Just a quick ramble to catch you all up on my recent making. I haven’t been very productive with knitting recently, as the weather has been so warm that I haven’t wanted to even look at yarn for a while. But we’re having some unseasonably cool weather before the next heat wave sets in, and today I’m working on the red socks, which are now solid red.
That yellow project bag
The yellow bag is nearly done. All it needs is to be blocked and then lined with fabric. But I have learned things from it. One, which I suspected before, is that garter stitch is not appropriate for making a bag unless it’s to be felted. Garter stitch is far too stretchy. But again I expected that, and I plan to line it, so I’m not letting it bother me.
It was an almost mindlessly relaxing knitting project to keep me sane through some warm weather, and it used up some yarn I didn’t want to use for anything else. It will make a good-sized project bag, so I’m content with it, if not thrilled. The garter stitch strips were interesting, and not fiddly, although I did find I needed to use looser bind-offs (with a one-size-up needle) to make all the picking up of stitches go faster. It was a pleasant project, and I find I love that (Very Pink Knits) log cabin design, and hope to make a blanket out of it someday. Maybe even another bag, though felted this time.
I-cord tedium
But when it came to the drawstring, oh my. I decided to use up as much of that yellow as I could by knitting an i-cord drawstring. I’ve never done anything so tedious on a knitting project before! But i-cord is slow knitting, and I know now that if I knit any more bags, I’ll buy cotton cord to use for the drawstrings, or at the very least invest in one of those little hand-crank machines for making i-cord. I’m never doing that much of it by hand again. Its only redeeming quality was that it was so small it could be done fairly comfortably in hotter weather. But all that turning around of the dpn and sliding the work across it every few stitches got old really fast, even with a fairly short dpn.
Solid red socks
The red socks, solid red this time, are coming along. I decided to make them plain vanilla socks, for which I follow my own recipe. I only picked those up again last week, and have been knitting in little brief spurts, so they’re not that far along yet, but with the cooler weather I’ve been coming back to them more and more frequently.
No photos again today. Sorry. I don’t use a mobile phone at all, so the camera is always tucked away in a bag, not on me, and I just haven’t bothered. I’ve been busy with other things, and lazy on top of that when it comes to my blogs and my making. I have also been reading a lot, and both my cats have been more demanding this summer, each for his own reasons. And I don’t feel at all badly about taking breaks from knitting during the hottest months of summer. Such is life. It’s getting to be closer to knitting season, though, and I understand we’re in for a rainy winter. I’m trying to have projects in mind if not lined up and ready to go.
I watch knitting videos, look at my yarns, look at patterns and ideas, and think up ideas of my own all the time. The actual knitting is all that’s been on summer pause. The mental wheels have been turning.
A bit of slow stitching
I needed to repair some face masks, since there’s a COVID upsurge going on, and we’ve continued to wear masks throughout. We both got very sick early in the pandemic, and through that latest flu and RSV season we were desperate to not get sick again, so when we shop we still wear masks. That means occasional mending. I needed to replace some nose wires (pipe cleaners) and elastic, and decided to hand stitch it all. I found that slow process to be incredibly relaxing. (Why is i-cord not that relaxing?)
That little project reminded me that I want to do some slow stitching in a more creative way, so I might intersperse my cold-weather knitting with some of that, later this year.
I hope to catch up again soon, hopefully with pictures, and I hope you’ve had a good summer.