Yarn Yarn Basket

When I make these tall slipper socks, I use one skein of yarn per sock so there aren't any joins or knots in the sock. This means that over the years, I've amassed a whole bunch of little balls of scraps like this:

 

As they got to a point where they would topple out on me every time I opened my stash closet, I wanted to think of something I could do with them. I tried out a few headbands and a slouchy hat, but I didn't really love the results. The super bulky yarn creates a really firm fabric if you knit it tightly, which does keep the cold out, but makes the ear warmer headbands not quite stretchy enough. The hat was done at a looser gauge which meant it looked really cute, but the wind went right through it, which is not ideal for a hat. Then I came across an idea...I could make it into a basket! It would use up a bunch of it, and joining scraps together wouldn't be a problem since it's not a garment and I didn't have to worry about knots being irritating. The yarn is washable, so if (when) my pets get ahold of it I can toss it in the machine. And best of all, it would be useful! See - useful even during construction, already holding the yarn:

Right now I've got it holding the start of my Bleeker Street Cardigan, so this large size basket is easily corralling a sweater's worth of yarn in sport weight.

I tend to knit and decorate with a lot of the same colors, so it fits in to my home pretty well. Oh, and a yarn yarn basket and a dog using a stuffed dog as a pillow? Is that meta?

The sweater itself is going pretty well. I'm working with a yarn I got from a ravelry destash, so I got it for a steal, and it turned out to be cashmere! Nice! Especially since I can't count to 6 (the number of rows in the texture repeat) and I had to knit a few inches twice.

I'm back to the point that I ripped out now. I'm starting with the sleeves and working them two at a time so they are identical. I'm also counting now, so they aren't messed up identically as well. Then I plan to work the body in one piece rather than three as called for, so I hope I don't regret that later. It's knit bottom up, but I like my sweaters to be as long as possible. I'm going to start above the ribbing with a provisional cast on, knit up to the shoulders as directed and do all that finishing (the button band is worked at the same time as the body), and then go back and knit down the bottom until I run out of yarn.

I'm hopeful it will be ready for fall! What do you think of the yarn baskets? I'm thinking about listing them in my Etsy shop in the future. I think I could fold the whole thing down and ship it pretty easily in a flat rate box. For the smaller sized basket I might be able to ship it first class if I can find the right sized box.

Oh hey, it grew!

Well look at that...visible growth! Seeds+dirt+rain+moderate neglect = plants!

So here's what we've got growing:

Everything is coming up pretty nicely (probably needs to be thinned actually), but alas, nothing edible just yet. I could probably clip some of the green onions, but they're a little on the skinny side right now. The lettuce and spinach should have been ready, but about a week and a half ago...we had a little bit of this going on.

That's about 3/4 weeds, 1/4 plants. Argh. (skinny onions on the left, choked out lettuce on the right) I had some personal issues in the beginning of June that really knocked me for a loop (ugh, good riddance June 2014 - you were mean), and then we went out of town for 5 days, so weeding wasn't a top priority. Looks like my garden neglect hit at sort of a key phase of development!

This was taken about a week or so after the previous image (and from the opposite direction - bad blogger). The lettuce has recovered a little bit, so maybe I'll have about one salad in two weeks. The peas on the left are sticking to their cages nicely and not overrunning the place, but haven't blossomed yet. This is slightly disconcerting as we picked a bunch of peas at a farm last weekend. I assume they got theirs in the ground before Memorial Day....I'm hoping that our unseasonably cool weather will be on my side with them, and give me at least a few peas!

Because we have such a small sunny area, I've grabbed a few other areas of our property to grow food as well, some more successfully than others. That bunch of green ground cover in the front of this rainy picture?

Strawberries!! Yummiest groundcover ever.

This back corner of our yard is actually nice and sunny, but gets crazy overrun with weeds creeping over from next door. I've tried going the natural route, but this year I went nuclear. I protected my sort of crazy large stand of oregano, little bit of thyme, and moderately successful rhubarb plants from the poison and went scorched earth on the rest. I'm hoping that I can use a spray along the fence line to fight off the creepers and pull any strays the old fashioned way in the future.

See the crazy mess beyond the crappy white fence? Yeah.

That's probably the end of the rhubarb for the year....so I turned it into a cocktail I pulled from our paper a few weeks ago!

 

It was nice to enjoy at least SOME of the spoils from my garden, although they are the ones that I have the least to do with. They sort of take care of themselves! As for the drink, it was yummy. But I'm not as much for the cocktails as I was in my younger days, so I think I'll skip the vodka for my next one and just enjoy the rhubarb and the sparkling water with a twist of lime.

the never ending project

And I mean never ending in the best possible way. One of the women in my knitting group has been working on a sock yarn blanket for a few years. It's basically a time capsule - it's little squares of bits of yarn from every pair of socks she's ever made. I believe she's a 30+ year knitter, prolific at socks to boot! There's something about projects like that, that are a piece of your life, your history, that I just love. Like the quilts made from baby clothes, or concert t-shirts, or denim scraps. (A lot of those are on my lifetime project wish list too.)

Here is the original project. Cool, right?

I favorited the project on Ravelry about three months ago, but I've been thinking about it for longer than that. It looks like the original was made with an end in mind, and the knitter solicited yarn donations to make that happen. That's kind of cool too, the community contribution. But for me, the project will be personal. It's the kind of project that I'm not sure will ever end. I don't plan to buy or acquire anything specifically for this project. I want it to grow organically from yarn I've already used, or plan to soon. Just a little piece to keep, as so much of my knitting doesn't end up staying with me. So the other night, with yarn leftover from my toddler socks, I started a square.

Each one only seems to take an hour or so. It's pretty mindless, and will probably go quicker now that I've memorized the simple pattern. Once you have two squares, you start joining them together.

The blue yarn is for some preemie hats that I intend to knit. I have for some time, but I haven't been able to get myself into a baby knitting place recently. I wish it had done a color transition in the square, but it didn't. I'll have to add another one when I've made a few hats. As you can see based on the scale of my (slightly overexposed, slightly actually that pale) legs, this is going to take awhile. And that's cool with me. I don't have a plan for it at all. I plan to let it grow sort of amoeba-like, in whatever direction. I plan to leave it out once it gets large enough, to actually be used while under construction. I'll just knit a square now and then when the mood or the materials strike. This one is going to be around for a long while - I'll post an update in a few months and see where it's at!

Basement update

So last time I left you with a basement update, we were framing out the walls.

Since then, we've been making slow progress. We typically only get about one weekend day every two weeks to work on this, so that pretty much explains the lack of speed of renovation. While we've had several work days, many of them were filled with boring but necessary things like electrical and ductwork. All I'll say about that is that the drill bit on the left is the worst and the one on the right is the best.

I had to put my full weight on the first one to get anywhere, and the other just went through like butter.

So here is the current state of things - pink!

We've started putting up the insulation, and the drywall is on deck. Hopefully one more day or so of work and we can start laying up wall board, and the end will be near! Or at least...you might be able to picture an actual room?

We've made progress on that funny corner too. In the image above, we used to have a duct transfer on the right hand side of the room near the doorway. We would have had to drop a soffit down there to enclose it, but that was going to be a bummer because the ceiling height in this room is just over 7', and we didn't really want to drop the height right at the door. My husband was able to pull the transfer across the room to the left and hide it in the one soffit we already had to make. Remember my little sketch?

And here we are so far!

The soffit encloses the duct work and a gas line that came down below the joists, and you can see the framing for the removable bench that houses the water meter.

Slowly but surely...maybe by the end of summer?

Handmade Dolly

I've done several projects recently that are simply awaiting photos before I can add them to the blog, however, the weather seems to be matching my mood lately which makes photographing outside somewhat impossible.

And while we have been making progress on the basement studio, where someday taking photos will be a snap, we're nowhere near done yet. (update coming Thursday!) So, I just snapped a few quick ones inside, and we get what we got!

Back around Christmas time, I was itching to make a ton of stuff, and top of my list was handmade dolls. Well, cut to June, and I finally got there! I had flipped through a ton of websites, tutorials on Pinterest, patterns at the craft store, and nothing was really speaking to me. When I saw Hilary Lang's book from a few years back called Wee Wonderfuls: 24 Dolls to Sew and Love, it was just what I was looking for. I have at least three dolls I want to make from this book, but I started off with the Tag Along Doll

She's called Tag Along because she fits in an apron pocket that a child can wear, but I wasn't feeling that as much as I just liked the little girl herself. I changed the skin and hair color to match more what we've got going on around here. Ironically the fabric I chose for her dress matches the canister in the background of the book photo. I didn't notice that until I was putting these pictures together!

Overall, the pattern was written super clearly and was easy to follow. I wish I'd stuffed her face a little more firmly so she didn't have those premature chin wrinkles, but I suspect that she may have gotten them eventually anyway from some rather intense hugs. The only thing that I don't really like is that the dress is attached right to the doll. I finished this up late at night, and so I completed it as written. However I think I'm going to go back and cut the back of the dress and add some velcro so that she can be dressed...and undressed...and dressed...and, well, you get the idea. I'll try to follow up if/when I get around to that.

She fits right in around here, going "nigh-nigh" as all our friends do several times a day. I can't wait to make a whole group of these dolls and the other patterns I love from the book. Here's hoping it doesn't take me another 6 months to get there!

(p.s. In the spirit of full disclosure, this post contains Amazon affiliate links, which means that I may get a small commission if you decide to purchase anything by clicking on the link. I only recommend products that I use and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands)