Finally! Lattice Headband!

I've been working on a new pattern for a headband with travelling cables.  There were more kinks in the pattern than anticipated (it's taken me since April to get it to work out how I wanted it to!) but I am absolutely thrilled to report that I have successfully made my first ready-to-go Lattice Headband.  Katie M. commissioned this headband back before graduation in May so hopefully she's happy with the teal & feather grey combo she picked out. :-)

Made from 100% Peruvian highland wool in Teal and Feather Grey

I'll be making more so there will soon be some available for sale in my Etsy shop for $20 + shipping.  This style headband is a little more expensive than the Swirly Headband because it uses A LOT more yarn and takes me quite a bit longer to make.

Cozy! Keep warm with a Lattice Headband!

I am planning to write this pattern up, make it into a PDF and also have it available for sale on Ravelry and possibly in my Etsy store as well.  It can be a bit time consuming... travelling cables are like that, but I think the time is well-spent.

What are travelling cables, you ask?  When you think of a cable in knitting, you probably think of something like this fisherman's sweater pictured on the right. Those cables run vertically.  They are made by taking stitches off of your needle just before you are about to knit them, holding those stitches either in front or in back of your project, knitting the next needles, and then putting the other stitches back on the needles and knitting those.  This creates a cable or a twist in the fabric.  Cables aren't particularly stretchy, but they are very warm and create interesting textures.  You can see that there are individual cables or twists in the fabric that run lengthwise along the fisherman's sweater.  The ones on the sleeve of this sweater are your basic cable that just twists every so often... [p1, k4, p1* rep 4 rows, on the fifth row, p1, slip 2 hold in front, k2, replace 2, k2, p1... repeat whole sequence]

A travelling cable, on the other hand, is a cable that does not go straight up and down the garment.  Rather than the knit stitches staying in the same place on the garment, going vertically and twisting over or under each other every so often, a travelling cable 'moves' either left or right every single row.  This means that instead of having those nice vertical columns of fancy cables, you have a cable that veers wildly to the left or to the right.  Because you have to move the stitches every single row, they take a lot more time to create a garment using them, but you can create some interesting designs.  For instance, in the Lattice Headband, I made a trellis pattern.  In the Verhi Terhi mitts (pictured on the left), you can see how the cable (it looks just like a raised ridge) goes diagonally across the mitten.

In other news, I've got some cooking updates! First: my first recipe! Check out my Baked Shrimp Scampi. It's a conglomeration of a bunch of different scampi recipes... I just picked out the parts that I liked best (butter, garlic) and left out the ones I didn't (rosemary). I made this recipe for dinner last night and I am pleased to say that there weren't any leftovers or unhappy diners.

I'm also about to try to make some freezer jam with some of the strawberries from the festival! Wish me luck!

Strawberries!

Today Curtis and I went to the Strawberry Festival in Bellevue! Despite my sunburn, I had a lovely time.  There were all sorts of neat things to look at and live music and, of course, strawberries!  Curtis and I left with 12 pints of strawberries.  Not surprisingly, I am quite pleased.

We also got a caricature of us done (by Over the Line Productions). Since I forgot my camera (how could I possibly forget my camera?!?!) I think it's particularly fun to have. Check out Gumshoe Curtis and Femme Fatale Kristine!

I am a little uncertain as to the accuracy of our 1940's apparel, but whatever, it's still fun.

No camera also means I didn't get to take pictures of some of the things people were making for the festival.  I got a lot of neat ideas (without stealing others', I promise) just looking at the work that other people were doing. Knitted applique flowers on sewn handbags? I think so. Also, I've been thinking about making little knitted flowers to wear as hair accessories, but I wasn't quite sure how the best way to wear them would be. I was thinking of maybe wrapping them around bobby pins and gluing them in place (have I mentioned yet that I desperately want a glue gun?) but didn't think that was going to last very long. A woman at the festival knitted in a hair tie (rubber band thingy) into her flower. No glue, no pins, just a hair tie with a flower! Genius.

Apartment box countdown: 1 in the living room (small, full of cleaning supplies); 1 in the bedroom (small, full of things I don't know what to do with... my diploma??). That's it. So close! Curtis just has the curtain rod in the bedroom and a bathroom cabinet left to install and that's it! YouTube video of the apartment coming soon!

Headbands and Interviews

Kim S. will be happy to hear that I've finished her headbands!
Pictures can be seen below and they are also on display in my Etsy shop!
If you're interested in commissioning a headband (these colors, other colors, another design?), send me an email at knittinsmitten@gmail.com.

"Emerald City & White" (top) and "Aporto & White" (bottoms)

Ready to ship!

I haven't been getting a lot of knitting done recently because of the move-in (significant progress has been made, but still not there yet... I'm getting a little worn out from all the organizing) and because I've been looking for a job. Since I'm starting my master's program this September in library and information science, I've been trying to find jobs that are applicable to my studies and future career. I haven't been looking for very long, but I already wish I could just show up and get an interview. I'm tired of typing in the same information about my employment and academic history into those online forms that only let you have 50 characters to describe your skills and responsibilities. 

I do have two interviews pending (one is tomorrow at 11am!) for "big girl" jobs (one with an online retailer and one with a property management company) and have one job offer from a clothing store in the Bellevue Square mall. Depending on how things work out, I might try to do one full-time job and one part-time job over the summer until my classes start and then drop the part-time job. We'll see how things work out though; 40 hours a week might be more exhausting than I anticipate. When they say they offer vacation, they mean paid vacation, right?

Apartment Update

It seems I've been neglecting Peasblossom for nearly the past two weeks! Shame on me. I've been ridiculously busy unpacking and organizing and somehow it seems like I haven't accomplished much. I haven't even really been knitting, let alone sewing... no where to put the sewing machine yet! Despite all the work, I still haven't finished moving into the apartment; I only have three boxes in the living room (plus two full of Curtis's things) and two boxes in the bathroom and then I can return all of the cardboard to my mom.

But at least the kitchen is all done! We even have clean dishes, as you can see on the right.

Last weekend Curtis and I renovated our closet. I wish I had taken a "before" picture. It was basically unusable. Our closet is a walk-in that is approximately 5' by 5' with the door (a single fold-out) off-center. Whoever lived here before us must not have had much in the way of closet-fillers, because he/she installed a single shelf at shoulder height (using a plethora of anchors and approximately 8-million screws and plastic clip things... a mega-pain to uninstall) along the left wall and the back wall. The way the shelf was set up, there was no where for folded clothes at all and Curtis couldn't even fit all of his hanging things up. There was absolutely no room for anything of mine... Everything I had was piled up along the wall in the bedroom.

Now we have five shelves along the left wall, two shelves with hanger rod things on the back wall, and a shoe organizer thing from Ikea on the right wall. [Pictures coming soon.] All of my clothes fit in the closet and Curtis gets the top hanger rod thing plus the dresser that is out in the bedroom. I am pleased. With that installed it really feels like I might actually be able to finish moving in. All of my knitting stuff and sewing things fit in the closet too, which is a much better place for them than in the hall closet. Now we can hang our coats up too. It's still kind of a mess in the bedroom closet, but at least the clothes have somewhere to go now.

We have a magnetic knife rack now and two towel rods in the bathroom (all installed yesterday). Curtis fixed the toilet paper dispenser, the smoke alarm (it had come out of the ceiling), the dining chairs, and the toilet seat.  We have one large load ready to go to Goodwill (a shelf thing, the shelves from the closet, two bags of clothes and knick-knacks we don't want/don't fit), and a medium load to go to storage/Curtis's aunt's house.

Other than unpacking and cleaning, I feel like I've spent most of my time in the apartment cooking. I've made a whole bunch of meals and tried several new recipes and made several tried and true ones.
- crock pot macaroni & cheese (new)
- french onion Salisbury steak (new for me, but mom has made before)
- black bean burgers (new, not all that successful)
- spaghetti bake
- stuffed bell peppers
- freezer-to-oven pizza (haha)
- brown lentil & pasta soup (new)
- lamp chops with Greek yogurt & mint sauce (new)
- baby argula salad with chevre and walnuts and vinegar-y dressing
Pretty good for $60/week for groceries for two people (went a little over for the lamb chops, which yielded no left-overs) and only having been here for about three weeks.

I'm going to go putter around the apartment and see how much I can get done in an hour. I'm pretty unmotivated (I don't get much done on Sundays, it seems) so I'll probably just get sucked into playing DDR again... best/worst present ever.

Arctic Blast Mitts in "Midnight"

My mother!

With moving comes cardboard boxes and fortunately, my mother had a friend at work who was willing to lend us her moving boxes for my move from Walla Walla to Bellevue.  As a thank you, my mom bought some yarn (Manos del Uruguay Silk Blend in "Midnight") and I knit her a pair of fingerless gloves. They turned out really well; it helps that the yarn is beautiful. Because it is kettle dyed, there is a slight shading to the color. The 30% silk mixed in with the extra fine merino certainly doesn't hurt anything either.

I particularly liked the bind off method and I think I'll use it on gloves in the future. The bind off method recommended was Elizabeth Zimmerman's stretchy sewn bind-off.  Rather than knitting your stitches off the needles, you cut your yarn after your last knitted row leaving a long tale (at least x5 the length of what you want to bind off) and using a tapestry needle, sew through the first two stitches purl-wise then back through the first stitch knit-wise. Then you pull the first stitch off. You keep doing that all the way around. The result was (surprise) a stretchy bind off that was even and didn't have a clunky edge.

These gloves won't be available in my Etsy shop but if you're interested in commissioning a pair of gloves for yourself or a friend, shoot me an email at knittinsmitten@gmail.com.