20 posts tagged “gift”
The first sekrit project is what many partners of knitters will have been given today, the heart from Knitty. This was loads of fun to knit, and small enough that R didn't even notice that for a couple of evenings, every time he looked in my direction, my hand 'happened to' cover what I was knitting. The yarns are Dream in Colour Smooshy in dark red, and Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Valentine - luxury sock yarns for a luxury heart :-)
On holiday last year, Kauket got me hooked on the PS2 game We love Katamari. Long before I had ever played it, I'd spent a lot of time watching other people playing, and shouting things like "get the elephant!". A Katamari, you see, is a magic sticky ball which picks up anything you roll it over that is smaller than its current size, so you start off rolling up paperclips, and end with rolling up continents, passing through elephants (and tigers, and giant squid, and dinosaurs - I don't know why the most appealing things to pick up are all animals) on the way.
I had previously come across this crochet pattern for a Katamari with magnets, but since I didn't know how to crochet, had filed it under 'cool but impractical' and mostly forgotten about it. I'm not much of a computer gamer (can't knit at the same time), so didn't play Katamari for a while, until I introduced my parents to the game last autumn, and then bought them a copy, and a PS2 to play it on, for Christmas. Since they're even less gamers than I am, it seemed only polite to unlock all of the levels for them, so I spent the first few days of my Christmas holiday playing a lot of Katamari (in the name of giving, you understand).
Coming with surprising haste after Christmas, as it always does, was female-R's birthday, and I remembered the crocheted Katamari. One evening was enough for me to teach myself basic crochet, and another was enough to make the base ball-shape. With the arrogance of an newbie, I modified the pattern to make the ball in one piece instead of two, and then ordered some magnets from the interweb, and waited for them for days when unexpectedly heavy snow stopped all of our post.
Photos on Ravelry. I'll post about it when it's been delivered.
Have made one and am making another sekrit project as gifts. No pictures or details here in case the recipients choose this moment to wander by this blog, but one recently finished and one recently started can be seen on my Rav projects page. I'm very happy with both: the FO worked perfectly and looks really cool, and the WIP is new territory for me that is so far working out well, if a little confusing. And it's one of those patterns that got its hooks into me the moment I saw it - it knew all along that one day I'd be making it, even if it took me a little while to catch up ;-)
... I've also spun batches two and three of the red leaf fibre (wildly varying weights because I changed my mind about how fine I wanted it to be after batch one, but never mind), and begun Henry for large-male-friend-R: I've completed the cast on plus two rows! Since each row is approximately five million and six stitches, this is quite a lot of work. I know I've only just started the push-me-pull-you socks, but I thought I could do with a larger-needle project as well, to save my hands. No photos yet, for either the spinning or the knitting (in Henry's case, because all that's visible at the moment is the waste-yarn cast on, which is Lorna's Laces rainbow (my go-to waste yarn for most purposes, since I've got a fair amount of it left hanging around), so a picture wouldn't be very informative anyway).
The second is a last-minute Christmas gift for R, which I partly wove in front of him on Christmas Eve, figuring (correctly, it turns out) that he pays no attention to what I'm making unless I talk to him about it. There are stripes in the weft - plain dark grey Jaeger merino and black tweed YSL - but they're much less obvious in the flesh than in the photo.
Next up (pictures three and four) is the finally-finished Clessidra. I don't think I'll use the riverbed sockitecture again, because I don't like how it fits me, but I love the socks and am going to wear them to a crafting date tomorrow :-)
Picture five is R's blue socks with a reknitted heel after he wore a massive hole in one of them. I think I've still got some of the blue, but I'm not sure where, and he didn't mind them being mended in black.
The last pic is my new sock project, double knit socks which I'm knitting wrong side out, so I don't have to move the yarn backwards and forwards (near side is English-style purl, far side is continental-style knit, so one strand in each hand, which is fun). The downside of knitting them this way around is that I can't read my knitting on the wrong side, so whether I'm increasing or not on any given row is a bit random but because I'm knitting them at the same time they'll match anyway so it doesn't matter, and I'm planning a short-row heel so there's no other increases or decreases to keep track of. I wanted to use different yarn to make it easier to keep track of which stitch belongs to which sock, so these will end up non-matching stripes - once I've finished the toe I'll break the yarn and swap them over, and keep swapping them at random intervals throughout (must remember to break yarn to do this, so I don't end up knitting the two together).
Since I had to guess the size of this, I'm really hoping it's not too small for the intended recipient!
I originally intended to knit it for the birth of my niece-in-law, but the first version of the sleeves didn't work out, so I frogged and started reknitting, and lost motivation in the process. But it's now finished in time for a Christmas gift, and I'm hoping the recipient hasn't grown out of it before receiving it!
Next up is a matching hat from the leftovers, which I will finish before working on any other crafting projects. Honest.
This is my lovely new drum carder, which arrived yesterday, and which has already got through hours and hours worth of hand carding in a very short time indeed :-) I've now carded all of the lilac alpaca which is destined to be my MiL's Christmas present, and spun the first lot of it; I'm intending to spin most if not all of the rest of it this evening, and then it will be ready for washing and plying, hoorah. I've also made a start on carding the black alpaca, which will end up carded again, with the purple merino, to make goth-coloured yarn.
I was intending to make this into a wrap for me, and had originally thought of one of the beautiful spiky lace shawls I keep seeing on Ravelry, but in the same delivery from Fibrecrafts as the carder was another package, which I'm not entitled to enjoy for about six weeks: the loom R is giving me for my birthday. I've got two projects planned for this, and one of them is the gothmerino-alpaca - a nice simple rectangle of plain weaving to make the kind of wrap I like best. The other weaving project I'm planning is one I've already talked about: the autumn coloured wrap, with one ply of burgundy merino and one of variegated autumn-leaves colours. For a while I looked around for fibre in the colours I want, and then when I gave up on that, I looked around for undyed fibre and dyes to produce it myself, but then I remembered that Freyalynn (who dyed my Wisteria and Caribbean fibre) also does custom dye jobs, so my autumn leaves fibre has now been commissioned! This will be a birthday present from my parents. I believe in planning ahead in such matters :-)
And Clessidra is coming along nicely. The heel is turned, and I'm into the ankle, and am just about to take measurements and make calculations for the calf increases.
