Djevellue for Days

I recently found two small FO that I had completely forgotten I had done!  I am not exactly sure how you forget that you have done a project - maybe because it was a small project, the pattern was very easy to follow or because it got packed away for when the baby comes.  I did two baby caps from this pattern on Gros Lille Krok's blog.

Not knowing yet at that point if it was a girl or boy, I opted for relatively gender neutral colours - fire engine red and a softer orange.

The orange cap I did with some Handmaiden Casbah that I had laying around.  The leftovers went to the baby vest I made recently, so I managed to get a matching set out of the skein and might have enough left over for some little booties.  We shall see...

For this cap, I followed the pattern quite literally with regards to needle size, etc.  I did find though that the yarn had so much give that the gauge is a bit larger than what was suggested in the pattern, meaning the hat is a little large as well.  The baby I am carrying is huge though... so I think this "knitting error" might work out in my favour as he will probably need it to cover this quickly growing head sooner rather than later.  

The second had, the red cap, I did a little differently.

This one I knitted with some Kauni wool/acrylic blend I had leftover from a sweater I had knitted my last son.  As we live in Denmark, which is famous for windy, wet, miserable winters, I wanted to see if I could knit this with a slightly larger needle and then gently felt it by soaking it in warm water.  I knew the wool would felt quite easily as my husband had washed the previously mentioned sweater with regular colours on a warm cycle.  Yes, it came out of the machine as one large wooly ball, so I knew just soaking it would be enough to tighten down the stitches just enough so the had would be pliable but still warm enough to keep the wind out.  Worked brilliantly!

FO: Knitted Baby Vest

I haven't been knitting a lot lately, but as I find my size growing and my due date for my third child quickly approaching, life seems to be taking a slower tempo.  What used to take a lot of my time now takes up much less and I suddenly have time for other things like knitting.  Besides, knitting requires a minimal amount of bending over or stretching which is always a plus at 34 weeks pregnant.

So my first finished object in about a million years is of course for the baby.  I found this pattern on Ravelry and knitted it in some leftover orange Handmaiden Casbah sock yarn I had laying around.  I finished it off with a some little buttons I found at Handler, this small sewing accessories shop I found right next to Kongens Nytorvet in Copenhagen.  Now, I could write an entire blog post just about this shop and the magnitude of their selection and great service, but will resist the urge for now.  I went off of the Danish pattern and found that it was a very quick knit and gave a very satisfying result:

Vest #2 is already casted on - pictures of the FO including buttons from Handler to come!

I am back

It’s been a long time – a very long time – since I blogged last.  Two job changes and a lot of grey hair later, I can finally say I am back.  I knitted my first project in well over a year yesterday.  It was a rather unassuming little project, a cell phone cover for my daughter but boy did it feel good to be creative again. 

My daughter is always complaining of small scratches on the front of her iPhone.  She’s 9, she should be grateful that she even HAS an iPhone….  Anyway, she crashed on her bike on the way to school and dropped it.  The screen shattered in the process and she was incredibly upset by the whole thing.  500DKK in repair costs later, my husband asked me to come up with some sort of case for her.  This is what I arrived at in only a couple of hours:

You can see the ravelry project here: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/sbjindk/sock-yarn-iphone-cozy

Tags fra Technorati: cozy,iphone,yarn,knitting

Autumn in August?

The grey boring weather has taken over the Danish skies yet again.  You may ask “When did it ever really leave?” but last week we had a week of summer.  A whole week.  And now I sit in my office overlooking the Østerbro neighborhood of Copenhagen and the sky looks like this:

I am in that red dot – Right in the middle of the lovely blue swirls of sudden rain showers and ominous black clouds.

I grew up in Seattle, so the soggy socks the rainy, dark days bring around here don’t usually get to me but today my office looks like this:

You can hear crickets chirp.  I took this this morning before the clouds rolled in so it actually looks like a nice day out.  So what’s a girl to do?  I think it will be a knitting lunch today.  Just me, my food and a good ball of yarn. 

A little news on my Elvira sweater: I am only missing about 75 gr. of yarn before it’s done.  Kind of makes me wish I had remembered to take it with me to work today.  We could have had a nice lunch at the local café together…

Yarn Bombing Hits Denmark

Some years ago before I started knitting, I noticed a bust of a man who was of local relevance a long time ago fitted with a hand knitted Santa cap just a couple of days before Christmas.  I had never heard of yarn bombing and only figured out some years ago that I had been witness to a bombing some years ago when I saw this site: www.yarnbombing.com.

So I am reading the local newspaper’s website at work (because that’s what you are supposed to do at work…) and found the following article in Danish: http://politiken.dk/turengaartil/rejsenyt/storbyogkultur/ECE1337093/strikkeguerillaer-indtager-storbyerne/ 

So the Danes are finally hip with it.  Hopefully I will see more guerilla knitting coming soon.

“Crochet just got funky”

Love, love, love this picture on poorlydressed.com:

Grown man in a crocheted jump suit.  Let’s get funky…

Knitting on the Go

My Elvira has been around the block a couple of times.  When she was just a wee cast on, she took the big trip over the pond on a business trip with me from Copenhagen to Chicago, San Diego, LA, Toronto, Buffalo and again to Chicago:

On the flight to Kiev, I joined the front and back pieces to form arm holes.  She was really starting to look like a real top/dress:

She has taken the daily trip to and from Copenhagen with me From Roskilde every day for the last 2 months:

Tomorrow I leave for Barcelona and guess who is going with me!  We will be working on the main part of the body:

At the pace I knit, she will also get a little vacation in Cyprus in April and hopefully return finished and ready to block:

So by the time she is done, she will have travelled 33,978 km or 21,114 miles.  Man I am a slow knitter…