Thursday, July 16, 2009

Summer Knitting Had Me a Blast...Summer Knitting Happened So Fa-a-ast...

Every summer we all hear about knitters that put their needles aside as soon as the days begin to grow longer and the temperature starts to rise. These people rarely, if ever, pick up their knitting until we begin to see the days shortening and the temperatures decline. I, however, am not one of those. I can totally understand doing whatever it takes to stay as cool as possible!! (I live in Texas!) But I cannot stand to have nothing in my hands to work on. And the thing that makes my hands the happiest is knitting!

So...What kinds of things do people knit in this kind of weather? I really knit pretty much anything. For example, last summer I finally finished a blanket I'd been working on for my younger son. I started that blanket in either 2004 or 2005. I finished it after my Italy trip, assembled all the blocks, and took a picture of the final project on August 1. I don't something this big out of the house to work on. So I can control the temperature!!

Here's Kelby's blanket.
Kelby's Retro Throw 2
Here's Kelby enjoying his blanket and faking sleep:
Kelby pretending to be asleep under his new blanket

I knit it out of Knit Picks Crayon. A really nice boucle' cotton. Kelby had picked out red, blue, and purple. I did it some different than the pattern. I doubled the yarn and increased my needle size to make the squares the size they needed to be. It's got a lot of imperfections because I was a fairly new knitter when I started. I got much improved as I went along. But Kelby loves it ans uses it all the time at home and takes it whenever he's away from home.



This summer it seems like I've been working on smaller projects. I didn't do this intentionally, it's just worked out this way. For this particular blog I'm going to focus on the one small project that took me the longest. It's the Skull Isle hat from Son of SnB. I actually said something about this nearly a year ago. I had bought the yarn to knit it but got frustrated and gave up. It's a fair isle hat knit in fingering weight yarn. I used Knit Picks Pallette in red and black. Those are colors used in the book but they're also Logan's favorite colors, so...
Finished Skull Isle
Logan wearing Skull Isle
It took me nearly a month to knit it. The problems I had were
1. Teeny yarn and on size 2 needles and over 200 stitches per round.
2. Too many stitches for my 4 needles. I finally had to add in another set of size 2s. I had both sets of Knit Picks DPNs (wood and metal) and I ended up using ALL of those needles!! it really made it so difficult. It kept rolling back on itself. However, it was worth all the work and problems because Logan likes it!!!

This weekend I'll talk about some of my other summer knitting!
Let me know what you've been working on...(If I have any readers!! LOL!!)

Knit On and more later!!
Shama D
Jessiesgrl on Ravelry

3 comments:

Enid said...

That is a very nice size of blanket Shama!!! You couch look so confy too!!

Katlyn said...

What a fun hat!

Unknown said...

You know you have a following here .....so keep up the blogging. Sometimes it is the only way I keep up with what you are working on!!