Tag Archives: Cozy

Cozy pictures and Brittany needles

Posted on 24 February 2005 by Kris

Blocking = good. Trust me on this one. :-)

Unfortunately, alpaca’s fiber memory isn’t as good as wool, so it didn’t stay quite as large as I’d stretched it out to, but that’s okay. Still a good size for me. My new wrap is approximately just over 17″x59″. Perfect, since I’m only 4’10” and a bit.

For the sake of easy size comparison, I’m wearing Cozy here with the same tank top as last night’s pictures. Yesterday it didn’t even reach my elbows!

A different view of it while wrapped around me… I like how you can really see the pattern against my skin here.

Pattern detail! I really like it open like this. And I think it’s definitely an improvement over the unblocked pattern, too.

As you can probably tell, I’m proud of how this one turned out. :-D

I now have nothing in progress. I’m not planning to work on anything all day; now that I’ve done the usual job search stuff and unpinned Cozy, I’m just going to curl up and read a good book. (I love reading just as much as I love knitting, and have loved it for nearly 19 years, so I really should dedicate some time to it too. ^_^) Sometime this weekend I’ll be starting up a couple of things.

In other news, I finally got my replacements for my broken Brittanys today. Took quite awhile; I’d gotten e-mailed responses to both my replacement requests (which were about two weeks apart!) within the same day last week. I got 3 needles in one box and 4 in the other, meaning I have more than a complete set now. Guess they realized that someone who could break two in less than a month needed that many replacements. ^_^*

So, Jess, I’ll definitely be giving you at least two of those. I’m half tempted to keep five so that I could give them another try when I think I can restrain my grip a bit more, but we’ll see… you might end up with yet another complete set!

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A year of crafting

Posted on 23 February 2005 by Kris

One of Jess’ posts reminded me of just how long I’ve been knitting.

According to my LJ archives, exactly one year ago, I first used a crochet hook and knitting needles. Funny thing is, crochet came more naturally to me and I did it more in the beginning, but then I decided I liked the challenge of something I couldn’t pick up as fast, and, well, a monster was born.

Of course I didn’t realize until after I finished my first scarf that I was twisting my knit stitches, but whatever, it still looks okay, though I never wear it because it’s not a “keep me warm” type of accessory. I made the thing specifically to go with a relatively dressy black-and-white outfit, so that’s about all it’s good for.

Appropriately enough, today I finished knitting up a project, thus bringing a year of crafting to a close.

This is Cozy fresh off the needles, in its unblocked glory.

Though I kind of think I should’ve knit it on 5s now. I actually originally started it on the 5s, then frogged that and switched to 6s because I wanted this to be really drapey. And now it might be too much so. Oh well. I still like it, and it’s nice and warm and soft.

Right now, it’s currently blocking. I’m cheap and using extra foam board from an old art project. One of these days I’m gonna get a better blocking board, but for now, this works.

Unfortunately, I bound off too tightly. What else is new. Won’t stretch anywhere near as much as it did on the cast-on end (which is also the end I started blocking from). Oh well. So the bound-off edge will probably look a little bit odd, which bothers me, but then again, I’m not sure how many people will be paying attention to that edge anyway.

A couple of more pictures to come once it’s done blocking.

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Charged and ready

Posted on 15 February 2005 by Kris

For the first time in quite awhile, I have fully charged batteries for my beloved digital camera. You have no idea how happy this makes me. Oh, how I’ve missed using it so!

So, to celebrate…

Taking pictures of your own feet is kind of odd… and I swear they seem much bigger in the picture than they really are. But whatever. Toe-up socks in their flawed-but-finished glory.

Cozy’s about a third of the way done here. It can definitely use a good blocking, but other than that I’m happy with how this one’s turning out so far. It looks like I’m going to end up with an extra ball and a half of this yarn, maybe even two. Mmm, alpaca…

A detail of Cozy. I really do love this pattern a lot… except after this project, I don’t think I’m going to be making another one again. Not for a long, loooooooong time at least.

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Winter (if you could call it that :-P) WIPs

Posted on 25 January 2005 by Kris

I had to frog my first sock to below the heel late last week, because I’d somehow wound up with extra stitches and didn’t notice until I was about three inches past the random increases. I finally found where they were, swore very profusely for not having noticed earlier, started ripping, decided I wanted to fix the big gaping hole between the heel and the instep (which I’d tried to work on as I went along but had sort of failed at), screwed that up, and then ripped some more.

Oh well. Shit happens.

After all that, though, it went pretty smoothly. And as of Saturday afternoon, I now have a new sock! (I’d post a picture, but I still haven’t found my USB cable. Grrarrrr.) I’ll be working on its mate over the next few days.

Man, after working on this, my size 6s seem positively huge in comparison.

I’ve also been working on my Cozy, which I haven’t gotten too far into because I kind of let it go to the wayside in my initial sock excitement. Unfortunately, I majorly screwed up somewhere, and while the few mistakes I’d made previously were easy enough to fix, this last one required unknitting almost an entire pattern repeat. Yeah, that was not fun. But it was either that, or rip all the way down to my lifeline (which was several repeats down at the time).

On the plus side, since I’m working with alpaca yarn this time, I decided I’d try just splicing the ends of two balls together so that I didn’t have to do the whole weaving-in-ends thing (which was not fun the last time I did this pattern). It worked beautifully, but I really should’ve just used half the plies of each strand for that, which I didn’t think about at the time. So I’ve got a slightly thicker strand running through somewhere, but while it’s noticeable to me at least, it doesn’t really bother me all that much. (And no, I didn’t use spit because that grosses me out. Wrapped a damp cloth around the twisted-together strands for maybe half a minute, then unwrapped it and rolled the join between my palms.) I’ll just have to make sure I don’t repeat that mistake when I add the next ball in.

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