Tutorial: Octopus Hexipuff

About a month ago the tiny owl knits community made Miss Owl herself a beekeeper's quilt of her own!  I was struck by the love of the community and found myself crying right along with Stephanie in the video.  In addition to the amazing love in the video, she showed all of the puffs in the quilt.  There were two octopus puffs (one made to resemble a lost member's Ravatar) and I was completely inspired to make an octopus puff for my quilt.  

I didn't see any instructions on Ravelry, so I just winged it.  I thought I'd share my notes here in case anyone else wants to add a little weirdness to their quilts as well.

Here’s how I made him:

Just knit the puff like you normally would, but instead of binding off, knit the first 5 stitches on one needle like an i-cord. Once it is sufficiently long (an inch and a half maybe), k2tog, k1, k2tog, then continue on a 3 stitch i-cord for a three or four more rows, then k3tog and tie off.

Then do the same for the next five stitches on the needle. And then move on to the next needle and do the same! Once you’ve made all four legs, stuff the puff part of the octopus, then whipstitch him closed.

Oh, and then put some eyes on him! :)

I left a bit of yarn hanging from the end of each of the legs like so:

You can use those tails to tie him into the corners of your quilt!

He's taking over!  I may make a few more...  Maybe a squid too!  :)

♥ ashley

Knit in Public Day 2012

As many knitters know, World Wide Knit in Public Day happened last week.  Every year the website announces a week that knitters all over the world can group up and knit out in the public arena!  Technically our group knits in public every week at our local book store, but truthfully as far as the usual Books-A-Million crowd goes we are just as much a part of the scenery as the furniture we sit on.  We agreed we needed to change it up a bit. 

The biggest question when planning an event like this is "Where the heck are we going to put this thing?"  There are not many places in a middling town like this where a group of women can sit and knit for hours.  Restaurants will let you hang around as long as you are ordering food.  Starbucks only has enough seating outside, which in our June Louisiana heat would be considered a suicide attempt.  Other than our usual bookstore meeting spot, there weren't many options for us to choose from.  We landed on the food court in the mall, with an extra credit evening meet up at the nearby pub.

We had a great time and more than a few funny looks.

Mhmmmm... Green tea and alpaca...

Crystal bought us each a Ravelry button to put our usernames on.

Crystal's knitting bag fielded a few questions for us.

Shelley working on a little surprise for our evening event.

Later that evening we met up anIrish pub for a slightly more intoxicating knitting experience. (I promise we didn't get too crazy!  We had pointy needles after all...)  Shelley and Laura had called the owner to reserve us a table and, to our surprise, they were okay with us doing a little yarn bombing.  As soon as I sat down at the table, Laura passed some green yarn over to me and said, "I think JFK needs a hat."

So make a hat for the JFK bust I did.  The clover is a little wonky, but gimme a break 
I only had an evening to work on the thing!

May his head stay ever warm behind that bar counter.

Laura made a festive hat and scarf for the gnome inside the bar.

What a cozy gnome you are!

Britney and Whitney worked on clovers to keep the place lucky.

Once we started yarn bombing the columns, we became a beacon for all drunk people to talk to us.  Shelley didn't even get her Irish flag on the pole before a drunk guy bought it from her. She was still able to contribute to the bombing with an Irish hexipuff (you know, from all that beekeeper's quilt stuff).  Nikki and I put up two column cozies.  Nikki kept to the Irish theme with hers, while mine was a bit more 70s sunset in nature.

There were more people than this around.
I swear we didn't scare them off!!

After the yarn bomb dropped, I enjoyed a tasty beverage with even tastier yarn.
No hexipuffs were harmed in this process!

We had a great evening full of yarn and laughter. Angela even suggested we should make Enoch's a weekly knitting event.  We could call it Drunk Knit Night, or DK Night for those of you who enjoy DK weight yarn. I for one am all for spending more time with these awesome ladies.  Knit Night is my weekly therapy session and one of the few things I look forward to every week.  The World Wide Knit in Public Day was just an excuse for us to squeeze two Knit Nights in a week.  It makes me wonder what people without knitting groups even do?  

They probably knit.  That sounds okay too. 

We are truly not your grandmother's knitting group.

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.

Color Frenzy

In the past I gravitated toward single-skein projects and avoided colorwork because I thought it was too complicated.  The idea of tangled yarn and weaving in ends made me dizzy.  I eventually learned to suck it up and deal with multiple colors in a single project, but I've only done it sparingly.  Like when a project just jumped out and made me knit it.

But lately colorwork is all I want to do!  I find myself searching Ravelry for colorwork projects and pairing up my yarn to find the right color combinations.  I'm going to completely blame this on my knit crush Alex Tinsley for these three colorful hat patterns!  Also the Condurat by Sarah Burghardt is partially to blame as well...

Last night I finished a Phoncible hat in two contrasting skeins of Noro Silk Garden.  Each skein changes color on its own, but when stranded and striped together, you get a sort of mystery hat!  There's no way to predict how it will come out until it is done, which meant I had to knit this hat three times.  I would get almost done and realize I didn't like the way the colors were pairing, rip it out, then rewind the yarn so that I could work from the opposite end to get a different color variation.  Luckily watching the colors change is a lot of fun so I didn't mind all the ripping and re-knitting.

 

Sometimes I just want a little hint of contrast, like the wonderful running stitch in Wale and Course!  I knit this in Madelinetosh Sport in the colorway French Grey with a hint of Malabrigo Worsted in Frank Ochre.

Or a contrast brim like in A Hat For Eudora.  No one knows that contrast is even there while you are wearing the hat, but it's such a cute touch.  This one uses Madelinetosh Vintage in the colorway Cove and the contrast brim is done in Malabrigo Rios Cocoa.

And who doesn't love stripes?  Or cowls?  Or... gasp!  A striped cowl!  I love this cowl.  It's not a real pattern, or anything fancy.  I just provisionally cast on 100 stitches, striped up two gorgeous colors of Madelinetosh tosh dk in Afternoon and Fawn, and then kitchener-ed the whole thing off.  It's fun!

Okay, so I haven't done any real colorwork like intarsia or fair isle, but whatever.  It's a step for me anyway.

And that's all from me for now!  I've made it to the 270 hexipuff mark, so I might make a hexipuff update post soon.  I've also moved and as such I have a completely new yarn space.  Maybe I'll sneak in a yarn post as well...  See you next time!  :)

Hexipuff Stash

I've been neglecting my hexipuff-filled beekeeper's quilt with all my cowls and hats lately, but I did make it to 250 puffs today!  To celebrate, I thought I'd share my sock yarn stash with you today: 

This is my hexipuff bag.  I tote this giant thing to Knit Night and work even if I'm not knitting hexipuffs that day.  It may not look like a lot of yarn from up top...

...so I pulled all the skeins of sock yarn and spread them on the bed.

 And this isn't even counting the mini-skeins that my Valentine sent me!  I've tried to put them together based on type.  In the front left section is all the Koigu, with all my Malabrigo in the front right.  Behind all the Koigu on the left is some Noro Kureon sock with a lot of assorted Knit Picks behind it.  There's even three sneaky skeins of Madelinetosh merino light hiding behind the Malabrigo on the right. 

Mmmm... I love all this stuff so much!  

Here's the Malabrigo sock just hanging out.  The yellow "ochre" colorway is my absolute favorite! 

And here is all my lovely Koigu. 

I may actually have enough yarn to finish my quilt from just my stash...  But that didn't stop me from ordering another skein of Koigu yesterday.  ;)

I'm moving in with my sister later this week.  Once I get my stash moved and my knitting station set up, I might give you guys a little tour of my real stash...