Maple Leaf Forever Scarf and More

 

I introduced the Maple Leaf forever scarf back in November when it was almost finished (see post here). I finished it in the meantime and had sufficient yarn to make a matching toque, but I didn't want to make it using multiple double pointed needles. While I do own some, I have never used them to actually knit in the round and have no desire to, using them only when I need them for a cable or other fancy stitch. Especially when I also own knitting looms. While I can generally hand knit faster than I can "loom", I just didn't want the hassle. There's probably a way to make a toque with a circular needle instead of double pointed needles, but I would have had to find a pattern. And I had made loom-knit toques before. However, when it came down to it, I didn't remember which pattern I'd used. I think I finally found it, but now I don't honestly remember which pattern I used. I believe it was for a slouchy from LoomaHat, but she has a lot of different patterns and videos. I modified it anyway as I incorporated the maple leaf design from the scarf pattern and made it shorter, so it wouldn't be as slouchy. If I had to do it over again, I would move the maple leaf closer to the brim and made the toque even shorter as it's still slouchy, and I don't like slouchy hats. Yes, I know I was using a slouchy pattern, but my previous efforts didn't turn out slouchy at all... Perhaps it was a totally different pattern that I had used before. 
I finished both the scarf and the toque by the middle of November, but I've been so busy getting other projects finished before Christmas that I haven't blogged about it until now. One of the projects was Tartan Delight, another one of Fabric Cafe's 3-yard quilt patterns. 

This one is the It's a Snap pattern from the book Pretty Darn Quick. I had purchased the fabric on one of my quilt shop hops. I love tartan fabric and I think it turned out very nice. The recipient suggested blues and greens, and this was the best match I had in my 1 metre/yard collection. I used a royal blue minky dot for the backing. 

Anise is the pantograph I chose. It was one I received for a pantograph of the month program that I was in briefly, but I haven't used it as it didn't really appeal to me. However, now that I've stitched it out, I do find it rather pretty, though it will likely never be one of my favourites. 
I worked on this one at the Lutheran church sew days, but when I got it home and put it up on my design wall to measure for the borders, I thought, "What is wrong?" It definitely did not look right. I finally figured out that I had gotten all the blocks in the correct order in each row, but then I had stitched the rows together in the wrong order. I think I only ended up with two out of the 6 rows in the right place. I gave the stitch ripper a workout that day. 
Next up was Higher Ground, using the Stepping Up pattern. I had gotten the pattern as one of the freebies that Fabric Cafe shares. They switch out their freebies every couple of months, so it's a case of you snooze, you lose. But I try to keep up with their pattern giveaways, so I don't lose out. 

I was kind of loathe to part with this one because the colours and the fabrics are just really awesome, but the recipients loved it. I had to make a few design changes - a couple were deliberate, based on my fabric available (I didn't have quite enough of the navy blue, so had to rearrange fabric placements, and decided to make the mauve border wider). And I accidentally made one too many of one block and one too few of the other, so my rows are arranged slightly differently than the pattern. But it's still a beautiful quilt, in my opinion. 

I had some mauve minky dot in my stash that I used for the backing and Zoidberg Feathers for the quilting. This is a pantograph that I have used before, but I had to choose something that would work with minky - nothing too dense - and would look good on the quilt top. It's probably one of my favourite designs - it's very pretty and works up relatively quickly. 

As a matter of fact, I decided that it had the right qualities for stitching up fabrics for bag-making, and I used it for quilting the fabrics for a travel bag for my grandson, seen here on the longarm, and a backpack for my daughter. I was really hoping to get these bags finished, plus a couple more quilts, in time for Christmas, but I just ran out of time. As a matter of fact, I didn't even get all 3 of my Christmas trees up and decorated until Christmas Eve. And other Christmas decorating around the house was pretty sparse. Hopefully, I'll get the bags finished soon and you'll hear more about them then. 

A Homemade Christmas

I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or less organized or because being short-staffed at work has impacted my outlook at home, but Christmas came much too fast this year. I didn't get anywhere near as much done as I had hoped, but sometimes I think I expect too much of a single-homeowner who works full-time. 😉 However, I was still able to get some of the important things done. Like spending time with my grandson. That's always high on my priority list. 
This year I determined to make some homemade Christmas tree decorations with him. I have a 4' green tree that I bought to use as a prop when I was teaching his Sabbath School class at church, and I was using a camping theme. I'm no longer teaching his class, and I didn't have any decorations for this tree, so this seemed like the perfect vehicle for his homemade decorations. I had bought some clear plastic baubles at Walmart in the after Christmas sales last year. I used one of the bigger ones to make a fabric decoupage bauble for my tree 

and he used a smaller one for his tree (with Grandma's help, of course).

He also filled some of the baubles

but you have to be cautious in filling them, lest the filling have too much weight for the hook. And let me forewarn you that if you try to fill them with those tiny styrofoam snowballs, static makes them stick everywhere!

Covering a styrofoam ball with pom-poms made another ornament.

The majority of the ornaments are salt-dough, cut with cookie cutters,

dried in the oven, painted and sealed with acrylic sealant spray. 

We also collected pine and spruce cones and made them into ornaments with glitter paint and ribbons. 

This one is felt glued to foam and decorated with sparkles.

I have lots more craft supplies for making ornaments, but this was sufficient for this year. However, as I was determined that, aside from the lights, and possibly the tree topper (I have an angel from my childhood tree that is probably around 50 years old that I was planning on using on this tree, but I never got all of my decorations out of the garage), all of the decorations on this tree would be homemade, I had to decide what to do about a tree skirt and garlands. I wanted Damian to be involved in as much of the production as possible, so I googled for a loom-knitted tree skirt, as I know he can loom knit. I found a pattern, but the instructions were kind of vague and left me guestimating how to make it. I bought some Bernat Blanket yarn as Damian loves soft, fuzzy things like blankets and stuffies, and got him started on the knitting loom. I hadn't counted on the attention span of a 5-year-old and knew we'd never get it done on time for Christmas, unless we had started way back in January. I finished three of the wedges myself and stitched them together, 

but I really didn't feel that they were going to work. They were lopsided and the space in the middle was going to be much too large. Knitted tree skirts are actually quite rare, so I googled and found this crocheted Snowflake Ripple Christmas tree skirt pattern that I figured would work and produced this. 

I had to abbreviate the pattern because I was using such bulky yarn and was making this for a small tree. Here it is under the tree: 

Much nicer looking, in my opinion, than the first pattern I tried. I used the leftover yarn to make the garlands, combining the red and cream for one garland and a gold tinsel-y yarn from my stash with the cream for the second garland. So, there you have it: Damian's Christmas tree. He also said that he would like a white tree, since Grandma has a white tree. So I brought in my white fibre optic tree, also about 4' tall. I never did get around to decorating it, but he was quite impressed with the fibre optics nonetheless. 

Meanwhile, I was busy trying to get some dishcloths and hot potholders completed. Unfortunately, knitting and crocheting dishcloths exacerbated my carpal tunnel syndrome, so I had to employ my splints in order to get as many done as I wanted to. 

This isn't the total haul. I actually made two more, but they had already been given away by the time I took this picture. And I still want to make one more. 

Surprisingly enough, I was initially only able to find one of the big balls of Bernat Handicrafter cotton in this Mistletoe colourway in our local Walmart. And nothing in a solid red or green. I find that the pattern shows up better when using solids than when using a variegated yarn. Walmart later got in some smaller balls in different holiday colours, which are rather expensive compared to the non-Christmas yarns, but I was able to find one more big ball of this yarn. You can tell it was from a different dye lot as the green is more faded-looking in the second ball. Most of the dishcloths have been knitted:

these 5, plus the two that have already been gifted. Each pattern is different as I'm working my way through this book:

 I'm not loom-knitting, however. I'm using needles as I find needles are faster than the loom, and the pegs are too far apart for worsted yarn on most of my looms. It makes the stitches much too loose. 
These are the crocheted dishcloths: 

Top left is the Linen Stitch dishcloth. Interesting that it's produced a sort-of plaid pattern when using this stitch. You can tell that I started the new ball about one third of the way up. Bottom left and top right are variations of Cable Stitch dishcloths. And the bottom right is one I just made up. The final one is Tunisian Crochet 

using the diagnonal stripe pattern from the Button Down Pillow found in this book: 

All of these dishcloths look like they could use a good blocking, but why would I block something that's just going into the dishwater? 
When I couldn't find a second ball of the Mistletoe Ombre, I took a brief detour with the Psychedelic colourway. 

I can't remember whether I got one or two dishcloths done in this yarn (and I don't know where they are at the moment), but when I found the second ball in the Mistletoe Ombre, I decided to continue with that colour as these are Christmas gifts. I've used the Psychedelic before, but didn't end up with this problem: 

The dye was colouring my hands, so, before I gift these dishcloths I will have to make sure I give them a dye-fixing bath. I intend to finish the whole ball, however, and then do them all at once. 

When I went to Damian's school Christmas program, I saw posters up for their pajama day the Friday before Christmas, where the students wear pajamas to school. (I have no idea if the teachers do or not...). So, in the midst of all the other Christmas hubbub, I threw together some awesome and warm pj's for my grandson from McCall's pattern M6224.

In order to complete them, I had to find my black binding, which necessitated dumping out multiple rough totes of fabric, creating havoc in my living room.

As it turned out, it wasn't a school day for Damian. He's in kindergarten and only attends Mondays, Wednesdays and alternate Fridays. So, no pajama day for him. I gave him his new pajamas for Christmas instead. 
Damian and I also took time to decorate a gingerbread house. Being a newbie builder, I incorrectly decided to put the decorations on first before building the house.

I promised him a carrot cake which will be our "plot" on which to build our house. I'm waiting for his next visit to complete this part. 

Next project was quilt-as-you-go potholders. These two have already been gifted.

Might seem bizarre, but I find that there are certain colours that don't show up well when photographed on a horizontal surface with a cell phone. These look kind of yellowed out to me. 

See: when I take the picture vertically the potholder doesn't look yellowed out like the ones in the previous photograph. 

Last time I did these potholders, I used cat fabric for the centre. This time I decided to go with these cardinals. However, I cut the cardinals out smaller than the cats, with the result that a lot of the corners are not covered by the third round of fabric strips and I have to add a little tiny piece to the corner. Frustrating, but I'll try to remember for next time. 

I've got 9 more potholders to add binding to, and one complete potholder to do and then I'll be done. 

Except that for 2018, I plan on starting in January, doing one or two a month, and then I'll be sailing come December. 

Loom Knitting: 2 Book Reviews & Some Projects

I started out in loom knitting when I found 3 out of the 4 sizes of round looms at a thrift store (I later found the fourth size). I started with google and found some youtube videos and websites on various loom knitting projects. I began with a pretty basic cowl.

Basic Loom Knitted Cowl

Then I used a youtube tutorial to make a Seed Stitch Cowl:

Seed Stitch Cowl

This yarn is so bulky that I couldn't tell what the pattern actually looked like and whether I got all the stitches correct. Then I tried a hat 

and a scarf. I don't remember where I got the patterns for either of these. 

For Christmas, I bought myself the set of long looms. 

However, I felt like I needed a basic guide for using knitting looms. I like books and I really like to be able to have a handy reference that is available when I'm not on the internet. So far I don't own a tablet or a smart phone, so having to go to the computer every time I want to access information on a particular subject gets rather tedious. So I ordered myself a couple of basic books on loom knitting. 

Both books offer very straightforward instructions for the basics: casting on, casting off, different stitches and include pictures for clarification. The projects are mostly beginner to easy level with one or two intermediate projects thrown in for an added challenge. I would recommend both for someone starting up in loom knitting.
Starting with the circle loom book, I produced this At-Home-Comfort Sock from Premier Yarns Mega Brushed Chunky in Carousel: 

I didn't realize it was a striping yarn, but I just love the vibrant colours. The heel and toe were done in Red Heart Comfort Chunky. I'm not entirely happy with how the heel turned out, but for my very first ever sock, it's not too bad. Here's the finished pair: 

As a woman with size 11 feet, I added 3 rows to the 9/10 size foot and they actually ended up a little too big, but they will keep my ankles nice and toasty during the winter, especially when I'm working in the basement, where it's cooler. 

I moved onto a long loom project and started the Woodsy Warmth Shawl, using Premier Yarns Aurora in Rosehip. Initially I thought I'd give it a little more textural interest by using the twisted stockinette stitch instead of the regular stockinette. However, I realized this was going to use more yarn, so I ripped it out and started fresh using regular stockinette stitch. The pattern calls for a 4 (worsted) weight yarn, but this yarn happens to be at the heavier end of that weight category and has less yardage per 100 g ball than the yarn used in the pattern (Red Heart Collage), so I did end up buying more yarn just in case. 

As I was knitting along, I noticed that the shawl was longer on the sides than it was in the middle. I was hoping this was just a result of the stitches being on a loom and not a needle and would work itself out. While this is likely part of the issue, I then noticed that the loom was bowed inwards in the middle.

This was making the stitches looser on the ends and tighter in the centre. I assumed that it was because I was wrapping the yarn too tightly, but then I also noticed how I was holding the loom. 

While my hand is rather relaxed in this picture, it doesn't take a whole lot of pressure to bend the sides inwards, thus allowing you, unconsciously, to wrap the centre stitches tighter. This is not a subject that was dealt with in the book on long looms. Indeed, most of the pictures that showed the instructor holding the loom, it was in this position. So I made a conscious effort to hold the loom differently, either holding it only by one edge

or by holding it only on the end, where it won't bow.

Furthermore, as I really didn't want to rip out what I had completed so far (especially since I'd already ripped it out once when I decided to change stitches), I wedged a couple of nickels between the two sides of the loom.

This kept the sides separated while I wrapped and knitted the next few rows so that I could get my centre stitches back to the tension they should be. 

I actually packed this project (which was on the longest loom) into my suitcase when I went on vacation. I finished the main part while in Ontario and blocked and fringed it when I got home. And the finished project:

I'm very happy with how it turned out. This was a gift for my niece, Julie, for her birthday.