Since all I have to show you is the start of the sleeves for Glacier (knit two at a time, flat), I thought I would also share a picture from my lunch hour yesterday. It’s the Presidential motorcade, streaming down Pennsylvania Avenue, with a mist-shrouded Capitol in the background.
I’m steadfastly knitting away on Glacier in my free moments, so I don’t have a lot to show you this week, other than that progress.
But I do have a few thoughts to share:
1-The Plucky Knitter’s Snug Bulky is one of my all time favorite yarns. It’s like knitting with butter, but the stitch definition, which matters a lot with the cables, is immaculate.
2-Cabling without a needle. If you haven’t started yet you should. It’s incredible how much more quickly the front is going than the back! I’m still using the cable needle for the nine-stitch cable, because the reserved stitches have to move from the front of the work to the back midway through the cable. But that only happens on two rows in the twenty row repeat. For the other rows, I’m cable free.
3-All I want for Christmas is more hours in the day to knit!
I’m hoping to make some progress on my Glacier sweater. It got put on hold so I could knit Ollie’s Arlo and a few other projects. I’m happy to be back to its delicious cables! I just finished the second repeat on the front.
I wanted to participate in the Indie Design Gift-A-Long this year to show support for all of the talented indie designers who share their patterns with us. When I saw the list of patterns that were eligible included the Sweet and Simple Cushion, I raided my daughter's stash for some super bulky, Tahki, Sweet Montana yarn wool yarn she purchased while we were on a trip two summers ago. Perfect yarn for a fast, easy cushion. (I know the picture is mostly cats, but as soon as the yarn came out of stash and was living upstairs on the couch with me, it was clear it was one of those yarns that is so close to it's natural, sheep-y state that cats love it).
I had an old cushion with a really lovely goose feather core, so I decided to discard the worn cover and upcycle it with a knitted cover.
Miss Fig, my Boxer puppy, is every bit as happy with the results as the cats were with the yarn. I've got a bit of the gray leftover, and I'm so pleased with the cushion that I'm going to do a second one and stripe the gray with some think and thin handspun that incorporates Sari fabric.
This is a great pattern, starting with a clever figure eight cast on that leads into one of the best patterns I've seen for mastering magic loop. Although I taught myself to do it several years ago for a project I didn't go forward with, I never use it. But here, it was such a logical way of knitting the cushion and so easy to do that I think I've become a convert. You can easily conform the pattern to any size with an easy gauge calculation or knit something more complex — I think I'll do one with the cable from my Big Cabled Afghan pattern incorporated into it, but you could do any sort of cable or even make a "Weasley Pillow" with an initial in the middle of it. The possibilities are endless and yet another great reason to support Indie Designers. The bundle of all of the eligible patterns is here and you have until December 31 to complete your project(s), so there is no reason to sit this one out!
My baby is turning 13 in a week. So I knit him a sweater. He picked out the pattern and the yarn. Truth be told, it was a little bit over my head, but I got a lot of help from my friends, and it's all finished.
I remember when it only took a few afternoons to knit him a sweater. That wasn't the case here — in fact, this one is a little bit big on me. But he's very happy with it.
The pattern is Arlo by Michelle Wang. She writes very smart, clear, patterns and seems to be obsessed with cables. I see a lot of her sweaters in my future.
The set in sleeves were, surprisingly, not as hard to do as I thought they would be, especially with the help of the Craftsy videos I mention in this post. They went in on the first try.
I'm sad that he's not a baby anymore. But he's a nice guy. He gets big bonus points for appreciating hand knits. I hope he's going to have as much fun wearing this one as I had knitting it!
It looks cute on him, but he doesn't get to keep it. Nor does anyone else in my family who has tried to snag it. This is the Wooly Wormhead 2015 Mystery KAL pattern, and I'm so happy with the result! My.Precious.
My only disappointment is that the deep jewel-toned turquoise has eluded my rather lacking photography skills. It's a lovely blue green and I'm so glad I decided to participate in this MKAL, because it gave me the chance to dye some yarn for myself. Knitting with this yarn reminded me how much I miss dyeing yarn for Elliebelly. I'm so happy I have two leftover skeins to knit a cowl from.
The ponytail split in the back of the hat means it forms perfectly to my head. It's a really nice fit. Even though I don't look quite as nice as Ollie in it, I'm keeping this one for myself.
I wrote and knit this pattern in 2010, intending it to be the first of a series of simple, beautiful projects that would work well in Elliebelly Yarns, which I was dyeing at the time. The original project page is here. Life + Career took a radically different turn a few months later, and as most of you know, I stopped dyeing Elliebelly to pursue a public service opportunity. And, I never wrote up the Big Cabled Afghan pattern. I had good intentions, but because the yarn it was written for was no longer in production, it didn't make any sense.
Fast forward to last year when the Plucky Knitter release her Snug Bulky yarn, and I realized that in addition to finding the yarn of my dreams, the perfect yarn for the Big Cabled Afghan was in front of me. It hasn't been a fast or nearly as efficient process as I had hoped, but my sweet friend Helen, an outstanding knitter, took on the challenge of knitting the pattern in Snug and we have a pattern ready to be released into the wild. I hope others will knit it and share their comments with me so that I can continue to enhance the pattern and provide additional advice on sizes and other details. It's a simple, basic cabled pattern, easy enough for an adventurous beginner but the cables will keep the interest of a more advanced knitter.
I have plans to do a neutral version for our screen porch.
Here is the original version compared to Helen's lovely version, knit in Plucky Pup Tent.
I hope you'll dive right in — I can't wait to see different versions of it knit up. You can access the pattern on Ravelry or download it here. Please let me know if you have any corrections, ideas, or pictures to add. Happy Knitting!
Corrected Link to Download the Pattern
