Sheep On My Stuff

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!)

The Bog Jacket continues apace, but I am too lazy to take more in-progress pictures of it. I have, however, passed the 75% mark, and if I can make myself work on more boring garter, perhaps I will finish it this month! (And to think I wanted to have 12 sweaters knit this year. HA. HA HA HA.)

Instead of knitting sweaters, I have been knitting scarves. Let me point you at the following:

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Yarn used: For the Meditation Scarf (red/orange/yellow), Shepherd Multi in Flames by Lorna's Laces, needles 7mm. For the Triple Rib scarf (grey), Wool-Ease in Oxford Grey, needles 5mm.

The sheep modeling the Meditation scarf (on the left, red/orange/yellow) are a pair of wooden sheep with a wool outer coat. Are they doorstops? Footrests? Outdoor sheep? Honestly, I have no clue, but they've been around for years. For a while there, they were my circular needle holders, but that looked messy. And for a while, they lived in the bathtub upstairs, startling both me and SheepLad when we would open the shower curtain to find... SHEEP! (It was the middle bathroom; we don't shower there very often.) Now they live in the library, because we really cannot think of anywhere to put them, but neither do we want to release them into the wild. They have been part of our flock since we lived in Indiana. :)

I have been working on the Meditation scarf since January. I've decided to try meditative knitting, based primarily on the book Mindful Knitting by Tara Jon Manning. The first project is a garter stitch scarf, and the suggested yarn is variegated. I decided to splurge and buy myself some nice new yarn for the project, since all my variegated yarn is acrylic. When I saw the Shepherd yarn from Lorna's Laces (which, by the way, is superwash -- not that I can really imagine machine washing this thing, but you could), I thought "ah ha! An excuse to try this yarn out!"

Well, it turns out the Shepherd yarn is gorgeous, glorious, beautiful, fantastic, and lovely to work with. I couldn't be happier about it. :) I took a ton of pictures (one per day's work -- I did not successfully get to the meditation knitting every day or it would've been done far sooner), and have linked you to their album. Click on the image to see!

The sheep modeling the scarf on the right -- the Triple Rib (grey) scarf -- is named Ultra Soft Lamb. That's what F.A.O. Schwartz (in partnership, I can only gather, with Russ Berrie, for there is a smaller sheep that looks just like her made by Russ directly) named her, and that's what we call her. She is, in fact, ultra soft, and she's one of the few sheep who really isn't very anthropomorphized at all. She's got hooves, four legs... lamb shanks, so to speak. But don't worry! She is not on the menu. (Lamb is never on the menu around here. Would you eat kitten? How about puppy? This is how I feel about eating lamb.)

The Triple Rib scarf is based on a pattern from a stitch dictionary (k3 p3 on the right side, p1 k1 on the wrong side), and while I love the pattern to little bits, I'm just becoming less and less fond of Wool-Ease as time goes by. I know the sheep are giving it their best! I know they're contributing all the sheepy glory they can! But, alas, there's not much that can be done. It's still mostly acrylic, and I still don't care for the stuff!

But I care enough about it to try to use up the rest of it in another blanket project. Behold, the Powers of Two blanket:

Yarn used: So far, five different colors of Wool-Ease by Lion Brand. Needles: 4.25mm, subject to change without warning.

You may look at that sheep and think, "Oh, another sheep." But no! That's a special, glorious sheep. That's Pink Pads Sheep (ignore the tag, which reads "Muttons" -- what an undignified name for such a wondrous sheep). Pink Pads has the distinction of being the sheep with the largest ego in the entire flock. In my flock, that's one hell of an achievement. All my sheep are awesome, and all of them know how great they are, but Pink Pads sort of takes it to a whole new level. When you hug her? She knows it's because she's the best sheep in all the world. When she sits upon the shelf, she tends to climb to the highest vantage point (on top of the other sheep, don't you know) and survey all the bedroom around her, thinking to herself And they got all this just to impress me! How excellent of them.

Pink Pads claims that she is the only sheep cool enough, fashionable enough, to model such an awesome project as the Powers of Two blanket, and thus I have acceded to her wishes and given her the modeling job.

The Powers of Two blanket is a mitered square project. It's a scrap blanket, all in all. My self-imposed restraint is that each square must have a number of rows/ridges equal to a power of two. So 2² (4), 2³ (8), 2⁴ (16), 2⁵ (32), and so on. (So far the largest squares have 32 ridges, and the smallest have 8. I will probably go as high as 64 or 128, and as low as 4.) The fact that I can work on this project away from home as well as at home is great -- I can seam or work in squares as I progress. There will never be trouble finding a place to put them, because each square can fit perfectly in other squares. If all else fails, all I need to do is make tiny squares to fill in room. :) I look forward to seeing how this shapes up; I have a lot of Wool-Ease I can put into this blanket.

Done! Done! Finished! Done!

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Yarn used: Microspun by Lion Brand, Silver Grey. Needles: 4.5mm.

Now I just have to figure out how to get it where it needs to go. Mail? In-person delivery?

I have a little under two balls (or a little over a ball and a half) of Microspun left. I'm thinking little hats.

First, the part of a scarf:

Yarn used: Lion Brand Wool in Blue and Orange. Needles: 4mm.

This sheep hails from the mall. She comes from a baby store, and is actually the third of her family to join the flock. There's another one who looks just like her but happens to be twice her size, and there's the original, who has been in the flock just over a year, and is holiday-themed. She has earmuffs (though, strangely, they are not on her ears) and a nice red-and-white scarf. I may need to knit scarves for the other sheep sometime soon.

The pattern... well, it's being improvised, and it's double knitting, which is new to me. I'm not sure how it's going, but at least I haven't ripped it out yet.

Yarn used: Essential in Shale Multi, KnitPicks. Needles: 2.5mm.

I cannot for the life of me remember where this sheep came from, which makes me think it was probably a present from my parents. :) I just keep looking at this picture and going "AWWWW!" So. Cute.

I wish I had even the faintest clue what I was doing with the socks. So far I got nothin'. I'm sure I'll figure it out once I'm done with the ribbing section.

Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Silver Grey. Needles: 4.5mm.

This sheep plays music, much like Twinkle Sheep, but I can't remember what song. I know it's not "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." It might be "Mary Had A Little Lamb." (A not-very-surprising number of musical sheep play that one.

So this project has a bit more story than most. A friend of mine recently had a baby -- two months early! While in the midst of reading about her adventures as the brand-new mom of a preemie, I got a knitting newsletter whose charity of the month happens to be a knitting program for premature babies. I'm not knitting for that specific charity -- it's in Iowa and I was hoping for something more local -- but I did a bit of research and found that the local chapter of the March of Dimes collects blankets and other knitted items for preemies, and that Microspun is one of the preferred fibers, as it's very soft and machine-washable.

I have issues with acrylic yarn. It hurts my hands to work with it, and I'm not fond of it. However, like most knitters, I cut my teeth on it, and so I still have some left in my stash here and there. I happen to have just enough of this to make a nice blanket (and, honestly, might have enough left over to make some tiny preemie caps), and I'm very happy to be able to get it out of my stash. (At some point, I may break down and collect all my leftover acrylic and take it to Goodwill, where knitters who are looking for a bargain and don't mind acrylic will hopefully find it and take it home.)

At any rate, the pattern is a very simple k10/p10 (repeat for a total of 160 stitches), 14 rows per square. I eyeballed the height, but that should be about right -- they may be just a little long. I plan to do a couple of rows of single crochet around the edge when I'm done with the knitting; it curls just a teeny tiny bit, since the squares are stockinette, and that should even it out some.

Musical Sheep is in fact sitting on a crocheted project of mine. I can take a picture if anyone's interested in an ancient crocheted blanket. It is really very cool-looking. :)

There are still three projects hiding around my house that I haven't gotten onto the blog, so if I don't make significant progress on my current WIPs by Tuesday, that's what you'll be seeing. >_> With any luck, I'll finish up the blanket, at least, and maybe pick up another one of my languishing WIPs.