Final exams ended on Wednesday, and boy has there been knitting in celebration of newfound freedom! Not only freedom from the semester’s relentless grind, but freedom from classes…FOREVER! I’ve finally finished all the course requirements for my programs. Dissertation, ho!

Update #1: Remember Prentice?
Yes, Prentice, the poster-tube carrier that I knit in a fit of grad-student geekiness. I had originally planned to make a yoga mat bag version, both because I need a second yoga mat bag for my second yoga mat, and because I figured slightly more people would want a pattern for a yoga mat bag than a poster-tube carrier.

Prentice #2, in summery shades of red and yellow, has finally been cast on. After practically a year of sitting on the pattern, I decided the original Prentice construction was fine and have no plans to fiddle with it, other than changing the proportions to be more yoga-mat-esque.

Update #2: The Mess of Laceweight
Some progress has been made on the tangled wad of Merino Oro. It now looks like this:

I have no idea how much of it I’ve wound; less than half, for sure. Every so often I get into the mood to wind it, so I do a little more. I’ve managed to untangle a significant number of the stubborn knots without breaking the yarn too many times (only twice, I think), and now it’s at a point where it’s unwinding off the box flap rather neatly.

Continue reading… »

Pattern: Original
Yarn: Elann Peruvian Highland Wool, #3103 Allspice, skein
Needles: Addi Turbos, US 7 (4.5mm)

I still had one more skein of the Elann Peruvian Highland Wool, even after the slew of hats and a pair of mittens. My original calculations had the mittens requiring 160 yards. They took 60. Oops.

So I set about making a one-skein hat. I cast on 96 stitches, knit some 2×2 ribbing until I got tired of it, and then made 24 increases in preparation for the cable pattern. I knit alternating panels of the XOXO cable pattern until the hat measured around 5 inches deep, and then started the decreases for the crown.

I mostly winged the crown decreases, ripping once after I decided it was ugly and starting over. I’ve unvented this combination cable-cross/decrease move that helps maintain some cable-y goodness as you start to the narrow the panels. The remaining yarn went into the pom-pom.

The finished hat is about 16″ around.

I rather like the finished product. If I had to do it again, I’d do a couple fewer rows of ribbing at the bottom so I could finish the second repeat of the cable pattern before starting the crown decreases. I think that proportion would look a little nicer as well.

Total Afghans for Afghans item count: 7

Now that that’s done, time to revisit that lace!

Pattern: Original
Yarn: Elann Peruvian Highland Wool, #3103 Allspice, oddballs
Needles: Addi Turbos, US 7 (4.5mm)

Here’s another FO in my quest to outfit the children of Afghanistan with my wool oddball stash. These should fit a child aged 2-4 years and used about 60 yards of worsted-weight yarn.

These are my first mittens using standard mitten construction. The Target Wave Mittens were my first mittens ever, but they’re built in a non-standard way.

I mashed the cable pattern from the cable and rib hoodie and the cabled pom-pom hat in with the mitten pattern from Ann Budd’s Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns and wound up with these.

I made a few modifications to the standard pattern. First, I added increases along the back of the mitt to adjust for cables’ tendency to pull in. Second, I moved the decreases for the top of the mitt and the thumb to the sides, opting for a flat top instead of the spiral decrease pattern in the book.

Total item count: 6

I’ve just cast on for one more child hat, and then hopefully my oddball stash of Elann Peruvian Highland Wool will be gone. Then we’ll see about depleting my Cascade 220 stash.