Knitting

Last day of the Year 2025 – an FO Hat and Just Started Hats and a Baby Sweater.

/ LDSVenus / 5 Comments

I started the baby sweater (in the 1st picture in the light blue, Spa color way) in Yarn Bee Warm & Cozy yarn a few weeks ago, but had to frog it and start again. Been a while since I’ve done the Tin Can Knits Flax sweater pattern. Plus I decided to do a cable on the sleeves instead of the garter stitch. I have the neck done and the stitch markers in to mark off the front, back and sleeves. Just started the increases for the raglan part. I will be working on it soon, it needs to be done in February.

The hats are something I work on during the year for the local homeless shelter and as a bonus they give me a mindless knit when I need to knit but don’t have the brain power to think about complicated patterns. I don’t normally have more than one on my needles at a time, because having too many things going at one time gives me anxiety. But, for some reason, I started 3, sigh. The one in the 1st picture, that is finished, was done with I Love This Yarn, Print in the Mahogany Singe color way, it’s a very nice color. The 2nd one in blue in the 2nd picture is the I Love This Yarn, print color way Blueberry Buckle, which is also a very nice color knit up. The 3rd one I went with Yarn Bee Yarn ID in the color way Thistle (a light lavender). All these yarns I buy at Hobby Lobby on the weeks that they are 30% off (which is every other week) and they are all worsted weight. Hobby Lobby has a nice selection and you can also order them online if you don’t like to go to a store to shop. I’m a tactile person and like to see and handle the yarn before I buy :P. Anyway these should keep me busy for a few weeks. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will start spinning again too.

Hope everyone has a wonderful and blessed New Year!!!

Halloween at the Farm, Alpaca spin Turned into Hat and New Hats for Warmth Start

/ LDSVenus / 10 Comments

This was the Halloween celebration at the farm this past Saturday :). The first two pictures are some of his decorations, then there are several pictures of the alpacas wearing costumes, lol, some of them had trouble leaving them on! You can see the male behind the fence with a bow tie and little Apollo also has a tie on, some of the females were wearing hats. Libby the llama said, nope! They will be decked out at Christmas too :).

The next to the last picture is some sport weight hand spun I turned into a hat for my friend that gave me the smaller wheel that I use at the farm during alpaca days to show spinning to the people who come out to enjoy the alpacas as a thank you. It’s a paid for pattern, Husband Request Hat on Ravelry. I changed it a little so I made it a little longer and knit 4 purl 2 so it’s a little more stretchy, but I wasn’t sure of his head measurements and I am not a fan of the hats that fit skin tight so I thought this was the best way to go. Hope it fits him :P.

The last picture is the new hat I’m working on with the Hats for Warmth project I work on for our local homeless shelter. This will be hat number 5 this year, one more after this and I will send them off to the shelter. I am using a #6 16″ circular needle and I Love This Yarn in the print color #red tweed. It’s not really a tweed, it’s a darker red with black speckles on it, LOL, but it is pretty. I am enjoying knitting it.

Update Look for Happiness Blanket

/ LDSVenus / 4 Comments

I am almost ready to start the border, I decided I didn’t need more pattern rows as I think it is long enough :). Sorry for the lighting, we had drizzling rain off and on most of the day and no sunshine so nice pictures are a bit of a hit and miss. When I’m done I’ll wash and block it and take a better picture. :). I have also been working on the Hats for Warmth Project that I do to send hats to the local homeless shelter. Maybe next week I can start on those stranded knitting Christmas tree balls that I bought last year from Arne and Carlos’ website. I can watch their YouTube video for instructions on how to do it. Their Christmas Stockings and sock patterns are on sale at the moment. Closer to Christmas they might have their Christmas tree balls patterns on sale as well, they are really pretty :).

Spinning Purchase and Knitting Update

/ LDSVenus / 8 Comments

Ok, I hemmed and hawed and decided to buy a set of wool combs from Bam Fiber Works . I got the double row, fine wool combs with a magnetic comb cover. LOL so glad I got those covers, these things look like weapons!!! It came with a bottom that you can clamp to a table and had a nice set up to hold the comb still while you use the other comb to comb through the fiber and align it and and clean it from short cuts and left over vm. I will be washing some of the 2nd cuts from the cria (baby alpaca) fiber I got so I can try it out. Gotta be careful using those, they can do some damage!! These combs are very nice, I will enjoy learning to use them (carefully!!)

On my Look for Happiness Blanket I have the bottom border and 20 patterns done (4 rows to a pattern). This is the medium size and I need to do about 49 total patterns before doing the top border. So almost halfway done. If it doesn’t look like yarn chicken, I might add an extra pattern or so before the doing the top border. I am almost done with the 2nd skein and I have 4 more, so I might be able to make it a little longer, I’ll see where it is when I finish the 3rd skein. I’m hoping to be further along before Tour de Fleece starts on July 5th when the Tour de France begins. We spin on our spinning wheels on the days that the bicyclists ride and have two rest days when they do. We don’t normally spin all day, just however much time we have decided to spin, I’ll probably spin 20 to 30 min a day, it ends on July 27th. Will need to buy a new Tour de Fleece tee shirt this year :).

Hope everyone is well and enjoying the summer!

Knitting Update and an Agaparthus Plant

/ LDSVenus / 10 Comments

Time for a knitting update. Picture one – (if you click on the picture it will enlarge) I have been working on my Hats for Warmth project so I will have hats for the homeless shelter this fall, gotta get a head start on it :P. The finished one is from I Love This Yarn from Hobby Lobby, color Deep Sea Diving/842. The one next to it is still from Hobby Lobby but it’s their Yarn ID, color Indigo, it looks like a denim. Really pretty. I am also using that same yarn and color for a new Look for Happiness Blanket. I really like the softness of this yarn. I love this pattern and find it extremely comforting and peaceful to knit. It is for a Christmas gift and since it’s the medium size instead of the baby size, it will take about 6 skeins, I decided I needed to start early, but to be honest, I don’t mind knitting on it all year long at all.

The 2nd picture is an Agaparthus plant. My son gave it to me about 5 or 6 years ago for Mother’s Day and it did well outside the first year and had so many blooms. It did not like it inside my house tho’ when winter came and I needed to bring it in, I do not have the full sun it needs inside my apt. I struggled to barely kept it alive and because it was so weak I was afraid to leave it outside in our sometimes windy and very hot summers , and then all of a sudden it’s come back to life and has a stalk that might actually bloom. When I know the warm is here to stay I will try to put it outside again and hope it will grow!! Time will tell.

Blanket FO, Hat Frogged and Hail!

/ LDSVenus / 10 Comments

I finished the Look for Happiness baby blanket for an expectant mother in my church. :). Hope she likes it. It was a very enjoyable knit, not complicated, but enough “need to pay attention to one of the rows” to keep your interest. I found it a relaxing knit. 🙂

On March 19th we had a little hail storm. I thought it was just a really heavy rain, until I saw these (2nd picture) on my balcony!!

I had the hat finished that I was working on with this skein of yarn I (that I had finished spinning for the 2023 Tour de Fleece) but was not satisfied with the hat at all!! The yarn was too thick and the needles I had gone down a couple of sizes, trying to compensate for the yarn weight, were a size or two to small and made it too dense and it was still to big and the cables didn’t show well. So I frogged it, sorry I never did get a picture of it. The yarn is a light bulky (because it’s a tweed) and the pattern called for a dk weight. I have chosen another pattern but will probably still have to adjust it, or maybe just keep looking for a better pattern.

Hope everyone is safe with all the crazy weather, take care, be safe!

Update on the Baby Blanket & Frigid Temps.

/ LDSVenus / 6 Comments

The first picture is the Look for Happiness blanket (baby size). I am about 3/4’s finished. Getting excited to get this finished, even tho I am enjoying it, I have other things to get busy on!! The lightbulb markers you see running up the left side are counting 10 center patterns (four rows per pattern) because I need 39 and it is easier to keep track of how many I’ve knitted :). Nine center patterns left then the top border :). I will make this again!

The 2nd picture is our weather from yesterday afternoon to 3am this morning. We were almost as cold today, but starting tomorrow we will be a few degrees warmer and by Friday we will actually hit the lower to middle teens (without wind chill). I have stayed in my house yesterday and today, not my favorite thing getting out in way below 0 degrees weather. They are promising us lower 40’s on Sunday and Monday, impatiently waiting! Spring is getting closer even if it doesn’t feel like it :P.

Yarn I Got for a Christmas Project

/ LDSVenus / 8 Comments

I wish they would quit changing things on WordPress, this took an hour to get the pictures almost where I wanted them because creating the one choice I usually use, made them way to big and very long with no way to make them smaller. Ugh!

Anyway, my mind is un-fogged and I can think straight again and knitting on the blanket again, I’ll put a picture up of my progress in a few days or a week. I was very sick for 3 weeks in Jan, with some ugly respiratory virus’, RSV and influenza A, not at the same time (thank goodness!) but as I was almost over one I got sick with the other, very nasty critters.

The first picture is from some extra cold air that came down from Canada in Jan. Yes that is frost on the inside of the metal plate on my sliding glass door inside my apt. If I’d get some heavy thermal drapes that might not happen or if it did, I wouldn’t see it :P. I’m not a cold weather girl, but here I am anyway. sigh.

The second picture is the yarn I ordered before Christmas but didn’t get to start the Christmas gifts I wanted to do, partly because I was sick with a cold (this has been an ugly winter for getting sick for everyone I know!!) and wasn’t up to it. But now I can tell you what I got them for. I bought some patterns from Arne & Carlos and the Christmas tree decorations with the knitting Christmas ball color work ornaments was one of them. I will need to buy more of this yarn as I go. There are 24 ornaments in this pattern for $7, but just before Christmas they are 1/2 off. I’m really not into color work, but these aren’t very big and maybe I’ll decide I like it better than I did years ago. I haven’t started working on any yet, they will still be gifts, but I have a blanket and a couple of hats and a pair of fingerless mitts to finish first. All this sick stuff reset my brain and now that I feel human again, my knitting mojo is back. But this year I will have a little less time to knit because the new calling I now have in my church is much busier than the calling I had before. Especially while I figure out what I’m doing and get use to it!!! Having a little anxiety over the change and that is normal for me with change :P, but the knitting should help with that!

Some Catch Up Before New Year’s

/ LDSVenus / 15 Comments

Ok, some of this is a more than a month old and some is this month. If you click on the picture you are looking at it will enlarge. The first picture is a vertical swift my son made for me out of pvc pipe from some plans that I found online (maybe Ravelry). It was made, when finished, for a 4 yard skein around, but I only wanted a 2 yard skein so he cut it down a bit for me. Nice to have a great son who is willing and able to do stuff like this for me, I’m very grateful because he has a full time job and his farm to run, he could have said, I don’t have time, but he made it for me anyway, he is a sweetie!

The next two pictures are to show my progress on the Look for Happiness baby blanket I’m working on. I am loving this pattern, it’s such a pretty pattern, and it’s peaceful to make. I figure I am almost 1/2 way finished :). I took one up close so you could see the pattern a little better. I am still working on the fingerless mitts and will put a picture up when I get one finished and start the other one.

The next 3 pictures are at my son’s farm’s last Saturday with the public for the year (the Saturday before Christmas). He had to postpone from the week before because we had had an ice storm, I took the pictures before people started arriving. The first picture is Libby (the Llama) in a Christmas Top Hat, she was not impressed, hehe. The next 2 pictures are some of the female alpacas at the farm, 2 of them are wearing Christmas hats. They were ok with them. Libby is a bit more head strong, but that is a llama for you :P. They are all loving the cooler temperatures. There were cookies and hot chocolate for the visitors and my son’s mother in law made a wonderful chile con carne, for those of us working at the farm, for lunch, soooo good!!! She promised me the recipe.

Real cold weather is finally on the way, hello winter!

Fiber and Yarn and Projects

/ LDSVenus / 8 Comments

Well, I might have accidentally bought another 8 oz of spinning fiber, my picture didn’t really capture the sparkles. Let’s face it I have AD-OS (attention deficit – Oh Shiny!). I now have the same fiber, that I bought in yellow, now in cranberry. Thought it might make a nice batt with yellow, gradually blending the yellow and cranberry together toward the middle for an orange gradually blending back out to the, cranberry for a fade, well it works in my head anyway. Just a thought. As usual I got this from Camaj Fiber Arts.

I saw that KnitPicks is having their annual yarn sale (until 11/27 at 11:59pm so hurry!!!) and I got the Chroma worsted weight, 70% super wash wool, 30% nylon, on sale 60% off for $4 a skein so I bought 3. Then I decided I wanted to try to make this Brioche cowl, Purple Mountain Majesties from KnitPicks, I think it was a free pattern. I have never tried brioche before and it’s small (lets see if I’m biting off more than I can chew) so I bought 2 skeins in the colors of the cowl in the Chroma fingering weight, not 60% off, but it was 50% off so it was $6 per skein, still not bad. I got them all in and they are gorgeous, not merino soft but soft enough. But they are single ply, ugh, no where on the skein did it say it was single ply. Not my favorite to knit with, but I have them and they are pretty, I will see what I can do with the 3 that are not in a project yet, hats maybe, is 198 yards is enough for a non cabled hat? I’ll do some digging.

Haven’t gotten notice yet on the yarn being shipped for my special project, hope it comes in soon, I think it’s been the 2 weeks they said it took them to get it in. I need to go buy more color ink for my printer with my next paycheck so I can print out the color work Christmas stocking that Arnie and Carlos are doing as a free knit along. I’ve never really liked knitting color work and here I am jumping head long into deep water with a huge color work sock with an after thought heel (never done before, I can barely do the regular heel), and it’s charted (maybe I can read colors better than I can read symbols) oh my, life is so interesting! But if you are following along with Arne and Carlos on YouTube, it is really pretty.

Was warm today in the low 50’s, but tomorrow is 39F and it gets colder and colder from there. The next Monday will be around 22F, and after tonight most nights, will be in the 20’s (F) to lower teens. Winter is on its way!