Make

December 6 – Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

The perfect question for a craft-heavy blog, yeah?

I posted this image in the previous entry, because it shows the last two things I’ve made:

Yep, I finished two shawls last month. I’m pretty amazed, all in all! This year that has beaten me down in spirit has also beaten me down in the ability to knock projects out at the rate that I was making them last year or the year before. Last year I completed 26 projects.  (And if you click that link you’ll notice that I thought 2010 would be a great year! Oh, the blissful ignorance.) This year I have only completed eight.

First up is Multnomah, a garter stitch shawl that I started back in September for my mother’s October birthday. Alas, I wasn’t able to complete it until the weekend before Thanksgiving, but she loved it anyway.

I used almost an entire skein of Sanguine Gryphon Eidos for this project. It was a skein I ordered over a year ago and my mother had admired, so I always planned on making her something out of it.

After I finished the shawl and had pinned it out, I immediately cast on for the Damask shawl. I worked on it fairly solidly throughout the following week, and since I had a four day weekend for the holiday, I made the command decision on Saturday to stay home from the shopping crowds, and I actually finished the shawl. I wasn’t expecting it to be such a quick knit, but it did kind of knit itself as it was a fun and interesting pattern, especially in the Madelinetosh Tosh Sock in Envious. That was the yarn from the Loopy Ewe sock club lite package.

This took a startling amount of pins – each eyelet on the bottom had its own pin. One thing that surprised me about the pattern was that it had nupps in it, which I hadn’t noticed from the picture and was a nice surprise. I like knitting nupps.

And so that’s what I’ve made recently.

I have some things I’d like to make still, and some ongoing projects that have been neglected, such as my Brandywine shawl, and a new shawl – Whipporwill. I’d like to get back to knitting socks, but I seem to have lost interest a little in those. Not that I don’t love a handmade sock, but I’m a little more interested in shawls for the moment.

As far as something I’d like to make, I would like to find the patience to make another sweater, so we’ll see. I did make two this year, which for me is not shabby at all.

Making: It’s what I do, and have done for the great majority of my life. If I couldn’t make/create, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.