Sailors and Leaves

I finished this outfit this afternoon and wanted to go out and find me a baby to put it on! I’m not writing from jail so, needless to say, I didn’t do it. But I wanted to.

I was working on the pattern but I realized two things:

1) I wasn’t as far on the pattern as I thought I was.
2) I wrote the pattern and worked the pieces flat but, unless you work Norwegian purls, you can’t really do the colorwork flat.

Rats. I thought about doing it in the round early on but, for some reason, I didn’t carry through. So now I’m having to rework the pattern so that the middle section is worked in the round. The other complication about this is that I worked the sleeves from the top down by picking up stitches along the armhole section. Now, that will still work but it will take using double pointed needles. I think I will need to give an option for making the sleeves separately.

I think I’ve got it pretty well worked out but I’m going to need to do some testing to make sure I’ve got the math right. I also had to rework the pattern repeat so that it would fit the number of stitches around. So, almost done.

I’m very excited about my new camera that I’m still trying to learn all the things I can do with it. I love that I’m finally going to get to learn more about the art of photography. I’ve had a long-time fascination with photography so now I’m going to learn some of the technical side of things.

There's a new Dalek in the world

Please help me welcome the newest Dalek to the world...


tadah!
I love it as much as I thought I would.

I'm getting very close to finishing the final test for my Baby Sailor Suit:



The back is done and the front is done up to the shoulder. All I have left if to finish the front shoulders (which will be worked with the button holes), the little sleeves and sew it up. I love the color of this Katia Mississippi 3. It's color 408 (very descriptive, isn't it?) which is a sort of denim color.

Still Knitting

I'm taking another watercolor class this spring but for some reason I'm feeling really stifled this time around - it's just almost overwhelming to even start something. It feels a lot like writer's block - is there a painter's block? Guess it's sort of the same thing. Anyway, we've had 2 weeks between classes and I started a couple of things that I'm actually happy with so far so maybe that's a breakthrough. Of course, I never did like to do things that I wasn't pretty good with from the beginning but I'm hanging in there with this because I really love watercolor painting and I really do want to get better. Ain't gonna happen without some practice though, that's for sure.

I was going to start the Balmoral Thistle Dinner Cloth with the size 30 thread this weekend but I decided to work a little more on the size 10 just to give it a fair chance. I’m just getting the head of the thistle and am only about 20 rows from the “Coffee Cloth” size. I really don’t think I’ll go further than that with the size 10 but at least it will give me something to show for my effort. Actually, now that it’s big enough to put on the circular needle, it’s been a lot easier to work, although it still looks too chunky to me. I also realized that, for some reason, I was working it really tightly on the double points (not like me at all) so I calmed down, loosened up and now it’s going a lot better. You can see the thistle leaves and the head beginning to develop here.



I’ve also made it almost to the end of the black/grey Dalek and I’m totally digging the color combination. It was an absolutely gorgeous day on Saturday so I spent quite a lot of it sitting on my porch knitting and listening to the birds. One of the cardinals was getting really brave, hopping around and shouting just about 4 feet from me. Mighty fine. Didn’t even dampen my spirits to see rain all Saturday night and all day on Sunday.

Of course, we’re counting our blessings seeing what so many others went through this weekend – between tornados and earthquakes. So heartbreaking to hear about all the people, mainly children, who were lost in the earthquake and right on the back of the disaster in Burma.