Log Cabin Baby Blanket

Log Cabin Baby Blanket
Originally uploaded by missizii

More progress on the Log Cabin Baby blanket. Getting lots of knitting done is easy when you're marooned on the couch in a cast. After this strip and its neighbor, the blanket will be 24 inches x 24 inches. My goal is 48 inches square, which is 11 strips on each side. Right now I'm working on my fifth strip. So I have 6 strips per side (or 24 strips) left to knit.

I have a personal goal of having this done for knitting guild in a week and a half, so I can show it off for show-and-tell. The more important goal of having it done in time for the baby shower is much easier to hit, of course. I have over a month until the baby shower. The prospective mother and father are coming over for dinner this week, along with some other friends. I wonder if I should show them the work-in-progress?

A good soul on Ravelry sold me 1.5 skeins of Willow, so I now have all the yarn I need to complete the blanket. I am so happy about this.

Lots of progress on the baby blanket!

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Originally uploaded by missizii

My photography skills are significantly diminished by my immobility. This is the best I could do from my nest on the couch.

In one more log cabin strip, the blanket will be 16 x 16 inches. Which is pretty amazing for a few days worth of knitting.

My goal is for the baby blanket to be a minimum of 24 x 24 inches before I run out of willow yarn. The willow color is the speckly green and white bit. Blue Sky Alpacas has discontinued their green colorways for the undyed organic cotton line. I have two skeins of every color except for willow, of which I have only one skein. And since it's discontinued, I am now feverishly searching for another skein of willow. I found some in a New Zealand shop yesterday, and they were willing to ship it to the US, but the shipping alone was $25. Jim asked me to keep looking.

Oh please, oh please let this get to a decent baby blanket size before I run out of yearn.

My leg

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Originally uploaded by missizii

is in a cast, and will be for the next two weeks. I've survived one week in the cast, and it's not super fun.

Two months ago, I fell down the stairs and badly sprained my ankle. I think the phrase "bad sprain" doesn't really do justice to the %$*@-ing ankle though. I ripped two tendons - one down the side, and one down the front. I thought I broke it because I heard a loud snap when I fell.

It's not healing. Actually, it heals, and then I think "Hooray, it's all better!" and then do something stupid like walk on it without my brace or crutches. And then I re-injure it. So to stop the cycle of slight improvement followed by reinjury, I'm in a cast. For a grand total of three weeks.

One week down, two to go. I'm working from home, and I am getting loads accomplished. And at night, I'm knitting like it's going out of style. It's easy to be productive when you're immobile.

Log Cabin Baby Blanket

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Originally uploaded by missizii

My next knitting project is a log cabin-style baby blanket for a friend's baby shower. The expectant parents are very enviro-conscious, so the blanket is made of Blue Sky Alpaca'a Organic Cotton yarn. It comes in six shades of organic cotton, like sage green, pale tan, and camel brown. The pattern is published in Mason Dixon Knitting, one of my all time favorite knitting books.

I should have started this project sooner, the shower is in late October. Eek. But the blanket will be so beautiful when it is done.

Jim's socks nearing completion

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Originally uploaded by missizii

The second sock has only two more repeats of the Knotty or Knice pattern. Here they are on Jim's feet. It's so nice to have the socks nearly done, I've spent nearly a month on them.

In other news, I have a cast on my leg. I sprained my ankle in July, and it hasn't healed. So I have a cast on it for three weeks. I'm not sure how this will affect blogging, but it might. I'm barely mobile and marooned on my couch - not much fun. Hopefully I'll get a ton of knitting done. I'm missing the shop hop however, which is rather disappointing.

Sex-Change: Changing that Women's Sock Pattern to a Men's Sock Pattern

My husband's socks that I've been knitting up lately are a women's pattern that comes in one size - a woman's shoe size 6.5 - 8. Isn't that knice? All ladies with unusually small or large feet, kids, and men who want Knotty or Knice socks are out of luck.

It's actually not that big of a deal, if you own Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks. Measure your loved one's feet (getting that close is itself a sign of devotion). Figure out the pattern repeat. For Knotty or Knice, it's a 12 stitch repeat. Look it up in the book, and cast on.

So I actually haven't followed a sock pattern since I've gotten Charlene's sensational book. I knit all my socks toe up, always use a short row heel, and use her guidelines. That's it. One of these days I will add all the heel and toe variations in Nancy Bush's Folk Socks to my repertoire, but that day is not today.

Thanks to Alicia for this blog post idea!

What I did this weekend

I photographed and uploaded my entire stash to ravelry. I read that sentence, and look at the 70 (seventy!!!) photographs of yarn in my stash, and a cold shiver runs down my spine. Ravelry is awesome, and I really did need to go through the stash, but, really. Photographing your stash and posting those pictures to Flickr, because it makes your stash page look so pretty, is a level of knitting obsession I didn't know existed until now.


If you're not a member of Ravelry, and wondering to yourself "How bad could it actually be?" Well, there is photographic evidence. (Of course there is! I photographed my entire stash, ball of yarn by ball of yarn.) It's actually screenshot evidence. At normal size, my whole stash doesn't fit into one screen, but if you make everything very, very tiny by zooming out repeatedly, you get something like this:

You see how tiny the ravelry logo is? That's how small I had to make everything to get it to fit on one page. Ouch.

The whole process ended up being very good for me and the stash, however. I ripped out probably ten projects that I would never finish because I didn't like how they were turning out, or didn't want to make them any more. It's nice only having three projects going right now, with two of them hibernating. The old and fugly projects aren't hanging over my head, they have now gone back to stash land. I found a ball of yarn I didn't know I had, and I have no idea where it came from. Maybe some of my stash has finally figured out how to reproduce. Hooray!

First Sock Nearly Completed

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Originally uploaded by missizii

Jim's first sock is nearly done. And once it is done, then I'll have to cast on and knit its pair. There is a knitting superstition that if a knitter doesn't cast on for the second sock in the same sitting as she casts off the first sock, the second sock will never be completed (perhaps never even started). I'm not usually superstitious, but not finishing the second sock is such a grave matter. So now, when I sit down to knit on the first sock, I make sure that there is enough time, should I finish it, to cast on for the second.

Jim doesn't want trouser socks, he likes them shortish. Jim says that trouser socks always fall down around his ankles anyways, so just leave them that length. I contend that if the socks were perfectly fitted, they would not fall down, but they are his socks, and he shall have them the way he wants. This means, most sorrowfully, there will be no lovely cabled increases up the back of the calf. I will have to make a pair of these for myself, just so I can do the increases up the back. It also means I will have one completely unused ball of sock yarn, since I am using pretty much exactly one ball per sock, and I have three balls of yarn. The third ball was to make each sock trouser sock length.

What does one do with a single ball of sock yarn? Other than grow a third foot, I mean.