recycling yarn

I was at a thrift store last week hunting for the usual treasures - linen tea towels, old quilts, etc. when I ran my hands across a sweater. OMG - it was so soft. I looked at the tag and it said 100% cashmere, made in Scotland. It is a mens XL and in fabulous shape. The sweater is a green heather colour - a colour I can't wear but I know a few people who would look fabulous in it so it came home with me. I've recycled sweaters (for yarn) before and I was a little worried that I would accidentally cut into the sweater while picking apart the seams. But this sweater was sewn together with sewing thread so ripping it was really easy. I had it apart in no time. I started by winding the yarn on the ball winder but the strands aren't spun very tightly and the yarn kept snapping. I ended up winding it by hand.

I've got about half of the back undone. I'm trying to gauge how much yarn I'll have. Colourmart claims 2300 yds of 2:28NM cashmere per 150g. The sweater weighed around 425g before frogging. I think the sweater yarn is slightly heavier than the Colourmart cashmere so I estimate that I have at least 2300 yds. I'll be skeining up the yarn and washing it to get out the kinks so there'll be an opportunity to calculate yardage.

I'm keeping an eye on all those stole suggestions because I'll be looking for a pattern for this yarn. My current favourite is the Woodland shawl. Mmmm, mossy green leaves...

The Peapod baby sweater didn't get much attention this weekend. I did reach the bottom of the armholes. I've got 3 counters going - one for the leaf chart repeats, a count of the button hole rows, and row count (from the beg of the armhole opening) so that I can match the fronts to the backs. I need more kacha counters!


This is the cutest thing I've ever knit!

random Friday

I have a bunch of little bits that I'm just going to dump into this post.

Since I can't enter my own contest, I thought I'd list the stoles that I think Gladys should make.
1. Print O' the Wave Stole by Eunny Jang - I've got a cone of cobweb wool/silk from Scotland for this project
2. Juno Regina by Miriam Felton - currently, otn so it's easy for me to recommend it
3. Hanami by Melanie Gibbons - I've got some creamy shetland lace from a small farm in Saskatchewan that would be perfect for this stole.

I've had a look at your suggestions and they are all amazing. I can see my Ravelry queue growing...

At this time of year, the malls have their big post-Christmas sales. I'm lucky that I live fairly close to 3 large ones so I've been shopping this week (walking is good for my back) and I've picked up some great bargains.

I'm allergic to all costume jewellry. I can only wear gold, titanium, and usually silver so I don't have a lot of fun jewellry to wear - just serious stuff. Imagine my surprise when I saw a silver ring sale - 6 for $3. How could I resist?


And I've been buying lots of sale books. I even got a knitting one - Luxury Knits by Amanda Griffiths. I think a more accurate title would be "Knits using Luxury Yarns". Would you buy 15 balls of Rowan Kidsilk Haze (or 3435 yds of a similar yarn) to knit a stockinette cardigan? Yep, definitely luxurious. There are some very nice patterns in it. Here are some of my favourites:




We watched the Transformers movie yesterday night and it was hilarious. There was a lot of action, too but some great one-liners as well. Just too funny. I'm going to watch the movie again tonite.

Thanks for the get well wishes. I got the house moderately clean without making my back feel worse. Between the Advil and my heating pad, I think I'm definitely feeling better today. We'll see how it goes after I tackle the mountain of laundry (the next house I buy will have the washer/dryer upstairs).

Happy Bloggiversary to us!

It's our first ever bloggiversary! One year of knit blogging down and many more to go ;)

So as a thank you to our readers, we're having a contest. To enter, leave a comment (one per person please) before midnight PST Jan 31st. And in your comment, please include a link to a knitted rectangular stole that you think Gladys should make (she's got a lot of lace yarn and she's looking for the right pattern).

Gladys says: This was inspired by Vicki's contest last year at Simple Knits. She was looking for triangle shawl ideas and ended up with 336 patterns, sorted by amount of yarn required. I love triangle shawls, but I'd like to do a rectangular stole, and I've got a lot of laceweight yarn, thanks to a few sales this month! (Dotty enabled me into the Ram Wools sale, where I also picked up some sea silk.) I'll sort all of our entries by amount of yarn too, so that at the end of this contest, we'll also have a useful list for everyone's reference!

We will be drawing for at least 2 prizes (we reserve the right to add more if there are lots of entries! :)

Gladys is giving away 2 balls of Jojoland Quartette in Blue Rose Sprucestone. It's a very soft merino-cashmere blend fingering-weight yarn.

Dotty will make a fabric project bag (winner chooses fabric) and it will include some hand dyed bamboo yarn plus a few more goodies. Don't these sound great?

Go leave a comment and good luck to everyone!

FOs 4; WIPs 12

Pattern: Wyvern socks by Marnie MacLean
Yarn: some vintage stuff called Schaffhauser Wolle Soiree (wool/silk/nylon); originally yellow and dyed with lime Kool Aid
Needles: 2.25mm dpns
Mods: I increased 8 sts after the heel turn because I couldn't pull them on. The yarn doesn't have much stretch (due to the silk?).
Notes: 29th pair of finished socks; otn since Nov 2006 - it feels so good to get these finally done!

And here's Ricky providing some quality control.


They passed the Ricky sniff test.

So that makes 4 FOs for 2008 and only 12 13 WIPs left to go (assuming that I don't cast on for anything else).

What's this then?


I did cast on for a new project. A quilting friend is eagerly anticipating the arrival of her first grandbaby and she commissioned me to knit some baby items. I started the Pea Pod baby set by Kate Gilbert yesterday night. I'm even using some yarn from my stash! As you can see, the sleeves are done (sleeve #1 was my gauge swatch) and I've started the body. The instructions for the ribbed border is poorly written. I had to go look at a few finished pictures before I could figure out what was going on. And I think there's a few errors for the size that I'm knitting. I wouldn't recommend this project for a newbie knitter.

So why am blogging on a Wed night when I should clearly be at knit nite? I hurt my back and it's really ache-y. And the quilting ladies are meeting at my house tomorrow morning so all the cleaning that I've been meaning to do when my back got better is being done tonite. Ugh!

PS. Gladys blogged again! Those scarves look great - A's got some lucky pre-school teachers!

Blogging the Christmas FOs

I did a LOT of Christmas knitting this year, and absolutely no Christmas blogging at all -- sorry about that!

The projects were a lot of fun, so I figured I'd go back in time a little just to show them off.

First off, a pair of Endpaper Mitts in an alpaca silk yarn. I was over in Victoria, and dropped into the Beehive Wool shop, and they had the yarn on for $5/ball -- what a bargain! I also reversed the colours on the second mitt because I thought it would look funky, and it did! They were given to one of the graphic designers at work, and they totally suit her.


I couldn't figure out what to give to my infant nephew this Christmas — he's a younger brother, so he's got TONS of toys and clothes. So at the last minute, I whipped up a Baby Surprise Jacket for him, and it was perfect on him. This was a hit at Knit Nite, too — I know I got at least one other knitter to start one after she saw this one.


And then there were the four preschool teachers at Andrew's school. Last year, I made them all Fetchings, and this year, they each received a Branching Out scarf.


This was such a fun pattern to knit that I'm working on another Branching Out, either for me or for one of the birthday gifts that I've got coming up in the next couple of weeks.

felting flop

Look - I'm blogging from the laptop!


Yesterday's software installation was mostly painless. I spent an hour figuring out why the laptop wouldn't go into hibernate mode when you closed the lid. It turns out that Windows Installer (needed to install Windows updates) prevents the laptop from snoozing. I still need to install the 3000 fonts that I got for Christmas. And there's one more problem that I need to look into - IE crashes when I try to view a blog that has a poll. Hmph. On the upside, I have iTunes back so I can listen to the 900+ songs in our library.

Remember that I was going to use the leftover yarn from the tea cozy to make a matching potholder? Well, I did and I felted it.


Interesting looking shape, eh? It was originally 12" x 13.5". It now measures 11.5" at the ends and 9" in the middle. The length varies depending on which part of the wavy bit you push down. Yes, it does not lie flat despite my efforts to pull it into shape before drying. It's the yarn's fault. I was running out of the multicoloured so I added in a few stripes of solid green. Of course, the two yarns (from the same manufacturer) decided to felt differently. Any suggestions for salvaging it?

It's our first bloggiversary on the 17th and we'll be holding a contest. I don't have all the details yet so you'll have to come back on Thurs to check it out.

spring cleaning

There's been a flurry of activity the last few days. I finally got around to sorting through the 2 boxes of stuff that got turfed out of the dining room during the big re-org 2 weeks ago. I also combed through the living room (adjacent to the dining room) and cleaned it up. I think it's the first time that I've been able to see the top of the coffee table. I have a car load of items to donate to charity.

On the coffee table were several single skeins of yarn that I pulled out of my stash with the hopes of making something quick. One of them caught my eye while I was cleaning up. I bought a new, larger teapot during my Boxing Day shopping and a single skein of yarn is perfect for a tea cozy!



Pattern: Autumn Tea Cozy
Yarn: Patons Classic Merino Wool in Harvest and Leaf Green (yarn from the Irish Hiking Scarf that I frog'd)
Needles: 4.5mm addi circs and dpns
Mods: Cast on 100 sts because the teapot is huge and I used smaller needles than the pattern suggests. A few other changes to accomodate the spout and handle.

I have some leftover yarn so I'm knitting a felted pot holder to match. And I have the urge to knit my other teapot a cozy. Maybe an elephant one like this.

Our broken laptop is finally being resurrected. Hubby went out yesterday morning and came back with a new hard drive, a shiny blue thing, and a huge hard drive (500GB!) that goes into the shiny blue thing. He also ordered a new laptop battery but that's a special order item so I'll probably need to pick it up next week. Hubby spent most of yesterday installing the OS, patches, and Norton. He still needs to get the wireless stuff working and then it's my turn. I get to install the rest of the software and load all the files onto it. I installed the new hard drive into the shiny blue thing (proper name is external hard drive enclosure) and formatted it (took 2 hours). It will be used for backups which is my other computer task for this week.

Today, we got up early and headed out to a farmers market. It's not exactly farmers market season but this one moves indoors at this time of year. It was our first time and we bought quite a bit of stuff - lots of bread and baked goods, russian blue potatoes (they're purple inside!), and yarn! Yummy Yarn was there and I bought a skein of Ianto.


While I was photographing my new yarn, the lighting in the room where Ricky was sleeping was just right to take some pictures of him. Ricky is a cat version of a human redhead - orangey fur, blue-grey eyes, and freckles. It is so hard to take pictures of his lovely eyes and out of the bajillion Ricky pictures that I've taken, I don't have one of his freckle (yes, he only has one that I know of). But I was lucky today and I got pictures of both.



He is one handsome kitty cat!