Halloween

I'm back.

Life went in different directions for a while, but I never stopped knitting. I'll post some of past creations as we go.

The new thing is that this year I have begun spinning. The art yarns on etsy filled me with desire, so I tried a drop spindle, and became entranced, so I ended up buying a spinning wheel. More on this at a later time.

Today I wanted to show my latest shawl.

The solid white is some yarn I spun from fiber that glows in the dark. I spun it for a misbegotten Halloween shawl that I pulled out before making this one. It was based around the wonderful Pendle Witch Illusion, but I'm just not made for solid color knitting, so I made the contrast color a mix of Halloween colors. I got 60 rows in, out of 100, and it just wasn't 'reading' as a witch from the side. (It may also have been yarn weights instead of the colors, I'm not sure why.) I ended up pulling it all out, which was a sad day.

I thought I'd wait until after Halloween before trying something else, but the yarns looked so inviting, so in the end, I whipped this one out in about 8 days so I could hang it for a couple weeks before the holiday in my office.

And now making a Halloween shawl is out of my head. I grabbed some free motifs, modified them as needed, and used some lovely orange and black Alp Supreme yarn for the non-picture parts.

Here is the top.

Here are the bats near the edge. The fringe is some Circulo Tecido Trico ruffle in white, which I cut in strips and knitted in by a hole in it, because I thought it looked ghosty hanging that way.

Here is a part I made up myself, attempting to make it look like ghosty faces. (Yes, this is the glow in the dark part, which looks cool in a dark room but doesn't show up on film at all.)

For something made in a determined rush, it has been very popular at the office.

And my cat Ellie is extremely proud of being a model!

Pink!

Here is another scarf with hairpin lace in the middle.

The theme is FUN.

Here are some close-ups.

The edging is made from thick-and-thin yarn, where I knitted in the thin part of the yarn when I cast off, leaving the thick parts to be the a loopy edging.

The pink yarn was a wonderful add-in to an order from the Spinning Rainbows Etsy store.

I didn't have quite enough to go around this very long scarf, so I pulled some spring green thick-and-thin yarn from my stash to finish off. And, not being fond of super symmetry, I ended up liking the look.

The scarf is also comfortable.

A Net with Teeth?

Not sure how to describe this scarf, but I'm enormously pleased with it.

It started with a lucky juxtaposition of yarns, as I was adding new yarns to my stash.

I had to make something with these colors! So I made one of those start-from-the-middle scarves, with the wide net as the middle (instead of the ruffle edge), the carry-along tufted yarn as the outside, and the nubbed yarn as the edging.

I cut up the nubbed yarn into bits with two nubs, and then knitted them in as I cast off.

It hangs beautifully.

It makes me think of Where the Wild Things Are.

But how does it look on?

Fabulous!

Diversions

Here are two non-knitting bits, just for fun.

The first is from Christmas. I had this idea for a pompom tree. So I made a bunch of pompoms from my leftovers bag.

Didn't they turn out well?

The idea was to make a tree where the bottom layer was 4 pompoms, the next layer 3, the next layer 1, and the top a smaller gold pompom. In theory, it was perfect.

In reality:

Not so much. It just looked like a yarn blob, very home-crafted. The pompoms lost their uniqueness, and they just looked like one large mess. (I think the tree even looks a bit nicer in the picture than it did in real life--why can't all my pictures look that way?)

So I took it apart, but I still have the pompoms. They are sitting in a bowl until I come up with a better idea of what to do with them, something that shows them off in their own uniqueness more clearly.

The second crafty attempt was inspired by this Christmas gift received by a wonderful blogger. I fell in love with it, so I got this hand from Amazon (it is slightly smaller than an adult hand, which makes it perfect for jewelry), and ordered these from Wishy Washi Tape.

I'd seen washi tape from other craft blogs I follow and from Pinterest, but had never used them before.

And here is the result.

Quite a bit more successful than the pompon tree!

Once I realized the tape would slightly wrinkle as I tried to fit it around the curves, and that it didn't matter, I relaxed and just kept adding tape bits until I was satisfied.

I love it, and as a bonus, I have a lot of tape left over.

There may be some plain flowerpots getting some decoration in the near future.

Stolen Hours?

Lately I've been interested in stoles -- long rectangular pieces. I've been using Kim Salazar's Kureopatora's Snake pattern as my basis, on size 15 or 17 needles, just under or over 40 stitches wide.

Here is the latest:

That's a yardstick, so you can see that it is over 6 feet long.

I used two of my magic balls, alternating rows, for a random but organized look.

The edging was one of those tubular yarns, mean for ruffles. I did a couple of rounds of crochet, then attached the tubular yarn in a bind-off stitch.

I don't know why I am finding making these stoles so compelling, but I do. You'll be seeing several more here.

You Can't Step in the Same Stream Twice

I gifted one of my creations this last Christmas, and just got some pictures of what was done with it.

The creation was Stream, from 2011.

This one had always slightly fretted me, because it came out heavy for an afghan, but what else do you do with it?

This is what my friend Dee did:

She made it into a wall hanging! And it looks wonderful, doesn't it!

I feel like I'm seeing it for the first time. The slight ripples really do make it seem like water.

Darn Good Scarves

I've shown these types of scarves before, but here are the latest two.

They both have multicolor silk ribbon yarn from Darn Good Yarn as the center, and then stitches picked up around the edge, with a yarnover between each middle arm.

The middle yarn does the talking, so I make the hairpin lace wide and just edge it with a couple of rows of knitting on large needles.

For the end parts, I picked up some stitches for the edge, and then increased before and after each corner stitch on every other row (the 'right side' of the garter).

These scarves are rather long, at least 6 feet. The ribbon yarn works up fast when doing the hairpin lace part. These are best suited to be worn doubled.

The edged hairpin lace scarf is now one of my go-to patterns.