Pins and Needles

Saartje Style for the Grown Ups

I finally finished working out the pattern for the adult-sized slippers. Here's the pattern pdf. They are a little more clog-like and less roundy than the smaller size, but still pretty cute.

You can definitely fudge the sizes larger or smaller by changing needle size or yarn weight. I did a try with bulkier yarn following the pattern exactly and got about a size 39 (US 8). They're very quick to knit. Don't be afraid to mess around with the gauge for sizes.

Queue them up on Ravelry.

Saartje-Inspired Big-Kid Slippers

I have been knitting booties by designer Saartje de Bruijn for a few people I know who are expecting babies. I think these are the cutest booties I've ever seen. Vigo loved these little booties so much he would come up to them and give them a kiss. He really wanted a pair of his own. I first tried just knitting the booties with fat Aran-weight yarn and fat US9 needles, but the shape was just not right. Too floppy, too big, ill-proportioned.

I tossed that first experiment into the washer on hot and they came out very cute as a toddler-size felted slipper.

For the next experiment I tried some short rows in the toe, and the slippers came out just perfect for Vigo's little feet. I've written up the pattern, which you can get here: Saartje-Inspired Big-Kid Slippers pattern as a pdf

Here are pictures of the Big-Kid Slippers and the other booties I've been knitting.

On Needles

* Old Shale Baby Blanket: Ravelry Project Link, Free Pattern

* German Stockings: Ravelry Project Link, Pattern Link

* Cabled Fingerless Gloves: Own design, somewhat stalled

* Rag Scarf Number Two: Still getting the fiber combination right

* Raglan Cardigan for Vigo: Totally stalled

Lace

I've been thinking about knitting the famous Hemlock Ring Blanket for a long time, but I want to try some other lace patterns first, so I can learn how to read the lace charts and figure a few things out ahead of time. The blanket is basically a lace doily pattern that has been adapted to be knit on much larger needles with much fatter yarn.

My first experiment is a baby blanket that I made for Justine's daughter Sienna. The pattern comes from Knit Wiki and is called Beadspread (Counterpane with Leaves). You're supposed to knit an ungodly number of triangles and then SEW them all together (the horror). I used fat needles and yarn and made four triangles to create one large square, big enough for a baby blanket.

I learned a lot of things about lace knitting from this project. Number one, don't try to drink alcohol and knit lace patterns. Also, after every pattern row, count them stitches and make sure you didn't miss a yarn over somewhere. That can also be done while you're knitting the plain row. It's easy to pick up a yarn over. If you make a mistake, you have to frog a little. Tough luck. Don't try to finnagle.

Bike Stuff

A long time ago, I started knitting a sweater for my bicycle. Today, because I had the bike in the house doing some maintenance, I decided to put the sweater on the bike. I don't care much for the look of it, and I think I am going to do something else, but I will leave it on for a while to see if it grows on me.

Out of curiosity I went on Ravelry to see what other people might be doing for their bikes and of course I found a lot of projects. All images link back to the profile pages of their creators on Ravelry and I don't think they will work if you aren't logged in.

More Bike Cozies

Seat Cozies

Bike Racks

Locks

Attempted Helmet Improvements

Baskets and Such

Other Cute Stuff

Skyline Hat

I've been intrigued by double knitting for a while now. It's a process where you knit with two colors to make a doubled, reversible pattern. The same technique can also be used for doing things like knitting two socks at one time.

About two years ago, my friend Eric was going around town wearing a grubby old hat with a huge moth hole right in the front of it and I said that I would knit him a new hat. Of course, his wife replaced his hat well before I got around to knitting one. I decided that fulfilling my promise of hat creation could be a good opportunity to also learn this new technique, so I went on Ravelry and found this excellent hat pattern, uncreatively but descriptively called double knit earflap hat.

This is an excellent, excellent pattern. The shape is great. It looks good on a kid or a grown up. It feels wonderful on your head. I am definitely going to be using this one again. It was $5 very well spent.

The designer is called Giftable Designs.

My Friendly, Friendly Device

I have this adapter which allows me to talk on my phone using any normal headphones. It has a mic and a volume control, and a button that answers the phone. It's a great iPhone accessory. Unfortunately, it's a bit shabbily put together, and the wires started to pull out down near the jack that goes into the phone, so I had to repair it with electrical tape. To hide the repair and to protect the tape from coming off, I knit this cable cozy, which I think wonderfully compliments my cork cell phone case.

Lemony, Non-Scratchy Cabled Scarf

The first scarf I made for Vigo this year failed for reasons of itchiness, so I made him another scarf, in his favorite color. Unfortunately, his favorite color has changed from yellow to fluorescent green in the time it's taken me to knit the scarf. But actually, I'm happy enough not to have been working with eyeball-abusing fluorescent colors this time.

The scarf has three cables on one side and two on the other, so it's not all cabled and pretty on one side and ugly on the other. I really feel like scarves should always be pretty on both sides. It's a big gripe I have with cabled scarf patterns.

Bottle Cap Cookies

We had a little party for the Winter Solstice this year and we wanted to make sugar cookies, but we didn't have any cookie cutters. We made a few using the old-fashioned upside-down glass method, and then went hunting for other things around the house that we could use.

We made a big batch of adorable bite-sized cookies, using a bottle cap as a cookie cutter. Take one bottle cap and one wine cork and a hot glue gun. Hot glue the cork onto the bottle cap. Now you can use the cork as a handle to punch out your cookies.

Make your favorite sugar cookie recipe. I learned from a recipe this time that you can use powdered sugar instead of flour to ease the rolling of the dough. The cookies are small, so they'll cook a bit faster than normal. Decorate them with your favorite icing and candies.

Someone Else Knit my Hat

Someone else knit my Space Invaders hat and was nice enough to send me a picture of it on Instructables. She did a cool modification of the pattern and I think both hats look great.

Ikea Merit Badge

Fingerless Gloves

I found a pattern that I liked for fingerless gloves, but which only came in a big man's size, so I rewrote the pattern for a smaller hand (and an even smaller hand, and a really little hand). The gloves I knit here are the womens' large. Click on the "read more" link for the pattern.

Text Art

A friend of mine is thinking about putting a text on his wall in his new apartment. I have recently seen a really amazing text + drawing installation but I can't find it now. Instead I found a bunch of other inspiring text art. If you can help me find the one that I was looking for, I would love that. Fiona Banner's work is the closest to it, but it's not her. It was an installation in a gallery, the text overlapping with itself, sort of crowding into the corner, with illustrations breaking out of it. I saw it on the internet. It was red.

Click "continue reading" to see all the cool stuff I found while looking for the one I wanted.

Deutschkurs Dokument

This week I started finally using the video camera I got for my last birthday. I am filming a documentary about my German class. I just film stuff during breaks. We get two 20-minute breaks per class.

Making documentary movies has been a big fantasy of mine for a long time, so I'm both excited and nervous about really doing it. Starting a project is the second-hardest part, though, so I'm over that hump.

The movie is going to concentrate on the students in the class, not the organization that runs the school, not the teacher, not the space we're in. I'm not sure exactly what the film will be about in the grand sense, but I'm trying to set up a few constraints for myself to make the task less daunting and more focussed.

I think it will be cool to learn more about all the people at the same time as the people learn more and more German to talk about themselves. I'm potentially in the class for seven more months.

Finally, One for Myself

I've made a bunch of these beer cozies this summer and have given them as presents to people we stayed with on our road trip. Recently I made one for Dan for his birthday. Finally, I have gotten around to making one for myself. I used two kinds of sock yarn I had left over and some leftover mohair. I ran out of mohair before the top ribbing and had to change needles, but I like the way it turned out.

I started making these from a pattern in the book Knitting With Balls, but since the first cozies I have improved the pattern from the book a lot. I keep meaning to write up a nice how-to. This one is Berliner-sized for gigantic beer bottles.