O Christmas Tree

Okay, never mind that it's now January. Mike left the little tree up a few extra days because I was working on this tree skirt to fit our little Christmas tree.I think it actually turned out pretty well. Of course I'll have to press out the points a bit when I drag out the iron (which I had no intention of doing at 11:45 p.m. on Friday when I finished this thing). At any rate it definitely looks better than the other tree skirt that I had there before. It's just the right size and a little more colorful than the oversized plain white one it replaced (actually sized for a regular tree, not a miniature tree).


Now I guess Mike can finally take down the last Christmas tree for this year, and I'll pack the tree skirt safely away to enjoy next year.

Coming next: yoga mat bags and brain overload.

First FO of 2009......

And it's something that wasn't even on the project list!

Last Sunday evening I went to our church's Taize' service, and as I was sitting in the darkened sanctuary I realized that my hands were really cold. Because of my age and stage of life (think internal hormonal heating) I rarely get cold, but my hands were uncomfortable that evening. I came home after the service and promptly cast on a pair of fingerless mitts/handwarmers/wrist warmers in a mock baby cable rib pattern that I've used before on socks and even a baby blanket.

I finished them up last night but was way too tired to take photos and post by the time I got done. So here they are:

Naturally my youngest son accused me of leaving parts missing, and asked me why I couldn't just knit faster to warm up my hands. But I was very happy with the way that they turned out, and I'll probably make up a few more pairs to add to my Etsy site.

I'm also looking at knitting a few yoga mat bags, since I've run across a couple of patterns, and I've been told that the yoga students at the local university will buy anything. I also need to replenish my stock of fruit hats for the craft fairs. So the to-do list is increasing much faster than my stock of finished objects. I guess it's time to get away from the computer and go back to knitting.

Goals for 2009

Happy New Year to everyone! I am hoping that 2009 turns out to be an easier year than 2008 was. Of course it's already off to a better start since we're almost three whole days into the new year and no disasters have occurred yet (knocking on wood until my knuckles are sore!).

While reading a few other blogs that I follow I noticed one post containing photos of all the items the poster had knitted in the year just past. Needless to say, I functioned nowhere near that level of efficiency last year. In fact the vast majority of things I knitted were out the door and gone before I even thought to photograph them and blog about them. My goal for this year is to at least mention every project that I work on during the year and to post more frequently.

Right now I'm knitting a small Christmas tree skirt. We have a small fiber optic Christmas tree that's about two feet tall which sits on the corner of the piano (in addition to the regular tree in front of the living room window). When we were setting it up I decided to spiff it up a bit, and dug a tree skirt out of my craft show box to put around the little tree. While it is very pretty it is of course much too large for the little tree. So after all the commotion of Christmas stockings and other craziness was finished, I decided that this would be a good time to knit a tree skirt that was made for that specific tree. I started working on it yesterday morning, and I've frogged one section about five times now. Finally I realized that I needed to make more sections and therefore more increases per row so that it would be more flat as opposed to conical (did I mention that I'm knitting by the seat of my pants as opposed to following a pattern?). Once I adjusted the number of sections it has gone very well and I just need to keep knitting for a while to make it bigger.

Next projects on the knitting list (not necessarily in this order):

1. finish up the two prayer shawls I started before the Christmas rush - one for a local friend who lost her son unexpectedly this fall and one for a five-year-old who has recently been treated for cancer;
2. an out-of-season Christmas stocking - I've had the pattern idea floating around in my head ever since I finished up the last set of stockings right before Christmas but really didn't want to tackle yet another stocking right away;
3. a fairisle hat with earflaps for a dear friend of mine - yet another patternless project. E sent me a photo from a catalog and asked me to make a hat like it for her. She didn't want to buy the one from the catalog because a) it had a little bit of green in it and she hates green; and b) she would rather give her money to me than this impersonal company;
4. several pairs of socks for myself (actually I hope to knit at least one item every month this year that I get to KEEP!), my beloved spouse, and other fortunate family members;
   
5. a couple of felted bags to sell on my Etsy website, along with a purse organizer that I've been designing in my head for a couple of months now;
6. at least a couple more snowball hats to get the pattern transcribed for sale on my Etsy site; and
7. the ever-present cotton dishcloths that I work on when I need a totally mindless knitting project.
   

I'd guess that this list ought to keep me busy for at least most of January. If not, there are at least another half-dozen projects waiting in the wings when I get these finished up. If I totally run out of ideas I also have a fair amount of WIPs and UFOs that I can tackle as well.

The Last of This Year's Stockings

Hooray! I've finally finished the last of the pre-Christmas knitting projects. These two stockings were a bit of a challenge but I'm very happy with how well they turned out. The customer provided me with a stocking that she wanted me to duplicate along with a "pattern" that consisted of about seven handwritten pages of "k 10 red, 3 green, 10 red, 3 green", etc. etc. Fortunately about the same time that I started deconstructing this pattern one of my librarian friends who knows that I knit a lot picked out a book titled "Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines" and sent it home along with my requested titles. This book, among other goodies, contained a link to an online pattern for a knitted Christmas stocking that was popular in 1945. While the stocking was not the same as the one I had to duplicate, two of the graphs used in that stocking were identical to the stockings I needed to make. This saved me a lot of time and effort. Here are both sides of the stockings after I finished them this afternoon:



I called my customer to let her know that they were ready to be picked up, and she informed me that she has two more grandchildren coming in the new year, so she'll be asking me to knit a couple more for next Christmas. Thank goodness I've made really meticulous notes and graphs for the entire pattern. It will make the next pair of stockings go much more quickly.

Two Christmas Stockings

I finally finished my first of two big Christmas stocking projects for this year. This was a special order for two Christmas stockings for a friend. She had stockings for herself, her husband, and her two kids that had been machine-knitted several years ago, but the person who made them for her is no longer doing that. This year she gained a daughter-in-law and a son-in-law and wanted stockings made for them to coordinate with their existing stockings. She brought me the stockings earlier this fall and I've been working on them off and on since then. I completed them early this week and she picked them up today. I have to say that I'm very proud of how well they turned out, and she loved them too. I commented that I should have printed up a fancy "certificate of authenticity" verifying that these stockings are indeed designer originals as they weren't made from any particular pattern and are completely one-of-a-kind. In order to match the stockings she already had, these were knitted with dk weight yarn and size 2 needles at 7.5 stitches per inch. Needless to say they each took a few days to complete.

I am developing a photo catalog of all the fine gauge stockings I've made and the graphs for each one. Eventually I'll be able to have customers pick out various elements from the catalog to design their own. Meanwhile I'm about a third of the way through the second stocking of my second big stocking project of the year. By the time I finish this one (hopefully tomorrow) I think I'll be about stockinged out for a while.

Knitting Class

Last month after I spent some time helping a friend with her knitting on a couple of afternoons (she had knitted previously but needed some help with a new project) she finally was able to convince me that I should offer some knitting classes. I printed a flyer describing two classes that I would offer; Knitting 101 would be a basic beginner class and Open Knit would be a class for people who had some experience with knitting but needed extra help with a specific pattern or project.

I emailed friends and plastered flyers around town, and ended up with -- ONE student! So she and I went through three weeks of Knitting 101 and simply had a blast. I had stated that the beginning class would cover casting on, knitting, purling, and binding off, but at the end of the third session my student was also increasing (knit in front and back), decreasing (knit 2 together), and yarning over. She said that she really enjoyed the class (as did I) and we are already making plans for another series of classes in January. I'm hoping that I'll be able to have more than one student per class for the next round.

We're also planning a "class field trip" to Enticements for the end of January (and maybe a few other stores in the area). She didn't realize that there was a yarn store in Decatur, even though her parents live there, but I read about Enticements in another friend's blog here. I'm hoping that my other friend who got me started teaching will also be able to go on the trip.

Two More Etsy Sales

Hooray! Two more Etsy items sold today - a couple of Christmas stockings to a lady in California.

I was able to relist the fisherman stocking immediately because I had another one already made up.

The sock monkey stocking was the only one of its kind that I had on hand, so I won't be making any more of those this year.
Tomorrow I'll photograph and list my full-size afghans and some of my baby/children's hats. I'll have to photograph the fruit hats as well, and I'm sure there are a lot more things that I can't think of right now.

If I could just have a couple more sales days like this it would really help the budgetary crisis immensely. Now if I could just get caught up with my special order stuff we'd be good to go. For some reason I always have many more knitting projects than I have time to do them all. To quote the image from one of my favorite tote bags, "So much yarn, so little time..."

Katie and Doug's wedding

Well, the wedding has come and gone, and with it my one and only chance to be mother of the bride. All in all it went pretty well, except that the gorgeous ring bearer pillow that I labored over so intensely never made it down the aisle. By the time of the actual ceremony Kindon was so hyper from having been given prodigious quantities of chocolate by his Uncle Hank that he flatly refused to have anything to do with walking down the aisle.

Other than that, the ceremony was lovely, the decorations were awesome, and there has never been a more beautiful bride. My sister drove all the way from Florida to attend the wedding, and her planning expertise was invaluable at the rehearsal and during the actual ceremony. It was also awesome to get to spend some time with family during the weekend.

I'd like to say that things should calm down now, but with Christmas coming in about three and a half weeks it doesn't seem likely that it will work out that way.

Ring Bearer Pillow

So the wedding is tomorrow and I got the ring bearer pillow finished up this morning. It came out very well if I do say so myself.
In keeping with my propensity for never following a pattern exactly, I mitered the corners of the edging lace instead of knitting it in one straight strip, and I grafted the ends together instead of casting on, binding off, and seaming.

My mom sewed the pillow and put a strap on the bottom because she thought it would be easier for Kindon to carry that way.



We'll see how he does with it.

First Etsy Sale!

Today I made my first sale on the Etsy website. The buyer looked at the men's slippers I had listed and requested some further information. Then she ordered a pair. Naturally the pair she wanted wasn't the particular pair that I have in stock, so I'll be knitting up a pair of slippers tomorrow while I'm (hopefully) selling (lots of) stuff at the craft fair in Gillespie.

Here is the photo I had posted:

The request I received was for just plain brown, so of course I'll have to buy another skein of brown yarn to have two strands for the slippers. But I guess I can always use the extra as stems for lots of apple hats.

Here's hoping that I'll have many more sales soon.