Knitting is my most favorite hobby. I would be utterly lost without yarn in my life, but thankfully the size of my stash won’t let that happen anytime soon! Here you will find all the fibery goodness you crave, from knitting and crocheting to sewing and plastic canvas.
I got myself some gorgeous green mohair yarn for Christmas one year, but it has been sitting in my stash for a few years, so I decided it was finally time to set it free. I couldn’t find a pattern I liked for it, so I decided to wing it. I wanted to do a top down cardigan, and I did something like that before, so I just had to improvise for this yarn and this style. Continue reading “Airy Mohair Cardigan”
It’s a constant problem – I find cool yarn on sale and buy it without a plan of what to use it for, then it takes me forever to find something to use it for. I kept checking my stash to just feel this velvety soft yarn once in a while but eventually found the pattern for it.
This was a really simple and quick pattern – about 10 rows of half double crochet, about 10 rows of double crochet, and about 10 rows of triple crochet. Continue reading “Velvet Hug Poncho”
My mom asked me to make a shawl for her, but when I got some thick, grey yarn and started one, she didn’t like the color and it was too dark. So she looked through her yarn stash and found the yarn she wanted to use – Plum Wine from Caron Simply Soft, along with some unknown white yarn as an accent. We settled on those two and I was excited to get started. I decided to crochet since it would go faster and found a great pattern that I thought she would like. Continue reading “Falling Water Shawl”
When I was pregnant with Z, my manager at that time was two months ahead of me, and we ended up having overlapping maternity leave. That must have been fun for the team! I usually make baby gifts before the babies are born, but since I was in the same boat at the time, I ended up making this a bit later. I had some baby yarn that I wasn’t sure what to do with, and it seemed like the perfect yarn for the project. Little did I know that they had decorated their nursery in Minnesota Vikings colors, so this was the perfect color scheme!
This lovely set of baby blankets was made for someone at work when she was expecting twins. Their nursery colors were grey and pink, so that’s where the colors came from. I think it ended up being a really nice color combination. I wasn’t sure what to make when I first went to the store for yarn, but when I found this blanket yarn that was amazingly soft and fluffy, I knew it had to be blankets.
Baby hats are one of the easiest items to knit or crochet. They are small, so you get instant gratification of a finished project. And they are a great way to use up small-ish leftovers of yarn. They are also so incredibly satisfying because you are making something for tiny, adorable, helpless creatures.
I had a lot of yarn in baby colors that I did not need anymore and also some leftovers of soft yarns that were too small for most other things, so I thought baby hats was the perfect solution to both conundrums. I set up a small friendly competition in my local knitting group to see who can knit the most hats, but mostly to give me some motivation. It proved to be quite effective since I ended up making 30+ baby hats in just one month!
We have an awesome weekly meeting at work where we discuss technical issues that arise, make decisions on implementation, and make lots of inside jokes and generally have a good time because we work with awesome people. It’s my favorite meeting of the week – yes, there can be such a thing!
The previous long-time chair of this meeting used a wooden gavel when decisions were made, and since he had to pass on the honors to someone else recently, we needed a new gavel. I wanted to knit the new gavel so that it wouldn’t be so noisy. We also had a thing about each person on the team being assigned a superhero identity, so since the new chair was Thor, the choice for a new gavel was obvious. Continue reading “Crocheted Thor’s Hammer”
With anything that people do, there are obvious and more subtle reasons behind those actions. The same is true for why I choose to donate things I knit and crochet.
I will put this at the top because it’s the primary, and most obvious, reason.
I have always argued that if everyone did more for others than they did for themselves, the world would be a happier place since we would collectively receive more than we could ever give ourselves because of the different talents people have. So I do my part to make this type of world a reality.
I wanted a really quick project with bulky yarn and have been eyeing an idea I found that incorporated cables in the front and looked like it would be great over a collared shirt for work. It took a little while to find the right yarn, but I finally found this sparkly blue one that seemed perfect.
Continue reading “Sophisticated Twist Bulky Blue Cardigan”
I have been wanting to knit something lacy in a while, so when our team lead at work was getting married, I knew I had to knit a lacy shawl for her. I wasn’t expecting her to actually wear it during the wedding (those decisions are so personal), but I knew I wanted it to be white anyway, more as a symbol. I had thin white yarn that I thought might work, but I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough of it and that it would be too warm for lace. I knitted a swatch and decided to try it. I didn’t have the schedule to try it, but I couldn’t find a better yarn, so I bought clear beads, found a pattern, made a schedule of milestones (I only had a month), and went for it. Continue reading “Lace Beaded Wedding Shawl”