Yarn, toys and accessories

I’ve been working on a baby jacket lately, it’s almost done and I’ll post a picture of it soon but meanwhile some more goodies came in the mail.

I placed an order with Knitpicks for some lace weight yarn. I’d bought a book called “Victorian Lace Today” by Jane Sowerby and Alexis Xenakis and had a hankering to try knitting some of the beautiful shawls in the book. I discovered Knitpicks from the Internet group Ravelry. This knitting community has everything you can think of in the way of information for knitters and crocheters. Anyhow there are quite a few lace shawl projects finished and on the go by members of this group so I decided to take the plunge as it were and order some lace. The shawls are not supposed to be that hard to knit, you just need to concentrate on what you’re doing (famous last words?).

The yarn was quite reasonable but of course one thing lead to another and add the currency exchange plus shipping and of course boom my little order was soon over a hundred dollars.

I ordered three lots of yarns, three skeins each, one lot in the baby alpaca and six balls in Shadow a 100% merino yarn.

Knitpick’s “Shadow” – Midnight and Jewel.

Of course these hanks of yarn needed to be wound into balls so I ended up purchasing a ball winder.

Ball winder

However to use the ball winder a swift is required. The function of a swift is to hold the hank of yarn firmly and to rotate around as the yarn is being wound off of the swift into a ball. Unfortunately these babies cost a lot of money and no way was I spending $77 to buy one so I found a link in Ravelry to a blog where the lady had created a homemade version of one.

Homemade swift with a hank of Alpaca Cloud – Smoke on it.

The swift did work well but as I found out it was easier to feed the yarn off of the swift (stationary) into one hand held above the swift while cranking the ball winder with the other hand. The only problem came at the end when there wasn’t much yarn left on the hank and it slipped off of the swift. Normaly it wouldn’t matter but this was fine lace so of course it got tangled right away and I had to stop and unravel the whole mess.

Knitpick’s Alpaca Cloud lace weight yarn, colour smoke, very very soft.

I knew the lace weight yarn was very fine but until you actually see the stuff it’s kind of shocking how light weight this stuff really is. It should be very interesting knitting this I’m either going to love it or hate it. I probably only should have ordered the one colour but since I was going to pay for the shipping anyway and the Shadow was only $2.99/hank, I ordered more.

Well since I’d ordered the lace yarn I had to order the really nice needles with the slim points to knit it with (translate more money) and while I was there I tossed in a few more accessories.

Needle tips, cables, stitch holders.

The needle tips connect to the cables. They sell an assortment in a case for a reasonable price but since I was already looking at spending yada amount of dollars I kind of balked at putting out the money. I did the math and found out I really wasn’t saving any dollars by buying the kit. It was like getting a free carrying case if you bought the kit so why bother? I figure I won’t need several of the needle sizes in the kit anyway so why not just buy the needle sizes as I need them?

It’s funny because my brain was telling me there was no advantage to buying the kit but I was having a hard time letting go of the idea. Is this a case of brainwashing by being constantly bombbarded by marketing ads that make us think “it’s a deal, it’s a deal”? Another reason behind getting a couple of needles instead of the kit was that I wanted to try out these circulars and see how good they really are. The cable is supposed to be very flexible and without memory so it is easier to handle, we’ll see how it works. Until then…

Karen

Prayer Shawl

Well I finished the prayer shawl last night while watching television. I guess it goes to show you how much time is wasted sitting in front of the idiot box because I crocheted an entire ball of yarn.

I made this shawl from Paton’s Divine, a discontinued yarn that they had on sale at Michaels. I remember when they initially brought in this yarn for the weekly sale and it was priced at $1.99 ball. I thought wow that stuff is going to get snapped up fast but nobody seemed to want to buy it. One of the ladies that buys yarn for our group at church bought some so that’s what I used. From some posts I read on Ravelry I learned that this yarn is difficult stuff to work with.

I found the yarn soft and not that hard to deal with but it did take extra effort to pull it through the loops because it’s such a bulky yarn and I can see if you were going to knit with it, the yarn would be a nightmare. Anyhow it’s all moot as I’ve done the shawl. I’m not sure what blue stands for in the prayer shawl ministry but the idea was just to make someone a warm shawl to wrap around themselves.

This shawl was kind of hard to photograph as it was an awkward size. Blue fuzziness of soft wool, mohair, acrylic and polyester, Denium Storm.

A very basic pattern of double crochet, chain one into the spaces of the previous stitches. I wanted to crochet this project fast. It took four balls at about 2 hours per ball so not bad time-wise, I just needed breaks/days in between balls because of the elbows. Next time if I used this pattern I’d make the shawl less wide so it’s easier to drape over the arms.

I’m done crochet for a while (famous last words?).

Karen

Granny afghan finished.

I’ve had this finished for about a week now but am just posting about it as life gets in the way. Hopefully my son won’t see this but anyhow here is the granny afghan that I’ve made for his upcoming birthday using mostly scraps for the colours and nine (count em) 100g balls of black in Vanna White’s line.

Afghan hanging over back railing of the deck, yes it’s huge.

The first picture I took was on an overcast day and you can’t really see the colours so I took a picture of the ghan draped over a ball indoors. The colours are a lot more brighter in person, neon in some instances, it makes for a very colourful blanket.

Dan’s blanket of many colours.

I’m currently working on a prayer shawl for whomever using yarn provided by the church and it’s almost done. I’ll have to post another picture when it’s finished in a day or two. I’ve also started working on the first of many baby items for the two babes that are being born this August and October.

At some point some sewing would be good as well. Actually my two elbows are suffering from all the crocheting I’ve been doing and knitting is not helping either so it just might be time to switch over to something else.

Karen

Yummy Bunny

I’ve been busy, I’m almost done the granny afghan just a couple of outside borders to crochet and then it’s done – lol, only takes about 1 hour to go around once.

Meanwhile I had to do the Sunday school Easter craft so I did cookies again where the kids decorate their own. It took me until 2 a.m. to get the cookies baked and the icing made, you’d think I would have learned from last time I did these…alas no…but the kids had fun once again. The big kids as well, here is a cookie I made to show the kids how to put the bunny together.

3-D bunny cookie.

Karen