Prize: too much yarn for my baby blanket!

My niece had a bouncing baby girl so now I can share pix of the baby blanket I knitted for her. She lives in Florida so I wanted a cotton yarn in sunny colors. I found this gorgeous Cascade Sierra Quatro in Color #80, a combination of buttery yellow, mint green, and rose. It's 80% Pima Cotton and 20% wool and washable. Perfect for a Sun Belt Baby!

I found this fast-knitting pattern for free here: http://www.theyarncottagefairhope.com/patterns/4ballblanket.pdf . I'm a sucker for a basketweave.

Here's the closeup of both sides, which are different from each other, but equally attractive, IMO:



Here's the whole blanket. I expanded the dimensions slightly so it would be useful a bit longer.



And here's your prize because I overbought yarn for the project: two skeins of the Cascade Sierra Quatro, color #80!



Go to my website http://www.nancyherkness.com/ and enter my contest there. Just include the word "yarn" in the comments, and I'll know to enter you in the drawing for this fiber. As a bonus, you'll be entered in my regular website contest for the silver heart pendant.

Good luck and Happy 2011!

FO: I beat the baby!

That headline got your attention, didn't it?

However, my blog has nothing to do with child abuse. I'm just very pleased with myself because I finished blocking the baby blanket one week before the baby was born. This is a first since usually I am woefully behind when it comes to baby gifts. Often I have to give them to the NEXT arrival in the family because the baby the gift was intended for has long outgrown it.

This one though is right on time. The recipient was born at 1:00 a.m. this morning. Mother and baby are both well. Sadly, my nephew the daddy hasn't met his new son yet because he's in the Navy and is currently at sea.

This is the blanket I made by adapting the pattern for my Darling Daughter's Boundless Blue Blanket. I think it's really pretty and very practical.

Closeup detail below.



Next up: I'm going to attempt to knit a top for myself with some gorgeous yarn a red-headed knitter whose initials are B.B. gave me. The top and the yarn seem meant for each other but I don't dare try to knit a top to give away. I'm afraid it wouldn't fit.

FO: Boundless Blue Blanket in use

I finished the Boundless Blue Blanket in time for my Darling Daughter's birthday. Yay! To prove that it is appreciated, here's a candid photo of DD wrapped in the warm turquoise baby alpaca while Facebooking in her bed. Can you tell she gets cold easily?

FO: Bib for a new little girl

Just to prove I'm not a total waste-of-life as a knitter these days, I wanted to show you an FO:



Thanks to Mason-Dixon knitting, I have a bib all ready for the imminent arrival of my nephew's new baby (due tomorrow!). It's made of Frog Tree Picoboo which is lovely and soft to the touch.

I took the advice of a brilliant person on this blog and used the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of rows per stripe (1, 1, 2, 3, 5 and then back down). The mom's a math teacher so she'll really appreciate that. Not to mention the fact that I like the way it looks.

I tried a not entirely successful experiment with the edges. In previous bibs, I didn't like the way the color change bled up a row every time, so for this bib I cast on and knitted one edge with both colors of yarn. Then I whip-stitched the other edge with both colors of yarn when I was done. It looks okay but not great (probably a function of the fact that I'm a lousy whip-stitcher). Anyone have a better suggestion for that particular problem? I'm all ears!

P.S. I finished the Boundless Blue Blanket at last! Wahoo! Photos to follow.

Scarf in use

I had to share this photo of my handsome nephew on his way to a big game, wearing the scarf I lovingly knitted for him. It's always gratifying to see one's FO being used and enjoyed. Go, Demon Deacons!

FO: Alma Mater Scarf

I did it! I finally finished something! Of course, my nephew's birthday is September 10th and the scarf is for him so I really had no choice.

This is an adaptation of a pattern from Scarfstyle which switches right sides every four inches or so, has stripes, and some interesting ribbed texture. It's very manly somehow. Can you tell my nephew goes to Wake Forest (Go, Demon Deacons)? He requested that I include his initials, hence the LCN on the other end of the scarf.

Many, many thanks to all of you Yarnies for your suggestions on hiding the back of the intarsia. Taking your advice, I ended up knitting two plain back panels the size of the section with the letters and sewing them onto the back. (I wanted to do double-knitting but found it too complicated with the intarsia pattern; my brain is very feeble.) I left one end open to create a pocket for holding ticket stubs, cash, Kleenex, or whatever. I got that idea from a NJ Devils scarf my husband gave me which has a zippered pocket built in.

(I know this just looks like black but it is the knitted back panel/pocket, and looks much neater than the reverse side of the intarsia.)

Woo hoo! Of course, I still have to complete the white lace scarf which will probably never be done because I'm convinced Barbara's Sugar Maple magic has bewitched the ball of yarn so it never, EVER ends. And I'm working on a beautiful soft blue throw blanket which I'm trying to finish before Christmas as a gift. It takes me forever to do one row because it's so darn BIG. But the yarn is so gorgeous that I love having it draped over my lap. And my (different, older) nephew and his wife are expecting a baby so I have to knit a bib for that. And I''ve found a pattern for a sweater I want to knit for myself. And...yes, I've still got the knitting disease.

FO #4

My most important FO, at least as far as my so-called writing career is concerned, is my finished and published book. Romeo, Romeo by Fran Baker is available as an eBook in any format, including Kindle. It's a contemporary romantic comedy, kind of sexy and kind of funny.

You can read the first chapter for free here:

http://www.belgravehouse.com/bookstore/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=477

And you can get it in Kindle format here:

http://www.amazon.com/Romeo/dp/B002G1YTIA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246740939&sr=8-1

FO #1

Here's my first FO. My peach tree produced and I made 3 pies for eating and 4 for freezing. Now my apple tree is going to town, so I've got my rolling pin primed.

(U)FO: Darth Sweater

I have returned from the Dark Side: Darth Sweater has been conquered and here it is (ominous music swelling in background):







(I put the paperback there to show you the scale of this black monster. It's huge!)




Yes, my MIL is in proud possession of the world's largest, most evil black sweater ever. She's very happy and I'm even happier! It's done, it's done!!!! It looks great on her because she's very tall and statuesque (yes, I envy her that greatly--on me the sweater looks like a three-man tent.)





Much as I complained about this project (and you had to listen to it), I also learned a lot which I will happily share with you.




1) Zippers are not that hard. I got it in on the first try and I was a zipper virgin. The two tutorials Dallas and Cindi recommended were fantastic. They demystified the process and took me through step-by-step. What would I do without you guys on this blog? Here are the links again:

http://claudiasblog.net/2006/03/everything_i_know_about_puttin.html

http://www.unwindknitting.net/archives/2005/09/a_successful_zi.php

One thing I will note: I used Claudia's suggestion NOT to baste the two sides of the sweater together before I laid in the zipper, mostly because I wanted the zipper teeth to show since it's sort of part of the sweater's decoration.

The other thing I learned about zippers is that it's difficult to find one over 14 inches that doesn't separate at the bottom. So I had to fudge a bit by sewing up the zipper opening to fit the zipper. (You can see my zipper results below.)





2) My Lovely LYS Lady showed me how to graft the folded down edge of the collar to the inside of the knitting with a sort of modified Kitchener stitch (my first time for that too). This created a nice smooth join (see below). However, I have to admit that it's incredibly tedious to do.







3) Basting with a contrasting color (red in this case) is hugely helpful. I used it for the zipper and for the grafting line of the collar. It's really hard to see stitch lines in black yarn and I needed to keep the collar line even so it met up on the other side exactly in the right place. So I basted a guide line through the black and it kept me on the straight and narrow.



(Below is one of the pretty Italian buttons I chose for the pocket.)





4) Blocking before you sew the pieces of the sweater together makes finishing vastly easier. I made sure to block the sleeves and the front and back even with each other so my seams matched up almost effortlessly.


(Anotther up-close view of D. S.)

Does anyone else have a project they couldn't wait to be done with and give away?