you knitted what?

My best friend's mom recently passed away.  It's not much, but maybe my friend will feel a little love from me when she takes out a kleenex.  

Pattern:  Zakka tissue cozy

Yarn:  Noro Aurora, a little bit leftover from another project

(I love this yarn and am sad it's discontinued)

(if you ever see me contemplating a toilet paper cozy, you may need to stage an intervention)

Yes, I am one of those

Have you ever seen those knitting books and think to yourself, now who on earth would be crazy enough to buy that book and make anything from it?

Like the book "Hot water bottle cozies."  I mean, that's that's screaming crazy knitter.

I made one for myself a couple of years ago. I love it, I must say. So much so that I made one for a friend. She is going through chemo and one of her side effects is that she is intolerant to cold. Which is kind of a problem in February here in the midwest.

So I made her a fleece blanket. And a hot water bottle cozy. I hope she likes it.

Here it is, blocking the entrelac part before I added on the ribbing "collar."  I put my finished one next to it to make sure I blocked it out to the right size.

I love the entrelac with the noro kureyon.  Very fast, satisfying project.

Apple brandy or triple sec?

That was the question posed to me as I arrived at my MIL's stitching group Christmas party yesterday.  Wow! I thought.  Now this was the way to start a fiber group!  Only 11am too!  (I chose the apple brandy, just a splash to go along with the hot apple cider.)

Such lovely ladies with lovely stitched ornaments and projects.  I'll just share a couple pics I took of some knitted items.

This is a felted bag that one lady made with scraps of Noro.  It is the Kalahari bag pattern and based on a mitered square  idea.  She is going to line it and put leather straps on it, and then donate it to her grandkid's school auction.

These are fingerless mittens that someone bought in Connecticut so her friends could reverse construct it.  They look like a square of k2p2 ribbing in bulky yarn and then crazy yarn (have you seen those balls?  this is something to do with them!), sewn up the side with a thumbhole left.  Then it looks like they sewed some of that sari ribbon yarn around the wrist and cut it.


I posted this with my new blogger app on my phone!  Whee!

The cloud is telling me to post

I'm a little spooked:

So I've been playing around with apple's new iCloud system and my iPhone and I opened my apple email for the first time in months, maybe years.  I've been having password issues with my me.com email so I just have ignored it for the most part.

Shortly after I did this, I received an email from  my apple email to my gmail account that just says "Files" in the subject line, and it had this picture.

It's a picture I took almost a year ago of a scarf that I wove for a friend.  The yarn is this yummy Noro Silk Garden, and I thought the colors reflected well her fabulously colorful personality.  It's my first attempt at a leno weave pattern, which involved creating a string heddle to help me 'twist' the warp fibers with every other pass of the shuttle.  What that means is that I took some string and tied little loops in it exactly every other inch.  I wove it under every other strand in the warp, and then put the loops on a dowel.  So when I lifted the dowel, it created a different space for me to throw the shuttle through.  Sounds complicated, no?  Thank goodness it takes up a lot of space and weaves really fast, because it was!

Pattern:  Leno weave
Warp:  Noro Silk Garden
Weft:  Habu Silk (see Win, I do use the habu! :))

The weird thing is, I have absolutely no recollection of putting it in my apple email.  I don't even remember ever accessing my apple email and using it for anything, much less uploading cool pictures like this.  And then this email appears to myself from myself.

I guess it's a sign that I need to post about it !