A Rainbow of Socks

I've been working on my own collection of hand dyed yarns for months now. I've experimented and played around with countless colour combinations and dye methods, and have definitely found my nitch. I'm dyeing tonal colourways that knit into a beautiful heathery fabric. If the yarn looks good in the skein, that's great, but the only way to really know how good a particular colourway is, is to knit it up. So, that's what I've been doing lately, knitting socks to test my colourways. Chestnut is being knit into a lovely ribbed sock for my dad:



Chris chose Jewel for his socks (He has very jazzy tatse in socks, I love it!) Simple cables to highlight the yarns texture:

Mom joined in on the fun to knit up Mallard for me (expertly modeled by me!):

Luke is getting something on the conservative side, Shadow, for practical, professional people, of course, with cables for pizazz!:

And I've knit myself my first picot edge sock out of Peacock, the pattern is Mata Hari by Craftoholic:



I have a couple more colourways to knit before I've got samples of everything, but I'm on a roll. As long as no one minds having only one sock! I've knit only the first sock of every pair because I wanted to be able to see many different colourways knit up as fast as possible, when I've gone through the rainbow, I'll start back at the begining and knit the second socks for each pair!

Lizard Ridge Afghan

This afghan was my introduction to Noro yarns. I saw the pattern on Knitty, I loved the colours and the wavy lines, and I decided that I was ready for a big project. I guess you could call it a good thing that I didn't realize what I was getting myself into when I begun, because if I had, I probably wouldn't have started it. It wasn't the knitting that was hard, that part was fun and just flew by, it was the cost of the yarn, and the addictive qualities of the whole thing! On an artists budget, 24 balls of Kureyon don't come cheap! I decided to make it an on-going project, when Kureyon went on sale or when I felt like I deserved it I'd buy myself a ball and knit up a square, that way it made the project last longer too, because unless I purposely tried to slow down and take my time and really appreciate this project, I could just zip right through it! All in all, it took me about a year from begining to end (actually, I still have to learn how to crochet so I can add the border) but it was well worth it. I tried to use a different colour of Kureyon for every square, I think I may have repeated one or two colours because I had forgotten what ones I already had. The balls are all so different though that you really don't notice. I brought this blanket to last months knit together at my LYS and everyone loved it! Apparently 3 people from the group have already begun there own versions of the project.

Here are a few pictures:





The camera really doesn't do the colours justice, it's gorgeous and I love it!

This one's for Vince!

I took a little break from blogging not long after I posted my very first post. The thing is... I think I got cold feet. I didn't think anyone was actually ready it, (I hadn't told anyone that I was writing it,) and I guess I started thinking that maybe it was a little bit silly to be writing a craft blog that nobody would ever read. But then I spoke to my little brother. He lives on the other side of the country, in Vancouver, and as a masters student apparently has loads of free time on his hands to google things and randomly surf the net. I hadn't told him that I was blogging, but then one day he asked me why I hadn't posted on my blog recently? I was shocked that someone was actually reading it, and though he didn't admit it, I think that he liked seeing what I was up to, even if it was mostly about knitting. So, in honour of my little brother Vince, I've decided to renew my commitment to blogging. At least for now.

Today's post, while dedicated to Vince, is also about sewing rather then knitting. I spend most of my free time knitting, I love to sew too, but I'm not as good at it, and I don't have a sewing machine, so I have to plan projects around trips to my parents house in the suburbs. As a result, I get much less sewing done then I would like. I do however, have 2 sewing projects that I'm particularily proud of. The first, is this star quilt that I made for my boyfriends little nephew, Jake:

I love this pattern, I find the stars very pretty. The quilt is very simple, which is a requirement for most of my quilting projects seeing as how, like I said, I'm not the best sewer. The thing that I like the most about this quilt is the colour. It's my second quilt. My first used the same pattern, but fits my queen sized bed (is 5 x 6 squares rather then 3 x 3) and was made using fabrics of every colour of the rainbow. I tend to gravitate towards lots of colour, but I don't think that it's always for the best. For this quilt I was able to control my urges and focus the pallette using just watery blues with a bit of gray and turquoise thrown in for good measure. From what I can tell, Jake approves.

My next favorite sewing project, the Weekender bag by Amy Butler:

I chose to make mine using a bright navy and turquoise fabric, from one of Amy Butlers collections. I bought both the pattern and the fabric this fall on a trip to Guelph to visit my great friend Jenna. Her mom owns a quilt shop and I spent the afternoon on cloud nine examining all the beautiful fabrics and samples. I'm really happy with how the bag turned out, but wouldn't call it a novice project. There are many layers of fabric and timtex and piping, and required a lot of muscle to sew through it all, my mom helped a lot. She's the best.

Oh, so not only does my brother read my blog, apparently he told my mom about it, so she reads it too. Hi mom!