Monday, July 28, 2014

Progress on my modern triangles

I've been working away on my Half Moon Modern half-square triangle quilt.  Here's the back of the folded-up almost-complete top - I just have two more seams to pin and sew and the top will be done.  Then I will have two complete quilt tops awaiting quilting - this and my Fickle Nickel.  I'm planning to quilt the fickle nickel first, hopefully before the end of the summer!

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Men's dress socks

A month or two ago, my husband Robert mentioned that if I was looking for knitting projects, he would wear a pair of dress socks if I made them for him.  Black dress socks immediately became my next knitting project.  I ordered some solid black Cascade Heritage Silk sock yarn and got to work.  I'm working out of the wonderful sock recipe book More Sensational Knitted Socks.  The color in the picture is not quite right - the yarn is black, but it's hard to get a photo that shows both the color and the stitch pattern at the same time.  This photo is already a bit old.  Since it was taken, I've turned the heel and started the gusset.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

White yarn finished!

My UFO list says I started spinning this yarn in November 2011.  I finally finished it last week.  I bought a pound of un-dyed blue faced leicester to practice spinning on.  I spun the whole thing on my wheel, using a short backwards draw and the slowest ratio on my ladybug.  I plied it into a two-ply yarn and got two skeins: the one with green ties is approximately 270 yds and the one with brown ties is about 240 yds.  I could definitely see when I was plying it that the earliest singles were much less uniform that the more recent ones.  That was pretty gratifying!

I decided to use this yarn to knit a cardigan version of this sweater.  I have 4 oz of Hello Yarn hand-dyed roving that I got at yarn school two years ago, which I'd like to use for the top part of the sweater.  I'm not sure if it's enough, or if I have enough of the white yarn to do the body AND sleeves, so my plan is to start the sweater body from the bottom and see how it goes.  If I have enough to do the sweater body and sleeves as in the picture I'll do that, and if not I'll just do the body in white and then either spin something else for the yoke and sleeves or buy some Noro for it as the pattern suggests.