Travel knitting

I was away at a conference and camping last week.  The top picture is how my knitting looked when I left, and here it was when I got home:

I finished casting off on the last plane home, and then I couldn't remember how to do the Turkish cast-on to start the second sock.  It's probably just as well though - two of my friends and I had spent the previous night trying to sleep in a freezing cold airport terminal, and I fell asleep while I was waiting for the seatbelt sign to turn off so I could get up to go to the bathroom and woke up as we landed at our home airport.

I never knit as much as I think I'm going to when I travel for conferences.  I don't take my knitting with me to talks, and I'm usually out of the hotel from early breakfast until late night after dinner and socializing, so I just don't have time.  I also always expect to get more reading done than I do.  This time I split my flight time evenly between reading and knitting and didn't do any of either while I was actually at the conference.  It was such a great conference that I don't mind at all!

A flock of Geese

Week before last I finished up the quilt top for the first of two babies who will be born into my extended family this summer.  I used a bunch of scrap fabrics and some from Hawthorne Threads scrap packs to make a bunch of flying geese.  My original plan was to put in some squares of that owl print, because my cousin (the mom) loves owls, but once I had the geese made and laid out, it seemed too busy, so I put the owls on the back instead.  I filled in around the geese with a charcoal solid.

Here is the back.  I bought half a yard of the owls, but the other two fabrics are stash.

Today I'm going to baste and hopefully quilt this baby quilt.  I think I'm going to stitch in the ditch around the flying geese and then do some straight lines in the border.

Knitting along

I've been making some progress on both of my knitting projects - I'm actually a bit further on both of them since I took these pictures at the end of last week.  I finished turning the heel on the sock yesterday evening, and I finished the skein of black yarn you can see in the top left of the sweater photo and spit-spliced on the next one.

I also ripped the one sleeve I'd knit back to the start of the increases just above the colorwork.  On Saturday afternoon I measured what I had done so far and one of my favorite sweaters.  I concluded that because I am not getting row gauge (at all), the slower increase scheme I concocted at the beginning of the sleeve (because I want my sleeves longer than the pattern calls for, and I wanted the extra length at the bottom of the sleeve where it is narrow and not at the top of the sleeve where it would be all baggy) was totally unnecessary.  Now knowing what my actual row gauge is, I expect knitting the smallest size of the pattern as written will give me the sleeve length I want.  Hopefully it all works out ...

Two quick sewing projects

I've been intending to re-cover the full-sized ironing board for a while now.  It was old and pretty gross, and the little clip holding the string holding the cover on didn't work very well, so it would always get loose and let the padding get bunched up along the edge of the board.  It was really frustrating, but I had a lot of other projects I wanted to do, and I have another smaller ironing board that hangs down over the back of the closet door in the sewing room/guest room, so the big ironing board wasn't a priority.  But I finally got around to doing it.  I used a tutorial from Crazy Mom Quilts.  It was easy, if not quite as fast it was for her.  And now I have a lovely new polka-dot ironing board cover with an elastic edge!

I used the newly covered ironing board to make some cloth napkins with mitered corners.  Now we don't feel quite so much like heathens when we have company (or when it's just the two of us eating dinner on a week night).   I used this tutorial from Nicole at Home, with the narrow hem option, and I cut the rectangles 10.5" by 18".  I probably should have pre-washed the fabric, but I was impatient and I didn't.  So far I've made two of this lovely blue leaf print (one fat quarter makes exactly two with no leftover fabric) and two in a peachy sort of print.  I'll make more so we can have more people over and still have napkins when we need to do laundry, but four is a good start.

Half Moon Modern Half Square Triangles!

 I finished my Half Moon Modern HST quilt!  This might be my favorite quilt of all the ones I've made so far.  I love the asymmetry, the negative space, and the prints on the fabrics.

I quilted lines on each side of each grey/print seam using my walking foot.  I thought about trying to do some sort of FMQ filler in the negative space, but I wasn't confident in my FMQ skills and I like that the simple quilting leaves the focus on the fabric and patchwork.

There are big polka dots on the back and the binding is the paisley print from the Half Moon Modern collection.  The quilt top was made from two charm packs of Half Moon Modern and grey yardage, and the batting is Warm and Natural.

The top was about 48 by 60".  I didn't bother to measure it after quilting/binding/washing/drying.  The quilt is coming to work to keep my warm in my over-air-conditioned office this summer.

CMS/Colloquium knitting

 This is how my sock looked at the end of CMS (the first of two seminars) on Thursday afternoon.

This second photo is what it looked like when I got home Thursday evening.  I spent the first ten minutes of colloquium ripping back to the foot, because I realized that the foot was way to long.  By an inch.  This is the first time I've used this particular heel pattern, so it's not that surprising that I had to figure out the hard way how much length the heel adds to the foot (if you're wondering, I now know it's 4.25").  What is surprising is how long I was in denial about the need to rip it back and re-do it.

I don't mind, because for me socks are about process - after all, in this hot humid hot humid climate I don't wear socks very often - so it just means I get to knit with this wonderfully soft beautiful yarn for longer.  And even if I were knitting for product, it's so much better to have a product that fits!

Serger Cover!

I decided to turn my paper-pieced blocks from Quiltcon into a cover for my serger. I measured the serge (which is a very strange shape) and drew some diagrams.

I sewed together a strip for the front, top, and back, and quilted that in the ditch to a piece of batting (no backing).  I quilted the green print in parallel straight lines and later cut it into pieces for the side panels.

 Here's the finished front...

. . . and back.

 A close-up of the hole for the handle. I made this the same way I would put an interior pocket in a purse.

 Here's the inside. I made the inside 3/4 inch longer than the outside and finished the edge by turning the inside raw edge up to meet the outer raw edge, then folding the inside piece up again to encase the raw edge.  Then I topstitched around.