‘Tis the season to be blocking…

Firstly, Sami’s blanket! The blocking has been finished, and it’s been readied for wrapping. I don’t want to actually wrap it up until I know what’s happening to it (if it’s going to be taken to Japan in luggage, I should probably find a vacumm pack bag to shrink it down some…), but it has been prettified now 🙂

The blanket of doom is finished!!!! I think the entirety of KnitSoc here knows how much I dislike it, but last night while I was there I embroidered the name, and the year 2016 (I wasn’t about to announce to the world that it took me more than a year to make the thing…), and now its blocking (again, taking up the entirety of my floor…).

It won’t be properly finished until I go home and can use my mum’s sewing machine to back it with something soft (she’s going to buy the backing material, so I don’t know what she’s going to get).

Having finished that, I then started on an advent calender I’m making for the friend who got the blanket. Last year I bought both of us a tea advent calender, which was a disaster because most of the teas were green and fruity teas, and neither of us liked those. So this year I’m making the advent calender out of a crochet garland pattern(ravelry link here), and stuffing each of the bits with a ‘proper’ tea bag.

And of course, I’ve still been working on my aunt’s Advent calender scarf. I’m now half way through (I’m at pattern number 13, and if I recall correctly, there are a few of the later patterns I decide to skip), so hopefully this will be finished soon! (Maybe itll be being blocked next week…)

I was looking up what I said about this pattern last year as I was making the other Advent scarf, and found my old blog post about work of the year. That kinda fell down last year when life got massively hectic over the summer, so here’s a word for next year: breathe! One way or the other, the PhD is going to be over, and while my back-up plan of staying in academic (which was going over to America…) has been shot out of the water, I still hope to stay in academia, my PhD expects me to be able to, and if not, I can always move back in with my parents while I sort my life out. So whatever happens, however hectic life gets, I need to remember to breathe, and that knitting helps me to relax, and nothing is permanent…

The blanket is done!!!!!

Well, blocking anyway. I am ridiculously impressed that I’ve made another blanket (so’s all of KnitSoc too, so I’m not the only one!)

What I learnt from this: take a couple of days away from ‘post date’ to find ‘finish by date’. This was supposed to be posted tomorrow, but it’s not going to be dry *facepalm*. Although things are still a little up in the air about what my friend is actually doing- she may come up and see me, so I wouldn’t be posting it anyway. So let’s hope that I remember this when I do need to post things…

I also need to think about floor space when deciding on whether or not to rent a room… if I knew my housemates better/there wasn’t a resident cat, I would be more inclined to block this in the sitting room, but hey ho! It’s not like I’m planning on blocking anything this big again (except the Dick Bruna blanket, hmm…) I think I need to think about that more

I’ve also been keeping up on my NaNo project. I haven’t yet done today’s (v is for violin), but there are a few big ones (v, y and z) which is annoying because I’ll be doing the whole work thing again next week so I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to do them. I’ll give it a good go, and try not to beat myself up if some of them take two days!

On Friday I also started knitting another Advent scarf. People may remember that I started one in blue and black mohair for my aunt last year, only to learn that she dislikes mohair… so I’m making her one this year in green non-mohair yarn. I’d forgotten how fiddly beads are, but hey ho. Theyre a better option than nupps…

Penultimate blanket post???

So this blanket is really racing along now. The joining is nearly halfway done, and I think it’s looking pretty good (having Friday off really helped with this!)

(It’s all piled up like that to make it more manageable as I add new squares in, I’ll get a decent pic of the whole thing when all the squares are added 🙂 )

This joining method is pretty awesome, and I’m now very tempted to make a new scrappy blanket joined this way. Its another way of making lots of squares and then putting them together, making it portable, but they aren’t sewn together, so it’s much less fuss than that! Maybe after Christmas! Although adding in new squares is rather annoying. I’ve got a method going pretty well, but manhandling the whole blanket is already annoying, and it’s just going to get harder…

Hopefully it’ll be finished next week… I have a deadline in my mind of posting it next Monday, so if I’ve joined it all this week, then I can do the border over the weekend, hopefully. We’ll have to wait and see really, if I can wrangle enough time to spend on it!

I’ve also decided to really get on with this annoying Dick Bruna blanket The realisation that I’ve been working on it for more than a year suddenly hit me, so I’ve decided that it can be my NaNo project 😛 So every day in November (until it’s finished) I will finish a square on it (I’ve done up to and including O is for Octopus). I should finish sometime in the middle of November then, and the damn thing will be done. I’m so never doing it again!

Intermittent blog posts the second (and a finish!)

Firstly, I have finished (and washed!) my housemate’s blanket. I absolutely love it, and don’t really want to give it away. *sigh* But I’m sure he’ll enjoy it, which is the important thing. And I think I have enough yarn left over to make me a scrappy crochet blanket. I’m thinking hexagon, because apparently my brain really likes hexagons. Ooh, I could do that mathematical half-hexagon thing. Hmm, that would involve quite a lot of sewing up, I think. I will think on that some more…

But now this has been finished, I really should get back to the alphabet blanket. *sigh*. It’s nearly finished, so it really could be quite a lot worse, but I don’t want to. I really want to start knitting Cockatoo Brae, but the blanket really should get done first…and if I save it, it would be a rather fun (and slightly stupid, given that it’s 4ply yarn) option for NaNo this year.

So at the moment ~I’m being fairly good, and I plan to continue embroidering the last few letters on the Dick Bruna blanket.

Not too much left to go! I’ll get there eventually…

Well, that was a busy week!

York University now does seminars every other week, with the result that I have to do twice as much to get the same amount of money… great. So, every other week becomes crazy busy! As it was this week, although I did manage to keep crafting, especially after I realised that there’s less than a month until Mother’s DAy here in the UK. Eek!

So, as well as the blanket I’m still working on, I’ve also been cross stitching something. And I’ve actually remembered to keep track of how long I’ve been working on i!

This is slightly less than 4 episodes of the Mentalist, which run for about 45 minutes each, so a total of just under 3 hours. It would be 5 episodes, but I miscounted, and so spent the first 10 minutes of the second episode undoing what I’d done in the first (and I didn’t count that towards my total). *sigh*

As for the blanket, I stalled on j for a while, but that’s mostly done now, so it’s back to plain sailing for a bit.

I’ve done h for hammer

i for igloo

and j for jigsaw (stalled because that was all duplicate stitch which isn’t my idea of fun!)

I’ve also been working on my scrappy blanket- it’s coming along wonderfully 🙂 It’s starting to look like a proper blanket, which is great!

I should get a post in sometime next week, since I won’t be teaching. Although not teaching really means getting on with my work, so maybe not…

G is for…

…grape.

Told you I’d get to it this week 🙂

I’m hoping to keep doing 1 a day during the week, and hopefully more over the weekend.

A,B,C,D,E…

And so far so good…

A is for apple

B is for bear

C is for castle

D is for duck

E is for (really bad) elephant

and F is for fish. Now there’s the rest of the alphabet do go…yipee!

Improve: seaming

I really don’t like seaming. To the point where I knitted the body of my cardigan all together, so I didn’t need to seam the sides. Why I didn’t do the sleeves in the round I will never know…

But I also couldn’t knit this blanket all in one piece, there are just too many colours going on. So it had to be seamed. *sigh*. I also couldn’t figure out what colour to use- it would show when darning in, and I didn’t want to drag that much yarn all the way down if I was using the mattress stitch. So I figured I’d try the crochet method, which I love!

Same idea as the mattress stitch, but using a crochet hook, rather than a darning needle. For some reason I find it so much easier, and I think it looks pretty neat too 🙂

I still have to finish knitting the last stripe (which I’m massively procrastinating over because it really doesn’t seem to have been designed with knitters in mind- I’m very tempted to knit it plain and duplicate stitch over it, it’s that bad). And then finish darning in the ends, and do all the embroidery. And then block it- and I guess washing it would be a good idea, but I’m not sure that I trust the washing machine, even though it’s acrylic!

But I think most of the letters are obvious- which ones can you guess? Any ones you don’t have a clue about?

2 knitting projects

The first knitting project is the Dick Bruna blanket I’m making. I’m onto the last stripe, so I decided it was time to start cutting off all the yarn tails, and sewing the stripes together. And since they’re still curing up (I’m blocking them after I sew it all together), I figured that a picture of the scraps would be nice 🙂

The second project is my scrappy blanket. I think it’s coming along really very well 🙂 This is the second panel, and it’s about half-way done 🙂

And, as a bonus, I finished the scarf 🙂 However, it’s still awaiting my ministrations to block and darn in ends, so there’ll be a proper finishing post about that at some point, when I get around to sorting that out 🙂

Another blanket!

So, now I’ve finished one stripe of my blanket, I decided it was an excellent time to get out another one I have the yarn for. It’s a Dick Bruna pattern (so very bright!), for my cousin, who had a baby this summer (I cross stitched the ‘love is‘ for her, remember?). Unfortunately, this pattern was photocopied in black and white, and so the whole ‘use the colours shown in the charts’ thing kinda doesn’t work… I found a picture of it online though, so this is pretty much what it’s going to look like

The pattern calls for you to knit the thing in squares and sew it together…however, I know me! Instead, I’m knitting it in stripes, and then I’ll sew the stripes together. So far I’ve finished up to and including the ‘k’ from the first column, but it doesn’t look particularly impressive yet (it hasn’t been backstitched!), but I’ll try and get a photo of it for the next blog post. I’m kinda hoping this will get done by Christmas…but we’ll have to wait and see I think for that!