Odds and ends..
As promised, photos of some projects I’ve finished this week, as well as some new ones started and planned..
9-to-5 socks:
(All pictures are clickable thumbnails; click them to load a larger version)
I really love this sock pattern – the “fake” cabling is very easy and looks great and I really love the detail on the heel with the combination of the cable down the side of the heel flap and picking up the stitches so the selvedge stitches show on the outside. These were knit as a gift for a friend and co-worker, but I suspect I’ll make a pair for myself at some point, too. They were knit with KnitPicks Gloss in Woodland Sage on US1 needles.
White Lies Designs‘ Easy Lace Jacket:
Finished Jacket, with an attempt to make it look interesting..
Sleeve detail
Collar detail
This was definitely easy – knit with Cascade 220 on US 8 needles – and it looks nifty, but I think if I were to do it again, I would try to add shaping to the sleeves. They are the same width the whole length of the sleeve, so they’re baggier than I’d like at the wrists and the points don’t bell out as much as I think they should. I’m also trying to decide if I would want the sleeves to be longer so that the lace really covers my hands.. I think that would annoy me more than not, though, but as it is now, the seam where the lace joins the sleeve is about mid-forearm and it’s a little odd. I’ll pr’bly try to do some steam ironing of the cuffs to see if I can get them to bell a bit more, and I need to either tack down the back of the collar or steam block it out a bit more.
Peacock Feathers Shawl from Fiddlesticks Knitting:
Pattern and yarn – Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk in Marine Blue
Half-way through the first chart
This one will be a gift for a friend’s wife for their anniversary. It’s really gorgeous yarn and the pattern is well written if a little futzy-seeming after the Easy Lace Jacket! I have a little over a month to finish this one, which is making me a little nervous given how busy things have been lately.
And this is the big box o’ yarn that I have for other gift knitting.. there’s a couple sweater’s worth of Galway in there.
Last push..
I harvested pr’bly somewhere around 45 pounds of tomatoes out of the garden again today (5 pounds of tomatoes really isn’t that many.. I discovered this when weighing out tomatoes for a recipe today) and since I wasn’t feeling terribly ambitious, decided that I would make some tomato soup with about a third of them and then just plain sauce/paste with the rest. The soup turned out really nummy, but a touch over-salted; and since it’s creamy tomato soup and I was nervous about canning something with dairy in it, it’s just been frozen for enjoyment in later in the fall and winter. The sauce/paste is pretty.. well, boring. I didn’t spice it at all and I expect we’ll use it to thicken the pasta sauce we made a few weeks ago because it’s a tad on the too-chunky-not-enough-sauce side for our usual tastes. We’ll also use it as a base for pizza sauce and possibly more soup later in the winter, too. And yes, there are still plenty of tomatoes out on the vines so we can still do some just stewed tomatoes in another couple of weeks (though those will most likely all go to the Garden Gurus(tm) since we really don’t tend to have a use for them).
While I was out there, I also checked in on the peppers. We’ve been getting some unseasonably warm weather here this last week, which looks to last at least another week, so I’m hoping we can stave off the first frost until sometime in October to give the peppers enough time to get bigger. The jalapeños are doing just fine, but the rainbow peppers are still a bit teeny and there’s still no noticeable sign of any habaneros.
But despite the weather of late, it’s almost the end of September, which means I should have already started the holiday knitting. Since I haven’t (and since at the moment I can’t because I’m waiting for yarn orders to arrive for at least two planned garments and haven’t decided exactly what another will be) I’ve decided I need to try to push to finish up some loose ends before the end of the month. That means that I plan to finish:
- The Easy Lace Duster (I have both sleeves about 2/3rd finished, so need to finish those and then do the collar and seam it all up); and
- The 9-to-5 socks (these will be easy; I have the heel turned on the second sock *and* a conference this week, so they’ll likely be finished sometime Tuesday at the latest)
Yeah, I know.. not much. But since my knitting mojo has been in a bit of a slump lately, I’m finding that I need to set some goals or I’m afraid the (admittedly modest and completely attainable) holiday knitting goals won’t be met. And there are a couple of project sprinkled in with the holiday knitting (the DNA scarf, another pair of socks) and will likely be a few holida-related projects added, so .. yeah.
But that means there will likely be pictures later this week.
DNA snippets..
Awhile back, a wonderfully ambitious friend offered to make some garb for Jack. A few months later, she mentioned coveting the DNA scarf, but didn’t think she could add learning to knit to her increasing list of fiber arts. Since she was already working on something for Jack, though, it made perfect sense for me to make her a DNA scarf in (partial) exchange.
She really only had one “want” for the scarf: it should be black. This initially caused me some consternation – black yarn and cables normally don’t play nice; cables like yarn and colors that let them “pop” and “popping” is a function of how the light and shadows play off the different surfaces created by the cable. Black yarn doesn’t show much in the way of shadows. So, I told her to let me dig around for some suitable black yarns and knit up some swatches to send to her.
There’s another difficulty with black, though I didn’t know it until I started looking for some. It seems that finding solid black yarn in DK weight is something of a challenge, or at least it was at all the yarn stores I could manage to make it into. I really wanted to go into a store to buy this yarn so I could *feel* it before buying it – it’s going to be a scarf after all, and the skin on someone’s throat is usually some of the most sensitive on the body. I didn’t want a scratchy wool, but I also didn’t want something so soft it wouldn’t hold the shape of the cables.
In the end, I ordered three skeins of black DK yarn from KnitPicks – one in Elegance (Coal), one in Swish DK (Coal), and one in Telemark (Black).
Elegance (Pictures are clickable thumbnails; click to get to a larger version)
Swish DK
Telemark
The Elegance is (not surprisingly; it’s 70% baby alpaca and 30% silk) the softest, but that also means it’s the one that is most likely to lose the shape of the cables. Surprisingly, the Swish DK is also quite soft, and it has the benefit of being a superwash. The Telemark is pretty rough, even after washing, but produced a swatch that is slightly larger than the other two. The silk in the Elegance gives it a bit of a sheen that I think might help the cables pop a bit better, but I also think they look just fine in the Swish DK. *shrug*
At this point, these three swatches are on their way to the future owner of the scarf so she can look at them and feel them herself. If she likes one of these three, I’ll go with her preference; if none of these three is what she wants, I’ll look for other alternatives.
Bit of a chill in the air..
We’ve had some distinctly autumnal weather this week, so it seemed homey and natural to spend today enjoying the bright sunshine through the windows while the rich scents of chopped onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes and spices wafted throughout the house.
(Pictures are clickable thumbnails; click to load bigger versions.)
The end result is 26 pints and a dozen quarts of pasta sauce – most of it with summer squash & mushrooms, though there are some jars that are missing both, and 3 quarts and 6 pints with shitake mushrooms! There’d have been a couple more pints, but we couldn’t resist frying up some Italian sausage and trying it out for lunch with some garlic crescent rolls. MMMMMmmmm! Perfect fortification for more foraging in the garden, where, arriving just a few weeks late..
..our first jalapeños! There are now quite a few out there, as well as some still very small rainbow peppers. The habañeros are flowering, but this late I’m not sure the days are long enough to give them enough sun to mature.
Random Tuesday.
This time of year, I’m lucky I remember my name, much less what day it is. Or will be. Or is supposed to be random.
No pictures, but I yanked about 4 gallon buckets of Big Mama tomatoes out of the garden tonight, and I didn’t even get all the ripe ones. I got all the *really* ripe ones; the rest can wait until this weekend when I’ll have time to make pasta sauce. I didn’t quite have the energy to pull any more of the Sungolds or Yellow Pears, though there are lots of those ripe at the moment, too. Maybe tomorrow.
Speaking of which.. anyone have a *really* good recipe for pasta sauce? We have lots of fresh tomatoes, some fresh Walla Walla sweet onions (though pr’bly not really enough for a large batch of sauce since we used so many in the salsa), and some fresh jalapeños. And maybe some other peppers, but the jalapeños are the only ones that are likely big enough at the moment. Except that they’re not really.. well.. I’m not sure I want *spicy* pasta sauce. *shrug*
I’m knitting in the car most days of our commute. The first 9-to-5 sock is about to start toe-decreases and I’ve got a few inches done on the sleeves of the Easy Lace Jacket. I’ll post pictures when there’s something more exciting to see.
Work day..
Not really, but these *are* called the 9-to-5 socks..
(All photos are clickable thumbnails)
Just the first leg, and the picture’s a couple days old now, so I’ve actually turned the heel already. It was dark by the time we got home and had dinner though, so you’ll just have to imagine that part for now. So far, though, I really, really like this pattern. It’s easy, but also looks really amazing. In fact, when I showed the leg to the friend that will be the recipient of this pair, she exclaimed that she loved it, but that she thought was too much, too intricate for me to do as a gift for her. I assured her it wasn’t (and verified that she didn’t think it would be too much for her to wear!). I think I’ll be making another pair of these for myself at some point though, too.
And to follow up from this weekend, the first coat of paint on the porch:
What..? Did you really think we’d leave it white? *smile* It needs another coat – there are some thin spots – but it looks *enormously* better now than it did.
Days’ Labor
In honor of Labor Day, I give you the fruits of the last several days’ labor:
(All pictures are clickable thumbnails; click to load a larger version)
First up, a new porch light complete with motion sensor, and, even more exciting, new exterior outlets on each end of the porch, all compliments of dad!
Next, a fully scraped and sanded porch floor, compliments of me, Jack and dad!
From there, we move on to the self-same porch floor with two new coats of primer (and a dusting of morning glory leaves), compliments of me, mom and Jack! (The porch floor is now all a rather disconcertingly bright white, though it doesn’t appear that way in the photos; I *think* the funky mottled look in the first picture might actually be a reflection of the porch wall off the bright white primer..)
And finally, a little arithmetic..
+ 
= 
*smile*
Yes, those are all tomatoes from my garden – both the counter full of Big Mamas and the bucket full of yellow pears. The peppers were all bought at a farmer’s market – though it does look like my pepper plants are actually going to produce at least some decent jalapeños in the next couple weeks! Our Garden Gurus came out today to help us make and “can” salsa; we ended up with 24 pint jars, 8 each in mild, medium and hot!
Stuff and nonsense..
Ahem.. well.. yes. I’m still here, just.. well, fall term starts Tuesday and last week there was no doubt that everyone was returning to campus. At the moment, it’s less that there’s more demand for data (which there is, just not overwhelmingly so) that makes things so busy; it’s the sudden spike in meetings and receptions and committee work starting up. I was on campus for about two and a half days last week and attended one reception, one half-day workshop, one unit’s annual meeting, the Chancellor’s Fall Address, and the all-campus picnic. Doesn’t leave much time for anything else.
Unfortunately, including knitting. Though I did manage to make decent progress on the second Sprung sock during the half-day workshop, and even finished it in the car on the way back from the Cities (we went to the State Fair Friday to see Prairie Home Companion):
(Clickable thumbnail; I’m trying this out through Flickr for this post)
I like how the colors pooled in the leg on the second one better – it’s less like stripes and more like pools. The lace pattern has some depth to it which gives it some nice stretch, but also makes it difficult to photograph:
It looks like a lace ribbing, but there’s no purling in the pattern stitch.
Last weekend I finished both fronts of the Easy Lace Jacket and started the sleeves. The sleeves start with a section that is knit perpendicular to the rest of the sleeve (you knit it and then pick up stitches along the flat edge to start the sleeve), to get a dagged look:
There’s no shaping to the sleeve until you get to the cap, so they’re going to be pretty wide down at the wrist:
I’m knitting both sleeves at the same time, but only took pictures of one.
Now that the semester is starting, I should have more knitting time, even though things are busier. Jack and I carpool into campus most days and since he prefers to drive, I get about an hour of knitting time in the car each day. I promised socks to a couple of co-workers last fall, though, so those will be my car knitting for at least the next couple weeks – I’m doing the 9-to-5 socks in KnitPicks Gloss in Woodland Sage for one, and am trying to decide between the Fools Rush socks (PDF) or the Charade socks in KnitPicks Memories in Redwood Forest for the other.
