New Addition

Two weeks ago we welcomed a new addition to the Tinks and Frogs family:

Sprout arrived on February 17 and was quickly garbed in hand knits. She's wrapped in an Hourglass Blanket and is wearing a hat loosely based on one her sister wore home from the hospital.

We're all home and doing well. I've even managed to finish up a few projects over the last couple of weeks. But more on that later - I've got a diaper to change.

Crossing things off the list

I just went back to re-read my list of 2014 crafting goals and I'm actually quite pleased with my progress so far. 

First if all, I'm sticking with my "at least one post per month goal." Now if I can just get back to responding to comments . . . . I really do appreciate them. 

I've also finished one more sweater and a hat for sprout (AND I found my bin of baby knits from when tadpole was small). 

That's the baby surplice jacket from Knit One, Knit All - the EZ garter stitch collection that came out within the last few years. It's drying on the radiator cover (a fantastic drying spot during cold winter months) with a little hat I whipped up to (hopefully) fit a newborn. The sweater grew a bit more with blocking than I had hoped so I ended up casting on a February baby sweater, the next day. I had been hoping for a nice "coming home from the hospital" size but this will end up fitting better in the long run. 

The yarn here is some Knitting Notions merino sport weight that I'd initially tried in a textured henley pattern but stopped working on because I didn't like the flashes of color. Here the gull lace breaks the color variations up nicely and I'm really enjoying the piece. 

I also finished a quilt last night! The top is part of a project that I'd started back in college and set aside because I'd found some of the steps too intimidating, especially given my less than perfect product. 

 

It was easier to work on techniques like quilting and binding when I told myself this was just a practice piece. (You can't tell it's not really square when I prop it up in the chair). You see, I've finished the top of tadpole's quilt and I didn't want to jump into the new techniques - and possibly screw something up - on that one. 

Just in time on that quilt top, too. We put tadpole's big girl bed together the other night so I'd better cut the fabric for the backing and start basting the layers together. 

Other goals? Well, Mr. Tinks and Frogs' sweater is in the same state it was last month. I have to confess that I've been having so much fun playing with fabrics that I haven't wanted to pull his sweater out. Hopefully this week. 

But I did finish this little lovely (the yarn harlot's pretty thing) a while ago and finally wove in the ends today.   

Quiviut. It feels amazing - not scratchy at all. I used about half the skein and am torn between making another pretty thing as a gift with the rest or whipping up something new. 

I haven't even touched the good camera - these are all cell phone pics. When it's bright and sunny out, I just want to knit, spin, or sew. And I end up doing most of my crafting at night so the pics are often quick progress updates that I text to my mother ("hey look, I made binding!"). Phone pics are better than no pics, right?

I'm plowing through WIPs right now so I may even swatch for a sweater for myself soon. But for now, I'm off to bed. I want to snatch a few more nights of relatively uninterrupted sleep while I still can. 

Looking ahead

Happy New Year! In the spirit of the season, I've been thinking about what I want to do/accomplish/take care of in the new year (and, in many cases, before baby #2 makes her appearance). This year I'm focusing on setting reasonable expectations for myself. There is always so much on my to do list and I want to be able to take pleasure in what I can cross off it but not feel too guilty when I don't get to something. So I'm trying a new technique -- the list can stay as long as it always is but has two categories: realistic goals and aspirational ones. If I get to the latter, that's great, and if not that's ok, too.

Here goes on the crafting front:

1. Knit a sweater for me this year.
2. Finish Armas before knitting that sweater for me (I've told myself that I don't get to cast on for the Rocky Coast Cardigan I've been eyeing for ages until I finish Mr. Tinks and Frogs' current sweater-in-the works).
3. Finish at least one more sweater, two hats, and a blanket for Sprout (#2) before she arrives. (Maybe 2 hats is aspirational; might need to change this one to "find appropriately sized knits that I made for Tadpole").
4. Actually complete a quilting project. I've started a couple of quilting projects over the years but have never made it past working on the quilt top and I'd like to change that.
5. Finish Tadpole's purple pinwheel quilt around the time she moves to a big-girl bed [ETA March-ish].
6. Make a quilt for Sprout by the time she moves out of our room and into her own room [ETA June-ish].
7. Spin more. (Hopefully this won't be too hard since today was the first time I had sat down at the wheel since we moved into the new house in August).
8. Publish another knitting pattern. (This one is aspirational - I'd love to make it happen but I'm not going to stress out if I don't get around to putting the pattern together. And yes, the design is on the needles. Now I just have to see if it is going to work and whether it is worth trying to scale for multiple sizes or just leave as is).
9. Post on the blog at least once a month. (Again, I'd love to blog more frequently than that but once a month seems like a realistic commitment for now).
10. Figure out how to take better pictures in low light with my camera. We have a lovely new house but it's winter, which means I have maybe an hour a day (assuming I'm home and not at the office) in which to snap a good knitting shot since there is no obviously sunny spot. It would be really nice to know my way around my camera a bit more so I don't have to resort to the phone to get a shot capturing any kind of detail. For example the pic below shows the lovely soft light reflecting off the snow but doesn't exactly capture accurate color or stitch definition.

Making progress here - I've actually finished the first sleeve and started the second. Unfortunately, I'm utterly distracted by the little crib blanket I started for Sprout last week. Progress on Armas will recommence when the blanket is done.

Here's to a happy, healthy, and relatively stress-free 2014.

A tale of three hats

I've recently rediscovered the joys of travel knitting. Small projects in just one color work particularly well (the mittens I'm working on here and there are a perfect size to stick in my bag but the two colors are too diddly for wrangling on the train). I've got a lovely little baby sweater to share once I get around to taking FO shots. And I'm currently working on a cowl during my train rides to and from work - a great way to start the day. Did I mention I'm using quiviut? Enough said. 

But before that, I knit three hats. The same hat, in fact, three times in a row. It's a good thing I like Jared Flood's Habitat pattern, because three iterations of anything is one and a half times too many, in my book. 

First, Mr. Tinks and Frogs got a much needed new hat for the season. 

Knit out of one skein of Shelter on size 7 and 8 needles (7s for the ribbing, 8s for the body). A quick aside: did you know that Amazon sells addi lace needles? They even qualify for Amazon Prime, which means if you're in a bind and really want to start the hat while on a trip but can't, for the life of you, find the 16" needles you could have sworn you had, you can ship the needles to youself overnight for a very reasonable price. Don't ask how I know that ...

Miss Tadpole needed a new hat, too, and the yellow she picked out at our LYS seemed perfect for Habitat. 

So I knit another one. Version 2 is in String Theory dk weight, a superwash merino. It's lovely stuff but a bit splitty and I had much more fun knitting the cables with a very pointy needle than with the more blunt bamboo circular I started with. 

The main cables on Habitat are a bit uninteresting for me but I absolutely adore the cables on the crown. 

There was just one little problem with this yellow hat (you've probably already noticed it): it's a bit too small. The first yellow hat was knit on 4s and 5s, with the charts for the shorter version. I'm not going to say that my girl has a big head, but it's certainly bigger than I had guesstimated. Maybe next time I'll actually measure. 

So I knit version three on 5s and 6s, with the chart for the longer version and it's a great fit. 

(That's still version two in the picture. I just love this "daddy, let me fix that for you" shot.)

Now that my current travel project (the cowl) is almost done, I'm trying to figure out what next to take on the train. There are a couple of WIPs from the bottom of the knitting basket in the running. Tadpole has voted for the blue socks (Cookie A's Kai-Mei pattern, a perennial favorite of mine) while I'm leaning towards a silver colored scarf (Anne Hanson's fernfrost). We'll see what I feel like knitting next week. Thoughts?

This and that

What kind of knitter lets her two-year-old commandeer a shoulder shawl knit out of malabrigo lace? This one apparently. A dear friend came to visit this past weekend and was kind enough to take several hand knits back with her to find new homes. (I'd much rather see the pieces worn and loved than sit unused in a bin with me). We were going through the collection I had set aside and, somehow, Simmer Dim made its way around my shoulders. Tadpole snuggled herself in my lap to help look over the knits and promptly plucked the shawl from my shoulders, calling it "her green blanket." This would be green blanket #2, a very special thing in her world. How could I deny that? Especially to this kid:

Who helped me with a photo shoot the other day.  I snapped a few pics of my current WIPs:

Snowfling mittens (the kit from Tanis Fibre Arts), front and back. 

Another baby sweater in the works.

And one already finished.  If you haven't already done so, you really should try the Pomander baby sweater. All the details are just right in this pattern - and I have no higher praise than that. 

She got a few of her stuffed companions:

Oh, and I may have a use for those baby knits after the new year rolls around. 

If I do this a third time, could someone please remind me to knit more cardigans? I seem to have outgrown my favorite pullovers. 

It's been a while

Hello, there. It's been a little while, hasn't it? We've had lots of exciting things going on. We went on vacation on a "big white boat" as Tadpole puts it. Then we came back and moved into our new house a couple of weeks later. Yes, the pictures will look a little different - we've left our city apartment and moved to a house in the 'burbs. We're all enjoying the extra space. There's been plenty of knitting, too, on all sorts of things. But I've only got one FO to show, and I think it is worth the wait.

It took over a year to finish my Rams and Yowes blanket but this project was well worth the time and effort.

And I'm not the only one who wanted to photograph the finished product.

Blocking gave the fabric a beautiful drape that I did not expect from the work in progress. I decided not to work the applied i-cord edging around the outside of the border. In retrospect, it might have made blocking a bit cleaner (but not so much that I'd want to go back and add it now). But tacking down the underside of the border took so long that I just didn't have the heart to work several yards of i-cord after that.

Now for the money shots:

This one's a keeper. Who gets to keep it is still TBD.

About that stash diet ...

I really wasn't planning on buying new yarn. Especially after that skein of lace weight that I picked up when my mother was visiting last weekend - when you hear your grandmother would like a lace shawl (and you don't have anything in the stash in the appropriate color family) that's a special dispensation from any yarn diet in my book.

And then this happened later in the week:

That's right - I ran out of yarn on the last round of the fifth color from the end of the garter striped edging on my Rams and Yowes blanket. And not just on the last round, a third of the way from the end-of-round marker (the dark green clip below):

I knew it was going to be close. After all, I had finished the previous color with about two yards to spare. So at around 10:30 on Wednesday night (always a time for clear-headed thinking), I started frantically searching for more yarn to finish the last set of stripes. I'm low on the remaining colors, too, and didn't want to chance it now that I'd run out of one color.

Luckily, I found two options: order more from Jamieson & Smith on Shetland and know that I probably won't be able to pick up this project until after we get back from our vacation, which starts next week, or cross my fingers and see if the Chicago shop listed on ravelry as a potential supplier has the colors I need in stock. (Normally I'd be a dye lot purist but this is for the underside of the blanket border and slight color variances really won't bother me there.)

Success! Windy Knitty responded to my email shortly after they opened the next morning with the terrific news that they did in fact have exactly what I needed, and would be kind enough to set the skeins aside until the weekend so that I could come pick them up.

In the meantime, I've had fun working on Mr. Tinks and Frogs' birthday sweater, which now looks much less like a shrug than when he tried it on a week or two ago.

We took a family excursion up to Andersonville this morning (Tadpole LOVES the train) and I am now the happy owner of enough yarn to finish my blanket.

But I couldn't come away from such a lovely shop (and it is lovely, perhaps my favorite shop in the city now) with just the J&S shetland, not when they had a fantastic selection of indie dyers in gorgeous semi-solids - my favorites.

This Fleur de Fiber (a Chicago dyer I'd never seen before) in a fingering weight merino/seacell blend will be a something for me.

And Tadpole suggested that she should have a green sweater. We decided on this worsted weight from Neighborhood Fiber Company:

A girl after her mama's heart, don't you think? Now I've just got to come up with a sweater pattern that will work with only 400 yards. This one is definitely going to be top-down!