I really just needed an excuse to post this beautiful picture.
I’m hosting my first KAL! To those who are not deeply involved in the online knitting community, this stands for Knit-ALong (I know, it should just be KA, KAL bugs me every time I see it.) This means I am hosting a forum thread on Ravelry in which people who are knitting the Pippa Toque can talk about it and show pictures of their projects. Three winners will be randomly drawn from those who have posted pictures of their finished projects. The winners will be gifted a free pattern of their choice from my pattern store. If you’re interested you can join in here,the more the merrier! (You’ll need a Ravelry account, which is free and oh so useful.)
I just released my first free pattern, the Pippa Toque. It’s a cute little hat to keep heads and ears toasty and warm on cold winter days. The close stitches and stranded colour work make this a nice thick fabric for great insulation. Thank you to Eleanor Dixon for technical editing and to Ryan Barr for the wonderful photography again.
I have been one busy lady lately. All work and no play makes me fairly happy actually, but I must confess that the meals I’m putting on the table have been a little lacking. Tonight I boiled some pasta and threw in a jar of sauce. Everyone knew better than to complain too much.
But, I am getting a lot of stuff done. A little over a week ago I managed to finish another pair of thrummed mittens for my friend’s other little boy. The boys are very close in age and their hands aren’t that different in size so instead of adding another repeat to the pattern I just went up to a size 6 needle (rather than the size 5 I used for the smaller ones). This gave me an extra 1/2″ in width and height, which was just about what I needed. I chose another random stripe pattern but with the same colours, so the mittens would be similar but different enough that they would know whose were whose. I delivered them last week, but apparently the boys are not big fans of the feel of the thrums on the inside so we are considering lining them.
Last week I worked and worked and worked on my kids’ cowboy costumes. I am pleased to report that the damn shirts are finally done. I am not going to rant now about how painful the process was, I’ll leave that for a future post. For now, the mitts…
I was recently commissioned by a friend to knit some thrummed mittens for her and her two boys. They are wonderfully warm mittens, perfect for these frigid Cow Town winters. I still had lots of bright colours of Cascade 220 and some taupe-coloured Merino roving left in my stash so I was able to start on them right away. I decided to do them in a random stripe pattern of four colours. Since I’m terrible at being random or overly creative when it comes to these things, I hit up the handy-dandy Random Stripe Generator, input the colours and rows I wanted, and refreshed away until I found a pattern I liked. Also, since I have a terrible memory, I looked up the Yarn Harlot’s thrum tutorial. Then I did a swatch to figure out how many stitches and rows per inch (aka stitch gauge and row gauge) I had for my yarn and needle choice and did a little math to determine how many stitches I needed. I made a chart in Excel and added my stripes, thrums, thumbs and decreases and badda-bing, badda-boom, I had myself a pattern. I’ll include the chart here for anyone who might be curious, but with the warning that you have to do some reading between the lines (or just go ahead and ask me questions) if you’re going to try and make a mitten from it. I’m also going to show a little detail on how to make thrums.
Lets start with the chart…
The V’s represent where the thrums are added. Dashes are purls.
And now a brief tutorial on how to make a thrum. The usual advice is to make up a bunch so that you can just reach for them when you need them, and that is certainly most efficient, but I am neither usual nor efficient. I usually make enough for a row when I get to a thrum row, it breaks up the monotony.
Pull off a small piece of roving about 3 inches long (our lovely Queen for scale).Fold each end in to the middle.
Give it a twist. I like to give mine a little more twist just as I’m about to use it as I find they like to untwist if left to their own devices.
And then a little about how to add the thrums…
Insert needle into stitch to knit, place the thrum over the needle, bring the yarn around like usual……then pull the yarn and thrum through the loop as usual.On the next row, knit the thrum and yarn together through the back of the loop.
And then you knit and knit and knit some more. And then you have oh-so-cute, oh-so-warm mittens.
Since it is mid-October I’m having a bit of a crafting crisis. On one hand, we woke up to an inch of snow here yesterday so I am kicking mitten and hand production into high gear. P’s head and one hand are covered, but that other hand is still out in the cold for now. I’ve come up with new hat and mitts designs that are being tested right now. They are fairly simple and quick so I’m hoping to release them as free patterns that I’ll post on the blog as well. More on that to come.
On the other hand, it is getting awfully close to Halloween and I’m really hoping to be able to make the kids’ costumes this year. For the first 3 years of motherhood there was just no way I was going to go out of my way to make costumes when they had perfectly cute ones at Old Navy for $15. Last year we did make A a pretty cool costume out of a box – he was a construction worker…
But this year I own a sewing machine, and even kinda know how to use it. So I went out the other day and picked up this Simplicity pattern and plan to make the kids cowboy/girl costumes. I figure they can double-up as Stampede outfits next year. I’ve decided to skip making the pants and skirt, they can just wear their regular jeans, so I’m only making the shirts. As I was looking through the fabrics I realized that if I’m going to be making a shirt, why not make it something durable and nice that can be worn everyday. So I bought these beautiful fabrics and I’m going to use buttons or snaps instead of the velcro the pattern calls for. I’m hoping to get working on them this weekend, so maybe next week I’ll be able to post the finished product.
Cowtown Knits 