Qualified Perceptions

 Having just finished All The Book Reviews, it is time for All The Knitting Projects. 

These two are clearly relatives.  The gloves were for desireearmfeldt as replacements for a previous pair of gloves that wore out.  I tried to get the same yarn and couldn't find it, so I got a different cashmere/merino yarn, but it's much loftier and lighter.  Fascinating the difference that the spinning makes.    The sweater was for my newest niece!  

Two more baby sweaters for work folks: 

A bunch of small toys:

A pair of socks for the Christmas stash, if there is ever Christmas again. (My family had been planning to switch to family get togethers in the summer this year. Oh well.) And some surprisingly cute baby socks shoes what are those things called? Right, booties.

And the shawl is called "Love in the time of Coronavirus".  It was a knit-along, the title of the pattern based of course on "Love in the time of cholera".    "Courage did not come from the need to survive, or from a brute indifference inherited from someone else, but from a driving need for love which no obstacle in this world or the next world will break.”  Knit-alongs are sort of isolated social things, with a bunch of people knitting the same thing, paced by individual "clues", or pieces of the pattern, being released every few weeks.    I imagined the gradient as "blood or sunset descending into darkness, but then dawn comes and the light comes back" but it gets wide so fast, it's more blood than light.   Without the less-optimistic-than-planned symbolism, I do like how it looks, especially with the twirly ends (which could be flung across or worn twirly).  The pattern was a CDC / Meals on Wheels fundraiser, and I did like feeling like I was doing a thing with other people, though I wasn't really social with the other knitters, so I am not sure I did it quite right.    But I guess, it was one of the things that pushed me in the "we are all in this together" direction rather than all the other less good directions. 

 Sigh.   It took me until now to spot the awryage.   (Not the OO next to each other, that's correct.   The vertical column is in the wrong place.)


 

 Project one: The Love of Spiders (a Charlotte's Web reference)

A shawl from a gradient kit that caught my eye in I think a Ravelry ad.   Ravelry ads are probably a good example of why I think I won't mind if advertising gets better at targetting me; I would really much much rather see ads for things that I would actually want, rather than ads for weight loss products because I'm female, or for all of the lamps ever because if you buy a lamp once then surely you must want to buy more lamps immediately after that.    I brought it to work to be my too-much-AC or oops-forgot-to-dress-for-the-change-in-weather backup layer - it is soft and comfy wool, and I love the look of it. 





Project two: Baby Belarus Sweater. 
I realized that a coworker was on paternity leave rather than vacation only when I saw it in our outages calendar, so I hurried to make this one.  He was back for a couple of days by the time I finished, but only because our company does not have very good paternity leave.  :(   He's from Belarus, and I noticed that the Belarus flag has what really looks to me like a knitting pattern as part of it.  It's actually based on a different textile tradition, the woven ruchnik, but it has the non-square-pixel characteristic that made it perfect to adapt to knitting.   This particular pattern always ends up too large for an infant, but newborns outgrow anything that fits them very quickly.   As it turns out, three-year-old elder brother of the baby just fits in the sweater now, so they can timeshare.    I have also apparently impressed  the baby's Grandma, who is also a knitter.  :) 




Project 3:
A pair of socks, for the Christmas pile.   I still generally prefer heel flap and gusset, but when it's self-striping yarn, I don't really like the effect there.  So short row heel and toe it is, and I've tried a bunch of them.  Ask me about all the alternatives to the standard wrap-and-turn in short rows!   :) .  This one is Fish Lips Kiss, which has a silly name but I think is probably my favorite.    

The picture is a little weird - I was trying to keep my shadow from falling on the socks, so it's from an angle.  The feet aren't really that much bigger than the ankles, it's perspective.  The yarn is from White Birch Fiber Arts, my other main source of Fabulous Stripey Yarns besides Twisted Stitches.  

These were a project to use up about half a skein of red-brown yarn that had been used in the two-color socks finished earlier this year.   The V-stitch is interesting, but fiddly enough that it required looking at for most of the rows.   No putting my hands on autopilot for this one - even more so than a two-color pattern, oddly.

It really was odd to cast on and go straight into the heel. 

The yarn (Skeinny Dipping's Mericash yarn - they're local, and Gather Here had some) has 20% cashmere in it, so it's very soft and comfy.   (As well as nylon, because socks. 

I was working on these over Christmas, but didn't finish them until a few days ago.    First on the pile for next year!

The pattern was interesting, and I really enjoyed the yarn.  Cute colors (the colorway is named "Let's Go Fly a Kite", so the song from Mary Poppins kept getting stuck in my head), and a very nice feel.   

 

Probably the last pair of Christmas socks for this year.  This yarn is the "Phoenix" colorway from Twisted Fiber Arts - it was a fundraiser after their studio burned.   I basically made the pattern up as I went along using a simple plait cable and eye-of-partridge heel flap - I started a different pattern that involved eyelets at the color transition, but they weren't clear or even enough and I didn't like how it was going.  (I'll have to use that pattern on a striped yarn with less shaded transitions.)

I like the color continuation on the heel flap, but I don't like the jump along the top of the foot; I guess that means I should have used a short row heel instead

The pattern for this came out on Ravelry, and I knew I wanted to make it before i knew who it was for. 
(Now it's a surprise present that needs to go to the post office, for someone who I don't think reads this journal).

Tons of garter stitch and short row shaping, and a pleasant-to-work-with yarn.

A pair of socks, for a Christmas present.   I am not sure why the copy machine / scanner at work crops to legal size, when the glass is so much larger, but probably the answer is that I'm not scanning a piece of paper.   The pattern is called "Gimli" and is meant to suggest complex metalwork - the twisted stitches move every round, and the main cable is lovely.  (Sadly, it's on the fold so you can't see it as clearly.)   The green-black yarn suggests metal patina to me rather than seaweed, but your mileage may vary.

Hey, I can use sock yarn doubled for baby sweaters!    First bonus: it's a reasonably hard wearing and washable but still comfy.  Second bonus: I collect way too much sock yarn and this uses stash instead of buying new yarn.

I still miss Windsor Button for final button-picking - etsy has a lot of lovely buttons, but trying to figure out what will match is a lot more speculative.

Huh. It's orange-themed.