116

... patches I've made on the new blanket.

It's a rather wild mixture, so I will have to see how it turns out in the end. I concentrated on blues and greens last week, but guess I will have to dip into the reds soon. Currently I guestimate I'll need 500 patches all in all, for a afghan 25 x 20 patches, which would make it 225cm x 180cm (more or less), big enough to cover my queen size bed.

Kusha Kusha

The Kusha Kusha scarf is one of those immensly popular pattern (there are currently 643 projects on ravelry alone) that is extremely simple to knit up and has a quick, interesting result. It is worked from a stainless steel/silk yarn (if you can call something that is the thickness of human hair yarn, that is) together with a soft wool lace yarn, and, once finished knitting, gently fulled (or felted, what ever you prefer to call it)

The process of fulling gives, a) a sturdy body to the whole project, b) takes care that the whole think lays flat (it's knit in stocking stitch, which normally leads to curling on the edges), c) adds warms to the whole thing and, finally, d) softens the whole thing considerably.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to wear it to, but it's super light and rather pretty.

I might dye it though, as the grey is a bit on the boring side. I aimed for elegant, but it didn't turn quite out that way.

With the Iceland afghan out of the way, I've started a new big, long term project. The idea is to finally use up my pile of left over sock yarn. Having discovered recently that I like to crochet once in a while, I started a patchwork blanket. The pattern is available for free from drops and once you have the five row pattern down, it's super simple.

I've already made about 30 of those patches and they work up really fast. It is fantastically portable (a small ball of yarn, a crochet hook, that's all). Going through my bag with left over yarn, I've noticed I've got a lot of reds - I'm not so sure I want to go that way, but for now I've got still enough other colors.

Iceland Afghan in Moritzburg

Last weekend I finished the latest afghan in my collection. It is knitted with yarn I've bought mostly in Iceland two years ago, originally planned to be used for a cardigan. The yarn is Lett Lopi, it comes in a billion different colors and is dirt cheap (especially in Iceland).
Eventually I decided to not do the cardi and knit a blanket instead. I added a few more skeins of different colors to match the original set and started knitting.


Each square is 24 stitches wide and 48 row long in garder stitch. I used a little bit under 2 skeins for 7 squares, so in the end the blanket / afghan came out as 9 x 7 squares. For the border I used another 2 skeins. I made a really, really long circular needle by connecting three cables from an interchangable needle set. With this circular needle I picked up around 770 stitches all around, then I increased by two stitches in every corner every other row.
When I got the the cast of, I held my breath if the yarn would be enough. I wouldn't have been, if not for some pieces of scrap yarn I pulled out of my trash (it was on the top, and I washed it before I sliced it to the rest, so the yuck factor was not too bad). In the end I had about 10cm left *phew*

The afghan is super cushy.
I dragged it out to the castle in Moritzburg the other day for a photo session (spot the afghan in the picture ;))



I'm madly, deeply in love with that afghan. I do love everything about it.

And it's mine.
All MINE!

To knit, to crochet, to weave

Knitting: The Kusha-Kusha scarf. Interesting concept with using steel/silk yarn together with normal wool. The wool is going to be felted once the scarf is done.


Weaving: I'm trying to weave a wrap-faced band. Normally an inkle loom is used for this, but I thought I give it a try on my rigid heddle loom. So far, so good.


I also wove a scarf using Noro Kureyon sock yarn. Weaving with that yarn has its challenges, mostly because the wrap broke serveral times. The colors, though, make more than up for that.

Crocheting (or, as some people call it: hooking): I'm using up some stash yarn. By my calculations I might be able to get up to 100 of those patches (I've got 8 so far) - eehr, correction, I should get 50 patches, not 100. I've got 250gr of the yarn and 8 patches weigh 40gr, ergo, 50 (minus maybe one or two due to snipping off ends)

Not sure what I'm going to do with them once they're done. I baby blanket (which, given I don't know any babys is maybe a bit useless), a pillow or maybe a bag.

Registration

With ravelry it's fairly easy to keep track of one's stash. This is quite useful when one is not at home and needs to do a quick check if you have this or that yarn or if you have enough of it.


When my mom gave me all that yarn a short while ago, I decided when I have the time to finally update my stash.
So, today, I put all of my yarn into one room, and started to go through it and try to get it into some order. I also set up a little photo studio (a white piece of paper taped to the wall, my camera on the tripod) and took a picture of every yarn that had not been registered so far. All in all, I took about 50 pics, though not every one of those was actually new stuff (new in the sense that I didn't have it before. Some of the yarn I've added was bought more than 30 years ago).

After updating the list in ravelry, I now know that I have 106 different yarns in my stash. I also have 41664 meters of yarn to work with. This is more than 40km!!!
... and this doesn't even include the cottons and the uni colored sock yarn. I just couldn't be bothered with those.

One should think this is enough yarn to keep me busy for a while and I certainly don't need to buy any more yarn in the foreseeable future.
I'm not so sure of this, though ;)