Monthly Archives: September 2012

September: So much to do…. how about some leaves and berries?

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So September has just flown by, and unfortunately the memory card to the good camera is having issues and so I need to get a new one… so this means rather poor quality photos this post.

My design this month was more traditional in nature although the implementation felt a little masochistic… which sometimes family holidays are that way aren’t they?

Leaves and Berries

I started with an attempt at a three color braided by cabling look for my cuff, and ended with a braided hanging loop.  Braiding is not a problem… but working three skeins of yarn and remember which is cable over and cable under and how to space.. that was a bit of gymnastics:

Cuff and hanging loop… they look similar but are done very differently.

When I got down to the heel I thought how nice it was to bring those colors back down the sock a bit more… so I went with a heel of alternating red and green.  This wasn’t too bad at all in my opinion, though it was a bit interesting as I started to turn the heel.

Heel detail.

And I finished it off with my new favorite thing to knit… some leaves with some berries.  Leaves are surprisingly easy to do, and while I did flirt with trying to make some more holly shaped leaves, or a wreath of leaves, I didn’t feel like this was the best project for them.  (So now I have some pre-knit spare leaves in my yarn stash.)

Leaves and berries!

I can’t say as I’m super thrilled with this one, but it is a whole stocking and it was a bit more to learn and try than some of the others so I’m putting it in the win column.

What you haven’t seen is a nearly complete third quilt, which will be a gift…. a cross stitch gift I have about 1/2 done… and my counterpane project I am designing and building. I am now on pane #3.  The first pane took quite some time as I was designing, the second pane I was writing out the pattern and now I’m knitting from the pattern to make sure I got it right.

I am also slowly but surely working on getting my etsy shop ready for a relauch with all these stockings.  After all something needs to feed my yarn habit!

Now in .com!

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A few weeks ago, I took the plunge and updated the blog URL to misscarlotta.com, which may be a bit easier to keep track of… at least that’s a hope.

Starting the end of this month I’m going to start clearing out the stash of finished items, and I’m debating about posting a page here or just over on my wepay or etsy page.  If you have seen something you liked on the blog and want to enquire about a particular item you can send me an email using this handy form for now, it does get scanned for spam automatically:

Let it Snow!

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Quilt Two is now completed!  This one I made for my grandmother, and was inspired in part by Hawaiian Quilts.  Final size is approximately 50×50 inches, which is not really a standard size for anything, but just what I thought looked good and would work as a smaller lap quilt.   I did a much better job of the binding this time around, in fact there were corners I felt looked downright professional!

“Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go?” ― John Banister Tabb

I am going to mail this out just as soon as I figure out my letter I want to write with it.  I’m sure that societal conventions would say this is a Christmas Gift type of quilt, but I’m too impatient to tell her I love her and think about her all the time.  So conventions be damned!

There is a whole gallery about this quilt you can check out with pictures of flakes I didn’t use, close ups of materials and in progress work available here.  I plan to send some of those photos with the quilt.

While putting this together I found some pretty cool stuff… like there was a fine Gentleman by the name of Wilson A Bentley that took the first photo of an individual snowflake all the way back in 1885!  And he was so fascinated by snow, he went on to take 4999 more!  You can read a bit more about him over at snowflakebentley.com.  Also… there are scientists at Caltech creating snowflakes in their lab to study how they are formed, and you can watch video clips of some of the snowflakes being formed on their site SnowCrystals.com.