Monday, May 12, 2008

Time Flies ...

"Time flies on wings of lightening" and "time flies when you're having fun" apply to the past month. The time has been filled with vacation, knitting, netting, reading, mundane house and family related chores, and work, even though I have not been blogging. Sorry.

So now for a quick look at some of what has been done the past month.



These socks from Cat Bordhi's book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One, can be worn with the rings scrunched down (left) or pulled up (right) .

Either way my 4-year-old grand-daughter loves the socks. She should since she chose both the yarn (Softee Baby in Bongo Blue - a sport D.K. Bernat yarn) and the pattern.

The visit / vacation was just long enough to finish them.





Of course her year-old brother deserves a pair of his own, but for grandma's sanity, a different pattern from Cat's book.



I have been working on string bags - net with net handles - including one used as a baby shower gift bag for my middle daughter's youngest. This gift bag was made bottom up, with a pentagon increase for the base and two handles. Before you ask again, a pentagon increase base is where I start with 5 loops and increase to 10 in the second round. After that I add 5 loops to each round by increasing in each of the "closed" loops. That continues until I have the number of loops I wanted for the mouth of the bag. This time it was 40 loops. I finished it with just minutes to spare and so did not take a picture. I'll have to borrow it back to get a proper photo, unless she beats me to it and displays it on her blog.

I have also been busy decoding the doily sent me my Nancy Day. I used much larger mesh sticks, but I think I have figured out the center.

Nancy's is on the left and mine is on the right.

Her doily uses at least a 0000 knitting needle for the mesh stick, mine used a 3 knitting needle for the mesh stick.

I used size 10 crochet thread. I suspect her doily used 70 tatting thread.


Her doily center was about an inch in diameter, while mine had a diameter of several inches.

I would have continued onto the next portion of Nancy's doily, but there was a wedding on Saturday . . .



. . . and this was the present, so I needed to put an edge on quickly. I created the edge using some of the information gained in making the earlier portion of the doily.

One other project I have been working on is a sweater for my 19-year old son. The entire sweater is done in knit 4, purl 2 ribbing. I changed the pattern to work down from the neck instead of up from the ribbing. I have done down to about 6 inches under the arm and am taking a "break" and starting the sleeves, yes both at the same time, picking up stitches from around the armhole. When I have the sleeves at least 6 inches long I will try to take a picture. And ... since this sweater and another one need to be done soon (maybe next month), I better leave this blog and get back to knitting his sweater.