Mysterious advent knitting!

Yesterday was the start of probably the most awesome KAL (knit-a-long) that'll ever exist!
The big advent mystery knit hosted by dearest Bittami through her Facebook page.

This is so cool and so awesome, I really don't have any words. We started off yesterday, but before that, all we knew was the recomended yarn and needle size and the fact that it'll be a looooong scarf. It consists of 20 parts that we will be handed from now until the 19th of december.

We were supposed to get the first part at 6pm yesterday, but it was released early, so I had to hurry up with my chores so I could get started too. I had used the whole day, digging out scrap yarn and winding it all up into neat yarn cakes.

I finished off the first part fairly quickly, and I'm using SO much scrap yarn for this thing! SO MUCH FUN!

The next part will be released tomorrow, so while I'm waiting, I'm working on a hat for my friend Nina. She asked me if I wanted to make one for her, and then she ran off to buy yarn for it. She's all about that blue!

As soon as I'm done with this hat, I'll move on to a sweater for the baby girl for another friend of mine. I ordered yarn for it earlier this week and it arrived today! Beautiful Merino!

Third time's the charm!

Last year, I promised Bård a Marius sweater. I had bought the yarn and I started it right away, but at the time, I was working on two other sweaters that were of the same colour, and just grew tired of it. I put it on the back burner for quite some time before I picked it back up and decided to frog it, just to start over again. Then I put it to the side again! And I didn't pick it up until july! I worked a few inches before I ended up frogging it a second time! Now, I've just finished two sweaters and I'm on a sweater roll! And seeing as it's Bård's birthday in a couple of weeks, I decided to pick it back up again now. This is the third time starting it, and dang it if I'm not to finish it this time! Two-three days have now passed with my knitting being focused on this sweater alone, and I've already surpassed my two earlier tries!

It's uneven and full of cat hair, but that's how it works when frogging has taken place in my home. It'll tidy itself up after a wash, so there's no worries.

The traditional Marius sweater do have cut and sewn in sleeves...

But since I haven't had much experience with a sewing machine together with my fear of cutting my knitwork with scissors, I think I'm gonna try and work it in raglan instead. It gives a better fit and it's less feminine than the round yoke one. BUT! There's not really many Marius sweaters with raglan...so I'll have to do a bunch of trial and error to get it to work, and hopefully it'll look good...

And for those of you wondering, I'm gonna do this sweater in navy blue and white as the traditional one, but I'm switching the red out with a lighter blue.

Two finished pullovers and a cowl!

Well...finished and finished... Two of these have been finished for a few days, but again, I've been lazy and haven't gotten around to photograph them until now. The third are still left with a bunch of ends that needs to be weaved in. ALL THE LAZY!!!

But lets take one project at the time now. First lets do the cowl. I started this, thinking I could get ridd of some scraps and at the same time make something a bit different from my usual preferences and also kind of mindless. I'm currently stuck in a yarn block (the yarnsters version of art block...totally made both those therms up myself) and need something that don't demand much brain useage.
So yeah, I started this cowl from one scrap skein of Drops <3 You #3, thinking I would use up a bunch, but ended up just using just the one. Casted on 100 stitches on a 7mm needle and alternated between doing parts in garter stitch and parts with drop stitch, simple, easy, done!

A few days ago, I finally recieved the baked bean buttons that I needed for my blue hoodie, and after sewing on 42 of them (36 of which on the hood alone). Had a lot of fun just placing them around randomly. This pullover has been nothing but fun and games and references! So refreshing! I used two strands to make it fluffy and textured, one was Bernat Mohairlaine in the colourway 7566 and the other was Drops Alpaca in the colourway 2919. Got the Mohairlaine from Brooke ages ago and the Alpaca I got on a crazy sale. Again, 7mm needles, no pattern.

The last thing is another pullover! This thing I finished up back in june but didn't give a rats ass about weaving in the ends and actually finish it up. It's still not finished really, I just wanted to photograph it and get it over with, it's been a month overdue already. Weaving in bamboo (and cotton for that matter) ends are pure nightmare fuel. The best (and kinda only) way to do it is to split the ends in half and weave in each of those ends. Example: look at a dishcloth with one end in each side. You'd think you got only two ends to weave in, right? Wrong... You actually got four if you want then to be fastened good and have durability and quality on it. Since cotton and bamboo is so slick and hard, it doesn't attach itself to...itself in the same way wool does. Hopefully I'll get enough courage to weave in these ends...some day...

New projects!

No idea how I managed it, but my yarn storage has actually shrinked since the start of this year! Just did another round up of my used yarn (I keep a list on my laptop of each new skein I break open, and when this list is long enough, I add it up and update the yarn count widget on my blog here and on dA), and I am currently at 16900 grams of yarn. That's 16,9kg (37,2 pounds) and translates to 338 skeins! Of course, there's a huge amount of scrap yarn and some skeins that's both smaller and bigger, so my yarn storage has a lot more yarn in reality, but it still feels good! For your information, I'm only counting whole 50gram skeins which is pretty much the standar size over here.

But what I was originally going to blog about is my two newest projects! I finished up Sips and Sjin the other day and washed the blue hoodie yesterday...which I now realise I haven't shown off yet (I've become lazy with this blogging, yo)... I'm still waiting for the buttons for it, so I'll talk more about it on a later time, but here's a sneak peak on my baked bean sweater! 10 points if you get the reference!

Yes! Two new projects! That's what I was supposed to blog about! Since I finished up Sips and Sjin, and the hoodie is on hiatus until the buttons arrive, I've been at a loss for what to do next. I eventually got started on the little matching jacket for the baby rompers I finished not too long ago. I'm using this pattern from Drops for it. It's pretty simple, but it matches the rompers better than the jacket that's supposed to go with. Using the same colours of course. Hopefully I'll have enough green to go around, but I might just have to do the sleeves solid yellow. The yoke will be solid blue and it will have buttons going all the way up in the front. So much fun working with thin needles again! 7mm is a hassle while 2,5mm feels so tidier!

 

But that's not the only new project I've got! I've also started a pair of fingerless mittens! Crazy you'd say, it's the middle of summer and the sun are blazing hot, burning my skin as if it were crispy bacon! Calm down, I'm not planning on using these during summer. It was a rather impulse project and I started it based off the colours only!

For a while now, I've been looking for the perfect pattern and colours for a pair of fingerless mittens for myself, but I'm a picky bastard and nothing's good enough! I do however enjoy this pretty pattern called Susie's Reading Mitts on Ravelry. I've made these once before for the Jane Austen contest on dA last year. They're simple, yet decorative and I've been wanting to make another pair of these that fits more my style. I'm not saying that the ones I'm making now will be more my style, but I am serriously making these based of the colours ONLY!

As you've probably already figured out, I've turned into a crazy Yognau(gh)t with Lewis as my favorite. It has gone so far that I am currently using his skin in Minecraft and I've drawn up a similar one in Animal Crossing New Leaf (sorry Nostalgia Critic, but I'm replacing you). I just love his burgundy coat with gold details.

While roaming though my yarn storage earlier today, searching for yarn for the amigurumi Lewis, I rediscovered this beautiful burgundy merino skein I got ages ago, from England none the less! It was too thick to use for the amigurumi doll, but perfect for the fingerless mittens pattern! It also hit me that I had some scraps leftover from the retro Marius sweater I made earlier this year, so BAM! I had a new project and I had to start it right away!

Merino also regulates heat more easily than normal wool, so it wouldn't kill me if I started using them as soon as they're finished. MUCH FUN! SO GREAT!

WIP - Blue pullover

It's getting there! I feel like I'm taking my sweet ass time on this pullover, but it still grows really quickly! The wonders of using huge needles. I must admit that it is kinda fund seeing a project growing so fast, but it takes a lot more effort to work with these.

I finished up the sleeves really fast and moved on to the raglan. I was a bit scared that I might have to frog it down and do more increases on the sleeves to make the raglan more loose, but in the end, I think it'll work out just fine.

At the end, I decided to work a hood on it. I haven't really done a hood without a pattern before, so hopefully I'm not making it too weird. It's turning out huge though! Just like I want it!

I'm also planning on knitting a kind of tube on the front so that I can put a string through it, just for decoration.

Speaking of decoration. I've ordered a lot of orange coloured buttons off eBay. While I was still working on the body, it hit me that the color was the same as the Heinz baked beans can...which again translates to Yogscast...of course! When you're obsessed with something, you see references in just about everything. And in this case, Simon, Lewis and Duncan built a gigantic can of Heinz baked beans in their MoonQuest series and launched a rocket to the moon on top of it. So this pullover has become my baked bean pullover, and I'm gonna sew buttons on it to represent the beans. I'm too nerdy!

Pullovers and amigurumis!

So, after knitting on the blue, fluffy pullover straight for a few days, I started to worry about the amount of yarn that went into it. After some measuring, I found out that it was 50cm (aboout 20") too wide! I could easily fit two of myself inside of it! After some rethinking, I ended up frogging it all and started over, this time with 64 stitches less in the round. Now it grew really fast and seemed to be the perfect size. Took me two days to finish up the body alone at snail speed. I also started the first sleeve last night, so it's currently looking good!

It's impossible to get the colors right on picture though. It has a green hue to it, and it's still very bright. I'm using Alpaca from Drops in the color 2919l, called "light petrol", but even the website can't get the color right on it. It's beautiful though! I'm not usually a blue person, but I am really digging this shade.

Also, my little Yogscast amigurumis are slowly getting there. I am now currently working on Sips and Sjin. They both wears these Portal inspired space suits, so I had to work them both side by side to make sure they turned out equal. They're joined by the hip in real life, so making them both at the same time makes sense.
Just sewed on their little heads a few moments ago. Yes, Sips (the blue one) has white skin. Next will be their arms.

Work in progresses!

I must admit, I've been REAL slow with my yarnster crafting these past few days. Minecraft snuk up on me again...and I can't help it when it does. So here's a little WIP of things that has happened since last blogentry!

The mindless shawl that I frogged have reached it's stopping point once again. I've misplaced the third skein in this colorway (that happened some time ago) so I can't continue it. This picture here are pretty old. I managed to finish the third stripe of red before I ran out of yarn, but this was the only picture I had that gave a good look at the pattern itself. If you're wondering what I did, I knit the row facing the front and the back was knit 1k, 1p all the way till the end. I also increased two stitches at the end of each row, that's four in total for one round, which made it a lot wider.

If you compare it to this picture, you can clearly see the differences. This version has a sharper point and boring garter stitch as the pattern.

I really hope I'll be able to locate the third skein cause I really want to finish up this shawl at some point.

I've also done some progress on Simon. I had an episode with Pepsi here the other day though... He had managed to grab my skin color dyed skein and turned it into a mess! I woke up to this vision...

It took me forever to unknot it and then wind it up neathly again. I was pretty upset cause I did put a lot of work into this skein, getting the right color. Lucky for me, he didn't manage to chew over the thread anywhere.
So far, I've finished the head, helmet, feet and body for Simon. I've just started the gloves/gauntlets. It's looking good so far and he's comming along nicely! Hopefully I'll have enough skin color after this for the others.

Otherwise, I haven't really done much. I spent most of the morning/afternoon trying to work up a project for the Super Mario contest over at KnC, but it didn't really work out too well, and I've got only 4 days left to work up something. Me not entering a craft related Mario contest is like blasphemy! What I did work on though, was a question block. I got the sides worked up, and my plan was to stitch on the question mark afterwards, but it didn't look good at all, so I gave up. I might just give in and do some of the Super Mario dishcloths from Ravelry, but I feel like that's uncreative. I might try and work up a Luma since I've got more yellow crap yarn lying around...

As a last note, something I've forgotten to mention on the blog here. A few weeks ago, I ordered  a truckload of yarn. Drops had this mega sale during may, but sadly I was too late for that one. I did manage to find this one page that had an extended sale on the Drops yarn, so I snatched up a good bit of Karisma, dirt cheap with free shipping. All the dark green will become a Marius sweater eventually.

Along with all of this, I did order a bit of Alpaca yarn in a bright an beautiful petrol color. I've been looking for some soft yarn in a striking blue color to go along with some vintage mohair yarn I got from Brooke ages ago. This will eventually become a cuddly, fuzzy pullover.

Again, got this dirt cheap cause of the sale, and I almost regret not buying yarn for a green version too!

Pullover and Vaporeon!

Might be a bit early for an update on things, but whatever! I haven't really updated on my pullover for a few days so I can do with an early update today now that I've got pictures to show for it.
SO! I've been working with the raglan for the pullover for quite a few days now. It takes forever and it doesn't feel like the amount of stitches are increasing really. I am also running out of yarn so I do hope I'll manage to finish up within the next two skeins...then I would have used 17 skeins in this thing...which isn't so bad for you 'Muricans out there. Each skein weighs only 50gr, that's about 1,7oz. But bamboo and cotton yarn are pretty heavy compared to wool and other materials, so you don't get that many meters and it feels heavier automaticly.

But it's starting to look like something now! Wish is was longer in the body, but then I wouldn't have enough yarn to finish it up.

It's a bit awkward to put on right now since I still have the stitches on the needles...but it does fit kinda, and it will be a tiny bit longer in the body when it's done.

Since I've now finished Fibi the fox, I've started my next crochet project. I'm gonna try and have one running all the time along with my normal knitting. And this one's gonna be a baby Vaporeon! Aphid777 on deviantART makes fantastic crochet amigurumis and several of these she writes up the pattern for and posts along with pictures of her creations. Recently, she's been making the Eevelutions and I died when Vaporeon was submitted. Ofcourse I had to try my hand on that one, expecially now that I've managed to actually follow a crochet pattern succesfully. So far I've managed to make the head without too much problems. I've stuck the green marker there to mark the nose tip.

So far I think it looks pretty neat! I'm using Silja from Gjestal for it, 80% wool and 20% nylon and 2,5mm hook if you were wondering.

Quatrefoil mittens WIP

Quick little update on the mittens before bedtime.

To start off with the bad news first, I will not have enough blue...or maybe even green and pink to finish of the second mitten...so I might actually have to buy more yarn to finish them off... Sad to think that a pair of these awesome mittens would cost me 6 skeins!
I'm thinking about maybe doing the second mitted totally different or mix the order of the colors if I have enough yarn. Whatever I can do so I don't have to buy more.

Good news though, it's simpler than I thought and I can work them on my shortes circular needle! I really do like how they turn out and I'll probably end up making more of these! And this pair is the third overall mitten pair so far this year! OMG! 2014 is the year of the mittens everybody! Watch me not make a single pair after I'm done with these...
Oh well... They look awesome though! Even though this is a color combination I would NEVER pick out for something for myself...but they will just have to be mine if nobody claims them. Maybe just pulling whatever colors I have from the storage should be a thing for me this year?

What do you guys think? Are they crazy enough for ya?

Quatrefoil fair-isle mittens?

Earlier today, I asked the members on a Facebook yarn group if they would be so kind to find me some patterns, any kind of patterns really, and I would choose one of the patterns as my next project. I am currently switching between the blanket for baby CarCar and my mother's granny square chair blankets, both which are pretty boring right now if I might add.

Two people posted a bunch of patterns, and while some of them have been on my needles before, none of them really caught my eye as something I felt I just HAD to make. But my promise was to actually make one of the patterns that was submitted, so I chose the Quatrefoil mittens. Although they look simple enough, I got little experience with fair-isle on DPN's and also fair-isle with three colors at once, so it's a good practice, I should think.

I dove into my yarn storage and fetched out three skeins of singles from my superwash batch. Not really my first choice for colors, but they'll hopefully be ugly enough for people to steal them if I decide to keep them for myself.
The yarns are Trysilgarn Superwash color 215 and 238 along with a skein of Sporty Superwash color 241.

I am also currently having a headache, so wish me luck!

Yesterday's knitting progress - 5th jan

Not sure if I'll be able to keep up with all these "progress of the day" posts so I might end up do them like this...the next day. Then again, I might not do one of these every day. I should quit blabbering now and get on with it!

I finished one of the diamond snowflakes, so now I only have to do the whole thing over again on the other mitten. Not really looking forward too it, seing as it makes me go insane, but then again, I can't wait to see them finished  and hopefully they will not get ruined during felting, cause then I would kill myself for sure...
Even though they're turning out to be my worst enemies right now (and I'm seeing now that I managed to missplace one of the stitches...ffffffffffff), I just love the design of this diamond snowflake so dang much! I fell in love with it and the mittens when I first saw the movie, hence why I'm now making them in real life. They are a bit missplaced compared to the one in the movie, but it was the only way it would look good cause of the round with increasing around the wrist area.

During my rage quit on these for a moment in the middle of the night, I actually started two other projects. One is a very unimportant one and just for inbetween stuff...even though I really should have been working on the granny squares for my mother's chair blankets, I started a simple granny square blanket with a bunch of yarn I don't really like using. Might give it to Pepsi if I ever finish it...though I might frog it down in a month cause I've forgotten about it. And yes, that is a Joker band aid... I cut myself while slicing a bun... Batman is freakin' awesome!

And the last project I started will most likely be another eternity project. I found this awesome FREE pattern on Ravelry the other day and I knew that I needed to make this for baby CarCar. Yes Carolyn, this is for your baby! It's a baby blanket! I dug out some yarn from my storage and hopefully I won't have to buy too much extra yarn to finish it up. I'm trying to use as much as possible from my storage, which means the main colors will be coconut grey (which is a beautiful color in my opinion) white and either green or red to spice it up a bit. It will also make it more or less gender neutral since it's too early to tell if baby CarCar will be a boy or a girl. It's not much too look at yet so don't freak out, Car...save it for when the fair-isle has started. I do not want to cut in my knitwork...cause I'm a wuss...so I'm knitting it double...not double knit, just double... I hope it won't get too bad...