May is UFO Month!

It all started at the end of April.  Crystal, a cool lady from my knitting group, suggested that for the entire month of May we do the unthinkable:  We don't cast on anything new.  Every knitter has a pile of unfinished objects in the shameful corner of their craft stash.  We all do it.  Cast something on, get a few rows, maybe halfway, into the project, and then some new pattern or colorful yarn catches our eyes. Then wooooosh!  Project abandoned in the corner.


Let's be real honest with ourselves for a minute, shall we?  This happens all the freakin' time.  So Crystal started an Unfinished Object Knit-A-Long!  I won't lie, it's been tough.  Like the yarn junkie I am, I relapsed on the first day.  I blame Alex Tinsley's Hat-A-Long.

Don't confuse the smile on my face for happiness.  
There is  SHAME welling up inside me.

But a relapse doesn't mean you have failed!  I just got back on the wagon...  Wait, is the wagon sobriety in that metaphor?  So falling off of the wagon would be falling into a sea of yarn and new projects.   It's a confusing metaphor.

Ahem.  Anyway.  After that initial slip, I dug out a project that has been hiding in my closet for over a year.  This is my Howarts blanket!  It's the Olive's Afghan from the book Knit-A-Long (which is fitting since I'm picking this project back up for a knit-a-long!).  It actually made the move with me from my old closet to my new, much smaller closet where I am forced to interact with it daily. This UFO KAL has made those daily interactions less awkward.

See how ugly and unfinished everything looks?  
No wonder I put it away.

I am knitting my strips in the house colors from the four houses in the Harry Potter series.  I finished the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw strips before I put the project down last year.  I may have had a mental block against Hufflepuff and Slytherin since they are respectively boring and evil.  

The biggest problem when picking up an old project is that you are dealing with Past You. Past Ashley did not know how to properly weave in ends so she just left them running through the stripes like so:

BAD!  BAD, PAST ASHLEY.  Grade:  D-

My first order as a new UFO-knitter was to cut those running strands and weave them in as God intended.  So far I've only managed to fix one set of Gryffindor and Ravenclaw strips before I got bored as hell.  Then I moved on to stitching together the strips I want next to each other.  The planned order is Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, then repeat.  

First I thought crocheting the strips together would be the easiest, but that wound up taking up precious strip real estate and puckering, which I did not like:

Plus, you can't even see the rad purple yarn I used
which is supposed to represent the school color. 

It doesn't look bad necessarily, but I just wasn't feeling it.  I ripped it later that night in a craze. You know that delirium that sets in when you are awake much later than your body feels is appropriate?  Yeah, that's when I got the great idea to rip out all that crocheting and whipstitch these two strips together.  The result actually looks quite wizardy.

Ignore the ugly red end popping up to say hello.
I'll sort him out later...

For some reason I like the messy look better.  Plus, it's nice and flat like a blanket should be.  No ugly puckering in the back side.  This way the wrong side of the blanket still looks and neat too (if you can get past the crazy whip-stitching...).

Now that I've fixed at least one set of strips, I moved onto knitting the Hufflepuff strip.  I've only finished one, but here's how they are lining up:

Look at all those strips!  It's kind of nice coming
into a project that is already half done...

Not too shabby, if I say so myself.  Initially restarting this old project was a pain in the ass. Figuring out where I left off with no notes to myself (Thanks, Past Ashley!  You're a jerk!) and weaving in all those ends I had tried to hide by running them up the stripes.  But now that I've got a game plan and I actually like the look of it, I feel in control.  The UFO bag has moved from the shame corner in the closet to my yarn chest in front of my bed.  I am no longer mocked every time I see it.

It feels pretty good.

It's Time For a Blog

Hello, Internet!

I have wanted to do this whole knitting blog business for a really long time, but something about the gorgeous weather today and a particularly boring pharmacy management class gave me the energy to give it a go!  I'm going to use this blog to show-and-tell you about the projects I am currently working on, give the run down on some cool techniques I've run into, and maybe post a few patterns every now and then!  (I've only made one pattern so far, but it was crazy fun so I want to do much more of that from now on!)

So here we go!  Lately I've been stung by the Beekeeper's Quilt bee!

I have been what the cool kids are referring to as "puffing" in my idling hours since the end of July.  I've even convinced a few girls in my knitting group to pick up the puffs.  We've started a game called "Puff Puff Pass", where we knit puffs from each others skeins during our weekly meetings so we get a nice variety of colors in our quilts.  Now I have 166 "hexipuffs".  Of course I need, like, a thousand of these things to cover my bed.  A hundred and sixty-six feels like a drop in the bucket.

But every time I start feeling overwhelmed by the numbers game, I just pull out the patch of honeycomb goodness that I have already stitched together and imagine how awesome it is going to look once it is finished.

When I am not puffing, I am working on my Christmas knitting.  I am currently working on some Fishtail Wristwarmers out of some awesome Malabrigo Sock in Eggplant for a classmate of mine.

I'm more of a hat kind of gal, so making a pair of gloves feels like such a daunting task.  Hopefully I'll be able to finish this glove and the mate so that I can share happy fun pictures with you guys!


Lastly, I wanted to share pictures of my latest finished projects!  Both are patterns from the exceptionally talented Alex Tinsley who is one of my favorite knitting designers.  She makes lots of cool hat patterns and I make a lot of hats.  It works.  :)

This one is Rimple in Madelinetosh Vintage (Tern) and Malabrigo Sock (Ochre). 

This is Catacomb in Malabrigo Rios (Coco).

So that's it for now!  I have a free pattern I wrote up a few months back and released on Ravelry, but I am going to make a post here with the pattern in it for people who aren't on Ravelry (if you aren't, you totally should be!).  

I am super excited to be a part of the knitting blogging world and I hope to post more helpful content in the future!

♥ ashley