Monthly Archives: February 2018

Craftvent 2017

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Advent calendars aren’t a big part of my childhood, but I liked the idea of getting little presents all through December, and since I’d intentionally cut back on gift knitting, I had time to do a mystery-a-long, so I bought into Jimmy Beans’ Craftvent.

It’s a nice kit, filled with knitting tools (including needles and everything else in the photo above) and enough yarn for the mystery shawl. Well, MAYBE enough yarn for the shawl; a lot of people ran out of yarn #2.

I didn’t run out, though it was close! Unfortunately, the upset over yarn shortages and the posting of spoilers made the Facebook group they made for the kal super angry and not fun until jbw realized they had a problem and laid out ground rules. I don’t think Facebook is really designed to deal with spoilers, and they should have stuck with Ravelry, which has tools and conventions about spoiler and no spoiler threads that would have really improved the experience.

I liked the pattern ok. There was not much mystery for the middle clues, but since the yarns were also part of the mystery that didn’t bother me as much as it might have. (Picture above in grey to show that there is a subtle difference between yarn 1 and 3)

It’s a lousy time of year for me to have a calendar based thing going, so I started opening boxes early, which made me more chill about spoilers at least.

I didn’t finish before Dec 25th rolled by, but that’s ok.

It was a pretty busy season!

And I did get it done before I left Ottawa and blocked after I got home.

It’s gotten me thinking a lot about designing a similar “Christmas in July” advent out of season, so it hits at a less busy time of year. It’d be a neat way to showcase some yarn from my local yarn store, but i think I’d want a lower price point so it’d have to be a bit lighter on the goodies. Maybe I’ll try to design a simple scarf and see if I could make it work!

As for doing the jbw Craftvent again, I’m not sure. It’s fun and I have no regrets (except maybe for joining the fb group) but I think i might try one that’s all yarn or use the same amount of money to get surprise yarns at a time of year when I can appreciate them more.

Still, it was a fun thing to do this year!

Stitch markers

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Here are some stitch markers I made to go with my 5 shawls in 5 days, because sometimes I like to have new pretties for a project. These are simple to make if you have the right tools: snip off a short bit of thin necklace wire, curve in half, place both ends through your chosen beads, then crimp an end bit in to hold them on. Snip any wire that’s sticking out the end. (And be careful not to get it in anyone’s eye!) Done! I probably spent more time playing with the photo processing overlays than I did making the stitch markers themselves!

Laser engraved toy dog collars

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Yup, you read that right.

I have a Glowforge laser cutter/engraver that had so many delays in manufacturing that it wound up arriving when I was 9 months pregnant. So it hasn’t gotten quite as much use as I’d planned, but I did use it for some holiday presents! And then I forgot to take pictures of most of them. But I did take pictures of these!

I picked up these puppies at a toy store downtown, and wanted to customize them. I did some quick measurements and used the leather that came with the machine, so it was already prepped.

The idea was that these should be removable so they could also be used as bracelets (or just removed entirely if the kids didn’t like them), so I put in snaps. Or rather, I should say that I put in one snap, then was so frustrated with the second one that I begged J for help and even he had trouble getting it to sit securely in the leather. Next time, I buy heavier duty snaps instead of pretty ones!

Still, I like how they turned out, and the pups themselves are cute. Next time I go by the leather store, I might get some heavier snaps and make myself a ruler bracelet!

Pi shawl: 5 shawls 5 days challenge

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Day 5 is the pi shawl, which I’ve always kind of wanted to try because of the name, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until this day!

After the square shawl, I decided to try a circular cast on with a crochet hook. It felt a lot like magic loop for knitting, and I liked it a lot more. I also knit with a circular needle, which is awkward to start but ok once it got big enough. Still, it did look funny when it was in progress:

It did block out, though!

Bind off is Jenny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off, for somewhat obvious reasons when you see the stretch in the blocking.

Yarn: Rowan Super Fine Merino DK, also from that Feb 2016 beanie bag. My goodness, this is the roundest of round yarns. The construction of this is what the network engineer in me wants to call twisted pairs, but in yarn it’s a cable construction (network cable, clearly). It is soft and lovely and so nice to knit with. Would definitely use again.

I did run out before the pattern was done, so I subbed in some pink yarn (leftover from the medallion hat, blue sky fibers of some sort, I think?) but then when that was running out I realized there wasn’t much more for me to learn by doing the whole thing so I just didn’t. Kinda like how it went with my math homework when they stopped checking it so I stopped doing it as a teen. (I think it dropped my grades by 2% and I decided I could live with that. Who knows what I’ll do when my kid is old enough to have homework…)

Square Shawl: 5 shawls 5 days challenge

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Day 4 was a square shawl. I don’t think I’d done a piece from the center like that, and I didn’t like the giant hole left by casting on 4 and joining, so I tightened it up some after casting off. I did this on double points which was pretty finicky especially with a sleeping baby on my lap. Not sure if I should blame the uneven yarn over sizes on the double points or the baby, but I’m not going to worry about them.

I did an icord bind off again, because I was curious how it would look and it was one of the recommended ones when I did a search for square bind offs. I like it on this little swatch, though I can see why people cast on conditionally and graft. I faked it and it looks ok to me, though!

Yarn is Knit Picks Diadem (if I remember the name correctly). This is leftover from a mystery cowl I did and it’s not my favourite because it doesn’t travel well on my bag. (It felts itself into knots.) However, I only have small double points and this was smaller than the dk sized sampler bag I was using. And more importantly, this stuff is soft, so it was a texture cleanser after day 3’s terrible yarn. Mmm, silk alpaca.

Asymmetrical Triangle shawl: 5 shawls 5 days challenge

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Day 3’s shawl is an asymmetric triangle shape. I like this one’s particular slip stitch/yarn over edging.

Yarn: Rowan Colorspun. This is a mohair-wool-polyamide blend, also from the Feb 2016 beanie bag and I hated it so much. To me, it felt like I was getting splinters in the sides of my fingers while I knit. I’m usually ok with mohair, so it might be the wool part of the blend that was the problem. End result: I couldn’t even bring myself to finish knitting up the sample.

Texture aside, it’s an interesting homespun lumpy blend with some subtle colour. But that texture was just too awful for me.

Comparing the remaining yarn on my 3 samples: