Sunday, February 3, 2008

Finished Projects

After a massive disappointment with the tween cropped jacket which came out large enough for a four year old in spite of having knit the size twelve version, I gave up on knitting for a bit.





I also gave up on blogging. Besides knitting failure, I was very busy preparing for my new position as a child welfare trainer. There were many "train the trainer" sessions to attend and lots of time spent mastering the material. My partner and I presented the first module last week. It was fairly well received and we will only get better as we present it again and again.



So, back to knitting. Once my granddaughter tried on the tween jacket (that is, tried to try it on, as she could not fully insert her arms in the sleeves) I decided I would make some smaller items that would give me some quick satisfaction. I had some Sugar 'n' Cream cotton yarn which I had gotten when I was out in California. I searched the net and found any number of free patterns. I've finished two bibs at this point: a cornflower blue one for Perry and a yellow and pink feather and fan design for Linnie.


Once I had made two from online patterns, I decided it was time to design one of my own. I found a mosaic knitting design from Barbara Walker called brick and adapted it to a bib. It's not quite finished, but it's coming along. I used Sugar 'n' Cream hot pink and an ombre called play time. The design is rather interesting. The bricks are subtle because the color keeps shifting. It's not quite finished and I can see that I have made the straps too wide.

I'll have to frog them and make them narrower. Here's a preview of the nearly finished Brick Bib. There's a lot of satisfaction to be had in these small projects.
I spent the weekend in Vermont because it was my mother's 91st birthday. My sister and I managed to squeeze in a visit to the LYS where I took a photo of the babies and bears sweater the store had on display. On my last visit I had admired the display sweater and purchased both the pattern and the yarn to knit two sweaters for the California grands. On this trip I purchased enough Cascade Paints to make a grownup babies and bears sweater for myself. Ambitious projects I'm looking forward to beginning.