Wool on Sundays – 166 (Christmas Knitting)

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Happy December and Welcome to Wool on Sundays!

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I have had nearly a year, now, with decent internet and almost no making to blog about and suddenly, during a month without being online, I’ve become a knitting factory!

I’ve been trying to combine making Christmas presents with using yarn from stash and these hats enabled me to use the ends of some self-striping yarn with odd balls of 4ply. I used two strands together to make aran weight and blend the bands with the hat tops, if that makes sense.

I also made another pink cardigan. I’m not fond of it but I didn’t dislike it enough to frog and, hopefully, it will look nicer on. The pattern for this was ‘See Saw Cardigan‘ from Love Crafts and I used Stylecraft Bambino DK.

And, lastly, my favourite. A red and white Winter jumper for a little boy who is coming to stay at Christmas. I used a Drops Design pattern from Garn Studio, which you can find here. It is knitted in Drops Karisma.

I think my New Year’s resolution will have to be trying to make and blog at the same time!

If you have any yarn themed posts, I’d love you to link up. The rules, as usual, are: 1). Posts must include some content – makes or musings or photos – related to knitting, crochet, felting, spinning or yarn. 2). Projects sewn from felt or wool fabric or stitchery using wool are also welcome but please don’t link posts that are exclusively about sewing, quilting and non-woollen fabrics. 3). Posts don’t have to be from the past week but please put a link to WOOL ON SUNDAYS in or at the bottom of any posts you link up. 4). MOST IMPORTANT visit anyone else who links. 

I am having issues with inlinkz at the moment so, if you would like to link up, please leave your link in the comments and I will add it here :)

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

Wool on Sundays – 165 (Finally a Finish!)

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Welcome to Wool on Sundays!

I’ve been starting to wonder if I’ll ever post here again, let alone make another Wool on Sundays post, but, apart from this morning when we had a sunny intermission, the weather has been horrible here and I’ve finally finished the Blue Cable Jumper.

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Looking back, I see that in April I only had the sleeves and neckband of this jumper to do and I said, ‘I’m not in a big rush to get this finished’. At the time I was thinking a week or two. Since then, I have sometimes wondered whether I’d ever get it made but, at last, it is done!

I’m now UFO free and knitting weather has certainly arrived so, hopefully, I will be back on December 1st with the next Wool on Sundays.

If you have any yarn themed posts, I’d love you to link up. The rules, as usual, are: 1). Posts must include some content – makes or musings or photos – related to knitting, crochet, felting, spinning or yarn. 2). Projects sewn from felt or wool fabric or stitchery using wool are also welcome but please don’t link posts that are exclusively about sewing, quilting and non-woollen fabrics. 3). Posts don’t have to be from the past week but please put a link to WOOL ON SUNDAYS in or at the bottom of any posts you link up. 4). MOST IMPORTANT visit anyone else who links. 

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

I am having issues with inlinkz at the moment so, if you would like to link up, please leave your link in the comments and I will add it here :)

Please visit Maria at The next Stage to her Wool on Sunday’s post :)

Unexpected Bursts Colour

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It’s been a while since I did a ‘New to Me’ post but, despite appearances, I have spent some time in the Makery this month and tried out a couple of new things.

The first was inspired by something Fiona at Celtic Thistle stitches did a while ago. I say ‘inspired’ because I did this from memory and it’s probably not the right way to do it at all. It’s a sort of trapunto technique using strands of yarn. You can see the stages below. It’s an improved version of the golden hare I made last month. I started by stitching the outline, then cut away the backing fabric and, finally, threaded strands of wool into the spaces I wanted to be raised.

After that, I painted with gold, as I did last time, and hand quilted the background. I also tried some lettering. The letters are about 2cm high so it was a bit fiddly but I was quite pleased with the overall effect.

Having managed to paint the edges fairly straight, I attempted some more ambitious fabric painting. I quilted larger shapes and attempted to fill them in with paint and you can see my straight line painting leaves much to desired! I edged the gold with threaded running stitch using metallic Anchor stranded thread, which I have never tried before and I found it reasonably easy to sew with (even through layers of paint, fabric and wadding) but separating the strands to sew was a trial. They kept tangling and I ended up having to tease them out one by one. Bizarrely, I also tried a silver skein and managed to divide the threads without particular difficulty.

With the other painted colours, I decided to leave the poorly painted edges as they were.

Lately, I’ve come to conclusion that sometimes you just have to go for the overall effect because getting too obsessive with perfecting details is a certain route to a UFO…

Something I couldn’t really leave, though, was an experiment to create a more water-colour-like effect. It seemed to me at the time that, however much water I used, the paint wouldn’t spread easily. The next morning, however, I discovered that, quietly during the night, a whole band had seeped past a line of stitching into an area that was meant to be unpainted :( I frogged the red hand stitching and then remembered there was a line of machine stitching under it. So I frogged the machine stitching and steamed and steamed to get the holes made by the stitching out but to no avail :( Eventually, I re-did the hand stitching, where the black frixon line is in the photo below, and added a strip of lace under it. If I had settled on doing that sooner, I could have left the machine stitching in but onwards and upwards!

A more cheerful New to Me was my garden when we got back from my daughter’s wedding in Rhodes. Before we went I had cut back lots of flowers (which were dead and hadn’t been great this year owing to successive heatwaves) for Autumn but whilst we were away it rained for a solid week and I arrived home home to an unexpected burst of colour.

Now we are back in GMT so the sun is in the middle of the sky at midday and the evenings are dark. All that bodes well for more time in the Makery. This year, that will be another ‘New to Me’ and a very welcome one :)

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

I’m linking this post with Fiona at Celtic Thistle stitches for ‘New to Me’