Caryn's Knits

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Oops

For anyone who's reading through the LJ feed - I just updated CarynKnits to the latest version of Blogger, and apparently it dumped everything into the RSS feed. Sorry about that!

Hopefully, the new version of blogger won't post everything every time I update by sidebars, though. That would be good. I think that's what caused everything to get posted to LJ the last time I tried modifying the side bar....

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Gift Knitting!

My gift knitting this year actually started with doing a Lace Wings shawl in a pink and gold colourway of Handmaiden's Seasilk yarn. (It was a birthday gift for mycrazyhair). I loved working with this yarn - it was great to work with, and the slight scent of the sea that rose from it was just wonderful.


The pattern is only available from Lettuce Knit as far as I know. I modified it slightly, to add a YO's on either side of the central stitch, instead of doing the M1 the pattern calls for.

Then, it was on to my Christmas knitting, and I actually managed to finish it all in time, yay! There were two hand-knit gifts this Christmas - an Emerald Isle shawl in Jaeggerspun Zepher, colour cinnabar (for crystal_diva), and the Pea Pod baby set from Interweave knit that was done in purple Zara fine merino (for my neice).

First up, the Emerald Isle Shawl, pattern from GoddessKnits. Unblocked, it looked like this:



After blocking (man, I love what blocking does for lace - it makes an ungainly mess of wool look like something quite cool) it looked like this:


I left the same paperback by the side of the shawl, to give you an idea how much bigger the shawl was after blocking. One last shot of the shawl, a close-up of the edge detail:



The Pea Pod Baby set for Chloe was the last thing I finished. This was my first attempt at doing real modifications to a pattern - the hat was a beanie style, and Mom suggested I try to make it more bonnet style, since, apparently, beanies are for boys and bonnets are for girls. Who knew?

I didn't really like the look of the hat anyway, so I took her suggestion and added ear flaps and straps for under the chin in seed stitch. I had to do a bit of math to get them sitting right, but I could manage it. *g* The set ended up looking like:



The buttons (little purple and white flowers that match the wool almost perfectly) are the best!

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