And We’re Off!

I don’t recall if I mentioned it that I signed up for Dish Rag Tag hosted by Emily of Yarn Miracle. I signed up for it in June, a bit of competitive knitting, if you will.

We’re all on teams and and each team captain (that’s me) receives a box from Emily with a dish rag, two skeins of dish cloth cotton and a little goodie. We take one or both skeins and knit a dish cloth, put in a new goodie, two new skeins of yarn and the new knitted dish cloth and mail it to the next participant. Earlier in the summer, I was having a dish cloth affair and was really into knitting my dish cloth cotton. Since my last dish cloth bender, I’m actually down to just 5 skeins, but now I want to buy more. Anyhow, enough of my “addiction” talk.

I received my box on Friday evening. M and I had planned to enjoy an outdoor music concert, but the weather looked shaky and M2 had all four wisdom teeth removed that day and wasn’t feeling too well that evening, so we skipped it. I checked my mailbox and I had a package, yay! On the left is the dish cloth I received from Emily, a 4 Corners dish cloth. On the right is my finished Violets dishcloth (warning pdf!)

Then a finished dish cloth all by itself in Sugar ‘N Creme Denim Blue. After I finished it, I was sad to see it go. I’ll be needing to pick up some more yarn in this colorway (umm, yeah, back to that “addiction” talk).

And the box is on its way to the next contestant on the “Running Ragged” Team:

I really love the dish cloth pattern, Violets. The only problem is that when I see it, I think it’s so pretty, I might have a hard time actually using it. I think that’s why most of my dishcloths are plain, just garter stitch.

Ooops, gotta go check on a fully submerged DFS. Later all, hope you’re all having a good weekend!

FOs to share

I kept meaning to post sooner, but was thwarted at every turn. I took pictures and then my camera battery died on me while downloading photos. Of course, it was before work, so I didn’t have time to wait for the batteries to charge up again. And yesterday, I really wanted to post, but this pesky last minute packing slowed me down.

Yes, I said packing. I am in Atlanta visiting my mom, sister and nephew and I’m excited to be here. Even though, of course, I am missing Estes, *sigh*. The sacrifices one makes.

Anyhow, I finally finished seaming those two baby raglan sweaters. If you can believe it, I knit both sweaters in a period of 4 days. The pattern knits up very quickly and I think it’s quite cute, but all of the ends it provides, that and the fact that I added a stripe on the sleeves and the body, just means more ends to weave in. Once I sat down and made myself work on it on Saturday evening and Sunday, it was done. Well, both of them are done. The smaller one in blue was made for a co-worker whose baby was just born (in early April), but now I fear it is too small, so I gifted that coworker with the baby burp cloths.

Baby Raglan sweater from Debbie Bliss’ The Baby Knits Book
completion: started mid April ‘07, finished seaming mid-June (very sad I know)
Yarn used: Cotton-Ease in Cherry Red & Licorice, Candy Blue and Licorice
Size needle: US 7 (4.5 mm)
Modifications: adding striping. In the future, I will have my friend Susan help me modify this pattern to a bottom-up raglan, so I can eliminate some ends. I don’t mind seaming a sweater, but on this pattern, it really seems unnecessary to have quite so many seams and so much bulk created by all those ends. I love using Cotton-Ease for baby knits, especially when it comes from my stash too!

Lately I’ve been on a bit of a dishcloth bender. Some of you may recall that in February, I mentioned that I had a bit o’ dishcloth cotton stash. I also mentioned starting a goal of knitting one dishcloth a week. Well that goal never really worked out, but I have still been knitting with the dishcloth cotton as time permits. I love knitting up the variegated ones and watching the colors emerge. After stressful days at work, it’s nice to me to knit up a simple garter stitch diagonal eyelet dishcloth. I also love to see a stack of them in my linen closet and know that I made those for our home. Mostly I don’t see a need to put up tons of the same type of dishcloth over and over again on the blog, but I found a blogger who has some great dishcloth patterns. She has a series of dishcloth patterns that she called Geometric Lace, with parallelograms, squares, circles and triangle patterns. For some reason, I felt the need to save all of these patterns and I knit the parallelogram dishcloth. Although I do have plans to knit the triangles and squares too. They are fun.

Of the cotton stash I acquired last year (16 skeins), I’m down now to 2. Of course 2 weeks ago, I picked up about 3 or 4 more, but overall, my dishcloth cotton stash is way down. And I do have plans to make more baby burp cloths too. I even knit dishcloths out of my many yards of scraps! I think these are great stress relievers for me to knit and we do use them in our house.

Enough with the dishcloth talk. Not much is going on. I’m in ATL for a week, so I’m going to try to post a couple more times, we’ll see how it goes. Have a Happy Weekend and oh, go wish my friend, Stacey a Happy Birthday!

FOs to share

I kept meaning to post sooner, but was thwarted at every turn. I took pictures and then my camera battery died on me while downloading photos. Of course, it was before work, so I didn’t have time to wait for the batteries to charge up again. And yesterday, I really wanted to post, but this pesky last minute packing slowed me down.

Yes, I said packing. I am in Atlanta visiting my mom, sister and nephew and I’m excited to be here. Even though, of course, I am missing Estes, *sigh*. The sacrifices one makes.

Anyhow, I finally finished seaming those two baby raglan sweaters. If you can believe it, I knit both sweaters in a period of 4 days. The pattern knits up very quickly and I think it’s quite cute, but all of the ends it provides, that and the fact that I added a stripe on the sleeves and the body, just means more ends to weave in. Once I sat down and made myself work on it on Saturday evening and Sunday, it was done. Well, both of them are done. The smaller one in blue was made for a co-worker whose baby was just born (in early April), but now I fear it is too small, so I gifted that coworker with the baby burp cloths.

Baby Raglan sweater from Debbie Bliss’ The Baby Knits Book
completion: started mid April ‘07, finished seaming mid-June (very sad I know)
Yarn used: Cotton-Ease in Cherry Red & Licorice, Candy Blue and Licorice
Size needle: US 7 (4.5 mm)
Modifications: adding striping. In the future, I will have my friend Susan help me modify this pattern to a bottom-up raglan, so I can eliminate some ends. I don’t mind seaming a sweater, but on this pattern, it really seems unnecessary to have quite so many seams and so much bulk created by all those ends. I love using Cotton-Ease for baby knits, especially when it comes from my stash too!

Lately I’ve been on a bit of a dishcloth bender. Some of you may recall that in February, I mentioned that I had a bit o’ dishcloth cotton stash. I also mentioned starting a goal of knitting one dishcloth a week. Well that goal never really worked out, but I have still been knitting with the dishcloth cotton as time permits. I love knitting up the variegated ones and watching the colors emerge. After stressful days at work, it’s nice to me to knit up a simple garter stitch diagonal eyelet dishcloth. I also love to see a stack of them in my linen closet and know that I made those for our home. Mostly I don’t see a need to put up tons of the same type of dishcloth over and over again on the blog, but I found a blogger who has some great dishcloth patterns. She has a series of dishcloth patterns that she called Geometric Lace, with parallelograms, squares, circles and triangle patterns. For some reason, I felt the need to save all of these patterns and I knit the parallelogram dishcloth. Although I do have plans to knit the triangles and squares too. They are fun.

Of the cotton stash I acquired last year (16 skeins), I’m down now to 2. Of course 2 weeks ago, I picked up about 3 or 4 more, but overall, my dishcloth cotton stash is way down. And I do have plans to make more baby burp cloths too. I even knit dishcloths out of my many yards of scraps! I think these are great stress relievers for me to knit and we do use them in our house.

Enough with the dishcloth talk. Not much is going on. I’m in ATL for a week, so I’m going to try to post a couple more times, we’ll see how it goes. Have a Happy Weekend and oh, go wish my friend, Stacey a Happy Birthday!

Dejected Lace

I might have left you with a bit of a cliffhanger in the last post. My lace shawl and I have not been getting along. But not for the reasons you would assume. The lace and I aren’t getting along, things are tough at home, it’s a rocky road, not feeling the love for it anymore. No, no, no. It’s sadly that the yarn I chose for this project and I are simply not getting along. It’s really too bad.

As you can see, the color is absolutely beautiful and I couldn’t be happier with it. One small problem is that I keep feeling a burning sensation and getting headaches when I knit with this yarn. Hmm, sounds familiar? Sad but true. I appear to also be allergic to Garnstudio Angora Tweed. I really should have known better. I kept hoping that the angora wouldn’t cause me any issues, but after the mohair debacle, I’m not sure why. No way to know of course if it would bother me but to try to knit with it. I did go into this project knowing that it could fail, but if it was successful, I would have a most beautiful shawl that would be warm and cuddly. I was really looking forward to using this yarn and having the shawl. I will definitely still make the Wool Peddler’s Shawl and I will need to search for new yarn.

When I return the yarn I bought for friend’s baby gift last week, I may use that credit to get some different yarn for the shawl. Still not buying new yarn, but unfortunately my friend lost her baby and I learned that difficult news last week. I feel horrible and that I cannot keep the yarn I slotted for her baby.

Also, something I never mentioned on the blog last summer was when the Mason-Dixon knitting book came out, I went wild for it and bought tons of Sugar ‘N Cream cotton yarn. I never did anything with it until I made the baby bibs last month. Now, I’ve decided to knit dishcloths with the yarn as I feel if it’s there, it needs to be used up. I have a goal now of knitting one dishcloth a week. Since the inception of my once a week dischloths last week, I’ve knit two.

The dishcloths are fun and quick to knit. I think they will be more useful in the kitchen than the sponges we currently use and easier to clean and nuke them to kill any germs.

That’s all from the knitside today.

Dejected Lace

I might have left you with a bit of a cliffhanger in the last post. My lace shawl and I have not been getting along. But not for the reasons you would assume. The lace and I aren’t getting along, things are tough at home, it’s a rocky road, not feeling the love for it anymore. No, no, no. It’s sadly that the yarn I chose for this project and I are simply not getting along. It’s really too bad.

As you can see, the color is absolutely beautiful and I couldn’t be happier with it. One small problem is that I keep feeling a burning sensation and getting headaches when I knit with this yarn. Hmm, sounds familiar? Sad but true. I appear to also be allergic to Garnstudio Angora Tweed. I really should have known better. I kept hoping that the angora wouldn’t cause me any issues, but after the mohair debacle, I’m not sure why. No way to know of course if it would bother me but to try to knit with it. I did go into this project knowing that it could fail, but if it was successful, I would have a most beautiful shawl that would be warm and cuddly. I was really looking forward to using this yarn and having the shawl. I will definitely still make the Wool Peddler’s Shawl and I will need to search for new yarn.

When I return the yarn I bought for friend’s baby gift last week, I may use that credit to get some different yarn for the shawl. Still not buying new yarn, but unfortunately my friend lost her baby and I learned that difficult news last week. I feel horrible and that I cannot keep the yarn I slotted for her baby.

Also, something I never mentioned on the blog last summer was when the Mason-Dixon knitting book came out, I went wild for it and bought tons of Sugar ‘N Cream cotton yarn. I never did anything with it until I made the baby bibs last month. Now, I’ve decided to knit dishcloths with the yarn as I feel if it’s there, it needs to be used up. I have a goal now of knitting one dishcloth a week. Since the inception of my once a week dischloths last week, I’ve knit two.

The dishcloths are fun and quick to knit. I think they will be more useful in the kitchen than the sponges we currently use and easier to clean and nuke them to kill any germs.

That’s all from the knitside today.

Dejected Lace

I might have left you with a bit of a cliffhanger in the last post. My lace shawl and I have not been getting along. But not for the reasons you would assume. The lace and I aren’t getting along, things are tough at home, it’s a rocky road, not feeling the love for it anymore. No, no, no. It’s sadly that the yarn I chose for this project and I are simply not getting along. It’s really too bad.

As you can see, the color is absolutely beautiful and I couldn’t be happier with it. One small problem is that I keep feeling a burning sensation and getting headaches when I knit with this yarn. Hmm, sounds familiar? Sad but true. I appear to also be allergic to Garnstudio Angora Tweed. I really should have known better. I kept hoping that the angora wouldn’t cause me any issues, but after the mohair debacle, I’m not sure why. No way to know of course if it would bother me but to try to knit with it. I did go into this project knowing that it could fail, but if it was successful, I would have a most beautiful shawl that would be warm and cuddly. I was really looking forward to using this yarn and having the shawl. I will definitely still make the Wool Peddler’s Shawl and I will need to search for new yarn.

When I return the yarn I bought for friend’s baby gift last week, I may use that credit to get some different yarn for the shawl. Still not buying new yarn, but unfortunately my friend lost her baby and I learned that difficult news last week. I feel horrible and that I cannot keep the yarn I slotted for her baby.

Also, something I never mentioned on the blog last summer was when the Mason-Dixon knitting book came out, I went wild for it and bought tons of Sugar ‘N Cream cotton yarn. I never did anything with it until I made the baby bibs last month. Now, I’ve decided to knit dishcloths with the yarn as I feel if it’s there, it needs to be used up. I have a goal now of knitting one dishcloth a week. Since the inception of my once a week dischloths last week, I’ve knit two.

The dishcloths are fun and quick to knit. I think they will be more useful in the kitchen than the sponges we currently use and easier to clean and nuke them to kill any germs.

That’s all from the knitside today.