Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Wow, has it really been that long?

So, what happened to the last two months? One of these days I will get internet at home and posting will become frequent again. Right now I'm chilling in a crappy hotel in California on my way home for a week, really getting wild for New Year's:


The blue tube is Oreos I brought in my carry on from Singapore, don't ask me what language that is. The rest is courtesy of the pizza delivery man. :)

Anyway, my knitting output has been embarrassingly small. But, it's that time of year so I finally finished some gifts that I've been working on for ages, nobody reads this blog so it's safe to post about them a couple days early.

Here are some socks I finally finished after being a WIP for like half a year. They go to a male friend of mine.


I really enjoyed this cable and moss stitch pattern (from Sensational Knitted Socks) and wouldn't be surprised to see it on my needles again. Earlier I mentioned that one of the toes is screwy, I realized that I simply had more stitches on one needle than the other and needed to do some rearranging before beginning the decreases. My non-knitter friend will absolutely not notice.

This is a pair of mittens, knit for my bff and crafty genius Corinna. I just finished one of them, so one is blocked and the other is still unblocked. Funny thing, the unblocked one is the bigger one. I guess that just goes to show how stressed I was at work a couple months ago when I knit the first one!

It was a joy to knit this pattern (Ruba'iyat Mittens that I found on Ravelry), though if I did it again I would shift the cuff so it matches up with the hand part. The yarn is from Knitting Notions (note: this price of this yarn definitely puts it in "splurge" category for this student-loan-laden lady, but I've got a pair of mittens and a pair of socks out of two skeins, with oodles left over), and I adore both colors. Colorwork mittens are likely to be my next obsession, I can bring them to work knit them while I am taking a youtube break, and they are the right size project so that following the chart is fun.


I also knit a Koolhaas hat with the extra yarn from the sweater, another gift for a male friend. This guy happens to have a ginormous head so I added two pattern repeats (cast on for 120 st). Since there were more stitches remaining at the last round, I added one last round of k2togs to avoid a big hole at the top of the hat. I took the pics pre-blocking, but this yarn is from colormart and had to have the oil washed off of it so it did get blocked before gifting.


I love this pattern even though the first time I knit it (before I had the blog) I had an awful time. That was a couple years ago, and I realized how far I have come as a knitter. I remember the first time with this project that the pattern was tough for me to figure out and I had to refer to it frequently and frog a bit, but this time everything seemed so intuitive that I knit most of this on the train without even having the pattern with me.



With all these projects finished I have only one WIP. One!


This is the Cleopatra Wrap (Rav) from Sensual Knits. It's been on the needles for roughly a year now and at this point it's almost-mindless knitting for the next eternity.

But, waiting for me at my mom's house is a whole bunch of new yarns to play with, so I'm not likely to be monogamous for long. ;)