2 weeks, 2 head coverings

Even though it's been Christmas and a trip to San Francisco, I managed to get 2 super cool hats done over the last 2 weeks. Fun!

Little Blue Riding Hood! A great hood with a cabled band.

The same pattern I used for my friend's purple hat and the Ultralingua penguin hat, a really soft grey 6-cable hat with ear flaps and pom-pom.

So glad I have found ways to make winter fun and stylish :)

Cowl

I wanted to tackle Moebius knitting (a circular scarf with a half twist), but didn't have a circular needle long enough to put in the twist. Instead, I just knit a scarf in the round. It works as a hood and a thick scarf. Great for cold days!

Ultralingua Penguin

At my company, we make dictionaries and phrasebooks, but have recently been moving into the field of word games. One game we're working on involves penguins. We've since adopted the penguin as an office mascot, so when we planned a White Elephant gift exchange, I knew the perfect thing to knit. It didn't turn out as great as my last penguin hat, but my coworkers loved it! Here were some comments received when the lucky recipient of the hat sent out a photo to his friends:

-- "Please send my highest praises to Anna!  Her hat is purlicious!  Yarn over the top!  Cast off the hook!"
-- "Hat = better than good.  Try BEST HAT EVER.  Anna is my hero."
-- "I can't believe she knit something big enough to fit your head.  It's lovely."
-- "Oh, fer cyute! You look like you should be playing hockey, eh?"
-- "It's fabulous. Anna is fabulous. I demand that you wear it always. Will she make me a squid hat, I wonder?"

Extra Large Cable

I used my roving yarn and size 35 needles to make a scarf with an extra large cable. I wanted it to be a lot wider, but with only 4 balls of roving, I didn't have enough to make it as cool as these.

A Winter of Knitting

Since my boyfriend works every night until 11 pm, I have a lot of time by myself, so I've been doing tons of knitting lately. Here are some of my recently completed projects.

A scarf made from beautiful orange and gold yarn that was handspun in Nepal by local women.

Finally, one year later, a star hat for my friend in Chile. I started this while in Istanbul, but then became sidetracked by other things.

This hat was a special request- she wants a bird sewn onto the side, but I'm stuck figuring out how to make that look good. So this is the finished version for now.

I'm working on a roving cabled scarf and soon will begin my first Moebius scarf. A busy winter of knitting is ahead!

Crazy About Decoupage!

I recently became obsessed with decoupage. I had done exactly one decoupage project back in 2008- a cardboard money bank covered in Berber pictures for Aissa to save money for a trip back to Algeria, but beyond that, I didn't do much with decoupage, even though I had lots of ideas.

Well, one day at work I became crazy about the idea of starting again. After work I stopped at Utrect, an art store, looking for Mod Podge. They didn't have that, so I got Yes! Paste, a similar kind of glue that the salesman recommended. Aissa has brought home a few cigar boxes from work for me, and I decided that they would be the perfect things to start decorating. I had some MIR travel brochures with tons of pictures of Central Asia, so I cut out the best ones and glued them on. My final goal is to put a handle and a clasp on it to make a purse, but I haven't gotten past the gluing stage (Yes! Paste dries very slowly, so I can only do one top coat every 24 hours). Here are pictures of it so far.

 I then decided to keep going. I inherited an IKEA side table from Aissa's old roommate, and I bought a vintage National Geographic map of Asia a few months ago, and I thought that they belong together. So I started a map table. I still have to do a top coat and I want to cover the insides of the legs with maps, but here is a table that is now a million times cooler than it was this morning before I started.

There seems to be an endless stream of ideas in my head of things I can decoupage - picture frames, necklace pendants, more cigar boxes, dresser drawers, switch plates, lamp shades, wooden bowls... good thing it's winter and I have evenings free to turn all these ideas into reality! Pretty soon my house will completely covered in maps.

Next Project

I'm currently working on some cabled armwarmers, but I've found my next project- a giant scarf! It requires size 50+ needles and roving, which is unspun yarn.

Warm? Yes. Practical? Not really. Awesome? Totally.

Keeping Warm in Kabylia

My boyfriend is Algerian, but since he is Berber and not Arab, he self-identifies much more to the Berber "nation" rather than the Algerian nation. This is the Berber flag:

A few years ago I wanted to knit him some mittens and knew that this sign would be something he would like. Rather than making the entire flag (my knitting skills were far less advanced at the time), I just made the sign in the middle with the colours of the flag. I'm not sure Aissa ever wore them, but he kept them around all this time so that's good enough for me!

Tied Down

Long ago on StumbleUpon, I found a tutorial on how to turn a bunch of old ties into a woven seat cover. I saved it in the back of my mind as a great idea of how to re-make an old chair and when I got home this summer, I saw a seat-less chair in my grandma's basement and my mom mentioned a bunch of my grandpa's ties lying around the house. Less than half an hour later, I had a functional and beautiful chair to always remember my grandpa by.

First I had to cut the broken rattan out of the seat. Then I had a seatless chair. Useful for a Kyrgyz squat toilet but for not much else.

However, after adding a few ties, I was well on my way to having something functional again! I laid the ties out this way, always alternating which side of the chair the fat side of the tie was on.

Then I wove ties in the other direction (over, under, over, under, etc.) and knotted them all haphazardly on the bottom. You could trim them underneath so they don't hang down, but I left them just in case I ever want to take the ties off and use them again for some other fun project.

And that's it! Here is the finished chair, ready to be sat upon.

Scarves of the Past

I am back in Connecticut and found a box of various scarves (and one bag) that I've made over the years. Some of these also appear in my very first post, but you can just see them again :)
Here are pictures!

 Some close-up views:

 And to change things up, a bag I made:

So many of the scarves have never been worn, so I'm going to donate a bunch to charity. Hopefully they'll keep someone fortunate very warm this winter :)

Braids of Glory

I finished another pair of fingerless gloves for myself. I tried out a braided cable for the first time, which involves holding stitches both in back and in front of the row (as opposed to regular cables where you just hold stitches in front). Once I had the cable pattern mastered, I made my own fingerless glove pattern as I went along. I know that 48 stitches with my set of double-pointed needles makes a perfect wrist size, so from there I wrote out as I went along what I was doing, so that for the second one I would be able to make it symmetrical. This is what my completed "pattern" looks like. I'm sure it's impossible to follow for anyone but me, but it got the job done!

It lists the 4 main parts of the pattern-

Rows 1-3: purl 2, knit 12, purl 2

Row 4: purl 2, hold 4 stitches in back, knit 4, knit 4 from cable needle, knit 4, purl 2

Rows 4-6: purl 2, knit 12, purl 2

Row 7: purl 2, knit 4, hold 4 in front, knit 4, knit 4 from cable needle, purl 2

Repeat these rows and voila! You have a braided cable. The check marks are how I keep count of which row I was on. I added ribbing to the start and finish to keep the yarn from curling up and that was that.

Here is the final product and a close-up of the cables.

Wrapped Around my Finger

Recently I've seen a lot of girls with super skinny scarves. Since it's getting to be spring, I'd been trying to think about the best way to knit a scarf like that. Using needles is tedious because you spend most of the time switching the needles between hands to start the next row. Last night though, I found the perfect thing!

As I was on stumbleupon.com, I came across this website. I had never heard of finger-knitting before and so had to immediately try it. It seems like such a fun, easy craft idea that I can't believe I hadn't seen it before (or even learned it in school.)


This is what it looks like as you're doing it. It goes really quickly so you can finish a strand in just a few minutes. If you want to take a break, just move the stitches over onto a knitting needle or pencil and pick it up again whenever you want.

In less than 2 hours I whipped up this scarf, made up for 3 finger-knit strands. Braid and baste together at the ends and voila! You have a beautiful scarf.

I brought a little ball of yarn to work today to practice some more, but it ended up being enough to make a full scarf. 

My co-workers are always very impressed by my knitting, but today's finger-knitting in the teachers' room was the biggest hit yet. One of the first grade class teachers said she wished that I was younger so that I could marry her 16-year-old son. She thought about it more and then asked me if I wanted to marry him anyway! I doubt an atheist older woman is really what a conservative Muslim family wants for their eldest son, but it's still cute that all the women I work with think my knitting skills will make me a great wife. If anyone else though that then maybe I'd have been married off already, or better yet, bride-kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan!

Poncho Villa

I'd never really thought of ponchos as something cool, but they recently started to seem cool since they are very "in" now in Istanbul. To me, a poncho was a transparent blue bag-like article of clothing given out for free on the Maid of the Mist boat trips at Niagara Falls. To see them here in all sorts of colours, materials and lengths showed me a whole other side of ponchos. Also, many of my girl pre-school students wear beautiful ponchos knit by the grandmothers, so I decided to look into knitting myself one.

I bought a huge skein of variegated blue and teal yarn when on holiday in Bodrum and thought this would be the perfect project to use it on. There are countless free poncho patterns online, but liked this one the best:

(full pattern here)

The problem was that I didn't have the right sized needles. I'd thought about actually going to the knitting shop and getting the right size, but the day I considered it was pissing down so I instead just added about 40 stitches and hoped it would be the right size (lazy, I know).

It ended up not really being big enough, but it still works. I added a string with pom-poms to spice it up a bit (I LOVE pom-poms). I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it because it long comes down to my elbows so it won't be warm enough to wear instead of a coat but when it's warm enough to not need a coat, the poncho will be unnecessary. But still. It's cute and it was good practice perfecting cables.

Pretty Please With a Cherry on Top

Since getting my pig tattoo in Kyrgyzstan last year, I have been actively planning my next one. In the movie 500 Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt draws a skyline on Zooey Deschanel's arm. This got me thinking about skylines and I started imagining a Minneapolis skyline tattoo. I made a facebook status about it, and my friend Boris, whose hobby is graphic design, drew up a possible tattoo for me. It's beautiful and exactly what I'd been imagining, but a tattoo is still a big commitment.

I decided that I'd first try out the design in a knitting pattern. I've always wanted arm warmers so I drew up a skyline pattern for them and got knitting. Here is the finished product:

For the first time in my knitting life, I kept track row-by-row what I was doing, so the 2 hand warmers are exactly the same size (I usually count rows after completion and socks/mittens/thumbs are never the same length). However, the design itself is slightly flawed because my thumb and fingers still get really cold! What is the point? I guess they are meant to be worn when its warm enough out for fingers to stay toasty (but then is a palm warmer necessary at all?) Whatever, they are damn cool and I will wear them because, as I always say, "Style over comfort." People probably look at them and have no idea what the image is, but I know that wherever I go, Minneapolis is with me!

Now I just need to decide where to get a tattoo, but I might want this instead (sorry Mike!) Istanbul is beautiful...

Knitter's Progress

Now that I have a special blog just for knitting, I decided to search through all my photos to see what pictures I could find of things I've knit over the past 10 years since my grandma's cousin taught me how in 8th grade. They are more or less chronological.

High School:

This was my very first knitting project- a 10-foot long scarf/shawl made with 3 skeins of orange yarn that in sunlight weren't at all the same color like I'd originally thought. Still, it came in handy when I wanted to dress up as Little Orange Riding Hood in college.

This is one of two legwarmers knit on giant plastic needles. Being bright blue, neon orange and white they didn't match with many outfits and mostly made it look like I had abnormally fat ankles. One of many knitting fails!

This was my first try with knitting on circular needles. Instructions always say "be careful not to twist yarn," but clearly I wasn't careful and so had a whole twist in my in-the-round tube top.  I tried to make it part of the pattern and added straps but it just looks like a hunchback when worn backwards or a pregnant belly when worn frontwards. But as a result of this fail I learned quickly to not twist the yarn and have never made this mistake with anything knit-in-the-round.

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University:

I knit this thong as a gag gift for one of my friends. He was kind enough to model it for me but I'm sure he didn't get much use out of it!

I found balls of pretty pink and white variegated yarn at a tag sale and made a long and narrow scarf out of it. My college roommate wore it sometimes and she shows how it also doubles as a stylish shirt.

I've always been a fan of neon and so made myself neon green mittens to match my garter-stitch neon pink scarf. With the bright yellow sweater I look pretty silly but you can't ever go wrong with neon!

My friend dressed up as a tennis player for Halloween and I made her a sweatband to perfectly match the   rest of her outfit.

After seeing mittens I'd made for myself, my roommate requested her own pair. She picked the yarn out and these are the finished product.

Grandparents are hard to get gifts for, but I thought an orange scarf would keep my grandpa warm on walks in the woods. I even put a pocket in one end so that he could pack things away he wanted to have handy. 

Yet another neon thing for myself, this time a first try at following complicated directions. This lace pattern includes eyelets and scalloping.

This white lace scarf was my favorite for many years and I can be seen wearing it in pictures from all over Europe.

My first foray into knitting pictures into a pattern. These Bulgarian flag mittens were a big hit with my boyfriend at the time who was a very patriotic Bulgarian.

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There are many things I knit that unfortunately I never took pictures of- Austrian flag mittens for my dad, Suomi and Finnish flag mittens for myself and a friend, mittens with the Berber national symbol for another friend, and countless block hats, belts, mittens and scarves.

Many projects failed because I was mostly too cheap to buy more than one ball of yarn or the correct size needles- mittens in 2 different colors because once I'd gone back to the store the color I'd had originally had sold out, scarves that were barely long enough to wrap once around the neck, and hats that barely came low enough to cover the ears. Other projects failed because I was too lazy to check the gauge- hats too small for even a child, hats too big for even a giant and mittens that didn't fit on anyone's hand. Oh, the things I've learned as a result of my mistakes!

In the beginning, it was difficult to follow even the simplest of knitting patterns. A garter stitch (knitting every row) is easy. Once you add in purl stitches, things quickly can get confusing for a starter. A knitting pattern looks something like this:

Instructions
CO 25 sts.
Work in Seed Stitch 3 rows:
Row 1: k1, *p1, k1; rep from *
Rows 2 and 3: Sl 1, *p1, k1; rep from *
Begin Star Rib Mesh Pattern
Rows 1 and 3 (WS): Sl 1, p1, k1, p to last 3 sts, k1, p1, k1
Row 2: Sl 1, (p1, k1) twice, *yo, sl 2 knitwise, k1, p2sso, yo, k1; rep from *, end (p1, k1) twice
Row 4: Sl 1, p1, k1, p1, ssk, yo, k1, *yo, sl 2 knitwise, k1, p2sso, yo, k1; rep from *, end yo, k2tog, (p1, k1) twice
End with Row 1 or 3 completed, leaving about 6 feet of yarn.
Work 3 rows Seed Stitch.
BO.
Block to open up lace pattern.

There are lots of abbreviations and at first it's impossible to remember them all. Once you get used to it though, the above is very straightforward. The above pattern gives you this result. Now there is no knitting pattern that is undecipherable to me, which means that the choices for what to knit next are endless!

I have started designing more patterns myself and altering patterns to match the needles I have (I'm still cheap!) I also learned how to knit cables, which make every pattern more fun. Many things I knit now have pictures knit into the design- animals, words, etc. For this to work I first have to draw out the image or words I want on graph paper to show me where and when to switch colors.

Since moving to Turkey I have been knitting a lot, and my recent projects have turned out to be things that I'm really proud of. I'm glad I have documentation of the things I made in the beginning stages of knitting to see how much progress I've made. And I hope to continue getting better until a time comes when I'm so crippled with arthritis that I can no longer hold the needles. :)