Ubercrafty

my new favorite scarf pattern

My knitting group was asked to knit a bunch of red scarves with green fringe for the local food bank. Never mind that every single member of the knitting group, save one, are Jewish! Still, we always need excuses to knit, so we agreed, and I set out earlier this week to make one red scarf. It had to be a quick and easy project, but I didn't want to do just a plain stitch. After yet another hour spent on Ravelry, I found this pattern. Super easy, but very very textured ans squishy.

The red scarf, with one skein of donated Red Heart Bulky, in red, turned out very well.

 

so well in fact, that I'm making a very long, very skinny version in bright blue bamboo for a poet friend who needs something stylish to wrap around her neck a few times.

I have a secret

If you want to know what it is, you have to either email me or leave a comment with your email address.

(and yes, this is a total cop-out post! it's late and i was out at a concert!

and now, for the last Entrelac post

the mitts.

I used the pattern from yesterday, but like the hat, I made an Entrelac band of 2 x 5 sts triangle (cast on 10) then continued the pattern as is. I skipped the ribbing on the end, selecting instead to finish with 2 purl rows.

Hopefully it will be freezing outside tomorrow and I can wear it all. I ended up steam pressing the scarf and it looks fabulous. Less bulky/squishy, but a lot prettier.

The Entrelac Hat (that I made up)

when I was done with my scarf, I still had 2 skeins of the fab yarn (having bought all 4), so I started looking for a matching hat pattern. The very few entrelac hat pattern were, well, frightful. Pouffy beret types. Not me at all. Eventually, I did come across this fabulous hat and mitt set by Blacker Designs.

At first, I was going to knit it as is. But then while I was sitting at my weekly knitting clatch with my friend Melissa, she suggested and I agreed that I should change the cable band to create an entrelac band.

The one from the scarf was way too wide, so I cast on 10 and built it on triangles of 5 stitches instead of 8. Then i just kept following the pattern for size and picked up the 80 stitches recommended. Since I'm not a big fan of poofy hats, I did a K2T, K9 decrease pattern instead and got a much tighter fit.

Voila, the new and improved Entrelac Hat.

 Tomorrow, the mitts!

The Entrelac Scarf

I have absolutely no idea why I became fascinated with Entrelac. I guess one night when I was spending hours clicking through patterns on Ravelry, I spotted the criss-cross patterns and was intrigued. While I was power-knitting some dresses for my daughters (pics to come over the month!) I put Entrelac in the back of my mind, to knit for myself at some point.

I decided to opt for this pattern. The instructions were clear, and I really liked the way her multi-colored yarn made it look like each square/triangle was a different color. Then one day, at my absolutely favorite knitting store, Ariadne, I spotted the Ozark Companion hand-dyed yarn in Indian and Fire and I knew I had a project. My winter coat is white, so the orange and pink combo was going to be just the thing.

It took me about 3 repeats to understand the pattern enough to not need to read it anymore. Once you understand the way the short rows form the combination of squares and triangles, it's really easy-peasy and just knits itself. My scarf is done, but I have not bound it off, because I decided to make a matching hat and mitt set. When I'm done, I'll use whatever yarn I have left and I will lengthen the scarf to have nothing left. I hate having a quarter ball left in the stash.

Tomorrow: the hat I came up with to  match the scarf.

A month of crafty goodness

hi there. how are you. Remember me? Well, I'm still here, sort of. Truth is, I don't think I'll ever come back as Mortimer's Mom, but as my life as been major sucky lately, I've been knitting. Knitting and knitting and knitting. non-stop knitting.

so when the Nablopomo email hit my inbox last week, I didn't think I couldn commit to it, at least not from a stardard blogging angle. But Then I thought I have all this knitting and some crafting that I could talk about and post pictures of. 

Here I am. A month of knitting and crafting. I will be here everyday, either with progress reports or pictures of past projects.

I've been trying my hand at Entrelac knitting, which is basically all short rows to create a basket weave pattern. here's a glimpse, I'll tell you all about it later this week.

valentine's drop

Today being Valentine's Day, we have big plans: a ski date with my friend Susan from Our Journey To Mei Mei, and their kids, CL and A, and of course her fab husband Gord. I crocheted each of the girls a little heart using a pattern I found online last week. But this morning, it occured to me there would be a Toy Society Valentine's drop. So I grabbed a couple of shriken/felted sweaters and whipped up two little hearts.

We skied all day at their hill, Morin Heights, and right after lunch, we headed to the "bunny" hill, which is decorated with wooden cutouts (they put them on either side of the hill to force the kids to make turns by going to visit the cutouts)

All the girls agreed that Tinkerbells' winges were perfect for our purpose, so we hugn our little package on her wings. The girls acted like super-secret agetn while I took pictures. But the settings on my camera were all off and the pictures are way over exposed, so until I can try to manipulate them, you can't see the drop, just hear aobut it!

We hope they find a good home, and this time, we hope we hear from our finders!

Before and After: BB's room and new roman blinds

Once upon a time at the Kibutz of the North, we had a bonus space, a mezzanine above the living room:

 

Take one very handy brother and his contractor-friend, slap up some walls, add a window on the staircase side to keep the staircase from becoming a dungeon, punch a hole on the living room side tolet in some light and hang some wodden shutters to make it easy to close at night when mommy and daddy are watching TV and you have a perfect little room for a perfect little girl.

For a while, there were vintage circus-themed curtains, but they were useless for keeping out the early morning sun and they were way too baby-ish for this now very big girl....

(really, those are just embarrassing!)

We happened to have an IKEA comforter cover still in the package. We liked the colors, but it too had childish animals on one end as a border. We are planning on getting her a big bed next week, but I think we can do better as far as comforter cover goes. However, the fabric was great, the colors were perfect for the rooms, so I hacked off the animal border, lined it with an old orange curtain panel and we now have roman blinds that look like fun summer awnings. And a finished room, minus the big girl bed.

 

she likes it. She really likes it.

Before and After: BB's Dresser

Poor Beach Ball. Stuck with hand-me downs all the time. Her first winter here at the country house, she didn't have a bedroom... she had to bunk with us, with her crib in the corner of our room. But this summer, my brother took the rather useless Mezzanine Den (which is right above the living room, thus useless) and walled it in to create the smallest yet super cozy bedroom for Beach Ball.

Since having her room, we've painted it a cheery yellow but that's about it, it's remained unadorned. We were sort of waiting for her to graduated from crib-as-a-bed to full-size bed before seeing what else we could fit in there, but poor kid really needed a dresser. I tried my best to find her a cool vintage piece that I could fix up, but the good antique places aren't opened in the winter and frankly, it could not wait til next summer.

So here you have the before, a 100$ WallyWorld pressed board atrocity

 

Add 2 hours of my time, a pair of scissors, one sheet of pretty wrapping paper and a jar of modge-podge and we have a much less atrocious storage solution:

 

I know it's hard to tell by the crappy picture, but it's a cherry-blossom of sorts.

Toy Society Christmas Drop: the Montreal Owls

This morning was absolutely freezing outside, but I convinced my girls to put on an extra layer and accompany me on my super-stealth mission of dropping my 4 owls. They were having a very hard time understanding the concept, peppering me incessently on the drive there with questions like:

• Why are we giving them away?

• Who's going to find them?

• What if nobody finds them?

• Do we have to dig them into the snow?

• Will they be cold?

• Why are we doing this?

• Can we keep them?

• Why mommy, I don't understand!

But once we got to Place Royale in Old Montreal and I told them that we were now super spies and had to make sure nobody caught us, they were very much into it!

Drop 1 was in fact the first owl I made, with it's little scarf made from the belt of a sweater that inadvertently felted in the wash (aka shrunk) We picked a little lit tree near the museum entrance and hung him in the branches.

 

the second drop was actually Owl #3, which we hung on the other side of the staircase, on the fire hydrant. Even in the worst snow conditions, the hydrants are always shoveled and the red really stands out against the snow. I played with taking pics of hydrants last year in my photoclass and this particular one always stands out to me because it's sort of in the middle of the sidewalk and I'm always wondering how many people fall over it.

 

 

The 3rd drop was on the side of the building, the street people would walk by when going from the one museum to the other. We tied him up on a pole and he started flapping about. I double checked to make sure he was secured and we got out of there before we were spotted!

 

 

Finally, for our last drop, we actually left Place Royale just a little bit and crossed the street to leave our last little bird in the phone booth.

  

 

 

Dumpling was absolutely frozen by then, but Beach Ball was still having a ball, this having been one of her two drops.

The pattern I used can be found here. But I didn't even bother printing it, I just opened it and enlarged it on my screen, then totally eyeballed it. I did add a base to mine rather than tighten the bottom, and as I made more, I made the shape more and more elongated, which gave me much nicer long beaks on the thick felted wool.