WIP Wednesday: Back To What I Want

With my Christmas gift knitting finished and on its way to their recipients, I can finally focus back on my favorite makes: things for myself, lol. I've been plugging away at the Belladonna Cardigan this week in hopes of finishing it before the end of the year, which I think is pretty do-able, honestly. I stopped last night with just 1 more ribbing row and the bind off for the body, so next up is the neck and button bands before moving onto the sleeves and then int will be finished. I'm hoping the length turns out good - I'm kind of on the fence about where it stops, but I'm holding out hope for after it's blocked and has sleeves.

I really like the shaping on this sweater - instead of having shaping at the sides as usual, this one places them like front and back darts and they are hidden in the lace pattern. See how the plain sections angle down at the waist? That's the shaping. So cool. I'm very excited to see how this looks when it's all blocked out.

I'm also realizing I have a lack of neutral colored socks. I only ever wear socks in the winter and before now I had always only worn them with tall boots, so the socks were always covered. I just got some ankle boots and realized I need some socks that can be seen without being crazy colors. I have wound up a ball of a beautiful skein I won in a giveaway years ago - Morning Bright Organic Merino/Nylon Sock in the Moonlit colorway. I remember being a bit underwhelmed with it when I first won because it's a very neutral light gray color, but now that I need actual practical socks I'm glad I had it on hand. I want to use it to make a textured sock like the 2 Hunter Hammerson designs I have in the picture. Jury is still out on which design I choose, lol.

But being a person who does not like to have a bunch of WIPs at once, planning those socks made me feel guilty about not working on these socks from literally 1 week shy of a year ago. I started these at a Solar Bears hockey game because I needed a small enough project to get into the arena, but shortly after that I got very into my sweater projects and stopped making these. These are Jaywalker Socks, which I've made before, and this is Premier Fruits yarn in the Dragonfruit colorway. Isn't it so fun? This yarn and pattern combo gives me very "Dragonfruit Goes To College" vibes. Part of why I haven't worked on these is that needle. I got experimental earlier in the year and decided to try knitting socks on a shortie circular needle. Guys... I absolutely hate this needle, lol. I need to pull out my trusty carbon fiber double pointed needles and just blast through this project. I'm trying to decide if I need to make myself finish these before starting the gray pair...

So that's what's going on with me this week. I'm doing all the Christmas things with my kids and working a lot but I always make at least some time for my hobbies to keep me sane. How are things going for your holiday this year? 

WIP Wednesday: Pumpkin Faces and A Putrid Sweater

My mom has 3 new grandkids this year and she has a tradition that she has made a pumpkin trick or treat bag for all her kids and grandkids, which means she has 3 bags to finish in the next week. This year she wanted to have her fancy embroidery machine make the faces instead of the original appliqué that the 1980s pattern has you do. For the girl face, that was no problem, but she enlisted me to help figure out how to do it on the boy face. The girl face is small and contained in one flat panel of the pumpkin, but this boy face spans 2 panels that curve. This is the worst situation for an embroidery machine because you can't hold the piece flat enough to embroider without huge puckers. After going back and forth and trying different things, I told her why don't we just do it the old fashioned way and satin stitch the edges by hand? She finally gave in and let me do it and here is the result.

This was done by using a zig zag stitch but with the length knocked all the way down to 0.1mm with the width set to what we thought looked good. It takes a bit of focus to make sure that you are guiding the machine along the edges of the appliqué fabric in a smooth way, but overall it's really not too bad. Her machine also had a blanket stitch, so I did that on the eyes as a nod to the original pattern which had you blanket stitch all the yellow pieces by hand.

Now the face is ready for the rest of the bag to be assembled and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Is it as perfect as an embroidery machine would have done? Certainly not, but I think if I didn't tell you I did this by hand that you wouldn't know. This is the same technique I used to make Fox and Otter hats for my daughters 2 years ago for Halloween. Those hats are still worn and loved and they have held up great. So hopefully my mom is happy with my work and she doesn't mind this as part of her legacy to her grandson :)

In knitting news, I've completely shifted into working on my Belladonna sweater. I'm still doing the Susan Shaw cardigan, but the sleeve I was knitting is much too large... ugh... this sweater with being too big, man. SO I just hadn't had the mental stamina to pull out so much for yet again and change it. This one has filled the void very well and I love the Halloweeny vibe of this putrid green yarn. I'm experimenting a bit more with the sizing than I ever have before. I've made a lot of Andi Satterlund's patterns over the years, but I've never been 100% happy with the shoulder width. I notice now that even on her example shots he shoulders are made wider than I prefer, then add to that my chronically narrow shoulders and it just could use improving. So this time around I decided to use stitch counts for the smallest size at the shoulders and then increase more at the bust to get to the size Medium. In theory this should work, so I'm excited to see how it turns out. I just joined the back and front pieces on Saturday night, so I have a ways to go before I can really get an idea of how this alteration looks.

I really like how this is turning out, but holy cow I'm not used to multiple lace charts anymore - especially not ones that use the same few stitches but in different orders each row, making it kind of impossible to memorize. I've had to go back and fix things because I read the wrong row of the lace pattern more times than I would like to admit. I think I've finally got to a point that I can read the knitting at least, so it's been smoother since joining the body. 

I've also done a bit of garment sewing, but those are all finished now so I will have them up as finished objects soon :)

What have you been working on this week?