I said "Hey, what's going on?"

Just a quick little update to show what I've been working on and, of course, goal-oriented shaming myself into completing projects and their patterns...

I have been dreaming of these mitts I saw in the Sundance catalog, and wanting to make something using the two color checkered stitch pattern they have, but I know it's done with stranded colorwork, which I am really not a big fan of working myself (it looks beautiful, it's just never going to be a bug by which this very lazy knitter gets bitten). I've cast on for my own version, but changed the stitch pattern to a simple slip-stitch colorwork check and it's coming along so quickly! I might be able to finish both of them by the end of the day today!

There is a ton—are tons? is, no, are, ugh whichever! #grammarmongermongersgrammar—of stuff on various and sundry needles and hooks around here. Many of them are (are!) so close to being finished that I'd rather wait until they're all the way done to post photos / write too much about them, but I know reading blogs is boring without pictures and I don't want to let down allllllllll the people out on the 1nt0rw3bz that are anxiously refreshing this blog for updates and lathering themselves into a froth / crashing Blogger's servers in the process—so here, have some eyecandy:

This is a crocheted potholder I made (and felted!) with three yarns held together after finding out my LYS carries Brown Sheep, which is probably in my top 3 favorite yarn lines ever: yarns used are Wildfoote Luxury Sock in SY48 Circus (a marled orange, pink, & yellow colorway), Naturespun Worsted in N85W Peruvian Pink (which is really more of a magenta color), and Naturespun Fingering in 157 Boysenberry (a really rich, deep fucshia). Started & finished in one evening January 2020 which I was watching some abysmally-bad sci-fi on the Comet channel and loving every minute of it. 

This is a pattern I've written up but need to get test-knitted before I can publish it. It's a brioche/tuck stitch design and I gave both methods for getting the same result in the pattern. It will be great for teaching people how different yarn manipulations can achieve the same things. This one uses Classic Elite Yarn Liberty Wool Worsted in 7861 Golden Pagoda. A quick note about this yarn: of the two skeins I used to knit this, neither skein had the green portion. I would like to ask the person who designed this yarn: "Why would you make a color repeat so long that it won't all fit into the yardage you've chosen for a single skein?" So silly. 

This is a really neato-cheeto design inspired by an Anthropologie scarf I was lusting after (like, I literally looked like Ratfink when his eyes pop out every time I would stare at the photos), but it was out of stock, not that I could have afforded it anyway at $158! I was going to try to copy it exactly, but then I realized I'd rather do my own thing, so this is just a nod to the Anthro one. It's not even close to done. Currently around 4.5 feet (1.37 m), but will likely be 7 (2.13 m) before I bind off! Wowzers, that's almost Dr. Who-worthy. The next section will have another slip-stitch colorwork portion to match the blue and green one (though it will be a bit different for visual interest) and then I think a bunch of really thin solid-color stripes before finishing it off with a bunch of embroidery & pompoms. This one is going to be a real show-stopper when it's finally done! The knitting is on size 6.5mm needles so it's going quickly when I actually make time to work on it.  

Found a wonderful new yarn line at my LYS (Knitting For Olive—great price points and high quality product! Can't recommend them highly enough.) and decided to use their merino fingering weight and mohair-silk lace weight together in this pretty little scarf. Am going for a vintage Boucherouite rug sort of vibe. This is hardly even the beginning of the little tassels and embellishments I'm going to drench this bad boy in. Next up is a ton of black and white ones followed by single-color ones in every color under the sun. When I'm done the brown will be a lot less visible. Words can barely describe how luscious the combo of these two yarns feels. I'll start with scrumptious, but am going to need a thesaurus to really get the point across. 

This uses a Noro yarn I bought 3 skeins of on sale quite some time ago (for the life of me I can't remember where) and it's really soft and pretty in the skein, but it is impossible to knit up without a lot of really ugly flashing and pooling. I am striping it with a custom yarn I made from 3 different kinds of Habu that I wound together into one skein. I saw the Noro and the Habu side by side in a yarn basket, and knew right away that it was kismet! Can't wait to finish this scarf to wear in the spring since it's mostly plant fibers so better-suited to warmer weather! :D More on this one in its own post later...

Check out this rainbow pussy hat that uses roughly eleventy-two billion yarns held together. I absolutely love this! It gets a lot of comments from folks when I wear it, too. Like, *nice* comments, even. Will likely be making a grip of these to sell in my Etsy shop. Pattern to come soon as well. 

 This is a totes gorg yarn I found at my LYS (Knitting Fever's Painted Sky in the colorway 226 Lime Twist, i.e. apparently the most difficult yarn on the planet to get an accurate photo of—the pic of the colorway on the Knitting Fever website looks like blues and browns, which is totally wrong, and all the ravelry stash photos make it look blue or brown or even totally off other colors as well, but it's actually sage, celadon, pale peach, and apricot with just a tiny bit of gray). I'm using it to crochet a trivet for when I want to put hot foods in the fridge because it has glass shelves. I know the glass is tempered, but one doesn't simply walk into Mordor mess around with fate like that. We also eat dinner at a steel dining table and this keeps hot pots from turning the whole thing into a field of magma when we're serving ourselves à la table, which is nice because having skin on your arms keeps your sleeves from sticking to them.

Look familiar? This is an unblocked version of the brioche/tuck stitch infinity scarf above but in the 7828 Stained Glass Disc colorway, which like the other one, was supposed to contain some kind of watermelon red color of which my two skeins only had a couple of yards in total. Weird!

And since I name-checked this place a few times, I just wanted to give a shout-out to my local yarn store, Unraveled in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon! The owner Janie is really friendly and knowledgeable. I came in on a January-raining-sideways-cold-&-windy day, and she helped me choose some yarns with which I am truly besotted. They were just the cure for a dreary, wet winter in the Pacific Northwest. If you haven't been and live in Portland or the surrounding metro area, I highly recommend you go check her shop out!

Okey-dokey, play time over. Back to scrambling to finish 4 things at once while typing up patterns and trying to eat a deeeelightfully unostentatious baloney* sandwich.

*Bologna is a city in Italy as well as the name of a perfectly respectable type of sausage from same. Baloney is a an American shibboleth for a smooth, pinkish, somewhat-meat-involving product that costs 99¢ for roughly 16 slices of sheer befuddlement bathed in nitrites and sodium. The more you know====★