Viking Tea Party

Froggy Friday

You've heard of WIP Wednesday and FO Friday, right?  Yeah, well, Froggy Friday is the usually unseen and less popular fourth cousin

First off, the one you might have already guessed...remember this little crochet sweater that I asked your opinion on a couple of weeks ago?  It's fate has been decided.

 

There were lots of fantastic suggestions and I thank you for each and every one.  I really contemplated finishing it and putting it aside so that I'd have a gift for a someone having a girl.  I even got momentarily excited because Ginny had just had a baby girl but by the time it was cool enough for her to wear it, it definitely wouldn't fit.  That thing was tiny. 

Then, as I was searching for buttons for my latest Pebble Vest, I found these...

 

Sorry for the lousy photos - it's incredibly overcast and rainy today

I did a little research and they could possibly be French buttons from as early as WWI or WWII but one site also said they're also still being made.  These, obviously, aren't new but I can't really imagine they're from the early 1900's. They either came from a tin that Mom bought for me in an antique shop or a giant tub that my granny found at a garage sale so who knows?

Then I thought about Chris' suggestion of adding buttons and patches to the original crocheted sweater to give it a military feel.  So, as strange as it may seem to use buttons that could potentially be from WWI on a baby sweater...I might use buttons that could potentially be from WWI on a baby sweater.  Maybe.  I could have added them all the way down the crocheted sweater but I still wasn't happy with the crocheted look so I frogged it.  Done and done.

And I'm not even going to think twice about the fact that a Pebble Vest takes exactly seven buttons!  :)

And then there's the Easy Baby Cardigan.  My original idea was to add crocheted loops and buttons after it was finished but I liked that idea less and less with every monotonous stockinette row.  When I got about an inch away from starting on the garter stitch bottom band I decided it's big enough for him to wear more than once or twice which warranted frogging it back and adding button holes.  So, in a matter of minutes, this...

...became this!

Ack! 

I had another reason for frogging it - not a great reason but a second reason none the less.  There was a medium sized pool of purple on the back (you can kind of see in the first photo) that bothered me a little bit and now I can fix that, too.  

All is not lost - I do have a finished project!  Granted, that finished project is a third Pebble...

I'm not really footloose and fancy free when it comes to color (even though that's my word for 2010) .  I'm not good at matching things at all.  That said, the buttons are all the same...just different, muted colors.  I also picked out several shades of orange buttons that looked good but I forced myself to put them back because I was leaning toward all the same shade rather than mixing them up.  These buttons are better than brown buttons on a brown sweater but they're still safe.  Thankfully, I still have a few months to work on that color thing....

Oh!-Dessa

My days of knitting and crocheting non-stop are coming to an end but at least it's for a great reason: my parents are coming to visit for the last two weeks of March and there are so many things we'd like to do around here before then.  For now, though, I knit.  A lot.

This week I knitted up another incredibly popular pattern, Odessa. 

I used a fantastic yarn by Colinette called Cadenza that I picked up several skeins of in both this shade, Summer Berries, and an beautiful blue called Adonis Blue at Burford Needlecraft on Monday.  It's incredibly soft and knits up wonderfully - plus it has a sweet price tag of only £4.50 (with 15% off while we were there - hooray for surprise sales).

I loved the pattern, too.  Without using beads, it's delightfully monotonous although I have to say I fell asleep a bit during the decrease rows and had to back up quite a few rows to fix my mistake. 

As much as I love the yarn and the pattern, I'm not really sure how much I like the hat on my head.  It doesn't flatter my chipmunk cheeks at all.  I blame all the butter, cheese and bread I've consumed over the last four months.  Regardless, I've already worn it quite a bit - it's really comfy.  

I'm going to add a new segment to Viking Tea Party in the next couple of days that I hope will be amusing to those on both sides of the pond.  :)

A Colorful Crochet Cure

I have lots of things on my restless needles at the moment but not one finished project in sight.  This need to finish something, I think, makes the restlessness that much worse so I spent some time the other night looking around for something I could work up quickly.  Little did I know the inspiration I was looking for was hanging put in my blogroll in the form of Kate's hooky fingerless mitts.  I dug out the Noro Striped Scarf I knew I was never going to finish (I didn't realize you needed two skeins of each color when I purchased the yarn), frogged it and started a pair of crocheted mitts of my own.  

I didn't photograph it but the flip side of a fabric crocheted through the back loops is really pretty so I had a little trouble deciding which side to use.  In the end I did use the front side, though.

Noro Silk Garden 255 crocheted with a G hook

I dug through my button box and pulled out three random-yet-vaguely-matching buttons for each mitt, thinking I would decorate the wrists a bit but once I sewed the first and started on the second I decided I liked them colorfully plain. 

So that was a slight cure for the restlessness - tomorrow I've got a bit more cure to post!

2010: Color

January 1, 2009: I'm not going to say what my future is going to be like or make any resolutions this year - instead I'm going to take the advice of a few blogs I read and focus on a word.  My word is simple, "Forward".  Everything in 2009 is about moving forward.  Moving forward to things that I've been waiting years, maybe all my life, to do.  Big things, teeny tiny things, but all very meaningful - and this is the year I'll, hopefully, get to accomplish some of them.

The above is from my first blog entry of 2009 and I have to say that, even though I may not have consciously focused on the word "forward" as much as I could have, I certainly moved forward.  I'm not sure what teeny tiny things I was thinking of but I know I accomplished the big things.  Getting married and moving to England were really beyond big and we have our fingers crossed that this year will bring even more big things forward. For now, though, it's time to pick out a new word for this new year.

My word is a few days late this year because I've really been feeling a bit indecisive. The word I finally settled on, though, is the one that came to mind when I first started thinking about it. 

I've been working on this post for two days now because it's incredibly hard to think about color in the dead of winter when everything is some shade of white, gray, brown or black.  That said, there are two blogs - do you mind if i knit and Attic24 - that I've been following for a few months now that are a daily dose of colorful inspiration and also part of the reason I chose the word 'color' this year.  When I scroll through Google Reader I almost always look first to see if they have new posts.  Not only do they post beautiful (and well lit, I have to add) photos but their writing is so positive that it's hard not to feel good once you've finished reading.  These two women also make me want to cover my couches in colorful granny squares.

For Matt's sake, though, I think maybe I'll just start with a cushion cover or two.  

Adding color to my knitting will be a little hard since one of my new year's resolutions is to save money by using yarn from my stash as much as possible and, as Chris said, learning to "work from the yarn end, and not the pattern end of knitting."  I already have a lot of green yarn because I Love Green so when I do buy yarn I'm going to go for colors I don't normally use - blues, pinks, reds, yellows and oranges...pretty much any color of the rainbow that isn't green.  I'm going to do the same thing with my wardrobe - no more black and brown and maybe a little less green there, too.  I was trying a bunch of things on a month or so ago and even the woman who showed me to my dressing room commented on the fact that everything I had was green.  

I also want to make color a state of mind, too, and channel some of the positivity that color inspires.  That's the kind of color I could really use right now while there's snow on the ground and the temperatures are in single digits.  That and a handful of crocheted flowers....

In closing, a colorful palette of talented inspiration! 

1. finished hexagon baby blanket, 2. Stack of happy crochet, 3. Crochet flowers, 4. ♥ colors, 5. Untitled, 6. petals, 7. Flower Power, 8. Flower Brooches (Bloemenbroches), 9. Granny squares, 10. Untitled, 11. Crochet Flowers, 12. That potholder., 13. prize winning rosettes, 14. rainbow acorn color wheel, 15. grannylicious, 16. Colourful cotton bag.., 17. granny garland, 18. All 5 Potholders Together, 19. Pastora, 20. Scrapghan - Progress Photo #2, 21. Granny squares, 22. Winter Project, 23. Mum's cushions, 24. Festa do Divino, 25. Babette Progress