Dodecahedron basket

Looking back at the blog's posts, I realized that I forgot to write about my stitch 'n bitch one-skein swap object from January. Since I'm not feeling terribly inspired in this heat, I thought I'd look back at this project.

The basket had a number of sources of inspiration: I got the pentagon idea from Knitting Nature, from this project, and from this pattern. Essentially, it's the knit soccer ball with the 12th pentagon missing.



The basket was knit with Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride chunky and lined using some quilting cotton. I used Vinyl-Weave as interfacing. Fortunately, cutting the sheet into pentagons was fairly easy.



I've been sorting through our photos from our trip to Europe (we visited Germany, France and the Czech Republic). We had a fantastic time in Berlin.



The Charlottenburg Palace was one of the first sites we visited upon arriving in the city, which was worth seeing for the grounds alone.

Spring knitting

The local stitch and bitch held another knit exchange yesterday evening. The theme was spring colours and cables, and as usual there were some neat projects. I got a pretty felted clutch, which I'll photograph later.

For my contribution, it was a bit of a challenge to find non-garment, gender-neutral item to make.

The pattern is my own, which is basically a 13in x 13in square for the front and two rectangles for the back: one was 13in x 8in and the other 13in x 6in, each finished with a 2 stitch i-cord bind off. The back pieces overlap to make an opening for a 12in x 12in pillow form.

I used 100g of Araucania Nature Wool from Piper's Quilts knit on US 6 (4.2mm) needles. The stitches used are Moss stitch, Wheat Ear Rib from Barbara Walker's treasuries and Celtic Vine from Encyclopedia of Knitting. While knitting, I noticed that Wheat Ear rib has an interesting reverse side.

A few notes about Nature Wool: the manufacturer's suggested gauge of 4.5 stitches per inch is too loose for this yarn in most applications, washing caused a lot of colour bleeding and it pills considerably with friction. On the other hand, the variegated colours are beautiful and managed not to pool, and the final fabric is fairly soft.

FO: Bamboo and berries baby blanket

It's finally done! That's it, about to be packed up for delivery to the doting parents. Between work, a high performance computing course and all the other life stuff, I had to finish the applied i-cord edging during the trip. A couple of notes about the applied i-cord: I found that knitting the picked up stitches through the back loop looked neater, especially when working with strands of different colours.

I also got the idea from Grumperina to pick up yarn loops through the slip stitch selvage at the sides of the blanket, knit the loops, then finally use those slipped stitches to make the applied i-cord. The stitch patterns looked really nice on the wrong side, so no backing was necessary. I wish the picture I took of the wrong side hadn't turned out so blurry, but I was in a hurry. You'll just have to take my word for it.



I've already covered the pattern details. In hindsight, there are a couple of things I'd do differently with the border: I'd use a provisional cast-on for the i-cord instead of knitting a few extra rows (picking out the cast-on and getting those loops is a bitch), and I'd knit the i-cord starting with the wrong side facing forward (that way less of the underlying colour shows on the right side).

There was a little time for shopping in Vancouver, so I dragged the SO to Urban Yarns. They have a nice little sitting area, so he didn't suffer much. Since I'm trying very hard to be disciplined with money, I only bought a couple of balls of Cathay to try out with Glampyre's One Skein Wonder and something new from Elsebeth Lavold:



I haven't found her products locally yet, so I decided to get a ball of her Hempathy to see how it knits up and what it might be good for.

Bamboo and berries baby blanket progress

As you can see, I've made it to the second colour set (the colours here are a little dark compared to real life). I think this pattern is working out pretty well.






This picture links to a closeup of the stitch pattern. The bamboo rib and berries stitch make for a nice thick yet airy and flexible fabric. Considering that the recipient lives in Vancouver, this should be about right for the damp, chilly but not really cold climate.

Baby blanket

This is my second start on this blanket (using KnitPicks Merino Style). It started out as a Big Bad Baby blanket variant, but then I got bored. A couple of baby sweaters I made recently (which I'll post once they're finished) were done in stockinette. I'm tired of stockinette.

So I changed the red panel to Berry stitch from Walker's Second Treasury. It's hard to see the detail in this photo, but it looks really cute. About 30 rows in however, I found that the stockinette/reverse stockinette sections were too stiff to work well with the Berry stitch. Arrgh.

After a few evenings of head pounding, I found a scarf pattern in Odd Ball Knitting (a gift from the SO's sister) done in Bamboo rib. It produces a flexible yet dense fabric that contrasts nicely with the berries. I'll post updates once I switch to the next colour set.