too big. And it fits even better now since we're pretty sure she had another growth spurt over Christmas.

And the first FO from 2013 is Aviatrix v.4 (yarn, etc. details on my Rav page). I can't express how much I love this pattern. Quick and fun to knit, fits like a dream, and it stays on! Yes, she can pull it off by herself now but she has to work at it. A bit. But still, this was by far the best baby hat pattern I tried and I highly recommend it.

Short rows shape each of the hat sections for a fabulous fit.

And crayons keep my model occupied.

(Look, Daddy, a hat!)

Right now I'm trying to finish up a Tomten Jacket for tadpole. I'm especially excited about this project since it's going to involve my first zipper! I'm planning to hand sew it because, frankly, I'm a bit scared about using a sewing machine on knitted fabric. And, if we're being perfectly honest, hand sewing is my only option right now since my sewing machine broke this afternoon.

The sewing bug bit me over Christmas when I whipped up several project bags for my various knitting projects. Things were going swimmingly as I put the finishing touches on a couple of the bags until the needle clamp fell right off the machine. Google tells me this is a repair shop job and, much to my surprise, there doesn't appear to be a good repair shop option in the city. More googling later, I'm eyeing this. And wondering how easy it would be for me to make it to a 6-10pm sewing class a week from Wednesday. Not very, I'm guessing, but a girl can hope.

Hoot

Did you know that Tadpole can say "hoot"? Actually, it's more like "hooowa." And, come to think of it, she may actually be saying "owl." Either way, when my favorite toddler needs new mittens, it seems only fitting that it should be this pattern:

That's Horatio and Oren by Barbara Gregory in the Fall 2012 Twist Collective (pattern also available on Rav). I have mixed feelings about this pattern (more on that later) but there's no denying that the finished product is adorable.

Wait, did I say mittens? As in mittens, plural? You mean Tadpole has two hands? Please excuse me, I have some work to do . . .

Not sure what I was thinking

I'm really not sure why I thought this third section of Color Affection would fly by. Maybe because I love the short rows? Perhaps because I was itching to start Rams and Yowes. Or could it be that I thought the knitting fairy would come and keep plugging away at this piece when I got swamped with work this week?

Regardless of how long this takes to finish, I'm having a blast! I do truly love the short rows. (There are just a few -- ok, several . . . many . . . lots -- more than I had anticipated.)

Please excuse me while I go knit.

On a roll

Happy 4th, everyone! I'm on a roll with this midweek vacation, thanks in large part to Mr. Tinks and Frogs for letting me carve out some big chunks of "me" time today. I'm actually caught up on blog comments (for all of the comments for which I had or could find an email address for the response). It feels so good to be moving forward with a clean slate and no backlog.

So now I'm going to try to catch up on FO posts, too.  I know there are a few pieces that I finished over the last several months and have yet to talk about on the blog (Catkin springs to mind). But I have absolutely no desire to model wool wraps outside in 100 degree weather so those will just have to wait. For now, I'm going to stick with FOs for which I have pictures hiding on my hard drive.

Today you get my belated birthday present to our favorite five-year-old, which went in the mail a couple of months ago.

Little n is an enthusiastic lover of seals and requested that I knit her one for her birthday this year. Finding a seal pattern is actually quite tough. There are a few in ravelry but nothing was quite what I was looking for. 

My first thought was to modify the loch ness monster pattern that I had knit back in January. I think I started that version twice before giving up on that idea - the body shape just wasn't what I had in mind. I had spent quite a bit of time googling pictures of seals (now that's an interesting set of results in google images) to get a sense of seal anatomy. Ok, maybe I was going a bit overboard on this one but I really like n and her mother, N, and wanted to get it right.

Then I searched some more and found a vintage toy pattern on Etsy that looked closer to what I had in mind. Still not quite what I wanted, I tried to reverse engineer a smaller version of that design. I think I spent two attempts on that tack before giving up.

I finally settled on a ravelry pattern that I had seen in my initial searches: the Showoff Seal (sans ball). I used a heavier yarn - Tosh Chunky (details on my project page) - to make a bigger toy than the pattern called for. I'd really wanted to make something bigger (the seal is only about 7 or 8 inches long) but instead of resizing and trying again, I made a second one.

The last component of the gift was a "seal blanket" made with Miss Babs Sojurn, a cashmere silk yarn (one skein, held double, and worked in a subtle cable pattern with garter edges) that n had picked out at the Michigan Sheep and Wool Festival last year.

French knots for the eyes and whiskers from the Tosh Merino Light that I had slated for my Color Affection completed the piece. I'm pretty pleased with the final result and I hope n is enjoying it, too.

What did I think of the pattern? It was quick and easy (very welcome after I had had so many false starts on this project). I much prefer the flippers from the loch ness monster pattern - they came out looking more polished than the garter stitch version here. But this pattern is certainly a lot less fiddly. The body is knit in the round with a bit of short row shaping and that's it for anything tricky. It would be a great first toy pattern if you're thinking about jumping into this sort of project but are worried about the finishing and other finicky aspects of amigurumi knits.

No sheep yet

I told myself that I wouldn't cast on for Rams and Yowes until I had finished Color Affection. The short row section is so much fun that I don't regret that decision in the slightest. Yet. 

So while I plow through many more rows of garter stripes, here's a little distraction for all of us as we're waiting to play with the shetland yarn:

This is 216 yards of (oh shoot, I forgot to check the wpi again - let's call it roughly light worsted) navajo-plied BFL silk dyed in a gradient dye by Friends in Fiber. The fiber was a delightful surprise gift from blogger friend Rachel a few months ago. This was such a fun fiber to spin! BFL/silk is a glorious combination - soft with a lovely sheen, and it drafts like a dream. The color shifts from the light lime into something closer to avocado and finally into emerald. Such lovely greens!

What to do with them? Right now I'm content with fondling and petting the skein but eventually I think it'll be a cowl with some sort of simple texture to play off the color changes. Is anyone else yearning for fall weather already?