Honestly, this is mostly a test of the Mastodon posting thing which apparently only works if I start a post from the web and not the app. (Unlike the Dreamwidth posting tool, which is clearly superior)
But here’s a picture of my new quilt in progress so that this is kind of a real post too.
This is squares from 5 (or maybe 6?) different “charm packs” of 5 inch squares from Craft Emporium PDX. The packs are relatively cheap so I kind of accumulated a few before I had a plan for them.
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!
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?
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.)
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!
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.
Glowforge: I made an embroidery floss holder as part of a care package for Marlene, and a no soliciting sign for our front door.
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!
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.
I started the month planning to do a gnome mystery knit (because I’d never tried one) and The Sharon Show (because the pitch of $7 for cat themed entertainment appealed to me).
I did manage to finish the gnome, and it was such a delightful little thing that I’ll probably sign up for the next. The pattern was clever and even in something relatively small, had a few new techniques to try. (The slip-stitch cables in the beard, and the knit-on-purl-bumps applied hoodie/bunnyhug pocket.)
The Sharon Show did not go as well. I didn’t love my yarn choices, so I wound up casting something else while I was deciding if I even wanted to do it. Enter the Heliotrope hat.
And then I found a mistake many rows back and nearly put that project in timeout too. In the end, with some encouragement, I ripped back the brioche and kept going. Emboldened by that, I also ripped out the shawl and was so much happier with it that I made a token attempt to catch up.
But then I went on vacation this week, and it reminded me that I hadn’t really been doing the Socks on Vacay knit a long this year. So I abandoned the shawl again to cast on a sock and even took it to the beach so I could pretend for a few pictures that this was a normal kind of vacation (and not an exhausting week of strong-willed toddler parenting).
I finished the sock last night, and I haven’t even mentioned the spinning I’ve been doing!
I’m still a full clue behind on the shawl and haven’t finished the brioche, and I didn’t finish my second “intermission” spin before the Tour started today, but… It doesn’t matter. I’m loving the shawl pattern now. $7 *was* a good price for cat-based entertainment. The pattern is simple but the drink suggestions and catty section names make it fun. The brioche will keep giving me a break when I need something different. And the spin will just continue through to be my first skein of Tour de Fleece 2.0.
I think I’m even going to cast on another sock. My vacation may be drawing to a close, but I’ve got enough time to finish the second before labour day for socks on vacay! And then maybe I’ll finally get back to my very long delayed Geek Sock, which has been quietly happening as a tiny purse project on my self-care walks and other times I wanted something small.
Also happening this month was a tiny sewing project because my kid wanted a doggy bone he could carry around in his mouth.
And I also finished Half the Knit Sky, which deserves its own post but I’m just going to post a finished object here in case it’s a while before I do that.
And also Hazelwood, which was mostly done much earlier but I had a big fight with my sewing machine and had to order more yarn. It also deserves a full post, but for now, here’s just a finished photo!
I’ve been feeling unsettled a lot this month, and I think I’m knitting in a slightly unsettled way as a result. But in a world where we’re not going to solve a pandemic or US politics or racism any time soon, I guess I have been finding it reassuring to finish knit/spin/sew stuff even if I’m not doing it the way I normally would and instead flitting from thing to thing. The unsettled knitting, at least, is a thing that I think will pass.
Cutting your knitting is scary, but I did it and survived!
I tried out two other new things in the process: Studio Donegal “Darnie” fingering” which is an Irish-made yarn that was perfect for this. So many rich colours, really “toothy” for nice colourwork. I honestly wasn’t sure I’d like it, because it’s a bit stiff feeling until it’s washed (and oh does it bloom beautifully) but it feels satisfying to work with in a way I can’t quite articulate. I might have to plan out a fancy colourwork sweater now that I know I love knitting with it.
Second new thing: those flexible double pointed needles. They’ve been available everywhere but since I mostly do magic loop on circular needles, I hadn’t tried them. But this was a needle size where I didn’t have needles I loved, so I gave it a shot. Not bad at all! I don’t mind dpns but with a curious toddler around they’re a hazard. But sometimes magic loop is a pain in small gauge. I’ve found a hat pattern using this size to try next!
Ready to cut. I borrowed those scissors but i covet my own now.
Cutting!
And blocked on the mug:
Success!
I’ve got enough yarn to do it again, and next time I’m going to do a few things differently: I want a sightly wider icord and I need to catch more of the edge into the sewn part. I had to use a felting needle to push in some errant strands, which is no big deal but makes me think I need a bit more rolled into that edge. I’ve got enough yarn to do a second cup cozy, so I’ll definitely do that before attempting a steeked sweater, but I do think I will try a sweater eventually!
I was browsing this thread about project bags, saw this design, and thought I should try it out. A quick search of the internet found me some basic instructions (this tutorial has particularly decent pictures and nice clear indications of where to sew), so I free-handed a pattern and gave it a shot.
In the picture above, you can see my free-handed pattern. I knew I wanted a project bag for my current knitting project (the sweater) that always has me carrying at least two balls of yarn (that’s to allow me to switch back and forth between two balls and avoid abrupt colour changes when I switch balls). So I basically put the two balls and proto-sweater on my grocery store ad and drew around it.
You cut two of both the inner and outer colours, then pin them right-sides in.
Then sew the outside/bottom edge of the bag EXCEPT the outside handles. Basically, start below the handle part and sew along the bottom until you get to where the handle starts on the other side. If you look at that first picture of my template, you’re basically ignoring everything above the grocery store ad likes that say “organic” on one side and “home & family care” on the other. Snip along the curve if you want it to sit better.
Also, sew the top flat part of the handles at this point.
Then, you turn the inner lining right-side out and stick it into the bag, re-pin, and sew the whole top curve INCLUDING the handles but only the one side of them.
It’s going to look kind of goofy as you turn it right-side out:
You pretty much have a big oval bag attached in the center with handles sticking out. Wrap it all around and you get a bag with holes in the handles on either side. You need the holes in both handles for it to turn correctly, don’t try to do something clever like I did or you’ll be making friends with the seam ripper. There’s probably some way to do that so it works, but I wasn’t going to experiment too much.
Iron the edges so they’re folded in and then complete the seams, do a bit of stitching at the bottom of each handle for strength, and voila, you have a bag!
You fold the long handle through the short one, and it stays reasonably closed and looks like it could be a cousin to the little hobo bag on a stick of the type you see in cartoons (wikipedia tells me this is called a bindle).
It’s a pretty simple project, on the same scale as my favourite drawstring bag, but with curvy seams instead of a fiddly drawstring.
We’ll see how it does after I’ve toted it around for a while, but it certainly looks prettier than the beat up old small cloth conference bag that I was using before! This is also a great bag to hang on a wrist if you’re knitting while standing in line or just want your yarn close at hand so it doesn’t get tangled or tempt a kitty.
Overall, I think I’d need to be a bit more careful if I were giving this as a gift, since I didn’t love my final seams that much, but I like it enough that I kept my freehanded template in case I want to make another!
Perhaps the most well-known of open source bugs this year is heartbleed, notable as much for its marketing as technical merit.
There’s a tradition at work of decorating people’s cubes when they’re on sabbatical, and while I wasn’t the one who came up with the idea to decorate our fearless leader’s cube with things representing the many well-marketed open source bugs, I was the person who brought in the first piece:
There wasn’t exactly a pattern for this:
Step 1 Draw half a big heart (to make sure it’s symmetrical) and cut out two of them.
Step 2 Cut a long strip with tapered ends to go over the top (to give the pillow some extra width at the top — you can’t see it in the photo but it’s about the width of my palm).
Step 3 Cut various thinner strips to be the bleeding drips.
Step 4 Sew each side of top to tapered strip
Step 5 Carefully sew bottom of two hearts together, placing drips at appropriate intervals.
Step 6 Curse and pull out drips and re-sew so they actually hang correctly. Several times.
Step 7 Leave a hole so you can flip the thing right-side out and stuff, then curse because you have no red thread and spawn another search of the house because it’s much too late to go out and buy thread.
Since my office (and indeed, half of the house) had no floor, there was a lot of frantic searching for the sewing machine. I don’t mind free-handing a pattern, but sewing through 3 layers of polar fleece by hand isn’t my favourite activity! Thankfully, we did find the sewing machine, but in the end, the only red thread I could find came from a promotional sewing kit I got from Raytheon at some Grace Hopper Celebration past. Seems sort of hilariously appropriate.
End result: one very one-of-a-kind throw pillow.
I’m sort of surprised that no one has started marketing open source bug merchandise, to be honest. I’ll bet there’s a market!
Ever since I saw Valleyviolet’s Pony Pattern collections, I’ve wanted to make one. I finally bought the collection in order to make the Pink Fluffy Unicorn mascot for Quelab (who is apparently MIA right now, likely stolen by the same person who vandalized the room sign; much sadness. She was a lot of work!), but I didn’t want to jump right into fighting with fun fur, and I’m fortunate enough to know a little girl of around the right age to enjoy a pony, so…
I went with blue and stars not out of any particular reason other than I liked the way the two fabrics looked together. The recipient’s young and lives far away from me, so I don’t know much about her preferences yet! However, I *do* know that her mom’s a mathematician and that her dad would like me to be a science role model for her. So the pony came with a book:
The book, as you can’t quite see in that photo, is “The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős.” I was super excited when I first heard of it, as it’s a beautifully illustrated children’s book about a rather famous mathematician. One of the things he did was travel the world, collaborating with mathematicans all over the place. Mathematicians sometimes talk about their Erdős Number, which indicates degrees of collaborators on your published papers leading back to the man himself. (I published a paper with someone who’s number is 2, so mine is 3, a number worthy of bragging about at math parties!). My Calculus prof, an excellent storyteller, used to tell us tales of Erdős at the end of class sometime, and I was totally enchanted to hear more of them through the book. And the art works a lot of careful math and real people into the story, which is amazing. I also love that it doesn’t shy away from the fact that he was a man who couldn’t do his own laundry but helped do so much math that people were willing to welcome him into their homes.
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos by Deborah Heiligman, LeUyen Pham (Illustrator)
I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve got a kid in your life who could use a gift!
It’s also a kind of funny pairing with this pony, as some folk have this theory that one of the My Little Ponies with somewhat similar colouring also really likes math. Not an intentional joke on my part, but I’ll take it!
So back to the pony construction…
Much like how representations of humans can have an uncanny valley effect if things are close but a little off, my experience is that this is a pattern that can go kind of horribly wrong if you don’t pay attention to the details. I originally sewed her head on in a weird way and was totally disappointed with the end result. I wasn’t even going to give it to V, it was so awful. I didn’t even take pictures (which is a shame in hindsight because the comparison was so striking). But after ruminating a while, I tried again, and with her nose tipped up just so, she got the curious look I was hoping for.
Valleyviolet’s instructions are very detailed and clear, and there’s a lot of work put into the shaping that really shows in the final product. There’s also just a lot of thought put into the instructions. I’ve actually never worked with a pattern that was so careful about explaining things, and I’ve got to say the patterns are worth every penny as a result. You can can buy her pony patterns here, and I promise you can make much more polished ponies than I did!
I think when I do my next one, I’ll have to be a bit more careful about marking the notches and just generally careful about the stitching. I also need to invest in some heavier weighting for her legs since, as you can see, she doesn’t quite keep all four feet on the floor sometimes. (This was right after she came out of my suitcase from my flight to Ottawa, though, so I can’t blame her for looking a bit disheveled!)
I don’t know how much the recipient cared for the pony, and to be honest she’s a bit young for the book yet, so I didn’t win any gift giving awards here, but it was fun to do and I really loved the pattern.
I think I’m going to try out the shoulder pony pattern next, once I find some suitable beanbag filling!
Another baby gift! This one I made just because I thought the pattern was adorable:
My picture isn’t great, but…
1. Little sheep feet in the grass!
2. Adorable sheepy texture!
3. 3-D sheep head!
4. Perky sheep ears!
And my favourite:
5. Puffy little tail!
This one came from a book called 60 Quick Baby Knits put out to show the glory of Cascade Yarns 220 Superwash. Alas, I didn’t have any on hand, so I used Caron Simply Soft. I don’t really recommend acrylic for this project since it made the stranded colourwork for the feet a bit harder to do. However, I like the yarn for amigurumi (it’s cheap, soft, washable, comes in many colours, and can withstand babies), so that’s why I have it on hand.
60 Quick Baby Knits: Blankets, Booties, Sweaters & More in Cascade… by Sixth&Spring Books
Ravelry Pattern Link:
Sheep Hat by Renee Lorion
My brother got me a Nintendo 3DS XL for Christmas this year, and he picked out exactly the one I would have chosen for myself, a special edition with the new Mario and Luigi RPG. (Of course, he’s the one who got me hooked on those games in the first place…)
It’s a beautiful little piece of hardware, and I’ve been carrying it around incessantly not only so I can play it at lunch, but also because the 3DS has some sort of meta games where you get points for walking around and for passing other people who also have 3DSes. As I am mildly obsessed with games that involve walking (I’m working on creating one for me and my sister to play together, but that’s another story), this means that the 3ds lives in my purse or backpack and I was worried about it getting horribly abused.
Thankfully, I have a sewing machine and I’m not afraid to use it!
So here’s my new DS case:
I was originally going to make this quick and just do two seams up the side and not finish any of the edges. But once I’d started, it seemed so easy to just put some nicer square corners in by sewing across the ends and then finish the top. The fabric’s a bit hard to keep straight because it’s thick and a bit grippy so it’s not my best machine work, but I remember learning how to square corners like this in home ec in grade 7:
Wait, you may say, what’s with that weird yellow corner? See, here’s where it gets interesting…
Yup, that fabric is changing colour based on temperature. (Also, check out my strangely coincidentally matching manicure!) Remember those old Hypercolor shirts from the 80s/90s?
The fabric was part of a sampler box that Quelab got filled with weird samples of sparkly plexiglass and thin veneers and, apparently, some colour-changing industrial fabric. I think it came from instructables? It was filled with interesting materials for projects, anyhow. I am still sad I never found a use for the sparkly plexi, which I refused to take until I had a plan for it, but Adric convinced me that it was cool if I took a chunk out of the very large (and slightly damaged) piece of colour-change fabric.
I’d been trying to think of something sufficiently interesting to do with it, something that sufficiently highlighted the colour change, and maybe the fact that it’s actually sufficiently transparent that you can see a LED through it:
But today, as I was flipping through my small fabric collection trying to find something for the 3ds case, I decided that just something I’d be using all the time is sufficiently interesting and gives me a chance to play with it and show it off regularly. Plus, I’m looking forwards to seeing the heat spots in my purse, which is filled with many power-hungry electronics like the 3DS.
It’s already fun for demonstrating how quickly evaporative cooling works. Look, let me draw a wet line on the case and then blow air on it…
(Fun fact for those of you who don’t live in the desert: New Mexicans cool their houses with evaporative cooling, also known as a swamp cooler, which is a formalized version of a wet towel over a fan, ’cause mold and mildew isn’t so much of an issue in the desert. So you think a lot about evaporation when you live there for 2 years… and then move to the west coast almost-rainforest. Will my clothes ever line dry here?!)
I don’t like being all “perfect is the enemy of good” or the sort of uncluttering fanatic who gets rid of things because there’s no immediate use for them, but there is something very satisfying about actually using an item I’d saved rather than having a never-diminishing collection of “cool things that I should use for something.”
Of course, I still have a little bit of fabric left…
Welcome to Dr. Terri’s maker blog! Since you can just read the about page to find out what’s going on here, I’m going to skip ahead to the part where I show you something I made: A plush Plants vs Zombies sunflower!
John’s father is a huge Plants vs Zombies fan, and when I went to visit for thanksgiving I was highly amused by how much time he spent playing. I thought he might get a kick out of having a sunflower plushie so sit on his desk. I could have bought one, but there didn’t seem to be any in stock that were a nice small desk size, so I bought some polar fleece and set about making a pattern:
As you can tell, my pattern isn’t exactly complex: draw a big oval for the face, petal-like shapes for the petals, and leaf-like shapes for the leaves.
I sewed little pockets to make petals, then ran a line down the centre to make them look right. There’s no stuffing in those because my fleece was thick enough and it would have made sewing them to the face really annoying. I purposely didn’t make them identical because I thought a little bit of wonkiness would look more right.
I hand-drew some eyes and mouth and appliqued mine on by hand. You could easily embroider this instead (and I think that’s what they do with the licensed plushies).
Like the petals, these are sewn as pockets with a line in the middle. You could probably put stuffing in these without making your life too hard, but I didn’t bother. Leave the pocket opening at the base of the leaf so you can just tuck the ends in and sew it to the stem.
The stem is just a tube of green. I filled it with a pair of twisted-together and folded-over pipecleaners to get it to stay up. Make sure to leave a big loop of pipecleaner at the top for sewing into the head if you want it to stay up without flopping over. If you want the sunflower to be able to stand up on its own, make the stem fairly long so you can curl it around underneath to make a base.
Put the two head pieces face together and arrange the petals sticking in with the pocket ends out and sew around the side, leaving a large chunk of space at the bottom and 1-2 petals to fill it in. You can’t see the back of the head in my photos, but it’s just a second brown circle — you could use another colour if desired. Be careful not to overlap the petals (that much fleece is a pain to sew through) or horrifically mis-angle them, although again, some wonkiness is a-ok.
Turn the whole head right-side-out. Insert the pipecleaner loop in and adjust it to suit you, then add some stuffing. Stick your missing petals in and sew through them and the stem. (I did this by hand because it’s awkward to pin and a bit dangerous to stab your sewing machine needle into wrapped wires.)
Sew leaves onto stem. In my case, I sewed them halfway up and then bent the remaining stem in a curl so that the sunflower could stand on its own (or perhaps be wrapped around something).
I really wanted a flowerpot for this so that it could look like a roof-level plant, but we couldn’t find a sufficiently small one since I made this in November and even in the sunny southwest, that’s not really a great time to find flower pots. However, I did find a tiny craft tin bucket, so that’s what I used. The bucket is about 2 inches tall, to give you an idea. The sunflower made its way to its new home in time for his Ayyám-i-Há celebration a few weeks ago, so I figure it’s safe to share the pictures with the world now.
Enjoy!
