Semele!

It's like I'm on a finishing streak!

This is Semele. I first started knitting it on my Addi Click interchangeable needles. Really, those needles are not fit for thin yarn. By thin, I mean anything thinner than a DK weight yarn. It gets caught in the cable needle join WAY too easily. You spend too much time fighting the join as you inch the working stitches up from the cable onto the needle.

After I finished the Sunday Henley, I swapped out the needles and starting knitting this on some Chiagoo needles and voila! It went much more smoothly! Not only that, I finally hit the half way point. This is one of those patterns where you increase until about the halfway point and then you start decreasing so that there is minimal leftover yarn. Between the change in needles and hitting the halfway point, it started to feel like I was making progress a lot faster!

I neared the end and started panicking about not having enough yarn. I sat on the couch yesterday morning and knit and knit and knit and then, I was done! There is an itty bitty bit of yarn leftover that I can add to my scrap blanket so I'm excited that it all worked out. I'm not sure what would have happened if I didn't have enough yarn!

Pattern: Semele
Yarn: Wollmeise 100% Pure Merino
Needle: US 6 (4.0 mm)

FO Friday - A sweater! A finished sweater!

It's the Sunday Henley pattern by Neoknits from her book Metropolitan Knits.

 
Funny story behind this. Someone else on the ravelry Puck This! group was knitting it when it caught my eye. I found I already had the yarn called for by the pattern and there was a little bit of egging on in the group to get me to knit one. I LOVE the stitch pattern so that's what helped me to decide. So, it was a little bit of peer pressure. Now that I think of it, the person on the ravelry group is a Pittsburgh Penguins fan. Neoknits is a Philidelphia Flyers fan (and pointed out this is a nice Flyers orange). I'm a Washington Capitals fan. In most other worlds, we would not get along.

Pattern: Sunday Henley
Yarn: Quince & Co. Chickadee
Needles: US 6 (4.0mm), US 7(4.5mm)

PA National Quilt Extravaganza

On Thursday, I took the Quilter's Unlimited bus up to the King of Prussia area to check out a quilt show. It was pretty awesome, aside from having to get up before 5am which does not leave me feeling right all day. At least I didn't have to drive since we did hit some rush hour traffic on the way back.

I came back with some fabric and some patterns and I was really happy to find some novelty print hockey fabric! I was so excited about this one that I came home and immediately made a knitting project bag with it.

Aside from vendors, they also had many quilts on display. As a newbie quilter, it was very inspiring to see them all. I have the full flicker set here but here are a few of my favorites:

Day in Pictures - Sept 7, 2013

In an effort to get myself out and about and out of my introverted head, I'm going to try to capture the day in a few good pictures so here we go.

1. Farmer's market - buying some peaches, 2. Bikes on a beautiful day, 3. Bridge Opening ceremony for 11th St Bridge, 4. Police cruiser from the late 1960s, 5. Naval ship behind the Navy Yard, 6. Doing some beading

WIP Wednesday - quilting a queen sized quilt

I know that normally, one quilts the layers before trimming and sewing on the binding but I changed the order around slightly. I basted my layers together and stitched in the ditch around each square. Then I quilted the lines in the border and sewed on the binding. I had a friend coming to visit and I wanted to make sure there was a lighter blanket available should he need it. I also wasn't sure how I wanted to quilt the blanket but I didn't think I wanted to stitch in the ditch around all the pieces. I was inspired by the lines in the border and decided to go with a free form line stitch. It's my first time using the darning foot on an actual piece I expect to finish and not just a test swatch.

Here's Looking At You!

We all thought I stopped beading but sometimes, it just takes a little bit of inspiration to get back into it.

The cabochons are some sort of crazy lace agate that I picked up at Bead Fest last year, along with the spikes. The eyeball is an antique prosthetic eye that I got from Laura McCabe. I knew about how I wanted to place stones and when I saw the glass eye, I knew where it would go in the piece. The only thing stopping me was another beading project that I didn't have much interest in but felt I had to finish. Well, I decided to put that aside until some later date and got started on this.

I also knew I wanted to incorporate a spike bead into this piece. I knew I had the large spike but when I dug through my bead stash, I also found the smaller spikes that I thought would be fitting to line the eye.

I wanted to do some sort of a spiral rope for the actual necklace part so I incorporated more of the Czech firepolished beads and the small 3mm pearls from the fringe into the spiral rope and later the clasp. The clasp has also been slightly embellished to go with the rest of the necklace.

As for the fringe, I didn't want normal fringe. The main body was starting to remind me of the characters from Greek mythology and while I didn't want to go the route of Medusa (I have a snake phobia - I wont' even touch pictures of them in a book!), tentacles seemed to fit. I ended up doing a layer of fringe in a embellished square stitch. The 3mm pearls with the small red size 15/0 beads make up the tentacles. I added another layer of fringe underneath that with some dagger beads. When you look at it all together, they remind me of the arms of a large squid!

I'm very happy with how this came out. I know the eye ball freaks out some people but I think it's neat!