Fibre Stash

As if I don't already spend enough time on Ravelry, they have recently added a whole load of new spinning features. Clearly this is awesome and has kept me pretty busy over the last couple of days. I've finally finished adding my entire fibre stash and it feels great seeing it all there. This is a feat which I will never achieve with my yarn, I already had a sizeable stash before I joined Ravelry and I've never managed to catch up with adding it all and for that reason I'm fairly lax about adding new stash. I'm hoping that having my fibre stash all in order from the get go will encourage me to keep a much better track of that. I'm also really excited about the spinning features because it means I can now show the whole process, from fibre to yarn and from yarn to FO. This was really the reason I wanted to learn to spin (and also to dye) because I love the idea of a garment that is truly handmade, from beginning to end, by me. Being able to showcase this is just wonderful. Thanks Ravelry!

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FO: Tubey

Following hot on the heels of Buzzbee, I took only two days to knit Tubey, showing once again why newborn knits are so much fun. This hat is just as cute and is so simple, being essentially just a tube.

After these two successes it was very hat not to go right ahead and cast on another hat, possibly one for Cassie this time, but I tore myself away from hats and have started another pair of little socks.

These will be a pair of Garter Stripe Baby Socks by Jennifer Hoel knitted once again in leftovers of some yarn I dyed to knit a present for my SIL. I think the yarn came from Yarn Undyed again but this time it is 4ply sock yarn. I'm not a massive fan of orange myself, but it's good to use up leftovers and its nice to use bright yarn for babies so I don't really mind it.

 

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FO: Buzzbee

Pattern Buzzbee by Woolly Wormhead

I love knitting things for newborns, they get finished so quickly. I don't have all that much time for knitting and this hat only took me a few days of a few rows here and a few rows there. I'm really pleased with it and I can't wait to try it on an actual baby, for the moment I have to do with a rather fetching bright green football which has roughly the same circumference as a newborn's head.

The yarn I used was some leftovers of an Aran weight from Yarn Undyed which I dyed in a variegated purple to make a scarf for my SIL a couple of Christmases ago. I actually dyed a second skein darker shades of purple and striped them. Seeing as how I'd really enjoyed knitting Buzzbee I decided to go ahead and knit the leftovers from the second skein into another hat from the same book. I went for Tubey as it called for the same gauge. I think this one is going to knit up equally fast and I hope I love it just as much.

 

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Momentum

After a bit of a craftual hiatus I'm finally beginning to feel like I'm getting somewhere, with things getting finished and progress being seen.
My trousers are done, they look like trousers and despite my best efforts they actually have inseam pockets which were a total first for me. Unfortunately they are HUGE. In some ways this is a good thing when I consider that I took my measurements and was very shocked about the size I'd need to make so the fact they have come out so big makes me feel so much better. Also they are actually wearable, just not in the way I had intended. Because they are elasticated waist I thought I would wear them under my bump but they are sooo big that I can pull the waistband right up over the bump and I think I will be able to do this for quite a while. I'll admit that they are not terribly flattering, but I figure they will be just fine for wearing around the house. I'll have to add pictures another day though, I cant seem to find a moment to actually get a picture of myself. Oh and one day when I get over the trauma of it all I'll tell you all about those pockets.....

Pattern: Sock-A-Roo's Baby Socks, Yarn: Regia Color 4-ply

The baby socks are also done, once again despite my better efforts! As I neared the end of the second sock it became very clear that I wasn't going to quite have enough yarn to finish. At first I didn't panic, the yarn was leftover from my Monkey socks and I'd knit each sock from a separate 50g ball so therefore there must be another small ball of leftovers somewhere. Apparently not somewhere that I could find it though. At that point I had a good look at the socks and it dawned on me that the feet looked rather long. Indeed it turned out that I'd made a bit of a measuring error and could lose around an inch from each sock and actually have enough yarn to finish.

Keeping the momentum going, I cast on my next project right away, Buzzbee from Woolly Wormhead's Wee Woolly Toppers. Surprisingly this pattern has also provided me with another first, I suddenly realised that I had never made I-cord before. The I-cord and the earflaps took me absolutely no time at all so now I'm on the main body of the hat and I'm hoping to breeze through the rest of it pretty quickly and have another FO for you next time.

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Stashdown Stats

As I haven't really been knitting too much lately I've kinda let my stashdown graph slide so I thought I'd better do a quick post before I forgot about it all together.

Stash | Infographics

So there we have it, no change whatsoever for a couple of months there but while this does mean I haven't knit much it also means that I still haven't bought any yarn.  Impressive considering there is a baby on the way!  I don't anticipate that there will be much change before August is out, the socks I have just finished (I'll post tomorrow), the hat I'm currently working on and the socks I plan to knit next are all knit out of scraps so they won't affect the total at all.  Hopefully as Autumn starts to arrive and I settle back into knitting I'll start to make a dent in the stash, providing those tempting yarn retailers don't tempt me too much.

Up next?

There's not been much progress on my trousers, mainly due to a lack of consistent baby napping, I do have one wee babby sock finished but I'll save that until they are both done so for today I'll have a quick look at my plans for future projects.  I did have a fairly concrete plan for the next few projects, but obviously the new baby trumps that and a new plan is needed.

The first thing I did was to download a copy of Woolly Wormhead's Wee Woolly Toppers and then amended my Ravelry queue to include four of the patterns from it.  I only really came across these patterns after Cassie was a bit to big for them so I'm itching to knit them all for the new bubba.  My queue now looks like this.  Basically the plan is to finish the little socks I'm working on, then knit a tiny hat, then another wee pair of socks and then a hat for Cassie for the winter.  I'm still planning on knitting legwarmers from my handspun after that, but I'm undecided which child they will be for now.  After all that I may just manage to knit something for myself, who knows?  Now all I need to do is dive back into the stash and pick out yarn for all these projects because I can feel my internet shopping finger starting to get itchy....

Almost trousers

Finally the eye bending pattern tracing is over and I have cut out all of the pieces for my trousers.  Now I just have to make some sort of sense of those famously mind boggling sentences that Burda call instructions in order to sew all the pieces together correctly.  Luckily I do know, in general, how to construct a pair of trousers so if need be I can resort to the old standby of making it up as I go along.  I've already decided not to bother with the bands that somehow attach to the bottoms of the legs, I couldn't make any sense of them from a quick read through of the instructions and they are not visible in any of the pictures so I'm just going to freestyle the hems and see what I end up with.  Other than that, these should be fairly straightforward, so I'm hoping to have them done in just a couple of nap times.

In other news, actual knitting has been taking place! Not very much as it's still a bit warm for me, but it's a start.

These will be teeny weeny baby socks for the new baby, made from the leftovers from my Monkey socks I made a few years ago.  Despite it not really being all that long since I had a newborn I already can't believe how crazy small this looks.  That is a very good thing though, at this size I should be able to have quite a few pairs ready to keep tiny feet warm once January rolls around.

Ocular confusion!

After wearing my newly sewn maternity top a couple of times and receiving a few compliments I've been spurred on to do a bit more sewing for myself.  This time I am going to attempt my first pair of adult trousers.  Nothing too complicated, just an elasticated waist so I don't have to worry about adding a fly.  I've made about 5 pairs of baby trousers with elasticated waists so I'm hoping that making these for me shouldn't be too much more difficult.  That's if I ever get as far as actually sewing them.

The pattern I am using is from Burda Magazine, 4/2011.  If you are unfamiliar with this publication, it is really great because you get loads of patterns for a few pounds, the catch being that you have to trace the pattern pieces and add a seam allowance yourself.  I have absolutely no problem with this.  I trace all patterns I make anyway so that the multiple sizes are intact for future garments and adding the allowance takes but a couple of minutes per piece.  What I do have a problem with is this...

Seriously, it actually took me two days to even locate all of the pattern pieces in this mess even using the handy guide numbers at the top and bottom.  It's a bit like my eyes just can't see the individual lines there and just blurs them all together.  It would be great if they could include a pair of magic glasses which allowed you to see just one colour at a time.  So at the moment I'm just getting ready to trace the final piece and then I will actually be ready to start cutting out some fabric.

This is a sort of soft herringbone suiting fabric which I have had in the stash for a dogs age, I can't really remember anything about it but I think it will be turn into nice comfortable trousers for me to sit and knit wee tiny things for the new baby.

Sewing FO and new WIP

A couple of days ago I finished sewing up a new top for myself, which despite not being perfect, I love.  I bought the fabric a little while ago from Minerva Crafts and have been waiting for inspiration to strike.

I had a little bit of trouble squeezing the pieces out of just 1m of fabric, but despite so very nearly cutting the back so the skulls were all upside down I did just about do it.  The pattern is Burda 7104 and yes, as the more eagle eyed among you will notice, it is a maternity pattern.  For pregnant ladies.  Just like me!  We’ve been sitting on this news for quite a while now, it took a really long time to schedule our first ultrasound and we didn’t want to announce anything until we’d had it.  I’m now 17 weeks and the baby is due 11^th January.  The sonographer was pretty sure it’s another girl but we’re going to get that double checked at our next scan.  So I finally feel like I can get excited now that I know that all is well and now that I can actually tell the world.  This will mean that I will need to overhaul my knitting queue, a January baby is going to need lots of handknits so I’d better get cracking!