Two FOs and one giant WIP

So as I said last post, it only took me two days to knit up the Nintendo cozy but then I had to add the buttons... Which means I had to go to the store and find some buttons and then motivate myself to attach them. Needless to say it's two weeks later and the project is finally 100% finished.

This project was the perfect project for one skein of Noro Silk Garden. The yarn is so soft and beautiful. It would make a fantastic lizard ridge blanket, but the blanket would end up costing about $250. I may start it anyway and just do one skein at a time for a year or two until I have enough for a blanket.

The other FO I have is the baby sweater that I was working on. I got the pieces all seamed together, the button bands picked up, and the buttons sewed on. It's darling, I can't wait to see it on a baby.


So cute for a baby being born into a dedicated Packers family. Even better the baby is due right at the start of the football season, so I can see mom putting him in this sweater a lot this fall. To compliment this little sweater and to give me something easy to do while I watch movies, TV on DVD, and read I started a Modern Baby Blanket from Mason Dixon Knitting. It's a beautiful looking geometric pattern where you knit blocks of garter stitch, cast off, then pick up stitches along the side of the blocks to add colors and length. Here's what I have so far...


The blanket is just made with Red Heart yarn. I don't love the yarn. The up-side is it's acrylic so it won't irritate sensitive baby skin, it's machine washable so no matter what the little baby puts it through it can get clean easily, and it's cheap which is nice since there's over 3 miles of yarn in this project. There's absolutely no way I could afford to make this out of yarn that's $5 for 50 grams. Like the sweater the blanket is also Packers colors--a light yellow and green and a dark yellow and green.

In other news I tried my hand at yarn dying for the first time about a week ago. The result was beautiful but unexpected. I used the Jacquard acid dyes and was trying to dye my yarn a sage green color with a semi-solid kettle-dyed look. The instructions tell you to bring your water pot to a simmer then add your dye and drop in your yarn. I wanted to play with the dye color and not worry about burning myself so I added the dye to the cold water and tested it until I got the color I wanted then I heated the water and added the yarn. Turns out if you let Jacquard dyes sit for too long the colors start to separate, so while my pot was waiting to heat up the colors separated into light and dark colors. The yarn turned out really cool looking but it wasn't what I was expecting. It variegates from almost black to a bright green.


This picture isn't great but it does show how it goes from very dark to much lighter. It's had to get a good photograph of something green. The yarn is lace weight merino, part of the Knitpicks Bare line. I really enjoyed dyeing and now really want to try hand painting. To do some more dyeing I ordered a couple of sock blanks from Knitpicks and started a dyed sock blank swap on Ravelry.

The last thing I did was knit a swatch for try #2 of Andrew's sweater. This time I'm doing the Unisex Irish Pullover a free pattern that I found on Ravelry. I think I figured out what I did wrong the first time but it's pretty stupid. I think I knit my swatch with the smaller size needles listed on the pattern when it specifically says do the the gauge swatch on the larger needles. I knit a new swatch for the new pattern (I can't bare to redo the Eden pattern right now) and I double checked about 100 times that I was using the right needle size. I'm not going to start knitting the project right now I think I'll save it and try it for the knitting Olympics in August. Here's my swatch...


According to the swatch I'm on gauge so we'll see... I haven't worked at all on the pink boucle wrap as if that's surprising.