merino
Making Peace
It seems like everybody and their mother all have knitted a Bluesand Cardigan before. And with over 2700 projects on Ravelry, it’s one of the most popular cardigan patterns on Ravelry. And anyone who has seen this design before knows why – it’s so cleverly designed with distinctive small touches and details that really make this piece stand out. And now I finally have one, too! Though the journey to get there was not so simple. But first, let’s admire this wonderful thing in all its glory.
Now let me tell you a tale of times long past. Years ago, I had decided to cast-on this cardigan for the first time, hoping to use this design to feature one of my first handspun yarn. I had paired it with one of my favorite yarns at the time, Cascade Heritage Sock in two shades of gray. Guys, it was a thing of beauty. To this day, I still bitterly remember this project (you can in fact still see it over here, as I kept the Ravelry project page with all my pictures). But one of the downsides of such an elegant design with careful attention to details is that its construction is very intricate and require significant focus every small step of the way. And unfortunately for me, I was not prepared for this the first time around. A series of mistakes back to back caused frustration, anger and disappointment, and I ended up frogging the entire thing. Not to worry, although it took a few years, I ended up using the yarn for another wonderful sweater from the same designer (remember my Stormy Seas?), but I was still left with a bitter taste.
Since then, time has smoothed things over and I now felt ready to tackle this pattern again, stronger from past experiences. Tedious work folks, but I made it. and in less than two months, to boot. I worked it exactly as per pattern, except for 3 small details – I did not use a provisional cast-on and picked up stitches for the neckband instead, I picked up the neckband stitches in the main colour instead of CC1 and lastly I changed the decrease rows on the sleeves for a tighter fit. As always, you can find all the details on my project page so please feel free to head over that way. Now, that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the yarn.
This time around, I decided to stick to the needle size and yarn weight recommendation, and I went for a combination of Berroco Modern Cotton DK in color Piper as the main colour and I opted for a skein of Cloudborn Fibers’ Pima Cotton DK for CC1. And because we can never completely forget our first love, I ended up choosing to feature another handspun this time as CC2. This colour combination gives me beachy vibes with the sandy main colour and the Caribbean blue sea hue of the handspun. The purple adds a touch of warmth to the mix giving it wild sunrise vibes.
While I absolutely adore the colours, I was a little bit anxious at how this was going to wash. You know me, I put almost everything in the washer and dryer because if I don’t, I am likely not going to wear it. And while the two commercial yarns I chose are all cotton, the handspun is a merino-tencel blend. I was expecting a bit of shrinkage in the wash, but I was hoping to avoid a felting mess. And fortunately for me, everything went as expected. The yarn was actually fairly fine, finer than the two cotton yarns I was using it with. And so the fabric was feeling a bit loose and airy. I sent the cardigan in the washer with everything else, and then sent it to the dryer on its own on on air fluff. And while it did shrink, the handpun knitted sections retained some stitch definition albeit a bit tighter and fuller and which showcases the blue tonal shades beautifully.
The finished cardigan is beautiful, soft, warm and so so comfortable, please don’t mind me if I just live in it for a little while.
Cheers 🙂
Yes I’m alive (and well!)
I know… I looked at the date. It’s been 10 months since I last posted on here. Why hello there, if you are still following, it’s been a hot minute. I’ve been spending the last 7 months trying to adjust to my new life as a mother, and it has not been easy, so I’ve been focusing on that and crafting has unsurprisingly been moved to the back burner for a while. But good news is, I’m slowly adjusting. And I’ve tried to pick back up some of my hobbies during my little bits of free time.
I cannot promise I’ll post often (or that I’ll post at all, for what matters) but hey, I’m here now and I can show you one or two goodies right?
So the FO wanted to show you today is the first project I finished since the birth of my Little Lady. It is a this Tunisian crochet chevron blanket, made in worsted weight Bernat’s Handicrafter cotton yarn, one in white and the other in a blue ombré. Now I tested something because I was lazy and wanted to reduce the (already insane) amount of ends I would have to weave in, so instead of working one row of squares, cut the yarn and start again, I tried to turn the work and crochet the other row of the same colour from the back instead. Not sure if that makes any sense to you? Anyways I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but I’m actually quite fond of the texture it creates, by having some squares right side facing and some squares wrong side facing. I might actually do this again! The blanket is pretty much lap size, and would be perfect for walks in the stroller, once weather permits. I used all but 10-15 grams of both skeins, and as usual you may find a couple more details on my Ravelry project page.
I’ve also completed a second raindrops sweater, a tincanknits pattern. The yarn I’ve used is a beautiful lush green Fino yarn from Manos Del Uruguay. Now I gotta say there’s more than a couple mistakes in this sweater, as I was having trouble keeping my mommy brain focussed enough to complete this knit. Fortunately for me, the pattern is extremely forgiving, and my many slip ups don’t really show too much. I’ve made a couple mods, including adding sone waist shaping, but other than that it’s very “by the book” – you can find all the details including yardage on my project page. I’m quite happy with the result, and will surely get a lot of wear out of it in the next few months as we transition to slightly warmer weather.
That’s all I had to share for now guys, not sure when I’ll be able to pop back again but I surely will one day (just don’t hold your breath).
Cheers!
Spirit of “gifting”
Why hello guys! Fancy seeing you here! Happy 2021, although I can’t reasonably say Happy “New” Year in May. How can it be May already?!? Anyways, I just finished last weekend this wonderfully delicate (and festive!) sweater called Mariposa, from Beatriz Rubio (SambaKnits). Now that I think about it… wasn’t my last post a few months ago ALSO about one of her designs? I gotta say… I just love her work!).
Anyways, I started this little baby up back in September, but you know… Work, life and stuff, so I just put the final stitches on it just a few days ago and wow, I’m so happy I finished it in time to wear it at least a couple times before the weather warms up because it is BEAU-TI-FUL!!
The yarn I used is Juniper Moon Farm’s Findley DK, I used all but a couple yards of 8 skeins. It’s a buttery soft 50% silk / 50% Merino yarn and, I mean, guys… Can we talk about the colour? The pictures really don’t do it justice, but this colourway is just stunning. It’s a deep, intense fuchsia that just makes my heart sing.
The pattern is knitted from the bottom up and is meant to be an oversized sweater with dropped shoulders. As dropped shoulders usually don’t suit me all that well (and also because I was lazy and wanted to skip on all the shoulder increases and short rows) I just worked the body as previously established after separating the front & back, bound off the middle stitches for the neck opening and joined the front and back shoulders with a 3 needle bind-off. As for the oversized portion… It definitely WOULD have been oversized, if I had not been 7 months pregnant when I finished it.
No worries though, it will no doubt go back to being oversized once I’ve given birth to my little potato 🙂
As pregnancy has been a bit difficult on me with extreme exhaustion and nausea, knitting (and blogging!) understandably took a bit of a back seat the past few months, but now that I feel better and more energetic it’s been easier to find a few hours here and there to complete the project, and although I originally meant to finish this sweater by Christmas (don’t you think the texture on it looks like little bows on a carefully wrapped present?), I’m still very happy I’ll still get a few weeks of wear out of it before summer arrives.
It is my gift from me to me, before our new little one arrives into this world.
Cheers 🙂
Autumn Vamping
I just recently finished my own version of Jennifer Dassau’s Vamping shawl pattern, a very popular choice among knitters for gradient yarns, and I am very pleased to report that it is just as wonderful of a pattern as people make it out to be. I mean, look at those sexy lines!
Now you see I’ve had this gorgeous 100% merino gradient yarn from The Blue Brick in my stash for a few years, over 3 I think, and I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. This yarn base called “Manitoulin Merino” (discontinued now – and the colorway, which was called “rose”, has also been discontinued since I think) is just insanely soft and pliable, but it is a single, and as such tends to be quite fragile so I wanted to keep it for something delicate that wouldn’t be subjected to too much wear.
As such, a shawl was very well suited, but I couldn’t for the life of me choose which pattern I wanted to make with it. I’ve already made an Iron Maiden, a Glitz at the Ritz, a couple Sunwalker from Melanie Berg, I’ve also made a Bosc Pear and most recently a Winterlight that would all have been very well suited for a gradient yarn and which I have all loved knitting. But I guess I just really wanted to try something new, ideally a different type of structure that would be a bit different from the traditional half circle or triangular shawls; something with a different architecture that would present the gradient in a different and original way.
And Jennifer Dassau’s Vamping is just that. The structure is interesting with central decreases instead of being at the beginning or the end, and it creates sort of a “V” pattern that is very fresh (at least in my mind) compared to so many other patterns out there. So I gave it a shot, and I am very pleased to report that the result is simply stunning. The pattern is very simple, but it does require to pay attention at least a little bit on the couple lace rows, which I have to admit I did not do. Consequently, I messed up in a couple places here and there, but the pattern is very forgiving and I don’t think it shows too much (I never ever use life line, and couldn’t be bothered to frog and fix it, so yea ^^). As always, all the details are on my project page so you can go check them out there.
All in all, I would most certainly make this pattern again, as I think it would be a great way to feature any gradient or handspun yarn you cherish.
Cheers 🙂
Sock weather (& fixing up mistakes!)
Yep, winter is here! In Quebec at least. In the last couple weeks here, we’ve been hit with very heavy snow falls wrecking havoc across town and causing major power outages in the area, and just like that winter rolled around a whole month in advance.
All this white fluffy chaos going on encouraged me to stay warm and cozy (while we had power, at least) on the couch, knitting stuff. Of course, season oblige, I worked on cold weather garments, like socks and scarves and things. I guess I kicked things off with a pair of socks I started on the plain to Taiwan and I’m quite happy at how they turned out.
I used my own Will you be my Valentine sock pattern but modified it a tad bit to add some 2X2 ribbing under the foot and around the ankle for stability. I like how the colors played out, and I’m still quite satisfied with the look and feel of the German short row heel. I gave this pair away to my pottery teacher, hope she likes them!
The other things I worked on the last few weeks though, I must say, were more about clearing WIPs from my craft room and fixing things that needed fixing… You’ll understand what I mean here in a minute.
The second pair of socks I completed last week was a pair of Solace socks I had started last year, but encountered a bit of a problem with. Now don’t get me wrong, Vanessa’s pattern is perfect in every way (as her patterns always are!) but I worked the first sock on size 2.5 mm needle (as per pattern), but mistakenly worked the second sock on size 2.25 mm needle, resulting in a totally different size sock. Oopsie much?
You may imagine my dismay when I noticed this little mishap, I was quite disheartened with the whole thing. So much so that the socks slumbered at the bottom of a bag for more than a year before I finally decided to fix it. Since the sock that actually fit better on me was the 2.25mm needle, I ended up frogging the larger sock, an reknit it again on size 2.25 mm needle to get a matching pair. All in all though, I think it worked out wonderfully – what do you guys think?
Lastly, I worked up a very simple double-sided broken rib scarf with a few skeins of Debbie Bliss’s Andes yarn I’ve had in stash forever. The thing with this yarn though is that I bought it in an off-white color that I afterwards decided I wasn’t too fond of, and tried to dye it. Unfortunately for me, Things didn’t work out as well as I thought they would, and I ended up with a very spotty minty yarn that I was even less a fan of. I tried using it for a couple different projects, but nothing would really work out and I ended up frogging many attempts. Now, since this yarn is a very soft and pliable single, it doesn’t like frogging too too much. Consequently, I ended up damaging the yarn, loosing quite a bit of it in the process and still didn’t have any idea what to do with it.
After much pondering, I decided that simple was best, and ended up working a narrow very simple scarf that I would over-dye afterwards, to mask my unsightly early attempts at dyeing. Here’s a before shot, just so you know what I was working with.
Now all the details are as always on my project page, but I ended up doing a dip-dye gradient using some Wilton’s food colouring in the “sky blue” and “black” hues. The blue and black mixture broke down a bit and made a few small splotches of pink here and there, but I think the experiment was mostly successful, and I am very (VERY!!) happy with the result.
What do you guys think? Yay? Or nay?
Winterlight
Life is cold… SO COLD! *tears*
Guys, temperatures here in Quebec have been dropping as fast as the daylight hours have been shrinking, winter has been slowly creeping in as we’ve experienced the first snow falls of the season.
Amidst it all, the only that’s been able to provide me any sort of comfort is a cozy knit curled up with a blanket on the couch, so today I would like to show you one of my latest FOs, a Winterlight shawl by Meg Gadsbey made with The Blue Brick‘s Killarney Sock gradient yarn in the “Waterfall” colorway.
This shawl was a very fast knit because the pattern is so cleverly designed to provide interesting and varied sections with minimal effort by maximizing the use of the simple knit stitch. Most rows of this pattern are actually just plain knitted, making this pattern extremely easy to memorize and very fast to knit. It’s also a great pattern to show off a gradient or a hand spun, so I am sure that I will make many more of this in the future.
I added a few plain rows at the end since I had a bit more yarn that what was needed, but I basically just followed the pattern the entire way through. There’s no need to fix something that’s already perfect! As usual all the info and yardage can be found on my project page, so take a look there if you’re interested.
Thank you all for reading, and I’ll see you again in a couple weeks for a little travel update 🙂
Blooming?
While my backyard is still invisible under a giant snow bank, cherry blossoms are blooming all around the world and making me jealous, so I decided to make flowers bloom in my heart at least by making this lovely Blooming Shawl from Sachiko Uemura.
More precisely, it’s an unbeaded fingering weight version of this shawl, on slightly larger needles and with fewer repeats of the main lace section. I used all but 2.5g of a scrumptious skein of Piccolo sock yarn from Julie Asselin, that I actually hand dyed myself a couple years back when I attended a hand dyeing workshop given by Julie herself at the Twist Festival in St-André-Avelin, in Quebec (check out my blog post here!). What do you guys think? Not too shabby for a first hand dyeing experience, eh?
The Blooming Shawl pattern is very well written, easy and fairly straight forward. It’s got both, written and charted instructions and the main lace section only counts 8 easily memorized rows (I had it memorized by the second pattern repeat). The only thing that I thought was a bit annoying was that only one of the WS row had increases, and I would often forget them and work a normal regular WS row instead – causing me great grief when I would start the next pattern row and notice I had stitches missing! Overall, I really liked this pattern and surely will make it again, although next time I might make it a bit bigger.
As usual, all the information on this shawl can be found of my project page, so feel free to take a look there. Cheers!
Comfort knitting
Well, spring hasn’t really been springing lately, what with all the snow and cold weather and everything, but hey! I’ve been keeping my spirits up by knitting up a shawl out of one of my favorite hanspuns!
I used the free Bosc Pear pattern from Tetiana Otruta, it’s simple and fairly straightforward, didn’t do any mods whatsoever apart from repeating the main body section once more than the pattern called for, since I had extra yarn. I used all but 4 grams of the skein, and I’m quite happy at how it turned out! As usual all the details can be found on my project page, so feel free to take a look there 🙂
How’s YOUR spring you guys, any better than mine?
Hopeful 2018
In retrospect, 2017 has been a very, very full year. Although especially challenging in many ways, I feel like I grew as a person throughout. I started the year in a funk fighting off a heavy case of knitting blues, then experienced the loss of my maternal grandfather, hustled through a crazy busy spring and summer at work, spent fall trying to catch up on things and topped off the year with the loss of my paternal grandfather less than 3 weeks before Christmas.
Among those hardships though, I was also blessed enough to experience beautiful moments of happiness with my loved ones and alone as I traveled to Washington DC and Hawaii, celebrated the birth of my best friend’s 2nd son, attended the wedding of a couple charming friends and spent a lot of time with friends and family.
Needless to say, this all had a significant impact on both, crafting and blogging since I had barely any time to catch a breath all year. In 2017, I was only able to complete 7 projects, for a total of 5481 yards of yarn.
I can tell you that it is by far the least productive year I’ve had since 2013 but all is well, since 2018 already seems more promising (hopefully!). As the new year rolls around, I just finished spinning a 50% Merino / 50% Tencel fingering yarn I’ve been working on since July 2016 (!!!!!!), and also finished set of placemats I was supposed to give away for Christmas (oops?), and I’m quite happy at how they turned out.
So now, let’s wish for 2018 to be full of hope and love and dreams and fibery goodness.
Cheers!
Twist Recap
Last weekend, I went to Twist Festival in St-André-Avelin, QC. For those who have never heard of it, Twist is actually one of the biggest fiber festival in Canada, with more than a hundred vendors, workshops and conferences in both French and English given by masters of their arts from across the country and sometimes beyond. It’s guaranteed to be good fun for every fiber artist, as almost every fiber craft was represented – spinning, weaving, knitting, crocheting, hand dyeing, sewing, quilting, felting; there really was a little something for everybody.
As any obsessive-compulsive knitter would, I made it a point to wear one of my hand knit sweater to the event (namely here my Golden Afternoon sweater) and I got quite a few compliments from total strangers, so that was cool.
I was also able to visit all my favorite kiosques (Pompon, la Julie Factrie, Artfil and The Blue Brick were all there, so lucky!) and I got to meet and chat with a lot of nice people from guilds or businesses I previously didn’t know of, so that was really awesome.
My new crushes:
Doudoulab. Annie creates beautiful rag dolls and plushies from new or recycled fabric and can even customize them for your child. That’s so cute!
Montreal Modern Quilt Guild. I totally didn’t know we had quilt guilds in Quebec. This is awesome, and now that I know they exist, I will make it a point to go see their quilt show (and maybe try to infiltrate their ranks). I also got to chat with Stacy & Betsy from Craft de Ville, who sell online various sewing and quilting and embroidery supplies.
La Vie en Bleu. This cute couple from Guadeloupe had a natural dye kiosque where they sold hand dyed tapestries, bags, scarves and clothes, all using indigo natural dyes and hammered leaf and flower patterns. They don’t currently have workshops, but they do plan on offering some starting in 2017. I really can’t wait!
My purchases:
6 skeins of limited edition 100% silk hand painted yarn from Artfil
4oz of a squishy Zenitude Fiber Arts Merino/Tencel roving from Lonely Oak Alpacas
A gorgeous felted hat with button from Arpents vert Alpaca
My own creations:
I signed up to a hand dyeing class with the always cheerful Julie Asselin, and as we were all chatting happily we practiced our hand dyeing skills on a silk handkerchief and a skein of her scrumptious Piccolo sock yarn. That’s what I came up with:
Any of you plan on visiting a fiber festival soon?
Crafty Effie 