Lady Busta Gloves

I have a new project due for my Hogwarts - A Little Bit of Everything swap, for our Potions class. It's so cold in the room where we meet that we were given homework. Homework was to knit or crochet a pair of mittens to keep our widdle fingers warm during Potions class, and it's due today!

I went through 2 or 3 different swatched yarns, over 4 different patterns on Ravelry, and nothing seemed to satisfy me. So, after much procrastinating, I decided to devise a pattern for myself, exactly how I wanted them, and so I started this past Thursday on lunch. I visited Bobbin's Nest Studio for the first time, it's actually right around the corner from my job! Easy access is not good for a yarnaholic like me! I wanted to knit some gloves in my houses colors, Gryffindor, but just couldn't find anything I was happy with. I went with some real pretty green Rowan Felted Tweed in Worsted Weight.

Here's the first finished glove:



When I finished it, I liked it, but it needed something more. I decided to add some Crochet to it, so I did 2 rows of Single Crochet for the rim border of the mittens (around the knuckles), and then added shell stitching to the border of the base of the gloves. Then, I was happy, they turned out nice, and perfect for my Potions class.

I'm calling them "Lady Busta Gloves" because they have a lady'ish flair to them, but also have that bust'em up look to them.







These will be perfect for my Potions class, there small and don't inhibit the movement of my fingers and allow me to work my wand.

Yarn: Rowan Felted Tweed Worsted Weight, Green
I wouldn't use this yarn again, not for this project. It is nice, but not pliable, I would use a worsted weight sock yarn instead, and will probably make more soon.
Needles: US8 circulars
Pattern: Lady Busta Gloves (not yet written)
Yardage: Less than 150 yards
Methods: Stockinette, Crochet, Knitting in the round

Homework completed by:
Lady Arabella Carmichael of Gryffindor

Since I'm done with my homework now, I can share my recent splurge of yarn.
It's been a bit since I've bought any real new yarn, I've been holding back for months now, believe me it's been very hard. I had to completely avoid LYS's, but the ETSY's do get me now and then.

Some lovely Noro





More Blue Sky Alpaca 100% Organic Cotton yarn



I've also been moving along on my Swallowtail shawl KAL on Ravelry, I don't have updated pics, but will post some tomorrow. Now I'm off to go get another assignment done and also keep going on my Swallowtail. Talk to you later!

A Snitch in Time

I finished this Golden Snitch today, just in time for it to be done for the Hogwarts - Little Bit of Everything Swap.

I went with Raynor Gellatly's snitch pattern, easy, but magical.

I used yarn from my stash bag, and cast a spell on this snitch. It isn't your average snitch, it has a ring of magical yarn around it's belly. If you look closely, you'll see the crystalish yarn sparkle back at you, but you have to catch it first! If you catch this snitch, you'll have the glory and honor of laying your hands on the golden snitch.





(I apologize that you can't see the crystalish magical yarn, I was distracted by the snitches spell)



Until our next meeting muggles 8-) I have some yummy yarn I splurged today to share, but that will come later.

Lady Arabella Carmichael
Gryffindor

Let's get it started!

I'm psyched out for this year! Is it too early to start talking about Stitches West 2009? This will be my 2nd visit and I can't wait, I tell you, I can't! All the wooly goodness makes me super-uber happy! I have alot of sharing to do, and geez, just don't know where to start? So excuse me if I'm all over the place 8-)

Since I'm talking about Stitches West, last year I saw Jennifer Hansen from Stitch Diva Studios there demonstrating her stash busting Tunisian blanket, which was totally gorgeous! I quickly bought the Jenkin's Tunisian Crochet hook in S with a stopper, thankfully, her blanket was such a hit that Jenkin's has these on back order still because of demand. After Stitches I went to a knit along for this blanket at Knitting Arts and started my blanket. I worked on it and found the method very easy and great "mindless" crocheting, or a cross between crocheting and knitting. I finally finished this, and am so proud of it. I love it so much. There are 9 different yarns in this, including Alpaca silk! It's so soft, and warm, this is fast to make if you actually spend the time working it, for me I put it away and finally decided to bring it out again.









I've been steadily knitting along on my Tech Square Afghan blanket, and finally, oh finally finished my Pocket Square! There are 3 pockets to it, a Kangaroo, Ribbed, and Pouch pocket. All are different methods and pretty darn interesting. I went on faith when following the directions, and thankfully the designer didn't fail.



In the middle is the Kangaroo pocket, method is fairly simple, you knit the center stitches to the desired length of the pocket, while leaving the sides on waste yarn, when your ready to knit the back of the pocket, you start knitting the live stitches on the waste yarn and when you get to the pocket front, pick up stitches in the back of it, in a straight line then continue knitting the remaining live stitches on yarn, and when you reach the same length of the front pocket, you use 2 needles, one for the back stitches and one for the front pocket stitches and knit the front and back stitches together, creating one seam stitch. Here's a close up:



This is the Pouch Pocket, the angle is looking at the inside or opening, that is lined with Red yarn. To start it off you take waste yarn and knit 2 rows of X amount of stitches you want for your pocket width, and then continue re-knitting the same stitches of waste yarn with the working yarn, and continue on your piece. When your ready to work the pocket, you remove the waste yarn, leaving 2 rows of live stitches, top and bottom row. You take these stitches and knit in the round, picking up a stitch at the corners to close the gap, and knit for however deep you want your pocket. You knit in stockinette so when you push the pocket inwards, it's knitted inside.



This is the back of the square:



The last pocket is a Ribbed square, you do a YO every other knit stitch, and then the next row you knit the knit stitches and transfer the YO's to waste yarn. When your've ready to knit the back of the pocket, you knit the YO's thru the back stitch, knit tightly, and keep going until you've reached the ribbing. You then seam up the sides.

Opening of pocket:



Out of all 3 pockets, all methods are pretty interesting, I like the Pouch pocket for being a loose change pocket, you really can't loose anything in it, the Ribbed one is nice, but you need to seam nicely, and the Kangaroo I love, very pretty and so many designs you can incorporate with it, I just don't care for picking up stitches on the purl bump side. I was so happy to finish this square, it had be hibernating for awhile because I was knitting other things or got stuck in the holidays.

I quicky cast on for my next square, the Entrelac square. I've made leaps of progress with this, almost done, but need to buy more yarn. It has 2 of my fave colors, green and red, oh my! I've never done Entrelac before, this is my first attempt, and I admit when I was first looking at the instructions, I was like, WTF, but mainly because the picture was far more confusing then the actual method. Anyways, I followed the instructions like a good little knitter, and sure as day, was speeding along in no time. This is why I love this project, you get something of everything and your smack ready for a real garment, like a sweater, or vest.



I'm loving the color combo, my hubby picked the 2 to go with out of my entire color scheme. So far these are all the squares I have done, the Entrelac is not shown yet cause it's not yet finished.



From a previous post, I never got the chance to post a picture of the Dayflower gloves I knitted for my daughter for Christmas, here's her pose (note she wouldn't let me show her face, kids??!??)



This is yarn scrumptous!

I also participated in a Christmas Stocking Swap with Yarnwhisperer on Ravelry for the Death By Socks group. All the members thought it would be nice to knit a stocking, no competition, but a way of knitting something nice for someone else.

Here's the stocking I sent her:



And here's the goodies and stocking she sent me:



I love the stocking, good color choice, and I love the Noro Kureyon Sock Yarn! All the goodies she sent, plus the lovely magnets and ornament.

Oooh.. and last, but not least, I received my Scout's Swag shipment, "Red Pear Tweed", I'm loving this color! Great for the upcoming Valentines day!





Phew! Sorry for the long post, but gosh I just needed to share all this, I have more, but I'll spare you and save it for another post.

8) R

Lesson Learned

A lesson learned indeed. I have common sense, and my common sense did tell me "Don't save your credit card!" "Don't be lazy, enter it manually!"...what am I ranting about? Well, I do alot of shipping for either my swap packages or my Traveling Scarves group, and so on, so I try to make my shipping tasks as convenient as possible. These past 2 weeks I had alot of packages to send out, and I was on USPS.com and because I had more than 3 packages to print shipping labels for at one time, I saved my credit card info so I wouldn't have to manually enter it for each shipping label. I thought "It's USPS, it should be ok". Well Friday evening while I was knitting at about 10 p.m., I got an email alert. I went to look at my checking account and found purchases at USPS.com for items I didn't charge, all equaling over $300! I immediately called my bank, canceled my card, and so on. I've been on a "cash only" basis for the past week since my account is all messed up, nothing I can do until the fraudulent items hard post to my account. Right now, it's just in a pending state. It's pending alright, pending my A**, I can't use my account, pay invoices I have from PayPal, nothing. It's a lesson learned, no saving the card anymore. Phew! Ok, I'm done, got that off my back.

Onto my therapy, yes 8-) my therapy.

I received my Christmas 2008 Swap package, and it is a wonderful Christmas package indeed!
My secret spoiler is HarlemQueen on Ravelry.



She knitted me a beautiful Santa dishcloth, a cute white bag cozy, filled with my FAVE Chai Tea, 1 skein of Blue Sky Alpaca 100% Organic cotton in Black, 1 Angel bell ornament (totally pretty), 4 of the most glamorous beads I've ever seen, and 1 Statue of Liberty ornament (I'm in love with this one, I've never been to New York, I dream of it, and this is just the sweetest closest thing to it), and 1 wrapped "don't open until Christmas" present (already nestled under my tree). Thank you HARLEMQUEEN!





Another great package came, and that is my "Peppermint Patty" kit from Woolgirl. I love the yarn colors and all the contents, especially the candy cane tape measure.

Contents are: 400yds. fingering weight of Miss Babs Peppermint Patty, a mini-skein of Miss Babs Red, 1 candy cane stitch marker, 1 candy cane tape measure, 1 peppermint chocolate cocoa, peppermint pattie chocolates, candy cane mints, Peppermint Patty lip balm & cream, and a knitting pouch.





Last, but not least, I received my Snowman Stitch Markers I won on the Nautical Knitter's blog, thank you!!!



In other news, I've been teaching myself how to knit faster without a cable needle doing cables, links for this given to me from a good friend Devotion2Knit. She gave me the link to Grumperina's instructions on this. It's been challenging and I'm fighting off that "bad taste" in my mouth for this project, I need to get this done. I've done a few repeats with the new method, and this is about as far as I've gone, doesn't seem like much difference from the other day, but it is moving along.



Well now I gotta go and continue knitting this beanie, wish me luck!

And I'm off!

The De La Hoya vs. Pacquaio boxing get together party Saturday went great. We BBQ some marinated carne asada and chicken, I made a fresh macaroni salad. For orderbs we served Garlic & Cheese Toast with fresh Spinach Dip, BBQ Hot wings and Chips & Salsa. For desert, I whipped out my secret weapon.



I made some Cranberry-Pumpkin bread that I make every year around this time, it's delish!



It's a combination of fresh cranberries and pumpkin puree with seasonal spices. I know the recipe by hard and right smack in the middle of it, I realized I was missing my key ingredients, FUDGERS! Well, not wanting to waste more time, I decided to improvise and make my own combo of spices, and boy, what a great thing that was, my bread came out better than it's ever tasted. So good in fact, I'll stick with my new combo of spices and will no longer make the original recipe. My bread was a complete hit and before I could snap any fresh out of the oven baked pictures, it was almost all gone! Here are a few left over morsels...



I'll be making more later this week because I still have 1 bag of fresh cranberries left. I shared the original recipe click here if your interested 8-)

Our get together was fun and relaxing, but the event we all gathered to watch, De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao turned out to be horrible. I was hoping that De La Hoya would pull it off, but he did such a horrible job, in fact he didn't even fight? Pacquiao had such an easy job to do and win when all De La Hoya did was just stand there and get hit. I never saw De La Hoya do this before, it was so upsetting. He may just be done with boxing as a fighter, but as a presence and force in the sport, he'll be around forever.

Friday evening before the party, I finished off the last 3 Traveling Scarves I had, which I had one from each group.

Here is Purpleturtle's scarf from Group 25 SO, I added the top brown section using Lamb's Pride Wool, I strung 2 ends of the yarn together to get the right gauge for the section. I went with a Box Stitch.



A full shot of the scarf



Here is Mspalmtree's scarf from Group 37 Noro. My section at the top, using Noro Silk Garden in 245 & 279 knit with the Box Stitch.



A full view of the scarf



Finally here is Adore1's scarf from Group 42 Tweeds. I added a Mock Cable stitch using O'Wool 100% Organic Brown Tweed yarn.



And I'm off finally knitting my Christmas gifts, starting with my husband's beanie that I've been improvising the design on. It's nothing fancy and nothing cutting edge, a Cable beanie.



I'm slow at cables, it's annoying, and I can get slower if I let the cables annoy me. I need to get this done by Tuesday, if I can without wanting to kill the cable needle.

Last, I'll leave you with a snugly picture of my doggy sleeping by our Christmas tree, she looked to precious to not take a picture!