Yesterday's view

Hmmm..... pretty silks. 

Have a great weekend!

Completely Obsessed?

Guilty as charged! I cannot stop knitting awesome blue gradient chevron knits! This might be my best one yet!

Chevron knit #1.

Chevron knit #2.

I can feel this phase passing, but for now I am still completely crazy about this pattern. 

ps: please excuse the tiny little Stella hairs that are stuck to my couch in the photo above... we love her, but she definitely likes to leave her mark on all our furniture (and clothing).

Stella has a hat on!

Oh my god, this dog makes me smile from ear to ear. I put this hat on her silly little head to take a photo and she didn't move an inch. She has totally accepted the fact that she wears clothes and sometimes models baby hats. What a girl. 

I knit this little hat for my niece Annika using Grammy's Hat pattern (I cast on 72 sts). She didn't really need hats this summer, but now it's getting chilly so it's totally hat time. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Grammy's hat pattern is so simple and so perfect, the ribbing makes it fit really well for a variety of head sizes. Grammy is so clever. I love making these hats for the little ones in our family because as soon as anyone in my family sees one they know immediately what it is. We had so many of these hats growing up, all knit by Grammy using leftover scraps of yarn. She still knits them and me and my cousins still get them for Christmas from Grammy sometimes. It's just a hat, but it's sooo much more than just a hat. 

I finished knitting my Palette Cardigan this week! I laid it out to block last night, it's still drying. I bought buttons today and hope to have an FO shoot done by the end of the week! I am going to live in this sweater this winter. 

Jazz Hands Handspun

My afternoon of rest turned into an afternoon of work followed by an evening of spinning. It all worked out for me though as I ended the night with this lovely skein of very colourful and magical handspun! Unfortunately I think that this is the type of yarn that looks better in the skein than it will knit up. As I was plying it there were sections that were coming together beautifully, but then towards the end there is one really long patch of green. Not terrible, but it's not very balanced in terms of colour distribution. I'll just have to be careful when choosing the right project for this skein. Although, who knows when that will happen, I'm amassing quite the collection of handspun and have little finished projects to show for it! I need to come up with a plan. Until then I'll just keep spinning pretty skeins and hoarding them, that's just as fun!

This skein is 102g and 250yds.  

Rest

Today my mom and I will spend the better part of the day packing up and shipping out the remainder of the September Club kits. It will be a giant weight lifted off my shoulders and I think that I'm going to spend the afternoon relaxing with my spinning wheel in front of the fire. It's getting quite brisk here in Montreal. Cool winds, crisp mornings, it's probably a little premature to be enjoying the fireplace, but I can't help it. I've been looking forward to it all summer! Hopefully I'll have a new handspun to share soon. 

Happy Wednesday!

Lemon Crinkle Cookies

source

Ah Pinterest... I'm still as hooked as ever. I pin craft ideas that I will probably never tackle, images of that dream home that I will never, ever live in, and outfits that I will never be able to afford. I have no problem with Pinterest being a bit of a fantasy land, it's fun to day dream. 

I also pin recipes, and they seem to be the one thing that I get an actual practical use out of. I decided it might be fun to share a few of the recipes that I've pinned, tried and loved. I baked these Lemon Crinkle cookies for the first time well over a year ago, and have turned to this simple and delicious recipe time and time again whenever I get the hankering for a sweet baked good. These cookies are chewy, sweet-but-not-too-sweet because of the tart lemon flavour, and really easy to make! Chances are you have most of the ingredients in your pantry already. I've made them for friends and they are always a hit. This recipe gets an A+ from me!

You can find the recipe online here.

Sky Palette sweater update

I'm making good progress on my Sky Palette sweater. Last night I hit a real landmark, I had finished knitting the body and I gave the yoke of the sweater a good and gentle steam. Man, did it ever change the look of this sweater! It was amazing. The last time I took a photo of this sweater it looked like this; colourful, but bumpy and not very crisp. After a gentle steam with my steam iron (my steam iron cost me about $11 at Walmart, and I couldn't live without it) the stitches relaxed and the zigzag pattern really  started to shine! The beauty of top down sweaters is the ability to try them on as you go, but pre-blocking the yoke was kind of bunching up and wasn't fitting just right... post blocking, it's magic! I'm in love with this sweater. 

I'm cruising through the sleeves now and hope to make really good progress on them this weekend. Lots of people struggle with sleeves, they hit the sleeves and get stuck on "sleeve island" (kinda like second sock syndrome I think) I don't have this problem, especially with top down sweaters since knitting the sleeves means I'm practically done! And it gets me one step closer to knitting the button band, and there is literally nothing I like more than picking up stitches for a button band. Hmm, a nice clean edge of perfectly picked up stitches gives me such a knitters high! Anyways, when it comes to the sleeves, I just put my head down and motor through them. They always go quicker than I think they will and I find that if I don't think, just knit, I'll be done before I have time to get bored of the stockinette tube!

Back from the Fair!

Another knitter's fair has come and gone. The weekend was a fantastic whirlwind. We packed up the van on Friday morning, drove 6 hours to Kitchener, set up the booth, ate, slept, enjoyed the Fair on Saturday and then packed up the booth and drove back home Saturday night. It was a very busy 2 days but that's the way I like it! Stella on the other hand... she doesn't love it so much. She stays home with my dad and though I know that she loves spending the weekend with him and his 2 dogs, she doesn't like the idea of left behind. She did her best to try and sneak in the van and hide amongst the bags of yarn. She was probably quite cosy nestled up in there!

Adhara Colour Combo's

In my pattern for the Adhara Shawl I specified that I thought the stitch pattern looked best when worked in two similar shades, with only subtle differences between them. I often get e-mails and Ravelry messages about this, I think that I may have inadvertently made people nervous about picking their own colours. Have no fear! I'm here to help. Here are a few of my favourite potential Adhara Shawl colour combo's:

Left column, top to bottom: Deep Sea and Peacock; Frost and Seabreeze; Lilac and Dove.

Center column, top to bottom: Sand and Gold; Shadow and Atlantic (the original pairing); Pink Grapefruit and Sunset; Stormy and Shadow.

Right column, top to bottom; Spearmint and Lemongrass; Garnet and Velvet; Brick and Chestnut.

There are of course a million other potential colour pairings that would all make gorgeous Adhara Shawls, but hopefully this is enough to get you pointed in the right direction. A single colour Adhara would also be stunning, I'm considering knitting one in my lace weight yarn myself. 

Palette sweater progress

I'm working away on my Sky Palette sweater. I sailed through the colourful yoke and am now working on the stockinette body. I'm not 100% certain how this cardigan is going to look when it's finished. I cast on using a provisional cast on so I can decide how to finish the neck edge later. I think it will have pockets and a zipper, and likely a touch more zigzag on the cuffs or something, but for now I'm just winging it. The chevron style of the stripes in the yoke is achieved with slipped stitches, so I'm only ever working with one colour at a time, which makes for a really easy knit. It looks kind of bumpy now, but that will all be smoothed out in the end with blocking. 

The K-W Show is this weekend, we leave on Friday and have officially hit that point where if it's not done yet, it's not going to get done! It's a funny feeling. I feel like this last week leading up to the show should be the most chaotic, and though it does include it's share of last minute organizing all the major work (the dyeing!) is done. Hopefully that means I'll have more free time to spend working on this sweater!