I finished Regrowth a few weeks ago, and I finally mailed it to my friend the other day. I’ll miss it!
But now the shawl has arrived at its new home. I am so happy that Debbie loves it!
Regrowth is home
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Tag Archives: Regrowth
Mission: Photograph “Regrowth”
“Regrowth” the behemoth shawl is done! I think it is the largest thing I have ever knitted.
I began it back in April. I knitted it through 6 seasons of “How I Met Your Mother”, a couple of seasons of “Justified”, couple of seasons of “Hell on Wheels”, couple of seasons of “Longmire”, a season of “Homeland”, and then just lots more evening knitting. I took some breaks from it to make some baby things and a couple of other projects, but they were mostly pretty quick, and then I was back to this shawl.
It’s beautiful. Our mission today was to try to figure out how the heck to get a photograph that might somewhat do it justice. I made it for a friend and will be sending it to her soon, so I wanted to get lots of pictures before I sent it off. We are going to miss it around here!
David and Davey tried to hold it up for me so that the beautiful patterns could be seen.
David had fun with this.
I tried draping it gracefully over a chair.
Then we decided to go walk over to have some frozen yogurt and to look for possible photo op places on the way.
We tried some steps behind city hall (this was to give Davey some added height by getting up the steps).
Then we just enjoyed our walk because it is just so darn pretty out today!
Lot of pretty colors in town.
We decided to walk around campus to see what we could figure out for picture possibilities.
There’s lots of concrete around, so we found a clean spot, swept the leaves off and tried again.
We decided that we needed a little more angle on the picture.
Davey may have been getting a little weary of the pictures at this point.
We took one final picture of the shadows cast by the shawl. We thought this was pretty cool!
This is really a nicely written pattern which was actually a combination of several different motifs that the designer liked. I had a lot of fun knitting it. I never grew weary of it except maybe when I had about 1700 stitches of purling to make my way across the row! I’d love to make this again though sometime!
Owl Mitts and the Behemoth
I just finished up some fingerless gloves last night. My friend Ann at our local LYS told me about the pattern. I made them with some bulky or heavy worsted (not sure) Ella Rae wool. They were a great knit. See the owls? Well they are upside down in this picture.
These mitts have a long warm cuff. One of my favorite things about this pattern though is the thumb construction.
I usually make thumbs where you put stitches on waste yarn and come back to the thumb at the end. There are always some small holes and you pick up stitches to try to fix this. But these gloves? You make the thumb as you go! You increase two stitches in the gusset every other round. When you get a big enough thumb, you bind this part off. It makes for such a beautiful solid thumb. I want to always make thumbs this way from now on. I will say that the thumb was a little large and I might not increase so much next time. I am a pretty loose knitter though, so that may be where the problem came from for me.
There are also a couple of increases toward the top of the hand. I did them at first, then I realized it made my glove way too big at the top, so I ripped back and did it without the decreases. Again, this might have been my loose knitting.
I should probably loosely block these, but I’ve not done that. I already wore them to school this morning (it was raw out and a little rainy!).
I also used magic loop to make them. This would be a great pattern to learn that technique – although it’s not difficult. Great first cabling pattern as well because there are only three rows where you have cabling (if I remember correctly.)
Love this pattern! I’d like to make another pair and make them into mittens.
My Regrowth Shawl is slowly approaching bind-off. I have now begun referring to it as “the behemoth”. It’s enormous. It’s been a great pattern, and I have loved knitting it. I have 8 rows to go, and I ran out of yarn again. It’s so large at this point, that I ordered 4 balls of yarn. It might take that to finish those 8 rows. Maybe it will just take 2 or 3, but I didn’t want to have to order it again. I wish I could take a good picture, but lace in progress just doesn’t photograph well (at least in any way that I know how to do it).
There are at least 1500 stitches on a row now. I don’t really want to count that much, so I haven’t checked for sure. I think there are actually more. It’s large – I think it’s the largest thing I have ever knitted. I can’t wait to block it, although I am still not sure where this is going to happen!
Morning Silliness & Playing at the Pond
David has been going to school in the mornings to work on stuff.
Off he goes – Davey and I waved good-bye, and then we started playing our new favorite game: Let’s run from the camera.
I guess I can only post so many “Mama, I am running from the camera pictures”, but I can’t get enough of them. Davey gets so tickled.
He laughs and laughs.
I guess I shouldn’t encourage this, but I can also be quick and stealthy with the camera when I need to be. Like when his back is to me.
I took this Sunday at the People’s Pond. Didn’t catch any fish, but we found a great place to play.
Davey played for a long time with an empty bottle and a cup. He was making potions.
He created “waterfalls” as well.
While Davey was playing, David fished some more, and I worked on a sock.
I got this yarn a couple of years ago at Hobby Lobby. I like it. Can’t remember what it is called, but it’s kind of stretchy. Should turn out nice.
Knitting Baby Sweaters
I’ve not blogged about knitting in awhile. I’ve not been knitting a ton since we moved, but I have been working on my Regrowth Shawl. Holy mackerel, it’s growing. I am approaching the last two charts, one of which is the edging chart. I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m not completely sure though that I am going to have enough yarn either, but I can order some more if need be. At this point, each row takes me almost an hour to knit. It’s getting pretty enormous.
I finished my baby sweaters before we left home. The Little Ancolie was the one I had so much trouble with, but I did learn a ton from knitting it. I ended up making short i-cords for the button loops, and I liked that a lot.
After I finished this one and declared it a “semi-disaster”, I had to make another one for my sister-in-law’s friend’s daughter. I found another pattern that I liked called “Granny’s Favourite”. I knit it with a more practical washable yarn too. It’s a cotton/acrylic blend from Kraemer.
The little lace pattern at the top and on the sleeves was easy to follow. Everything about this pattern went as smoothly as the other sweater went unsmoothly. My only problem with this sweater was that I first knit a long sleeve. There is lace at the wrist, and I thought it looked too bulky and long for a sweater for an 18 month to 2 year old. So I ripped it back and made a 3/4 length sleeve. I liked this much better.
I took pictures of this while it was still on the towel I used for blocking. I meant to get some better ones, but my brain was in pre-move addled mode at that point!
Both of these patterns are good ones. The first one is more difficult in that you have to be really careful when you pick up the stitches for the edging or you will have a side that is longer than the other. I’d like to knit this second sweater again sometime, although it’s like reading a book for the second time – there is no time to do this because there are so many great patterns to knit and books to read!
Regrowth Begins
I’m starting a new project with this yarn:
It is a beautiful sport weight bamboo/wool blend from Knit Picks. It’s called Galileo, and the color is Nebula. I’m going to make a shawl with it.
So back in October 2011, a friend of mine from Tennessee sent me a picture of a shawl. She’d seen it on etsy, and she just wanted to show it to me since she knows I am a knitter. We started talking and I told her that I’d be happy to make her a shawl sometime. We chatted about it for a bit, and I told her that really, it was something I’d like to plan to do in the next year.
So in January 2013 (yes over a year later), I remembered that I had said that I’d love to knit that shawl for her. I’d not totally forgotten about it; I’d actually kept an email reminder in my inbox saying “knit shawl for Debbie”. (email reminders to myself are the only way I remember to do anything.)
So in January, we started chatting about picking out a pattern and choosing the yarn. I sent her several possibilities of patterns I’d found on ravelry. She chose a shawl pattern called Regrowth. Here’s a pretty good picture of what it will look like.
Next we had to decide on a yarn. We messaged back and forth for several days trying to choose on a yarn. She initially wanted to stay away from wool, but then she decided that some wool would be ok – and this yarn is so soft. No scratchiness whatsoever.
Choosing the yarn was great fun, but it was the hard part! I think she ordered and sent back 3 yarn orders because when she saw the yarn in person, the color didn’t look like she thought it would from the picture online. It was worth the effort, because this yarn is so pretty and seems like it will be very nice to knit with.
It is a large shawl with lots of charts. I like charts though. It also has some Estonian stitches in it though. Yikes! I think I can figure them out though. There is something called a 2-9 star where you turn two stitches into 9. That may be crazy. I’ll figure it out though.
So I plan to blog about my progress on this. I can’t wait to get started.
Cpeezers 