The first CMS/Colloquium of the school year

With Robert's dress socks done, I dug out one of my longterm (very longterm ... the last time I worked on it was in college, so at least 4 years ago) UFOs.  It's a mitered square blanket using Tofutsies sock yarn left over from the sock war in Summer 2008.  I'm using this strategy to make the squares by knitting them onto one another.

I knitted 2 or so squares in my two seminars on Thursday afternoon (but the first seminar was short, it was just a planning meeting).

If I remember right, the reason I stopped working on this was that I don't really have enough yarn to make it any sort of reasonable size.  I weighed it the other night, and the knitted parts are 90 grams and the yarn I've got is 74 grams.  It is currently 17.5" by 18.25".

At this point I just want to finish things and get them off my UFO list, so I'm going to unravel the one square (I was going to make it one square wider than it currently is) and re-knit it on a higher row, and then knit until I run out of yarn.  At that point, it will be however big it will be and I will figure out what that size can be useful for.

That said, if anyone out there reading has Tofutsies yarn that you would be willing to give me, I would gladly take it.

Black dress socks finished

I finished Robert's black dress socks on Wednesday evening.  He is happy with them, and I think they turned out well!  I ended up having quite a bit of yarn left over, so I kind of wish I had made the legs longer, but it's always hard to figure out how long to make the legs on cuff down socks. 

I'm also making good progress on some other long-term UFO's...

Coffee-dyed yarn

I visited my mom last weekend, and on Sunday morning before I flew home we dyed some of her handspun yarn with coffee!  We used the book Harvesting Color as a reference (it doesn't have specific instructions for coffee, so we used the master dye bath recipe).

We mordanted by simmering with alum for an hour the on Sunday morning, then rinsed the yarn with hot water and simmered it in very, very strong coffee for 90 minutes.  Then I had to go to the airport, so we turned the heat off and let the yarn cool in the dye bath until Sunday evening, when my mom rinsed, thwacked, and hung the yarn to dry.

It is a lovely golden brown color - but not what we expected.  I think we both expected a darker, less golden, more "dirt" brown color.  But in any case, it is beautiful, and we had fun!

Half moon modern HST quilt top

I finished my Half Moon Modern half square triangle quilt top. I think it looks great! Not all of the corners are perfect, but they are good enough for me and certainly not bad. I haven't completely decided how to quilt it yet. I'm going to stitch either in the ditch or parallel to the seams between the patterned and gray areas. I might also do some free-motion in the negative space, but I'll see how I feel about it once I get going on the quilting. I'm going to quilt my fickle nickel quilt before this one , so it might be a little while.

A firefly geranium

A month or two ago I saw the most adorable border print fabric and I really wanted to make my niece a dress from it.  I used the Geranium dress pattern from Made by Rae.  It was pretty quick and easy to sew - I could probably get one done in an afternoon(although I didn't with this one).  The biggest challenge was maneuvering the little pieces in my sewing machine. 

The fabric is incredibly adorable!

I used a coordinating print (fireflies in jars) and this tutorial/pattern to make a matching pair of bloomers to go under the dress. I'm pretty sure they'll be way too big, but the dress will also probably be a bit big right now, too.  I made the smaller size of bloomers and the 12-18 month size dress.

I happen to have an embroidery machine, and a.week before I sewed the dress I happened to see a firefly embroidery pattern for free on Urban Threads, so it went into the lining as a secret surprise.
This outfit will be a first birthday gift for my niece.