Category Archives: embroidery

Finish or Frog Along Wrap-up

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I still spend more time knitting than using fountain pens but you wouldn’t know it from the blog posts I write! So let’s do a bit of an update.

In September / October a group of fediverse folk do “Finish or Frog Along” (formerly Fall Finish Along, but now with a better name for people in the southern hemisphere!) and honestly, I’ve looked forwards to it since last year. I started with 5 things on my list then added 2 more as I finished things:

  1. Clasped Weft weaving
  2. Sweater Ornament
  3. Pigeon Embroidery
  4. Purple spin
  5. Crown Wools
  6. Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)
  7. Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)

FinishOrFrogAlong is run by ConsumableJoy and I really appreciated the prompts that went with it for helping me think regularly about finishing and get a community doing the same. Plus it’s just really fun seeing everyone finishing things and cheering each other on. Especially since it’s a multi-craft affair so the projects are all so different!

I kind of want to have something similar for stash usage on the other side of the year and I’ve been trying to think about how to organize that. But for today’s post, let’s just talk about what I finished or didn’t finish!

Clasped Weft Weaving

Not finished.

A weaving in progress on a rigid heddle loom. it uses two colours of variegated yarn, one grey/brown and the other blue/green. It's a sampler showing multiple types of pattern that can be made with a pick up stick.
Image Description: A weaving in progress on a rigid heddle loom. it uses two colours of variegated yarn, one grey/brown and the other blue/green. It’s a sampler showing multiple types of pattern that can be made with a pick up stick.

I was really hoping to finish this piece which I started in April during “weaving month” as I rotated through my lesser-used crafts. But while I pulled it out and got it all set up, I only actually wove less than an inch during Finish and Frog along, so rather than being the thing I finished first like I thought when I set up the list, it became the biggest “fail” on my list.

Some of this was because I didn’t really know what to do next — I’d been iterating through exercises in a book and had to return it to the library, and when I bought my own copy I realized I should have taken pictures of all my sticky note flags so I’d be able to restart easily, and instead I had to puzzle it out.

But the other thing is that my current weaving setup doesn’t fit very well into my life, so I have to be more intentional about making time for it and I can’t do it while curled up with the dog in my recliner in the evenings, and as a result it feels like a hassle. There’s some things I can do about that: I can put the loom in a better spot where I can reach it when I’m in crafting mode not during dog cuddle time, I can grab audiobooks so I can multitask, and I really need to spend some time getting a bag so it’s easier to carry the loom and the yarn and shuttles and everything all together so it’s an option when I’m feeling overstimulated and just need to hang out upstairs or downstairs on my own for a bit.

But in the end it winds up feeling much the way I feel about quilting: I don’t hate it but it doesn’t quite fit into my life and it feels like a chore. A stranger commented “to everything there is a season” on one of my griping quilting posts with the explanation that it’s perfectly reasonable to save quilting for another part of my life when I don’t have a young child and a puppy and a full time job and a pandemic. And after two months of thinking I should make time for weaving and then just not doing it, I think it’s time to accept that this is not the season of weaving in my life. And that’s ok: I don’t have to be completely obsessed with every skill I learn or thing I do.

I will note that it’s a bit strange that I don’t feel this way about spinning, which similarly is hard to do curled up in a chair with a book. But the solution with spinning has been to enjoy it during a couple of sprints rather than do it year round: I enjoy Tour De Fleece, I get in a bit more during Finish or Frog Along, and last year I also did the 100 day stashdown from Jillian Moreno’s patreon. I think I may need to find some similar sprints for weaving if I want to do it, or (as I have with quilting) let it just be a sometimes craft in my life. I was really tempted by the Sweet Georgia winter weave-a-long that is happening now, but I’d need to finish what’s on the loom now before I could start it.

I’m still *intending* to finish up what’s on the loom now, and after I spent time writing about it I finally did pick it up in the last week of November. But it’s mostly taking a back seat while I finish my holiday knitting and stuff so I don’t know that I’ll finish it in time to really join the weave-a-long or if I should take the opportunity to pack up the loom in preparation for moving next year.

So, total fail on *finishing* this project, but it forced a lot of good introspection about whether this craft was suiting me and how to make it work better in my life.

Sweater Ornament

Finished!

A small embroidery kit including a nice round yarn holder, a piece of felt pre-printed with an embroidery pattern (a sweater with a sheep and yarn on it) and a small bag with a camping motf.
Image Description: A small embroidery kit including a nice round yarn holder, a piece of felt pre-printed with an embroidery pattern (a sweater with a sheep and yarn on it) and a small bag with a camping motf.

This is from cute Christmas ornament kit that I bought last year. I finished one then, one this year, and maybe I’ll do the last next year. I remembered to put the year on this time!

A small Christmas ornament style embroidered felt sweater with the year stitched on the back.
Image Description: A small Christmas ornament style embroidered felt sweater with the year stitched on the back.

I have to say, I really loved these kits: Knitted Bliss really puts together a nice set with the nicer thread holders, a magnetic needle keeper, needle threader, and everything for the 3 ornaments. This may be the nicest embroidery kit I’ve ever had, with a lot of thought put into how it would be used so the whole experience is just really lovely. (No thin paper to hold thread! Everything well labelled, and big photos to go with the instructions.) I highly recommend this kit and will probably get more from her when I’ve got space for more embroidery stuff.

My finished embroidered sweater ornament viewed from the front. It has a yarn bowl with a sheep on it filled with yarn on the front of a white (felt) sweater with pink ribbing at neck/sleeves/hem. There is a small clothes hanger stuck in between the two halves of the ornament that were sewn together, so the hanger can be hung on a Christmas tree or otherwise displayed.
Image Description: My finished embroidered sweater ornament viewed from the front. It has a yarn bowl with a sheep on it filled with yarn on the front of a white (felt) sweater with pink ribbing at neck/sleeves/hem. There is a small clothes hanger stuck in between the two halves of the ornament that were sewn together, so the hanger can be hung on a Christmas tree or otherwise displayed.

Pigeon Embroidery

Not finished, but that’s the expected result.

Pigeon embroidery in a hoop. The chest feathers have been mostly finished but the rest isn't done yet. There is a bee & honeycomb magnetic needle minder attached to the hoop near the pigeon's head.
Image Description: Pigeon embroidery in a hoop. The chest feathers have been mostly finished but the rest isn’t done yet. There is a bee & honeycomb magnetic needle minder attached to the hoop near the pigeon’s head.

I mostly wanted to put this one into the finishing rotation to avoid hand strain without feeling like I should be working on something on the list. Embroidery fills a weird niche in my crafting repertoire as a hand break because it uses my muscles differently yet keeps my hands busy so I don’t wind up with repetitive strain, so I usually have one on the go with no particular deadline for finishing. I usually finish one or two of these per year unless I’m feeling particularly excited about one or doing something very small.

Purple spin

Finished!

Long draw spinning in progress: my wooden spinning wheel set up with some hanks of fiber sitting on top as a prepare to spin.
Image Description: Long draw spinning in progress: my wooden spinning wheel set up with some hanks of fiber sitting on top as a prepare to spin.

This was another long draw spin from Tour de France Femmes this summer. I’m really enamoured of long draw and am starting to feel actually proficient. I wanted to do a 3 ply since I have the EEW lazy kates and could do it more easily, and I intentionally chose to let the colours mix in plying. It looks nice, but I think I like more of a gradient than a blend so I’ll probably plan differently next 3-ply. Still, I’m looking forwards to knitting with this and maybe I’ll like it more once it’s knit up!

Plying setup on an EEW Lazy Kate: three plies of purple singles waiting to be plied.
Image Description: Plying setup on an EEW Lazy Kate: three plies of purple singles waiting to be plied.
Purple 3-ply spin all done and twisted into a pretty yarn skein.
Image Description: Purple 3-ply spin all done and twisted into a pretty yarn skein. There are multiple shades of purple all mixed.

Crown Wools

Finished!

Crown Wools wrap: a rainbow wrap made with 12 different colours of yarn and 12 different textures. It's a large bias-knit parallelogram but has been curled into something more like a circle for the photo.
Image Description: Crown Wools wrap: a rainbow wrap made with 12 different colours of yarn and 12 different textures. It’s a large bias-knit parallelogram but has been curled into something more like a circle for the photo.

This was my year-long project, slightly condensed so that it would finish in September for the event. I loved doing this and have it displayed in my office, but I do need to acknowledge that while I love the curated sets of rainbow minis that come with these sorts of things, they’re pretty much my least frequently worn items because they’re just a bit too big to be practical for the way I move and do stuff.

I’ve picked out a blanket and some rainbow stash yarn for next year’s ongoing project (it may take more than a year, I’m not sure yet). I may also consider some complicated colourwork sweater stuff for future ongoing project planning if I can figure out a nice way to divide that up over a few months. Inches per body or maybe something with colourwork that I can split up?

Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)

Knitting still in progress, but charts are finished!

My design for a rainbow wrap in progress, showing colours going from red to blue. I had made a mistake on one side (you can see a bulge marked by a stitch marker where the problem occurred) and had to rip back two sections so I wouldn't run out of yarn.
Image Description: My design for a rainbow wrap in progress, showing colours going from red to blue. I had made a mistake on one side (you can see a bulge marked by a lollipop stitch marker where the problem occurred) and had to rip back two sections so I wouldn’t run out of yarn.

After I finished 2 things on my initial list of 5 I added a few extras and this is one of them! This was a personal design project that I started before my local yarn shop went online-only, before the pandemic. I feel like I was an entirely different person. But I’d taken enough notes and had the physical object, so I fixed up the charts and knit a bunch more repeats. I’ve got a few colours left but i decided to do a Clapotis for Knitty’s Clapotisfest and I want to make winter socks for my mom before shipping gets overloaded in December, so I’ll finish this later. I’m really happy with it and would like to actually make a good free pattern out of it eventually but I have to at least finish the knitting to take pictures before I get to that point!

Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)

Frogged!

The scarf pre-frogging, showing that I only barely finished one motif and it didn't look like much. Although the photo makes the contrast look ok, it was veyr hard to see in real life.
Image Description: The scarf pre-frogging, showing that I only barely finished one motif and it didn’t look like much. Although the photo makes the contrast look ok, it was veyr hard to see in real life.

This was a neat knitting RPG concept where you rolled dice and got different charts to go with the story, but I chose yarns that weren’t working for me and I wasn’t having a good time so I bailed on the MKAL. I usually frog stuff right away but for a variety of reasons I didn’t do it right then.

The yarn just after frogging (ripping out). It looks a lot like dried ramen noodles, all wavy.
Image Description: The yarn just after frogging (ripping out). It looks a lot like dried ramen noodles, all wavy.

So many years later, I had to frog and steam the yarn so it’s ready for re-use. Though I’m not sure what I’d use it in since I’d bought the yarns to be used together then didn’t like them for colourwork. Maybe some brioche instead? Problem for future me.

The frogged yarn sitting on my ironing board with a clothes steamer, used to steam the yarn and straighten it out so it can be more easily re-used.
Image Description: The frogged yarn sitting on my ironing board with a clothes steamer, used to steam the yarn and straighten it out so it can be more easily re-used.

In conclusion…

One frogged, 3 finished, 3 still going (although one of those at least had charts finished, so that should probably count!). I had a great time finishing and frogging this year and I like that this is becoming enough part of fediverse crafting culture that I wasn’t the only one looking forwards to it.

Embroidered Floral Necklaces

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Still catching up on finished projects! These three necklaces were from a kit that had been in my stash for a while, and I wanted something tiny and colourful after finishing up last year’s year-long constellation embroidery project.

Three necklace-sized embroideries of flowers.

I probably won’t wear them as necklaces. They’re small enough but a bit heavy and long, and honestly I mostly just wear shawls around my neck now. But they make lovely Christmas ornaments so I’ll probably put some loops on them and enjoy them that way instead.

I had some trouble getting the focus right because Hatch really wanted to help, including lying down on the blanket I was using as a photo backdrop:

Constellation Embroidery

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Last year, I decided to do this constellation embroidery sampler from Kiriki press as a year-long project, doing each zodiac constellation as it came up in the year and occasionally doing the other non-zodiac ones. (It took me a bit more than a year because I didn’t see any point in rushing during December when I had a bunch of other projects on the go — I should really start year-long projects in Februrary or something!)

I used gold metallic thread in place of the gold coloured thread that came with the kit. It looks great in person but it’s finicky and doesn’t show up as anything fancy in photos. But it looks great in my office, promise!

I got to use my favourite lazy finishing technique: cut a circle out of cardboard using the inner hoop as a template. Flip the edges of the fabric into the hoop, then squish the cardboard in. Done! Perfect for things that are going to hang and not be touched much (unlike the necklace embroideries, that need both stitching and glue).

Mid-year fiber goals check-in: the “other” ideas

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As in previous years, I chose four Fiber Goals for 2022. That small number always leaves me with a bunch of ideas that I toss out there on the post that I wasn’t committing to finish but also wanted to record as ideas. A year is a long time so some of those always manage to happen even if they didn’t make the top four.

De-stashing: I was lucky enough to find a local friend to take a big box of acrylic at the beginning of the year. She’d gotten into making crocheted baskets, so this box of sturdy yarn I’d “inherited” from someone else’s mother in law was actually useful! And just recently, my sister uncovered 7 giant tubs of yarn in my grandmother’s basement, and I was able to find a different crocheting friend who could take those. Cleaning out my grandmother’s house is a huge job and I was glad to have been able to help with one tiny thing from far away even though it was kind of a drop in the bucket. This was not the first cache of yarn my sister has found, but hopefully it’ll be the last big one!

Hatch observes the crates of yarn pulled out of the closet at my house.
Layer 1 of the yarns I was able to fit in the shipping box.

Finishing some languishing WIPs: I jumped on a challenge from Sox Therapist and finished my Tunisian shawl finally as well as a Flickering Light Shawl that I’d started in New Zealand and never finished after we got back. I thought I probably wouldn’t be doing more Tunisian for a while but I keep thinking about it so maybe there’ll be some smaller swatch/dishcloths in my future?

Terri holds her completed Loveland Lite shawl, a Tunisian crochet triangle shaped two colour shawl. Yarn from Alwan Sultan Fiber.
Finished Flickering Light shawl. Yarn was a kit from Space Cadet yarns.

Year-long project: I did the Get Together Advent wrap as a 24-week project (so half-year), but I also have an embroidery constellations kit and I’m doing zodiac signs around the year. (well, ok, I’m behind by a few weeks right now, but I’ll get caught up.)

Kiriki press constellation embroidery sampler. I’ve done the zodiac constellations as they come up in the year but haven’t quite finished Gemini yet.

Fingering Weight Sweater: As mentioned in the previous post: it’s started! I’m using the “I love me more than you” box of minis from Passionknits yarn to do big chunky stripes on the Playdate sweater from Tin Can Knits. It’ll be a rainbow when it’s done!

Sweater body showing 6 colours.
Tiny rainbow sleeve swatch showing all the colours to come.

The Act of Sewing: I made the top, which was not a great fit and needs re-thinking, and the skirt with added pockets, which has become a wardrobe staple this summer. I might make a few more skirts.

Top from The Act of Sewing. Careful photography makes it look not awful here but it’s way too big.
Bicycle print skirt with giant pockets. I wear this plenty now that it’s warm!

Glowforge: I made an embroidery floss holder as part of a care package for Marlene, and a no soliciting sign for our front door.

Yarn care package for my friend Marlene. The yarn is a hobbit themed one from Valkyrie Fibers and I picked up notions and tea to be on theme. The laser cut embroidery floss holder with the silhouette of the Lord of the Rings characters is on the top left.
A wooden sign that reads “No Soliciting (The dog gets very upset)”

Knitting machine: We made a tube with some of the yarn my kid dyed and he uses it a lot for play. Most often it’s attached to a toy so he can play a fishing game involving throwing all his stuffed animals on the floor then tossing his “fishing rod” out to touch the one he wants to catch. But I haven’t done much since then!

Tube made with green/yellow hand dyed yarn.

That’s a pretty large number of non-goals achieved or in progress! Not all of them, but the destashing ones were especially a relief.

Tiny embroideries

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Turns out the blog problem was solved on the app side after I spent all that time poking server settings. Augh!

Tiny pink rose embroidery on black fabric and the start of a red sweater.

Anyhow, here’s some tiny embroideries to test that upload is working ok now. These are from another random chinese kit (multiple sellers have them on etsy and amazon).

Tiny floral embroidery on blue fabric with classic bird scissors for scale.

I made the blue one with slightly more complicated stitches than it called for. It’s nice to be at the point where I know enough stitches to change things up. I guess I should work on some of the bigger kits I have, but these were a nice break while my hands couldn’t take more knitting on the Mando gloves.

November works in progress

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I mentioned in August that I seemed to be doing some unsettled knitting. Fast forwards a few months, and I’m entering a bit of a pattern: one big project for sitting, one tiny project for knitting on the go, and a few more complicated things for my “nights off” (where I’m not in charge of getting kiddo to sleep). Pre-pandemic, I typically had one on the go project and (sometimes) one bigger home project but since they’re both pretty simple right now, I’m enjoying rotating in a few other things that engage my brain differently.

Big project right now is the Stepping Stones Cardigan.

Terri in a harvest gold Stepping Stones vest.

It’s a boxy open front sweater with nice lace detailing on the front, hem and cuffs. The pattern has a lot of options for customization of the sleeves and I really appreciated those. The lace made knitting the body seem not so repetitive.

Books and knitting the front panel.

I love the yarn, which is Arranmore Light from The Fiber Co in the colour Finian. It’s kind of got a rustic handspun 2 ply feel. It’s also unfortunately easy to tear a single strand if it gets caught on something like a zipper or an over-enthusiastic 3 year old who wants to be in my lap. So I got a new tool to help with that!

This is a yarn ball holder from Hansen (better known for their espinners). I’d coveted it since Tina from Black Sheep Fiber Emporium showed me hers, because it is a beautiful piece of engineering: perfect smooth wood, balanced bearings, thoughtful design. But it didn’t fit into my life then. I’m happy to say that it does now!

Small project right now is socks for my Mom.

It’s the usual Sundae Socks pattern with some mods. I’ve been keeping the yarn colour a surprise, but it’s a matched pair from Must Stash Yarn.

More complicated knitting is the Butterfly Dream Catcher shawl.

This is done in this great special yarn from Black Squirrel Berkeley called ‘sup witches. It glows under black light!

Other alternate night off projects: Crochet

I’ve picked up my Christmas ornament advent from Little Box of Crochet. I got this in 2018 and didn’t plan to finish it all in December, but two years later and I just finished day 6. Whoops. But I need ornaments this year and I didn’t before! Probably should have started earlier than November, though.

Spinning

I’m still spinning but less regularly mostly because I’ve been getting paper books from the library and I can’t read those and spin! I need some more audiobooks. I usually enjoy podcasts but they’ve been kind of getting me down lately.

Craftsy sent me an email offering a full year for $2.49 and I’d wanted to try more of their spinning content so I did that and it’s helping keep my interest up because sometimes I watch spinning videos while knitting. I’m still not blown away by Craftsy. The content I’ve watched is good but the site itself makes it hard to find and doesn’t help you keep track of what you’ve watched, which gets more annoying the more I watch. But for $2.49 I already feel like I got my money’s worth out of it, so that’s ok.

Embroidery

I got a cute Christmas tree set from Dropcloth Samplers, but I haven’t gotten much further than the day I took this picture.

Other

I also finally finished a wooden marble run kit I got to make with my toddler (who I guess is more of a pre-schooler now?). It wasn’t the easiest to do with his help, but we got out the washable markers and he coloured while I built. He coloured most of these not just the scribbles, but sometimes he told me I had to help fill them in if he got bored (and sometimes i did the first scribble and he filled in).

I feel like I have so many things I want to do and so little time before December hits and I switch over to the advent style packages I plan to knit. I might have gone a bit overboard on the advent things this year since I won’t be traveling: I got the ShannaJean Gratitude box, the BySarahS Christmas mkal, and I signed up for the Gnome one too. Plus I got the Katrinkles tool one, though that’s shorter and I don’t have to knit anything.

But on the bright side, Mom’s socks are the only ones I actually “need” to finish in the next couple of weeks if I want to mail them off in time for the holiday! And I don’t have to finish any of the advents on time either!

First finishes for 2020: winter embroidery and walking into winter socks!

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Two finishes to share!

Kiriki winter embroidery kit

First off, surprisingly, isn’t knitting! I started and finished this Kiriki Press embroidery kit in 2020 after I got back from Ottawa. This one was a lot faster than the spring one because there was no time-consuming satin stitch. I’m still having fun learning new stitches and also giving my hands a break. I’ve got one more sampler, but I’m finally feeling confident enough to try some of my more free-form embroidery panels. I’ve been collecting some from the Fireside textiles kickstarter for ages now and I’m so excited to start them!

Walking into Winter socks, in A Very Hobbit Christmas colourway

Second, my advent socks! These clever colours are from Must Stash Yarn which is kind of the worst because they drop new colours every Tuesday and you usually have only a few days to buy them before they sell out. It’s… Much too addictive. They do matching pairs which is nice because I’ve lately been enjoying having half skeins in my little purse, and this way I don’t have to break out the scales. And it’s cute if they match, but I’m weirdly more excited about not having to split the yarn cakes myself!

Yarn cakes

Anyhow, the Hobbit Christmas colours are 24 stripes and if I’d been doing it right I’d have been doing a few per day every day before Christmas to get them done in time. I aimed for only one sock, because who needs deadlines, and finished that one on time!

Sock , complete!

The yarn does most of the work for you and the pattern, “Walking into Winter” by Sivia Harding, does the rest with an alternating knit/purl per stripe, and some cute garland-stylings at the top. I love the photography in this one.

Yarn on the go

The one thing I might change if I do this pattern again is the toe. My toes are definitely not that pointy! Socks are stretchy so it’s no big deal when I wear them but hey, what’s the fun in slow fashion if you can’t custom fit stuff?

Up next: I’m still working on my other advent project, the Craftvent project from Jimmy Beans. I had to swap out the needles because the full sized metal ones that came with the kit were giving me wrist twinges, but swapping to my favorite short wood seems to have eased my ergonomic problem and I knit on and off today while taking my turns with a very sick toddler. (Don’t worry, his fever seems to have broken now, but we watched a lot of tv today.)

I’ve also got a necklace as a purse project. But it’s nearly done! I don’t have another small project on the go and I’ve been debating what’s next: cast on a small shawl or top down sock for my 2020 fiber goals, or size up my purse and go to town on a few more works in progress that got too big for the small one? Or start my new year-long project and do the first colour? I’ve been loving going through my queue and making plans.

Spring embroidery break

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I strained my hand/wrist/arm at the end of socks on vacay (it wasn’t *just* knitting but the short needle setup I was trying didn’t help), so I took a two week break and tried some different crafts while I waited for my body to recover.

Embroidery has been popular in knitting circles. (even punch embroidery, which I haven’t done since I was… 11 maybe?) When my local knitting store was closing down their bricks and mortar location I picked up a couple of Kiriki sampler kits on sale. This one is spring and I also got winter. (And I might have to go order Summer now…)

It’s definitely a hello world style kit, meaning it’s clearly got training wheels intended to help you get started. The kit itself doesn’t have printed instructions, but they’re all on the website.

I’ve done a bit of embroidery for amigurumi and the odd Christmas ornament so it’s not a completely new skill for me, but this was definitely way outside of my skill set. I’m pretty pleased with the results, though! I expect I could get pretty comfortable with this if I practiced.

I wondered early on what I would even do with embroidery skills, but this is actually cute enough that I might try to find a way to display it. It’s clearly meant for a 6inch display hoop, but I kind of like it on a smaller one that doesn’t show the how-to parts. This 3inch is still a bit too big, but I might find something eventually.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this! I’ve got a few more free-form kits from Fireside Textiles‘ Patreon but I’m going to at least tackle the other sampler I have first.

And speaking of amigurumi and Christmas ornaments… I also did exactly that as my second project:

As the photo says, this was part of last year’s Little Box of Crochet advent calendar. I didn’t get very far in it, but that was expected because eh, life. Hoping to get a bit further this year!

Both of those served as a nice break where I used different muscles. I spent a few days on calls to Japan and needed something to keep myself awake while listening in, but with knitting out I needed to try to branch out. Although I was not exactly thrilled when it took two weeks to recover, it’s better than that time in high school where I didn’t rest enough and had sore wrists on and off for 9 months!

But even if I’m not on a knitting break any more, you can expect me to do some more embroidery and crochet coming up this fall. It was fun!

And yes, in case you were wondering, I do realize the title of this post is a bit punny.