Tiny Ornament Socks

Every year in December, we pull out Caleb's little advent cabinet. It has 25 small doors and little compartments for small gifts. Each night he gets to open one little door as we count down to Christmas. This means that I need 25 tiny things to put into each compartment. We usually go with small ornaments and this year I decided to knit some tiny socks for some of his gifts. This is a great way to use up the tiny bits (and sometimes not so tiny bits) of leftover sock yarn.

Here are two of the socks I've done so far. I'm not really working from a pattern, I'm just casting on 24 stitches on my size 1's (2.25 mm) and winging it. The sock on the right has a heel flap and probably should have had more rounds on the foot before I started toe decreases. The sock on the left has a short row heel and I like the foot length better. They measure about 2-3 inches long. If I took the time, I could probably find a free pattern (or 10) on the Internets for tiny ornament socks, but I'm having fun just making it up as I go.

A Surprise this Morning!

This is what we woke up to this morning. The roads were mostly just wet (with a little bit of slush), so the critters still had to go to school, but it was a beautiful surprise to wake up and see this. I think it will be gone before lunch.

Cassidy

I hope everyone had a great weekend and if your weekend involved turkey, I hope there was lots of it and good friends and family to go with it!

I'm still working on the back of Cassidy. (Actually, I'm working on more than that, but Cassidy is all I can show right now on the blog.) I've just started the armholes, so the rows have gotten shorter and things should really start moving along quickly now. The cabling is easy and since I made a few notes, I can work on this while I watch TV without too much trouble. Ramius has been helping me with it a bit - by helping I mean that he has been sitting in my lap while I knit on it - he hasn't actually been knitting on it himself in his spare time. It seems to me, that with the amount of spare time cats have (and by spare time I refer to 25% of the time spent sleeping), if cats could knit, they'd turn out an amazing quantity of work. I mean cats don't have to do laundry, pick up kids from school, cook, vacuum, clean the house, do the grocery shopping or any of the other things we have to do and it's not like a cat will get sucked into Ravelry for hours, looking at knitting. If cats had thumbs and could stay awake, they could be the perfect knitters! Just something to think about...

Pretty Quiet Around Here

Not much to post about today. I've been working on Christmas knitting and doing some designing, but I can't post any of it. I'll be baking pies today for Thanksgiving tomorrow. I probably won't be back this week to blog. I hope everyone has a lovely week and weekend. If you're celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow - Happy Thanksgiving!

Cherry Blossom Shawl, Done!

I finished the Cherry Blossom Shawl this weekend, and got it all blocked. It's just gorgeous and I love it! After briefly considering a more elegant photo shoot, I decided to go with the tried and true Pink Lemon Twist model, Finn. He's always happy to help out and since he's never modeled a circular shawl (because this is the first one I've ever knit), it was exciting for him too. I tried to get him to turn around so you could see the back view of the shawl, but Finn was having none of that - either we photograph him from the front, or not at all.

The pattern is the Cherry Blossom Shawl that originally ran in IK back in 2002, but is now available as an individual pattern - either from IK directly, or from the designer. I believe it's available in downloadable form as well as a hard copy. I used Shibui Knits Silk Cloud in Blossom as my yarn (4 skeins) and knit it on US Size 6's (4.0 mm). The lace is very easy to work, it just takes some time to get around the longer rounds at the end. I had no problem knitting it while I was watching TV.

Because it's Friday...

...I give you two dogs on a rock.

On a lovely November morning.

Have a great weekend!

The Fluffy Pink Squid of Doom Gets an Edging

I've started working the edging on the Cherry Blossom Shawl which both binds off the shawl, and finishes the edge nicely. If you've never done a knitted on lace edging, I'll explain it. After knitting the main section of the shawl, I have a giant circle of live stitches on the needles. If I were to try to bind them off in the traditional way I would never be able to get it loose enough for the lace to stretch during the blocking and it would look terrible. Fortunately, some long ago lace knitter figured out that if you add a decorative lace edging perpendicular to the live stitches, you can work one stitch of the edging with one of the live stitches from main part of the shawl and fasten off these main stitches without an actual bind off. Attaching lace to lace and live stitches to live stitches allows everything to stretch properly in the all important blocking phase. If you're looking for a design that uses this edging technique to finish off a shawl, in addition to the Cherry Blossom Shawl, my own designs Leda's Dream, Scheherazade, Moon Dance, and Atlantis all use this technique. There are other designs that use this technique as well, of course, but this will give you a sample.

At this point, I'm about 1/4 of the way around the shawl (assuming I'm doing the math right) and I'm estimating that I have about 6 hours, give or take to finish the edging up. The edging stitch pattern is easy to memorize and is working pretty quickly. The more I do on the edging, the less it looks like a Fluffy Pink Squid of Doom!