Robert's hiking stick

Robert finished his hiking stick about two weeks ago. He smoothed out all of the rough bits, sealed it with multiple coats of polyurethane, and put a copper cap on the bottom end to protect it from wearing down with use. It's really quite beautiful.

His next project is a small nostepinne for me. Just about all of the commercially available nostepinnes I've seen are HUGE. My mom has a small one that she bought at a living history museum in Denmark in 1993, and Robert offered to carve me one that will fit my hands and the skinny sock yarn I usually knit with!

CMS/Colloquium knitting

The past two weeks have been pretty tough. I've been very busy at school, and my grandfather died on March 31. I wasn't at colloquium or CMS last week because I was traveling to the funeral. The service was lovely, and it was good to be together with my family.

The knitting project I've been working on lately is this cowl. I've been alternating working on this and my embroidered tablecloth when we watch TV in the evenings, but since my garden socks are all done except for weaving in a few ends, this is my new CMS/colloquium project. Here it was before CMS yesterday:
And here it was after. It's now just over half way done:

CMS/Colloquium knitting

My garden socks are almost done! I just need to finish the second cuff and weave in all the ends on both socks. I'm happy with the length of the legs, and I used up just about all of the purple yarn.

I don't think it's very clear in the pictures, but I tried to do a ruffled cuff/bind off. One of the issues with toe-up socks is that cast-offs are often not as stretchy as cast-ons, so you have to be careful that you'll be able to get the bound-off edge around your heel to get the socks on and off, and that it won't be too tight around your leg while you're wearing them. I also wanted the cuff to echo the waves of the feather and fan lace. What I decided to do was knit into the front and back of every stitch on the second-to -last round before the bind-off, so I had twice as many stitches as in the body of the sock, which creates a bit of a ruffle. I think it solved both problems pretty well.

FNSI results

Last night I drafted out a pattern for a pair of shorts for myself and made a muslin. I have some really cool giraffe fabric that I'd like to make a pair of PJ shorts from, but I only have one yard of the polka dot fabric I'm going to use for the lining (and I don't want to waste any giraffe fabric), so I need to make sure the pattern is right before I make them.

Unfortunately, the pattern is not quite right yet. The general fit is okay, but there's not really enough room in the butt, so need to adjust the pattern and make another muslin. On the next round, I'm going to try out the waistband and hem also.

Last week's CMS/Colloquium + FNSI

Here's where my socks were at the end of colloquium last week. I'm running out of yarn, but I think the legs are just about long enough. My plan is to see if I can squeeze one or two more pattern repeats out of the purple yarn and then finish off with a green garter stitch cuff.

Tomorrow night is the Friday Night Sew-In over at Handmade by Heidi. I'm going to do some of the sewing projects I've been thinking about: my giraffe shorts and maybe altering some of my old t-shirts.

A Robert Project

Robert and I were on spring break week before last. We went backpacking with some family friends. Robert spent most of our daylight non-hiking time working on a beautiful hiking stick - removing the bark on the upper part and smoothing the surface with his knife. None of my pictures show him hiking with it, but I think our friends have some.

Elise's Quilt finished!

I finished Elise's quilt Wednesday night, photographed it at the university on Thursday (outside like all the cool quilt bloggers do), and put it in the mail yesterday.

I'm very happy with the result, and I hope she'll like it, too. After I finished it, I gave it a trip through the washer and dryer, and just like I've heard, washing it makes it a little crinkly and hides a multitude of quilting sins. Here's a close-up of one of the (better) stars: