Monday, January 31, 2011

What I Did on My Winter Vacation

Every year around this time we head out to the end of Long Island to stay at the house of my beloved Aunt Jane. We love it out there at this time of year - the bracing walks on the beach, the snuggly times reading in the cozy house, the local seafood. Heaven.

Also, I have a lot of knitting time!! Before I go on vacation, I start thinking about what I'm taking, knitting-wise, wayyyyyy before I think of packing stuff like, oh, clothes, toothbrush, those kinds of things...

I like taking small projects on vacation and besides, I'm in a very non-sweatery knitting mood these days. I started and finished these:

Shelburne Mittens from the latest Knitty.com. Great easy pattern. I do love a textured mitten!! The yarn is from an unnamed big box store. The yarn I brought was impossible to get gauge with, so I popped in a store (yarn emergency!!) and picked up a ball of this insanely bright fuschia yarn. I like it though, and they'll never get lost in the snow!

These gloves I had already finished before I left, but they felt short to me, so I picked up stitches around the cuff and knit a couple of inches of garter stitch. The wonky, Wonder-Woman type shape of the cuffs was because I had added a sort of tab to put the button on, but added it on the wrong side on one of the gloves. So I seamed the tab to the side of the cuff and got that weird shape. Which I like, so that's cool.

Garter Stitch Sideways Gloves, in Claudia Handpaints Fingering weight, Zecca buttons.

I did some Momogus knitting too. Here I am zooming up the 2nd of a pair of Totally Twisty Toe-Up Tube Socks. Some vintage Opal sock yarn from the stash. These will never get lost in the snow either!


Finally, I made an Easy Colorwork Headband for myself, but just as I finished a cold front swept the East Coast, and I decided to convert it to a hat. It was super-warm! I'm going to write up the conversion-to-a-hat instructions and add them to the Free Patterns page of the website.

Easy Colorwork Headband, converted to a hat! Brown Sheep NatureSpun yarn.

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