Tag Archives: 2020

Finished knitting projects

Every morning I knit a bit on my sock. The current one I’m working on, as detailed on this post,  is a lot of purling. And I was doing the toes (I knit socks two at a time on magic loop) and it just messed up my thumb and wrist. I probably do not purl correctly. But regardless, as a result it’s been tender and I am restricting my sock knitting (or purling at this point) to 1-2 rows a day. During the weekdays I do 1 row but over the weekend I do 2 rows because I have the time to do it slowly and not hurt myself.  I hope this will be okay with my recovery without having to completely stop knitting (purling) on it.

Every evening I work on my husband’s Weasley sweater. My goal for Q3 (which ends at the end of this month) is to finish the sleeves. I had about 20 rows of sleeve to do when I had hubby try it on. The sleeves seemed long. Now, I think that it might be the way he tried it on and the fact that none of the seams have been done but I have a feeling, he may want it longer once we’ve got it all put together nicely.  So, I started the cuff now and when I get the cuff to the length I want the sleeves to be, I plan to put them on cables and not bind off.  I will finish up the rest of the sweater in Q4 and then when everything else is done, we’ll do a try on and see how those sleeves are. By not binding off, I’ll be able to knit more cuff or tink back the cuff, knit more sleeve and then put the cuff back on depending on how much more I have to knit, if any.

I usually get to everything else on Thursday’s during our knit night on zoom.  Over the last few months I finished this cowl.

Mix Wave Cowl
9/12/2020

And last week I finished this pair of socks. All I needed to do was take a picture of it. The picture doesn’t sow the pattern very well but neither does the yarn. I love these kinds of yarn and my stash is filled with speckled, variegated, striped yarn that just do not show off cables or lace very well.  Of course, I love to knit socks with cables and lace so… they don’t go well together.

Dragon Pox
Designer: Knotty Gnome
Finished, 9/4/2020

On my sock knitting post, I wrote about pulling out my sock knitting books and knitting socks from those patterns once I finish the 5 kitted up projects that waiting patiently for their turns.  The problem is that my stash is what it is and the socks I want to knit are what they are and I have decided that I will need to appropriate my yarn to more suitable projects.  And since I do not need more socks and I do not want to buy more yarn, I am not planning to knit socks out of one of my books at this point.  I am thinking of knitting hats or mittens or shawls.  I will pull out my yarn as we get closer to year end to evaluate what I’ve got and what I want to do with it and then kit them up so that I will have my plan ready to go once my sock kits are finally finished up.

Happy knitting, friends!

~Melanie

Cross Stitch, progressing along

A Kiss for Snowman
A dimensions gold kit
9/17/2020

I finally finished the cross stitch on this Dimensions kit. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. I still have to do the back stitch so that will come around at it’s next rotation. This is not my favorite WIP to work on.  It’s a 6″ square but there are a lot of blending floss together and using 1, 2, or 4 strands at a time so it took a lot of paying attention.  I’m really happy to have gotten the cross stitch done and I hope to get the back stitch finished soon as well.

Titania
Mirabilia
9/17/2020

I worked on Titania this week and got a few stitches done before I got bored and moved on. Most of my cross stitch I stitch to finish a diagonal but this is one of those exceptions. So I don’t think I get as much done because after a couple of days I want to move on.  I may have to count stitches on this one and make it so that I get a certain amount of stitches done when it comes up on the schedule.

Gamer Nouveau
09/17/2020

And then I worked on Gamer and got another diagonal complete. This is my favorite project to work on. The kit is offered by GeckoRouge and the designer is Medusa Dollmaker. My goal for this year was 6 pages and I will have to check out where I was in the beginning of the year to figure out how much I got done. I would be really happy if I could finish the row this year.

Gamer Nouveau
09/17/2020

 

Gamer Nouveau
09/17/2020

My weekly crafty update

With the new month, I have new things.  But this week saw me enjoying the following:

A Stitch in Time, I got another diagonal done.

A Stitch In Time
Aimee Stewart
Heaven and Earth Designs
25 Count, 1×1
9/5/2020

With my cross stitch, I use the tiny decision app to pick what to work on. This time it chose A Stitch In Time. I love working on this but I need young eyes so I primarily work on it in the morning or early evenings when the light is good.  Once I finish a diagonal then the tiny decision app picks my next project.  Because we started a new month this last week, I got to start a new project. This is a new thing I’m doing.  I have a lot of patterns and kits sitting around waiting for me to do.  By a lot, I mean probably about 65.  Some of them are all kitted up and some of them are not.  Anyway, I was watching something on YouTube and from something someone said, the idea of dying with all these unstitched projects made me sad. For some reason I wasn’t sad if I had a ton of WIPs. I was sad to not have stitched on these projects.  For quilting, and knitting, I can only have so many WIPs going on.  It seems once I have more than a certain number, I get twitchy and anxious.  I don’t know why. I guess my brain can’t take that many WIPs for those kinds of projects.  I realized that this is not the case with cross stitch.  Cross stitch takes forever for me. Mainly because I love big projects like full coverage Heaven and Earth Designs.  One of those working all the time, will take me over 3 years to do. So if I wait until one is done before starting another, it would take forever to get through and stitch all the projects I have.  So I decided it doesn’t matter how many I have going on. I get so much joy stitching on the projects that I love that I decided to start a new project each month.

 

September new start
Too Glam to Give a Damn
14 count, 4×1
9/5/2020

Too Glam to Give a Damn
14 count, 4×1
9/5/2020

For September, my new start is Too Glam to Give a Damn.  Luckily it’s a small one. I picked this in August and took the month to go through my stash, pick fabric and pull floss.  In this case, I also purchased floss from Joanns.  It’s pretty much called for colors with the exception of Kreinik gold. You don’t see it here as I’ve not stitched anything with the gold yet but I could not find Kreinik gold anywhere.  And I didn’t want to buy it from amazon.  So I just used the DMC gold in a skein.  The fabric is mystery fabric. I believe I won this from a giveaway from the Hobbies Up To Here podcast gals a year or so ago.  It’s perfect for this dragon fly.

New Start for October
Ariadne
Heaven and Earth Designs
No details yet
9/5/2020

And on September 1, I asked Siri to pick a number from 1-65 and it picked my October start, Ariadne. I will take the month of September to kit it up.  Because it’s a Heaven and Earth Design and full coverage, it will take a lot of Floss. I believe it’s around 98 colors.  But I will not kit up the whole thing, I’ll just buy the floss I need for the first two diagonals.  Even though I’m only buying floss for the first two diagonals, it’s important I buy all the floss for a particular color.  For example, let’s say I need 3 skeins of DMC 333 (which is a beautiful purple, if my memory is correct), I will buy all 3 skeins now even though I will not need all of the skeins in the first 2 diagonals.  The reason is because I will want to make sure all 3 skeins come from the same dyelot.  I’ve seen a lot of flosstubers (cross stitch channels on YouTube) try to match skeins and then you’ll see a line from where the old skein was next to the new skein.  With DMC, it’s not that big of a problem as long as you are working on the project in the same time frame.  But given that this will probably take me years to complete, I wouldn’t want to grab a skein 10 years from now because even DMC colors change from time to time. Most cross stitch patterns that I’ve seen usually indicate how many skeins you’ll need.  If your pattern does not, then you’ll probably just need 1.

~happy stitching.

Melanie