I'm Still Here!

     Wow, the time has really just whizzed past me!  In my last post I remarked how I couldn't believe the year was 6 weeks old, and now it's more than half over.  Where does it go, I wonder.

     I wish I could say I'd been busy finishing up UFOs all this time, but while I have finished some things, most of what's kept me from blogging has been the much more mundane, real life junk.

     When I was working on the two little bags in my last post, I also finished a cream silk clutch bag, which I'd started at a class one year (I don't recall which year!) at the Original Sewing and Quilt Expo.  I finished it around the same time, except that I wanted to do something on the front, to cover where I'd sewn on the square of Velcro I used as a closure.  It took me a while to find what I wanted to use, but now at long last, here's what I ended up with:



In January and February, I participated in a Knit Along (KAL) in one of the groups I belong to on Ravelry, and made this pair of socks:



Today is going to be a day full of paperwork for me, so I suppose I'd better get started on it.  But I hope to get this blog all updated soon ;-)

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2012 Is Winding Down...

Well, I never seem to have gotten the big block of quilting time I was expecting and hoping for.  I have gotten some knitting done, and I may yet get a bit of quilting done before the end of the year.  It all depends on how much life decides to cooperate, or not.

Here are the socks I've finished recently and haven't yet shared here:













I have the next few days pretty much free, so I'm planning to spend it getting "lost" in some sewing.  And maybe some knitting as well. 

I hope that 2012 winds down in a good way for you, and that 2013 will bring you health, happiness, and lots of good things -- and the grace to appreciate them all.

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Let the Crazy Times Begin

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I was at our Toastmasters Fall District Conference.  We were at Pere Marquette Lodge and Conference Center, in Grafton, Illinois.  As always, it was great to see some of the Toastmasters from around the District, that I don't see except at District events.  I always learn something, and this time was no exception.  And I always have fun, too, and this conference was definitely fun, as well.

I always think of the Holiday Season as beginning with the Fall Conference, because it's almost always the weekend before Thanksgiving.  So it really does lead right into the craziest six weeks of the year.  Well, for most people it's a crazy time of year, anyhow.  For me, it's usually a time I can slow down a bit, and get some quilting stuff done.  I absolutely don't leave home at all on Black Friday.  I have get-togethers with a few groups during December, but I don't have nearly as much craziness as many folks I know do.  So, while everyone else is hustling and bustling, I can nest and quilt.  I always get in the mood to work on quilting at this time of year, too.  I think it may go back to my days in school, when I did a lot of crafting and sewing during Christmas break, that I didn't necessarily have time for during the school year.

For the rest of this year, I'm going to try to get a number of my completed quilt tops layered up, quilted, and ready to be bound.  Then in the early part of the new year, I'll have a binding marathon, and all of a sudden, I'll have a whole bunch of newly-finished quilts ;-)

For today,  I can show you a pair of socks I finished recently.  This was a pair I test-knitted for a designer who is new to me.  I stumbled upon her Ravelry group, and happened to be on the site right after she'd posted a request for test knitters, and was able to be the first volunteer.  They may look like they're from two different yarns, but they're not.  I was working from both ends of the skein, and apparently, the hand-dyed yarn was not dyed consistently throughout.  I really like the effect of slightly mismatched socks, though I know there are folks out there who would be bothered by it.  Anyhow, here they are:



Last week, I finished up this cowl, and blocked it over the weekend:


It's not really crooked or lopsided, I was just apparently standing at a funny angle -- when I fold it in half again, the top edges and the bottom edges are nicely in line all the way along.

I also finally got around to blocking several other things that have been waiting a while for that.  First, here's my Color Affection shawl:


 This is supposed to be striped in three colors, but unfortunately, the colors in my yarns were closer to each other than I thought they'd be, so I lost quite a bit of the stripe effect.  Here are the yarns I used for this:


Looking at this, it seems obvious that these yarns would be somewhat "blendy," but in person I really thought they'd be more distinct from each other.  No matter, I still like this and will wear it.

Then a fun little cowl I made during a knit-along (KAL) with the designer's group on Ravelry:



Then two basic long cowls/infinity scarves, one for DH:



and one for me:



The color is horrible on those last two pictures.  Here's the yarn that I used for DH's cowl:



and here's the yarn I used for mine:



I'm glad to have gotten all this blocking done, and to be able to use these items now. 

I've got a couple other pairs of socks I'm making good progress on, so I hope to show those here very soon.  And maybe some more quilty pictures, before too long.  For now, I'm off to do some sewing!

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More Knitting Stuff

I've finally got some space where I can leave my sewing stuff out, and have room to work on it.  But, I'm always working on knitting stuff in the background.  It's more portable, I can do it when I want to watch television or a movie, and it's very meditative in a way that sewing on a machine isn't.

I've previously shown you the first six pairs of socks I made for the 26 Pair Plunge, which runs from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013.  I'm ahead of schedule a bit, as I just finished Pair #13 last Thursday.  Here are pairs 7-13:










This pair is for my DH, the only pair in this Plunge so far that is.





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A Good Start...

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm participating in the 26 Pair Plunge, which runs from 1 July 2012 through 30 June 2013.  In that time, we're challenged to finish 26 pairs of knitted or crocheted socks.  They can be things we already have started, or things we start new for the challenge.

So far, I've finished six pairs for this new Plunge year.  Here they are:

I have some more in progress that I should be able to finish up pretty soon.  But I really want to cast on a couple of shawls that have been calling to me....

Next week, I'll talk about the quilting I've done so far this year.  Have a great weekend.

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The Rest of the 52 Pair Plunge Socks

Here are the last two pairs of socks I knitted for the 52 Pair Plunge. 

I wasn't intending to participate in a Plunge this year (July 2012-June 2013), because I was looking forward to knitting whatever I wanted to knit, shawls and cowls and mitts and hats and who knows what.  But I hate to be "left out," so I had to join in again.  But this time, I'm just doing the 26 Pair Plunge, so it won't be the same crazy pace.  And if I don't complete it, I really don't care.  I just wanted to be in on the fun and play along.  I've already made some good progress, though.  I'll show you that tomorrow.

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My Socks So Far This Year

Here are the socks I did for myself for the second half of the 52 Pair Plunge, which ran from 1 July 2011 to 30 June 2012.  I've already shown the socks I knitted in the first half of the year, and two days ago I showed two pairs I made for myself, which were related to the pair I made for my mom.  This is the rest of the socks I made for myself between the first of the year and the end of June:

Apparently, I can't add all the pictures I'd like to here.  So I'll post the last two that didn't show up here in another post to follow this one.

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Socks for Carrie

The only other pair of gift socks I've made so far this year was actually started back in the summer of 2010.  This was a kit (pattern + yarn + commemorative stitch marker) which was sold as a fundraiser for the Susan G. Komen foundation by Knitters Brewing Company.  I didn't want to make pink ribbon socks, but Wendy from KBC posted a list of awareness ribbon colors.  I saw that purple was the awareness ribbon color for Cystic Fibrosis, and that was it.  My friend Carrie and her husband lost a daughter to CF some years back.  It wasn't so much that I thought she needed more awareness of CF, but it was a way to honor the life and memory of her daughter.  I set these aside several times, as they're a bit complicated, and I needed to focus when I was working on them, not be watching TV or anything else at the same time.  I finished them in June, but didn't give them to Carrie until late July -- ironically just a day or two after her birthday, which I wasn't aware of until I gave them to her ;-)  Gotta love those happy accidents!  Anyhow, here they are, though the color's off a bit.  They're a lovely medium purple shade in real life:

It's not obvious from this photo, but up the center front and center back are the ribbon motifs.  Here's a picture where I turned them a bit to the front, trying to capture that:

Carrie liked them, and apparently her grandmother used to knit for her, so I struck a nice chord on several levels.  Win!

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Socks Because She Nagged Me...

So, my mom claimed she was jealous because my aunt got a pair of socks I made for her.  Last spring (I think it was in April), I was at my parents' house, to be there while she had heart surgery.  While I was there, I asked her what color socks she wanted, and she said "black or gray, they'll go with the most."  She didn't understand, that's like buying a painting because it matches your sofa.  Handknit socks are art for the feet!  Well, I told her "I'm NOT knitting black socks!" and didn't think much more about it.  But then I had to go to Jo-Ann fabrics for another reason, and I checked out their sock yarn, and found one that was self-striping in grays and cream.  I thought I could just about stand to work with that without getting bored to tears, so I bought it to make my mother's socks.  I cast them on, then kept putting them aside for more interesting projects.

I finally finished them in January, and sent them to her.  She received them on Monday, February 6.

I called her that Thursday, and she let me know that she'd gotten them and really liked them.  That was a good thing, because that Saturday morning (February 11), my dad called me to tell me that she'd died earlier that morning.  I had been expecting it some time in the next few years, but not that particular weekend.  Still, although we weren't close, we weren't estranged, and I'd spoken to her a few days earlier, so I didn't feel any of the regret that sometimes makes an unexpected death even more difficult to deal with.

When my dad called, I was finishing up these socks from leftovers:

Even after I finished them, I still had some of the gray yarn left, though I'd managed to use up all the pink, yellow and green.  So, I cast on toes of new socks with the rest of the gray, then used the rest of the yarn from the socks I made for my mom, and made these:

I only had a few inches of leg done when the "mom sock leftovers" ran out, so I continued with something from my stash that coordinated pretty well.  I call this project "Mom-mento mori," which is a variation on the term memento mori, which was an object (often a skull) intended to remind people of death and mortality.  In this case, it's more a reminder of my mother's life, and a way to feel connected to her.

My mother wasn't very old when she died, she'd turned 67 the previous October.  But she had a number of health issues that had developed in the last ten or so years, and she had smoked for more years than I'd been alive.  She quit in 2006 when she first got acutely ill, but had gone back to smoking a few years later.  She had about 5 years longer than anyone expected her to live, after how bad she was in '06, and they were mostly good years when she was able to do things she enjoyed.  She would have hated being an invalid, and from what my dad told me it sounds like her death was relatively quick and fairly painless.  So, there were a lot worse ways it could have happened.  The timing was a bit of a surprise, but we knew she wouldn't have another five years, probably.  I'm just glad I finished those socks and got them to her.

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One More Pair of Socks

I finished another pair of socks for DH last week:



This yarn was a prize I won in the Year of Stash Socks group on Ravelry, over Labor Day weekend. As soon as I received it, I thought it would be great for socks for DH, and I like how they worked up, with those sort of spiral-y stripey things. DH likes them, so it's a win.

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And Another Pair of Socks

I'm starting to feel like this is turning into a sock knitting blog, to the exclusion of anything else. But I plan to do some sewing this week, so hope to be able to show some results of that soon.

In the meantime, late last week I finished this pair of socks for DH. The yarn colorway is called "Rasta Man," but I think they also look somewhat Christmas-y. Anyhow, DH likes them, and is already wearing them.


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