Posted on

Work(s) in Progress

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I have, actually, been knitting. I even finished a pair of socks. Too bad they do not match, heh. I have been trying to finish the yellow bluebell rib socks, but I left them at my sister’s a couple of weekends ago and just got them back last weekend, so they are still not done. Since I forgot them, I ramped up work on a couple other pairs.

First up, the Bas-Relief socks from the winter/spring 2011 Knitscene. Very nice socks –

You can probably see that the pattern comes to a point over the instep – that’s my favorite part of the whole thing.

These are knit in Three Irish Girls Adorn sock (colorway a mystery; misplaced the ball band). I like it a lot. I’ll obviously have to give it the old wash’n’wear test, which other yarns I’ve enjoyed knitting with have failed (like Socks That Rock, my god, that stuff felts if you look at it wrong). Being me, I of course made mods: only one pattern repeat on the leg, and gusset decreases on the sole.

THEN I actually managed to knit a vanilla sock out of Knitpicks Felici Sport. Incidentally, the sport version of Felici seems more like fingering weight to me, though yes, heavier than the regular Felici. I love stripes. I can’t believe I managed an all stockinette sock.

I love the colorway (Boutique), it’s so cheerful! This one I kind of messed up the heel a little, but I haven’t done a short row heel in a long time. They work better with striped socks, I think. I did cut the yarn at the heel to maintain the stripe sequence on the leg/foot. Yes, I am that ridiculous. Sometimes I don’t care about the stripes matching, but… mostly I do. Heh.

Finally, here is the shawl I’m working on – the Bellingrath shawl. It is worked in Madelinetosh Sock in an unpronounceable colorway – Leopeditra or something. Yep, lost the ball band! (I’m noticing a trend.) This shawl is easy, but you have to pay attention – the lace is worked on both right and wrong sides, and when you’re working the wrong side, you have to read/interpret the chart from the left to right. Argh!

I’m on the last repeat before the edging. Looking forward to the final product!

I hope I have more time to work on this one this week! Last week I didn’t feel very good and one day had a major nap right after work. I suspect Daylight Savings has messed my internal clock up like whoa because right now it’s midnight and I’m TOTALLY AWAKE, argh argh. Yay work in the morning. A stockinette sock sounds just right, yeah?

I got some awesome new jewelry supplies this weekend, so there will be some more posts about that too. I’m thinking about if I want to designate days of the week to particular posts here, so we’ll see. And I want to get back into drawing, too! Too many interests, so little time…

Posted on

Refashioning Store-Bought Jewelry

While I don’t often buy jewelry (and why would I? I have a room full of supplies for custom awesomeness), I do go out to the stores to see what is trendy or new, and I occasionally buy pieces to take apart and refashion into better pieces.

Last weekend I was at the mall and stopped into For Love 21, my favorite accessory store. It is an offshoot of the Forever 21 brand, so that means one thing: on trend, and cheap. I found the following earrings I couldn’t resist for the low low price of $3.80.

You can see the potential, right? The base metal peacock feather is fantastic. Well made, nice etching, etc. What really irritated me about these earrings are the insanely crappy ear-hooks (only tiny people with tiny ears can wear that kind of ear wire), and the even crappier beads. Plastic! Bad colors! I shudder to think. Yuck.

Okay, so I took them all apart and refashioned them with high quality gunmetal findings and glass beads in appropriate colors for less than a dollar. So my *new* earrings still cost less than $5. And they are magnifique, yo.

So don’t discount the mall for finding supplies. You might be surprised at what you find, and how you can improve the pieces to your own standards and taste.

You can buy (and subsequently upgrade) your own pair of earrings here. I think they would also look good with pale pink, like albino peacocks.

Posted on

Stitches West 2011

This weekend was Stitches West, and as usual, my mom and I headed down there for two days of wandering around the market, buying stuff. No, we don’t bother with classes, we’re in it for Stuff Acquisition. Friday, we drove down with my aunt as well and stopped at Kinokinuya in San Jose as well (and we got caught in Friday commute traffic coming back up). Saturday it was just my mom and I and we also stopped for In-N-Out burgers.

Here’s what I got:

Oh DEAR that is a lot of yarn.

From left to right: Sanguine Gryphon Skinny Bugga! in Ruddy Daggerwing, Sanguine Gryphon Bugga! in Lubber Grasshopper, Wool Candy in Capsicum (?), Skinny Bugga! in Boxelder Beetle, Bugga! in Pink Dragonfly, Creatively Dyed Yarn Sami in Falling Springs (the picture does not do this yarn justice – it’s a deep magenta that glows in the sunlight), Miss Babs Yummy Sock yarn in Indigo Bunting, Sanguine Gryphon  Eidos in Antlia, Eidos in Hydra.

Yeah yeah, six skeins of Sanguine Gryphon, whatever. 😉

It’s a favorite, what can I say? Their booth was really great, and it was so nice to see all the yarn displayed in real life as I have only ordered the yarn from the internets before.

Incidentally, I finished my Brandywine shawl out of Skinny Bugga! and wore it on Day 1. It got a ton of compliments and there were many grabby knitter hands feeling it up, haha! As one lady said, “It’s the knitter’s handshake!” …heh.

It’s awesome.

I only did one mod and it’s not really a mod – for the main chart I did 18 repeats instead of 15, simply because I wanted to use as much of the yarn as possible. And I wound up with very little, so it worked out great.

Anyway, here’s the other stuff I got, mostly a ton of patterns!

Don’t you just LOVE that sweater on the newest Norah Gaughan collection? I sure do. I will have to figure out what I want to make it with. However there are a couple of patterns in the other Berroco booklets I got that I want to make first – they will be totally doable on the knitting machine, as will the White Lies Designs t-shirt pattern in the first pattern photo.

Tonight I cast on for the Bellingrath shawl above, though not in Stitches yarn – in Madelinetosh Sock that I got recently (Christmas-time-ish, I think). Not sure yet what I am going to do with all that gratuitous Bugga up there, but I am sure it will be awesome.

And now I can’t buy yarn for ages. (Except I totally ordered new Felici from Knitpicks today as I needed some needles. Whatevs. Shut up. I had an extra paycheck with overtime on it.)