socks & stuffies

 

I finally picked up Sophie again, and although the body and leg appeared surprisingly quickly I seem to have lost momentum again. I think I’m putting off the picking up of stitches. It’s not that it’s hard to do, it’s just that I don’t particularly enjoy doing it! I’ve also been a little over zealous with the stuffing. I find it hard to  know when to stop, which is very apparent by the stretched out stitches on the body and leg. Sadly I was too keen to bury the ends, so there’s not much I can do about it now! I might try steam blocking when (if!) I finish to see if that will even things out a little.

 

There’s also been very little sock progress as I’ve been distracted by spinning, but I’ve got some catching up to do with Sherlock so I’m anticipating a good chunk of knitting getting done whilst I enjoy that. Mindless stripes and t.v. are made for each other!

 

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t.v. knitting

I’m loving nice squishy simple stocking stitch at the moment. The Boneyard shawl is just perfect t.v./toss-in-my-bag-and-take-everywhere-with-me project.



I started off using a random stripe generator for the stripes but I soon got sick of having to refer to the “chart”, so now I’m just making it up as I go along.






  















I love how it’s working up, but although I’m not entirely convinced that the colours are very “me” they do remind me of Casey, who is the kitty cat that lives with my boyfriend’s parents, so I’ve become rather attached. He is such a sweetheart, but he’s sadly getting rather old and ill now.



Back to what’s on the needles now, and the rabbit is now an ear-less head, as I’m procrastinating picking up the body stitches (this project is taking far longer than it should…).



I finally picked up the socks that I’ve been designing since February, and managed to knit to the heel. I’m trying to write the pattern up as I knit because I know that if I leave it to the end to write up, I’ll never decipher my notes!



And finally a WIP that’s very much not in progress right now. Once you get past the toe these socks start to require a bit of stitch shuffling, which is perfectly fine but makes knitting them two at a time on the same needle a bit of a mistake. I should really relegate one of the socks to a stitch holder or another pair of needles and get on with knitting them separately, but frankly these socks are taking up far too much mental energy at the moment. They don’t seem like a particularly difficult knit, but I feel like I’m tied to the pattern which is something which I really can’t be bothered with right now (currently in squishy simple stocking stitch mode!), so these socks are being retired until I feel like I can give them the concentration they seem to need from me.

Until I wrote this I was sorely tempted to frog them and use the yarn for the current Solid Socks mystery, but I think I’ll keep them on the needles for now and go stash diving for some yarn for the mystery instead (I peeked and saw cables. Yum.)



And just for fun, the current nails. Which are now a little chipped.

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a new Friend

Meet Smith. I love him lots. Even if one eye is slightly bigger than the other…

 

Smith by Ysolda Teague

Yarn: Sirdar Donegal Tweed (spikes)
        Teddy Sonnet (body)

Ravelled here.

This is such a fun, quick, easy pattern. I started him on on a Friday night, finished knitting his head on Saturday night, and added the eyes and nose on Sunday morning, but if you were more studious than I he could easily be finished in a day.

Although the construction is straight forward he is a bit of a fiddly knit. The whole thing is knit seamlessly in the round, with the spikes knit separately and attached to the body as you go along. Whilst this isn’t in itself a complicated process, as more spikes are knit on to the body things start to become a little bulky, and once you have 6 or 7 spikes attached and start to decrease for the front of the body, things can get a tiny bit tricksy.

The hardest part of this project for me were the French knots for the eyes and nose. I can French knot on flat surfaces, but the knotting for this is done after it’s all stuffed and sewn up. Perhaps I was going about it all wrong, but I found it a little difficult knot securely onto the knitting and bury the ends safely enough so that the 2 year old Smith was destined for wouldn’t pull his face off! I managed to fudge it in the end, but if I was going to knit this again I might find some other way of doing the nose as I’m not entirely happy with how that turned out. Or maybe I just need to practice my French knots! I’m probably going to have lots of opportunity since I bought Ysolda’s Otto, Sophie and Elijah patterns when she had her birthday sale last week. I apparently seem to have decided to knit a menagerie for my goddaughter!

Overall though, this is a fantastic little knit with a lot of character, and I love him to bits. If you follow me on twitter you might have noticed that it was with a little bit of reluctance that I let him go in the end, although I’m sure he’s much better off with the little girl he now lives with :)

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