The Spring Rush

Spring is a busy time of year, even if it still looks like winter. Which it does. We actually drove through snow (in the air) to get to church on Sunday. The temperatures dropped into the mid 20's last night and the Weather Channel says we will see below-freezing temperatures again tonight. All of this weird weather confuses me.



Normally by this time of year we would be finishing with the planting of our cooler weather garden plants. But I just can't bring myself to put seed in the ground when I wake up to frost in the mornings. I have started forming my beds and rows and have amended my soil with good things for my plants for the year. I suppose I can keep working on my beds until the weather decides to behave. Soon it will be simply too late for cool season planting though. What to do, what to do. I have garlic and onions planted in the beds in the upper right part of the picture, under the hay, but nothing else so far.

In the meantime I have been squeezing in as much knitting and sewing as possible because soon, the garden will need all of my "extra" time.

I finished a new dress for Gabrielle.



I made it from some red velvet in my fabric stash and made it big enough to last a couple of years I hope. We've been listening to "The Little House on the Prairie" books on cd (we don't have many audio books and listen to the same ones frequently) and Gabrielle says her new dress is her new "winter's best." This dress taught me my automatic button hole maker doesn't work very well on velvet (no matter how I might layer my stabilizer). In fact, it got so bad in the end that I made most of the button holes with the "manual" feature and at least part of one button hole on Gabrielle's dress completely by hand. I suspect I too have been influenced by "The Little House on the Prairie" audiobooks.

I've spent some time working on my Mom's sweater. I posted a picture of my progress in my last entry. That picture depicts my first attempt with this sweater. I had knitted up to the arms or thereabout, when I finally had to admit the sweater was going to be too small. So, I ripped out all of my work and started again with a bigger size. I am using a lighter weight yarn than the pattern recommends so I needed a bit of time to figure it all out. I don't purl much and this sweater is based on the purl stitch so my gauge evolved as I fell into a knitting rhythm.



It doesn't look like I have done too much, but this is only my progress on the front. After ripping out my prior work, I managed to complete the back a couple of weeks ago.



I think I've finally found a pattern that works with the yarn we have. It is not easy to find the right pattern to showcase variegated yarn in a sweater and match my mother's taste for feminine looking clothing. I think the Minuette works perfectly. I still have to rip out the back and part of the front from the complicated Aran sweater I started with this yarn previously. That is going to hurt. But Aran doesn't work with variegated yarn. It looks pretty for a little while. Then it gets crazy. I won't make that mistake again.

Not to be bested by a pattern, I started another "Queen of Beads" pair of socks. (My last too small pair ended up as fingerless mitts, which I love.) Last night I finished my socks and they fit perfectly.



I like them so much that I decided to make another pair.



If I don't wear myself out in the garden (freezing to death) today, I hope to cast on this evening. These will be a gift I think.

The Knitting Life

Pretend for a minute you are knitting a pair of socks. You knit for a few inches and realize the socks are going to be way too big. (And yes, you hit gauge dead on.) Not liking baggy socks, you unravel everything telling yourself it is better to have socks you love, than socks you finished quickly. So you start over with the smaller size in your pattern. At the point you get to the heel flap, you can no longer deny the fact the socks are way too small and cannot comfortably fit over your heel without risking damage to the cuffs. But you knit an extra repeat making the cuffs longer so you have a lot of knitting time and effort invested. And the pattern called for beads and they are rubbing the yarn each time you move them up or down. What would you do?

When facing this exact scenario recently, a brilliant idea popped into my head as I fell asleep late one night, tossing and turning over the fate of my beautiful socks.



I could add thumbs!

I now have a really pretty pair of beaded fingerless mitts or gauntlets, just in time for the weather to warm up.



It is funny, I've been thinking about making myself a pair of fingerless mitts ever since the weather turned unusually cold this year and I discovered I couldn't knit very well with super cold fingers. I couldn't decide upon a pattern though. And now I don't have to decide because I finished the job without nary a thought about it.

I do really love the sock pattern and the yarn though and I plan to try knitting the socks again. I think I will go back to the size medium in my pattern and try them with a smaller needle since gauge isn't getting me anywhere with this one.

After my brilliant success (I am quite proud of myself), I started looking at other abandoned projects with a creative eye. A couple years ago I started working on a pair of socks and discovered they were too small after I turned the heel.



I pulled this long abandoned sock out of the bottom of my knitting bag for a look. I could add a thumb and have another pair of fingerless mitts, but I don't like the yarn enough for that and I am so past knitting only one sock at a time. I like doing 2 socks (or gloves, etc.) at a time so I don't have to think about making them match. They match because I do them together, row for row. If I go too far, they both go too far and I can ignore the deviation if I want. And I don't have to count rows, which is good. I never got a proper grasp on row counting. So, I'm still not sure what will become of this sock. It may work its way back to the bottom of the knitting bag.

While rooting around at the bottom of my bag, I found this:



I started this a couple years ago from a pattern in the book, "Victorian Lace Today" and got distracted by another project. Well, I have a confession. The pattern got really boring. I seem to go absolutely insane when I try to knit projects based upon the feathers and fan pattern. Normally I can do mindless knitting for awhile, but feathers and fans make me nuts. It is too bad really since I intended to knit with homespun yarn and I don't do that as often as I should.

While visiting the ghosts of knitting dreams past, I pulled out the Minuette sweater I started for myself last winter.



I had thought I'd try the pattern out because I have been looking for a pattern to use to knit my mother a sweater. She picked out some pretty and colorful yarn awhile ago for me to use and I've struggled to find the right pattern for it and for her. But the gardening got in the way of my knitting last year and the project languished as projects for me often do. But since I can't keep waffling about the sweater for my mother since I promised her one an embarrassingly long time ago, I plunged into the pattern with her yarn yesterday anyway.



I'm a bit nervous because I already knit the complete back and part of the front to a complicated, over-sized aran sweater before acknowledging it looked awful with the multi-colored yarn. I'm hoping the yarn will look good with this more simple pattern. Otherwise, I will be stumped.

Back in the kitchen, I received my new dehydrator and have already pressed it into service.



I selected the updated version of my older one and am pleased all of my old trays fit on it as well. Now I have 12 trays I can use.