Knitting!

I'm not a good knitter.  But that is something I would like to change.  And as I learned in 4-H in my younger days, you learn to do by doing.  

I found a pattern in Lens Mills (sidenote: this is a fabulous store) a few weeks ago for a cool scarf-like thing and picked up some yarn to make it.  My sister claimed the finished project before I'd even started it.  

A number of years back, I found a book on knitting in mom's archive of crafty books/magazines, and thought it would be fun to learn.  I learned a basic knit stitch, and had a scarf-to-be that I would work on from time to time to practice.  That has never been finished.  I also learned how to make the frilly scarves with the special yarn while killing some time at the curling pre-trials in November.  These are super easy, and my sister claimed that one too.  

This pattern however has an added twist.  Haha, twist.  I've never used a cable needle before.  I came to know what one was when another lady in a craft store saw me browsing the wall of hooks/needles and asked if I saw one.  At the time I had no idea what it was.  But before I'd found the hook that I wanted I'd found the cable needle for her.  

I am going to the good ol' U. S. of A on the weekend to pick up yarn for my massive blanket project, so in the meantime I started this little doozy.  I lost track of how many times I had to redo the first 6-8 rows.  But now I seem to be on a roll!

Triangles

 

So the olympics are coming up soon.  I love sports, and the olympics are no exception.  This mean that I will be (and currently am because of all the qualification broadcasts) spending a LOT of time in front of the TV.  So I like to work on bigger projects.  This time around I'm considering creating a blanket for my new bed made of triangles like this (squares are ... square).  If this happens, I would like to put some sort of a backing on it to make it into a proper blanket, but we'll see how far I get.  I found this fun triangle pattern on Carina's Craftblog (carinascraftblog.wardi.dk).  The color scheme is still tbd at this point.

Curling rock hat

Last November the city of Kitchener hosted the Road to the Roar, aka the olympic pre-trials for curling. I was signed up to be a volunteer, so I thought it would be fun to look the part! So I made this, following the pattern I got from Illumikniti (www.illumiknitidesign.etsy.com). I wore it all week long.  Everyone loved it and I sold them as fast as I could make them. I got some strange looks/comments when I went out in public!

Perhaps the funniest part is that another volunteer at the event had found a similar pattern that was knit, and she was making a few of them to take along when she and some of her friends went to Winnipeg for the actual olympic trials a few weeks later. We spent our breaks working on rock hats together.