Purple fair-isle sweater finished!

It's finished, it's packed and it's on its way to the post office in a few hours! Can I get a hellz yeah?

This sweater has been so much fun, but at the same time a pain in my ass. It's knit on 5mm needles, which is a bit larger than I enjoy working with. And with the yarn being heavy as well, it took a lot of (wo)man power to get it done.

As you probably remember from me ranting over a week ago, I managed to balls it up around the yoke. I totally skipped the heart row and started right on the rose pattern. How did I manage to do that? I've got no friggin clue! It just happened! And I didn't notice it until I was about halfway into the roses, so I had to frog down over a day's worth of work! My god, I could have killed someone at that point.

But with all that to the side, I do love the fair-isle on this one. It's different from what I normally work up, but it's still classy and fun. I love the hearts cause they look so fantastic from far away. I'm not saying that as in "god, don't look at my horrible knitting", but because the hearts looks fuller from a far. Close up they look like a clusterfuck of pixels.

The colour is impossible to picture right, which is the case with most purple colours. It just ain't gonna happend! The bottom right is probably the closest of all of these. It's still not 100% accurate though.

My friend whom commissioned this sweater from me, was very specific about the colour she wanted, and as it happened, the one we originally looked at wasn't avilable anymore when we were ready to order the yarn. So we ended up deciding on a thinner yarn which had the perfect colour, so it's knit double stranded...which the pattern tells you to do...but they want you to use a different brand of yarn... But it worked anyway! Now let's just hope that it'll fit her! That's always the worst part about doing a commission; will the piece fit? I followed the measurements as well as the pattern would allow me. Only one way to find out! I'll be sending it out today, so hopefully, she'll have it before the weekend!

Pattern can be found here, and it's © Drops Design.

Purple sweater WIP!

It's about time I post another WIP! Started the second sleeve the other day and I recently finished it up and put both sleeves in the round with the body. I've currenly worked a couple of rounds and will pretty soon start the yoke fair-isle! Can't wait cause it's so pretty looking!

As always, it looks like crap when layd out like this, but all the measurements are right compared to the numbers I've gotten from the commissioner. My mind goes crazy when I work on sweaters... "What if the sweater doesn't fit? This looks so wrong!" But it always fits in the end.

I really need to hurry up with this sweater though, cause Knitting-and-Crochet on dA recently announced this months contest and I know EXACTLY what I'm going to do for it, but it will take a lot of time. It's crochet (for once) so I will be needing all the time I can get!

Starting the sleeves!

Finally finished the body of the purple fair-isle sweater now! Or...so I hope. Not sure if I dare knit it much longer cause the amount of yarn I've got left is kinda alarming. But we'll see! I'm loving it so far!

And yes, I've started the first sleeve, hence the title of this blogpost.

As I did with the body, 4mm needles on the ribbing and 5mm on the rest.Thypically enough, I only had bamboo 5mm needles, so I picked up some metal ones while I was out earlier. They're not high quality or anything...but I can't stand bamboo needles, so anything's better...except plastic ones...eww...

Woop woop! Back to knitting!

Sweater WIP and stitch markers!

The purple fair-isle sweater I've got commissioned is slowly growing. If you got a good amount of stitches, then it's still slow work no matter how big the needles are. Right now I'm at the boring mindless part where it's just round and round and round without any pattern, so I need something really entertaining to watch to keep it going at a normal pace...

The fair-isle at the bottom is so cute! It's these heart shaped thingies and at a distance, they look even better. These will be repeated around the wrists of the sleeves too. Also, the colour is deeper purple IRL, the daylight and my camera did something weird here...

And today some of my stitch markers arrived! I'm addicted to using these safety pin-ish markers in my knitwork. They're easy to remove and they're light which makes them easy to work with. But they tend to dissapear too easily! Which is annoying! Lately I've had a hard time finding ones in the colours I need, so I ultimately went on eBay to order a butt load of them. They're super cheap as well, so loosing a couple here and there doesn't matter too much. The pack of 300 that I've ordered arrived today and boy oh boy, they came in the nick of time! I had to organize my little craft item box that I keep next to me so I had room for them, and I could hardly find any of my old markers in there! Where have they all gone? I know I had just about 100 or so, but there was hardly 20 in the box...
Welp, now there's 300+!

Mainly just 3 colours in there though, but that should be enough. Maybe I should look into getting some white ones...

WIP summer pullover!

Guess it's time for another WIP of the summer pullover I'm in the making of. It's quite slow, but I do try to sneak in some rounds between the Mario Kart and Minecraft gaming hours. Sadly, my computer mouse is getting worn out which makes my right arm hurt if I Minecraft too long... Need to get me a new one I think...

Anyways, summer pullover! It looks more and more hippie-ish, maybe kinda gypsy like. I do like it though. One stripe is one skein, so as you can see, these skeins are small. I try to pick the colors at random, yet trying to make it look organized and pretty. I'm also pretty limited with my colors seeing as I had only 8 skeins of green, 6 of purple and 3 of grey. I've allready used 4 green and 2 purple, and I've just started the first one in grey. After my calculations, I should knit for another 14cm (5,5") before I decrease for the sleeves. I am concidering knitting the sleeves only 3/4 long though. Hopefully I'll have enough yarn.

Can't wait to get it finished at some point in this lifetime though!

The Legend of Zelda fair-isle socks!

They are dooooooooooone! Finally! Legend of Zelda socks! I'm such a nerd... I do love me some Zelda and I do collect the Zelda games.

I redrew all the charts myself, it took me three days, but I did base them off this pattern, just because I'm too lazy to do test knits and all the calculations myself.

Dragon scale - fingerless mittens!

They are now finished! Made these for the chinese zodiac contest at dA since my zodiac are the dragon. Wanted to make something a bit more abstract since I'm not too good with making amigurumi and them actuall physical resemblences of animals...if you understand what I mean.

I wanted to take an object from the dragon to represent it, for me it makes for a more elegant result than actually having a dragon stitched on, or having my hands stick out of the mouth of a dragon.

The yarn was actually decided before anything else. I've had this skein of some kind of mysterious wool blend yarn for quite some time now. Carolyn gave it to me ages ago and it didn't have a lable. As a result I didn't know what to make with it. but it's soft and the color are soothing.

To make it more interesting and more royal (like all dragons are), I decided to work in a thread of gold decoration thread along with it, leaving only the ribbing plain purple. With this it makes me think about how Smaug in the second Hobbit movie had tons of gold coins stuck between its scales... Also Smaug's scales plays a big role in both the movies and the book and (spoiler) are the way they kill him off, so why not highlight them?

As I've said before, the pattern was ment for gauntlets actually, but I decided to shorten them down. For one, I prefer shorter wristwarmers/mittens, and while these seem to be long enough, they're just a little over half the lenght of the original pattern.

Good thing I did though cause I didn't get much yarn left afterwards! I couldn't have made another repeat of the pattern atleast...that's for sure...

Progress of the day - 9th jan

Not much really noteworthy happened on the crafting front here today. And since my phone are having charging problems again, I haven't really been able to take much quality photos of the little I've done.

So, I did work some more on the first granny square chair blanket...takes forever still...

And I managed to get one of the dragon scale fingerless mittens done! They look awesome so far, and hopefully "dragon" enough for the contest. The gold thread really makes them pop though! Pattern can be found here. I am doing a whole bunch of differences on them though, even more than I've noted down so far.

So that's all for me for today! See you guys for more crafts and stuff tomorrow!