CMS/Colloquium knitting - a new project!

Somehow I managed to leave my sock knitting bag at church last Sunday, so I couldn't work on my Deflect socks in CMS and colloquium this week.  Naturally, that meant I had to start a new project (really, what it probably means is that I should air out some of my old UFOs that are in a bin with mothballs, but that wasn't going to happen this week).  I've had in my mind that it would be nice to use the leftover yarn from my not-wedding shrug (I used less than half of what I ordered for it) to make a lace shawl.  I got out my copy of Nancy Bush's Knitted Lace of Estonia and chose the Lilac Leaf Shawl.  It is rectangular, which is what I had in mind, and it uses about the right amount of yarn.  Hopefully it will use up what I've got.  Mine will look a bit different, since my yarn is a light fingering weight instead of the lace weight the pattern calls for, but it should be lovely.

Already it's coming along nicely.  I'm happy!

My second quilt - finally finished!

I started this quilt when I was in middle school - sixth grade, I think.  My mom and I were in a mother-daughter quilting group affiliated with our local guild.  I designed it myself by drawing it out on graph paper.  I chose the fabrics, and my mom helped with lots and lots of pinning.  Then for some reason, when the top was mostly done, I/we ran out of steam, the quilting group disbanded, and it sat in a box in my closet until I was finishing high school. 

I rediscovered it, finished the top, and quilted it using invisible thread in the top and blue to match the backing in the bobbin.  I used a walking foot to quilt a diagonal grid, following the diagonal four-patch lines. I used masking tape to guide my stitching, which I won't do again.  I wasn't super good about following the lines, and in several places I accidentally stitched on top of the edge of the tape instead of next to it.  There are still some places where the masking tape won't come out from under the quilting stitches, and some other places where it did come out in the wash, but the white fabric is stained from where the tape was stuck for so many years. I also stitched in the ditch around the border.  I hand-stitched the binding to the back during my first semester of college, and then it went back in a pillowcase for several more years (although I did pull it out to put on my bed in the winters when it was cold and I needed an extra quilt).  I wasn't sure what to do with the loose thread ends from quilting, so it just languished.

Last month, I finally got it out and knotted/hid/trimmed all of the thread ends (there were many).  Then it sat for another week or two waiting for a trip though the washing machine and dryer, and then for another week waiting for photographs.  But now it is done!

It is a small twin size - it pretty much exactly covers the top surface of our double bed.  I'm not sure what we'll do with it, since we don't have any twin beds.  Probably we'll just store it and maybe occasionally take it out when the weather is extra cold and extra quilts are necessary.

CMS knitting

I finished the gusset and started on the foot of my first Deflect sock in CMS on Thursday.  I really like how this is turning out, but I've been reading ahead and I'm not sure the toe shaping instructions in the pattern are quite right.  I need to think about this and see if there are any errata to the pattern (the issue is that the rib pattern established by the cable on the foot is supposed to continue into the toe and get eaten up by the toe shaping.  The way the pattern is written, there will be three stitches between the decreases on the left side (rather than the customary two, as it is on the other side) and one of them is a purl.  I don't see how this will work out when I get to the kitchener stage.  It will be asymmetric, not to mention with a random line of purl stitches!

Mini-quilt wedding gift

 My father-in-law got married, not this weekend that just ended, but the one before.  Robert and I wanted to make a nice gift for him and his now-wife because we think they are really awesome and wanted to commemorate their marriage (and what can you buy for parents - they are a firmly established household and could buy anything they needed or really wanted).  We decided on a cute mini-quilt (my part of it) with a lovely kolrose-d stand (Robert's part) similar to the one Robert made for our wedding cake topper.

I followed this tutorial at Two More Seconds for the heart applique, but made it a lot smaller.  Most of the fabrics are from a warm scrap pack I got on sale from Hawthorne Threads a few months ago, and a few are leftovers from other projects.    I embroidered their wedding date by hand before I sandwiched and (minimally) quilted it.

Here's the stand.  There are two narrow vertical sleeves on the back of the quilt to put over dowels that go in the holes of the stand.  The T and A are in blackboard bold (a mathy font - both my father-in-law and his wife are math professors), which fit perfectly because the theme of the wedding was "Nerd love"!

I didn't finish the binding on the quilt until the morning of the wedding and in my excitement to get it wrapped up I forgot to take pictures of the finished product ... maybe I'll get some the next time we visit ... or maybe I'll forget ...

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I'm zipping along on my first Deflect sock.  I'm almost finished with the gusset.  Somehow I didn't notice when I chose the pattern that it has non-traditional shaping on the gusset.  All of the stitches decrease into (both sides of) the cable panel on one side of the foot.  It was a nice surprise, but for a few minutes I was pretty confused about how the gusset decreases were supposed to work out!

Machine-embroidered cloth napkins

My mom moved to start graduate school and celebrated her birthday in August, and I had a super idea for a birthday/housewarming gift for her: cloth napkins!  I got the idea from napkins my sister-in-law made when she first got her embroidery machine.  The designs are from urbanthreads.com.  I used the fancy embroidery machine that Robert's grandma sent me last spring, and they turned out super well.  I bought off-white home-dec weight fabric, cut 19" squares, embroidered the designs (four of each design) in one corner of each square, and used this tutorial from Sew Bon to do a narrow mitered corner hem.  Of course I didn't start the project until a week or so before my mom's birthday and it took way longer than I thought it would, so I didn't get them finished and mailed until half way through September, but of course my mom loved them anyway!

Three weeks of CMS/Colloquium knitting!

 I finished the second cuff on my shrug (it took two weeks of CMS and colloquium) in last week's colloquium.  Now I just need to graft the stitches together, weave in all the ends, and block it!

Last weekend, I flew to Arizona to hike in the Grand Canyon and camp in the National Forest with two of my best friends.  We had a great time, and I started a new pair of socks on the plane.  The pattern is Deflect, from Knitty.  Here's how much I got done on the trip:

 And here's how the first sock looks after CMS and Colloquium yesterday: