Sheep On My Stuff

Okay, this isn't going to be the most interesting post, but last time I said I'd aim for 20" by this time this week, and...

Seed Stitch Blanket progress

The blanket is actually quite wide -- wide enough to cover a queen-sized bed. The real question is... how long is it going to be?

Bam! (said the lady). Not just 20", but 24"!

I made it to 24", and I've still got a TON of yarn left. Maybe next week I'll be up to 36" of blanket!

I'm also seriously considering moving my destashing criteria from weight to yardage. That's going to be a little harder to count, but I think it'd be worth it in order to make me stop avoiding socks and shawls (which I love, but which don't weigh much).

I have a fingering-weight scarf on the needles, but no pictures of that just yet! I've ripped it out and restarted it several times, but I think I'm finally happy with the (tubular) cast-on...

I don't know what happened. One minute I was going along just fine, blogging twice a week, and the next... poof. Nothing. And for months and months I just kept writing nothing. I was still knitting... but maybe not as much.

So in the interests of actually getting more knitting done (I'm never going to knit down my stash at this rate), I'm going to see if I can get back to at least once a week, checking in and giving an update on what I've been knitting!

Lately it's been a grey and white bulky-weight seed-stitch blanket. No pattern, just miles and miles of seed stitch. This is actually what I'm in the mood for right now. Something easy, simple, soothing, something that can be done while I read, write, edit, watch TV, or in downtime during my raid.

Seed stitch blanket, 11/06/2009

I have started and restarted and restarted this blanket over and over and over. It has been many things. This is what I've liked best, and more importantly, what I've liked knitting the best. It's now 14.5" of seed stitch. I'd like it to be at least 20" by the next time I check in; wish me luck!

So happy!

It's been nearly a year since I started this (you can tell because the gallery was started on March 4, 2008), but it's done! Done! *does a happy dance around the living room*

Now I just need to weigh the leftover yarn and see what I ended up using. I think I may have inadvertently used some sportweight in the border, which I hadn't realized I still had. In any event, I'm extremely pleased -- it's a stashbusting project and it came out beautifully! Yay! I need more of those. :)

ETA: I was able to take 922g of yarn off the stash worksheets after finishing this project! (I obviously used more yarn than that, but the stash was weighed with this in progress.) I'm out of "yarn debt"! My destash weight is now at 555g -- a positive number for the first time this year!

It wasn't so long ago that I was talking about cannibalizing the Powers of Two blanket for yarn. It's not that I didn't like it, it's just that the pattern had been making me nuts for a while. It just wasn't fun for a while there, and I'd put off working on it and put off working on it and put off working on it until it seemed like I was never going to finish it.

I guess this was just one of those blankets that was meant to be small. Afghan-sized, even.

Uber-Woolo there is sitting in the little space which is all that remains unknit on this blanket. I am really looking forward to finishing it, which is making me work on it that much faster!

It'll need a border when it's done, probably in black, and when I'm done with that I'll need to decide if it needs a backing, too. It might. It might not. If it does, I'll look for something sheepy. :D

I'm up to four (and the center square plus first stripe on another). I'm definitely enjoying how these are coming out, although it'll be really ironic if I need to go buy more yarn in order to finish a scrap project. I keep telling myself I can make small blankets, but I'm not sure I believe me!

Several marathon crocheting sessions later, it's done! The stripey blanket is finished, and it's big enough to cover the bed, which is awesome. (The nightstands are a little messy. Please forgive my excitement, which outweighed my desire to present a clean bedroom for photographs.)

This used 2040g of yarn. If only that were enough to actually start destashing. Ha! It isn't. But every little bit counts, and now I'm on to another project.

I got Handknitting With Meg Swansen for Christmas, and I've been obsessed with the idea of the Puzzle Blanket ever since. I thought about ordering wool for it, but then decided on Homespun -- it makes soft blankets, so who cares if it's acrylic? And I've knit two bedspread-size blankets out of it, so it can't be that bad!

Well, that was what I thought until I tried knitting the first fifty stitches. My hands couldn't take the lack of stretch, and I quickly decided to shift gears and make something fast. What's fast? Crochet.

And so now I've got a crocheted blanket-in-progress to go with my Mystery-Blanket-In-Progress. Sigh. It is going quickly, though; I'm nearly halfway done with it. :)

I've had two balls of Cascade Eco-Wool sitting around in my stash for... man, four years or so. No kidding. I bought it from The Fiber Gallery in West Seattle when they first opened, opening week, and as a result, the skeins (long since wound into balls) carried a faint whiff of fresh paint, even years afterward. I'd just never figured out what to do with them.

Clearly the ideal project was... a scoop of fudge ripple ice cream?

No, seriously, I've been taking advantage of Ravelry's pattern finder lately. I did a search for any project that would take between 600 and 800 yards of an Aran-weight yarn, and came up with the Hemlock Ring blanket by Jared Flood. It's a lap-sized blanket with a center motif and a LOT of feather and fan extending out from the center.

I'm intrigued to see that many people managed to get a perfectly flat blanket out of the deal, and many other people had a very ripply blanket (like I did, although blocking helped). This is one of those lovely things about Ravelry -- it's always great to see the different things different knitters come up with. :)

Mine, as I say, started very ripply:

and got better after blocking:

Cuddly and sheep-approved!

This marks the first time I've ever had to block a blanket. It's also the first blanket I've ever made that's 100% wool -- no acrylic whatsoever. :) And I'm very happy to say that after a bath in Eucalan-enhanced water, it smells a bit of eucalyptus and a bit of damp sheep, but not at all like paint (the paint smell dissipated pretty fast once I started working up the blanket).

Say hello to a blast from the past! The Powers of Two blanket has come out of hibernation (boy, has it).

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight. Needle size: 4.25mm.

Pink Pads Sheep is confused about why I'd ever want to feature a project without her. She's that kind of sheep, you know; the sort that's about half wool (and polyester fiberfill), and half ego.

Oh, excuse me. She's now bleating that it's more like one-quarter wool and fiberfill, and three-quarters ego.

Now she wants me to go get her a nice patch of organic wheatgrass.

The things we do for sheep.

I never thought this day would come.

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sportweight in Wheat. Needles: 3.75mm.

Total yarn for this project: say 4 balls of Sportweight to be safe, which is maybe 1500 yards. Beautiful Sheep, I couldn't have done it without you!

Of course, this project is not without its flaws. For one thing, I did not realize that all those short rows were not just tapering the sleeves (and I have to say, they did a great job of that), but also turning the sweater into a V-neck. The original plan calls for a straight high collar, and if you look at what I did to disguise that, you'll see it right away:

As you can see, what I did was just to pick up stitches at the appropriate V-neck place. It came out looking pretty good. I think I should probably sew a couple lines of thread through the fake inner plackets and then cut them off -- if I'm going to do more work on this thing, that is.

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Yeah, it's sort of mutated, and when I put it on, one side's longer than the other (and I have no idea how that's even possible, because it's the same number of rows exactly). But it's mine, and it's finished. I did it. :) And, hey, I think it fits quite well -- it's the right length on body and sleeves, it buttons over the breasts, it has waist shaping. I can only go up from there.

And meanwhile, I have some more work on the Powers of Two blanket:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight. Needle size: 4.25mm.

Pretty spiffy! The squares just above the big green square on the left mark the upper left-hand corner. I'll be expanding to the right to fill it out and define the upper edge. When it's wide enough, it'll be time to start it growing down.

It turns out that I have a TON of the "white" (actually natural), light brown, dark grey, and red yarns in my stash, so I'll be using those fast and furious as I go. I'm hoping I won't run into problems with having nothing but those colors by the end of the blanket.

Last but not least, I've dragged something out of the UFO (unfinished objects) pile:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight, "Pines". Needle size: 5mm.

The adorable sheep modeling this vest is Dorset Horn. She (yes, she -- in the Dorset Horn breed of sheep, both rams and ewes have large, impressive horns) comes all the way from New Zealand! One of my many sheep from the New Zealand flock. In New Zealand, the tourist shops are full of sheep. It is nothing short of a woolly paradise.

The vest looks like a whole lot of nothing right now, for which I can only apologize and say: It is a lot of nothing right now. It's simple garter up to the armpits, which is about one inch further than I've got it at the moment. Sorry! It'll look more interesting next time, especially if I run out of yarn and have to substitute in some black. Most importantly, this comes from the UFO pile. I have no idea how long it's been sitting around unknit, but it's no short amount of time. It definitely predates the beginning of the year. Not only will knitting this up net me a vest, it'll get my ratio up.

Current stats for the year:
15 projects started up new
22 completed/tossed/frogged projects
11 completed for the year to date (yay!)

WIPs:
7 have been on needles since before the beginning of the year
14 currently in progress/hibernating

And the vast majority of this year's projects have been from stashed yarn (almost a 5:1 ratio of stash:new), which is also making me pretty happy. (Of course, that doesn't count the yarn that came into the house for projects but hasn't been used yet... which bumps that ratio down some. But I'll take my victories where I can get 'em!)