Never to Early to Get the Christmas Stockings Done

This year we have two new family babies.  Baby Elle was born in February.  Baby Beaumont just arrived.  For each baby's first Christmas, my gift is a stocking.

In the past few years, I have been using the kits from Annie's Woolen's.   The yarn in the kit is a good sturdy wool.  The shades of red and green are nice and Christmasy.   The patterns give me a chance to practice colorwork.  

Baby Henry's stocking was, by request, a very simple one. He arrived on time to receive his stocking for Christmas 2014.   I used a free pattern  found on the web.

Baby Henry's Stocking

As he is the first grandchild, I made it nice and big so that it can be appropriately filled.

Beaumont's older brother Alastair received a less traditional stocking.   Lorna Pearman's Firstborn Elvish Stocking was the perfect touch of Christmas and whimsy.   Beaumont will receive a similar one.....keeping the theme within the family.

One of my grandmothers made four of the five of us felt stockings when we were small.  Those stockings were put out for St. Nicholas Day each year and were an important part of our tradition.   Making the stocking for each new baby is my way of welcoming them to the family.   (I also keep the patterns.....so a new one can be made if disaster strikes.)

The Simple and Seamless Baby Beanie

My heart leaps when I see clever and tidy decreases.   One of my favorite hat patterns, The Man Hat, is a beautiful example of decrease love at first site.  I have made this several times as the whole pattern is as excellent as the decreases.  The Man Hat is an excellent gift.

This morning, on Ravelry, I saw a lovely little garter stitch hat.   It is simple.  It is elegant.   The crown shaping decreases are, for me, engaging and a siren call to work on this project.

Maria David Castro's
Simple and Seamless Baby Hat

The Simple and Seamless Baby Hat is free on Ravelry...in both English and Spanish.   This is definitely on my "to do" list.   I may have yarn for it. (Cough, cough).   Yes, garter stitch can be tedious but it is an excellent way to showcase a wonderful yarn or a spectacular color.  Test driving the pattern to try out the decreases is a real draw for me right now.

Ravelry changed the knitting part of my world.   Now it is so easy to see what other people are doing....and how creative minds approach knitting in interesting ways.   Trolling patterns on Ravelry is one of my favorite ways to get through a knitting slump. Everybody has them....

My friend, Marjorie, sent the "anti-negativity" picture to me this week.   It came on a day when I really needed to laugh.   I liked this so much that I called my friend, Phyllis, and read it to her.  She laughed hysterically.  Later, Phyllis told me, she laughed about it all day.  Neither of us will admit to the full extent of our yarn stashes.  Neither of us seem to be able to stop adding to our stashes.   If we can't die until we use all of our yarn, we will live forever.  Time to go look at more patterns for the yarn I have.

Tin Can Knits

Knitting Design is something that really interests me.  At this stage in my life I do not...and maybe never will...have the cleverness to figure out some of the things that come out of the heads of the really inspiring designers.   I have written about the folks at Brooklyn Tweed.  When I am tired or sad or need diversion, I go to their look books for a little vacation.

Tin Can Knits, is for me, in the same category.   This is a great team.   The designs that they show are classic, fun, and have that quality of making me want to ditch the day job and knit.  Of course, needing to find a way to pay for the yarn to knit the patterns makes that impossible.

Take a break...take a look.   Your stash will thank me.

This has been a cold, cold winter

The cold this winter has been brutal...at least we have not (yet) had a lot of snow.    My knitting has been suffering has I have been huddled under blankets and afghans reading trash novels.

I am having to confront, again, the amount of yarn I actually own.   This is not pretty.  I try not to think about it all at once as it makes my mind go blank.  Not blank in a happy creative canvas way.   Just blank.  Blank in an absolute panic if I had to have it all in one place way.   We will not discuss the secondary panic about the books and paper patterns.   One can only deal with so much panic at once. 

The original purpose of this blog was to document knitting down the stash.   Okay, so that has not happened in the writing or the knitting.  We begin again.

A skein of pink sock yarn had mocked me for quite awhile.   It wasn't really enough to make a pair of socks for me and I was not sure who else I should make socks for out of the pink.  I had several good choices but just could not pick one.   My friend Barb asked for a sweater for a very tiny baby.  Solution!  Wee Liesel!

This pattern is one that I have been eying for a long time.   I thought it was adorable.   Here was a chance to test drive it in the smallest size!   The pink sock yarn was a great choice.  Even the buttons came from stash....deep inside the button cannister.

The knitting had a few challenges which frankly is good for me.   I will make this again for another little girl.   I am very happy with it.   I am even happier that all of the elements came out of the center of the stash.

Happy 2015!

I will admit that I am not at all sorry to see 2014 go.  Enough said about that.

Piper, Jace, and Mallory got hats for Christmas this year.   I had a great time knitting them and the hats arrived at Grandma Sharon's on Christmas Eve.

I will say that I am very relieved that all of the hats fit and that the kids liked them.  Piper's hat with the hearts was a modification of a pattern from Siouxie Stitches.  I used Willow yarns and was really happy with the project.   Mallory and Jace's hats were both done from the Simply Cotton Beanie pattern.   That is an excellent top down pattern that I know I will use again and again.   It is another example of genius, yet simple design.   This pattern comes in a wide range of sizes that will make it a go to pattern.   It will be, I think, excellent for using up leftovers.   I would like to knit charity hats with project leftovers instead of tucking the leftovers into bags.  I am a firm believer in not wasting.   More and more though, I don't want to hang on to things just because I might need them someday.   My thought is that if I knit up the leftovers and donate the hats, I can avoid waste and do some good.   It will also be nice for those mindless knitting moments......of which I am having many.

My friend Jackie is about to have her first baby.   She is going to go the cloth diaper route and will be using soakers.   I had half a memory of my mother mentioning my aunt knitting a pair when my oldest brother was born.   I won't go into detail, but that would have been a looooooooooooooong time ago.    Soakers are back in use.   There were a lot of patterns available and I found one that I liked.   I made a couple pairs from odd skeins of Raggi.   I am hoping that the soakers work well for the new baby.   I have included a picture of one so you can get the general idea.  It is, I think, an interesting concept.  I hope it works as well in reality!


I have been feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of yarn in my possession.  This will, truly, be the year of the great stash knit down.    As one of the locations has to be relocated shortly...goodness knows where...there is a huge incentive to pare down.  Some of the yarn will be given away; some will be knit up quickly; some will be relocated to an as yet undetermined location:  it is one more thing to do and one more reason to use what I have as much as I can.   Lightening the load and making things for others will be a good multi-tasking project this year.  

Let us hope for a happy and health year to come.

The Needles Have Been Busy

My knitting needles have been busy...and so I have I.    The Christmas deadline is looming and things are going well...despite an arithmetic error that forced me to rip out half a sock.   Count twice, knit once.

As things were looking good, I have thrown three more hats into the mix.   If things go well, they will be knit and mailed by next Monday.

A Beret for My Friend Sigrid

Some gifts are already knit and gone.   Each year I knit a lot of socks.    This year I have also been on a hat kick.   My friend Barb got a hat to match the mittens she needed.   Sigrid needed a beret.   The pattern that I found was fun to do....quick...and will look lovely on her.

Each year, I knit something for my friend, Al.  This year I wanted to do another hat.   There are so many good choices for patterns.  It took a bit to figure out what I really wanted to do.   Then, bravely, I journeyed into the stash to find the yarn.   Yes, I am spoiled with the choices in my personal yarn store.   I found some Lion Brand Alpaka that had aged to perfection.    The choices were off white and black.    The black would make a glamorous watch cap but I wanted something a little more fun for me to knit.   I found the Between Two Lungs pattern and knew that was the one.

One of my thrills in knitting is finding hat patterns with clever decreases that elegantly support the design of the hat.   The Man Hat, which I have knit several times, is an excellent example of this.   Between Two Lungs is another.  The patterning was a lot of fun to do.   There was enough interest to force me to pay attention, but not so much challenge that I would curse...much.

Between Two Lungs

Al received the hat last weekend.   It looks great on him and I hope he will wear it all winter.

Jan Thompson and I went up to All About Yarn in Coon Rapids to take a Two Color Brioche class from Diane Augustin.    The class was interesting...well paced...and a great way to learn this technique.   My yarn was too fine...should have brought something a little bulkier....so I don't have anything to show yet.  I will do the cowl pattern when I have some "knitting for me" time.   With luck, I will have that before I forget how to do it.

Mindful Knitting.....

One of my current projects is the Fairbanks Cowl from Interweave Knits 2014 Gift Issue.  The pattern is lovely and is perfect for someone I know.  One of the Willow yarns, Blossom, was perfect for the pattern.   As I had wanted to try the yarn, I was ready to go.

Mindfulness...being present in the moment no matter what one is doing....is something I have been thinking about and working on being better at.   This project has been a powerful lesson in mindful knitting.  This project has also truly increased my skills in frogging (rip it, rip it) cabled projects.  

The cabled patterns in this project are truly lovely.   Unfortunately, the patterns are also truly easy to screw up.   I am enjoying the process despite the backward progress being much faster than the forwards progress.   It is shocking to me how much my mind wanders when I am doing this...and how hard it is to rope it back to what my fingers are doing.  This will be lovely when it is done....and well worth the effort.