12.10.2007

Better Now.

Sorry, sorry, sorry... I took a long weekend off to recuperate from this latest illness. Bad blogger. Bad!

I don't know if it was my last post or sheer boredom from sitting around waiting to get better, but I got a good jump on my holiday knitting in the last 72 hours. Baby A.K.'s Dora The Explorer blanket is underway, and I gotta say... it looks SO beautiful! And yes, this is kind of surprising to me - hot pink, electric purple, and bright orange are most definitely NOT the colors I'd normally choose for a blanket. You see, whenever I've knit this blanket pattern, I've always chosen light, airy pastels. It always seemed to me that a knitted baby blanket was sure to become somebody's heirloom someday, and all good heirlooms are in soft, dreamy colors that are timeless and classic and go with everything. Baby A.K.'s blanket was going to be different, but oy vey, those colors... ! I had my doubts. But I'm here to say, it looks gorgeous. Blended together, the colors don't look as garish as they sound - they just make for a bold, happy blanket well suited for my bold, happy toddler. It'll be one of her Christmas gifts.

As I type this, one of the Katia Nordic Print scarves is drying on my beautiful new blocking board. My goal is for it to become a fake Mobius scarf, but I'm not sure it wants to be a fake Mobius scarf. It knit up beautifully - the stitch definition is wonderful, and the colorway (blues, purples, greens) is so... me. Since this is a gift, and I really couldn't spend a fortune on it, the goal was to make this scarf using just one skein. I might have needed two. And I might have considered using a size smaller needle. And I probably should've made it a bit thinner. Well... not much to do about it now. I'll take it off the blocking board after I post this and see what it wants to become.

I'm still plugging away at my mom's Koigu socks. For the adult socks I've done so far, I've used size 2 DPNs, which work out fine, although I've found that they turn out just a tad big. So for my mom's, I thought I'd use size 1 DPNs. I think they'll fit much better, but man, I feel every single stitch. These are taking forever... can one needle size down make this big a difference? And another thing: any DPN smaller than a 2 should be metal. For me, at least.

One good thing about all this holiday knitting: at the end of it, I get to go back to knitting for me again.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope you're feeling much better! And glad at least that being sick encouraged knitting time. I'm very curious to see the Dora blanket, and how the colors interplay.

Re: socks; did you change the number of stitches for your smaller needles, or just take the whole pattern down a needle size to make them smaller? If you adjusted gauge and are using more stitches, then there's more knitting to be done and it will take longer (of course). All of my socks have been on size 0 or 1 (mostly 0) so I don't have much perspective on the difference between 1 and 2. My current sock is 66 stitches around the leg in 2x1 ribbing; how does that compare to your stitch count?

Good luck with the rest of the holiday knitting!

Deb S. said...

Hope you are feeling better.

Can't wait to see Baby A.K.'s blanket. I love bright colors so it sounds wonderful to me.

I liked your comment about the scarf you are making and what it wants to be. When I was making a quilt for a friend of mine, I wanted to make her a lap quilt. I started cutting fabric and making up blocks. I didn't have quite enough blocks to make a lap quilt and nothing (and I mean nothing) I had in my stash was going to work as wide sashing or borders. The quilt insisted (and I literally mean insisted) that it be a wall hanging. And really, who was I to argue with what it wanted to be?

All that being said, it will be interesting to see what your scarf will become; remember, the scarf is in charge. LOL

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