WIP

Welcome to my site! I use this blog to post my progress on the cross stitch and knitting projects that I am working on. You can find out more about me, check out more details about my projects, or check out a random post. You can also subscribe to my RSS Feed to receive updates as I post them. You can also contact me if you have any suggestions, questions, or random thoughts. Have a look around and feel free to come back often.

It feels good to be cross stitching again. It is also amazing to me how quickly ten hours of work can go by. It doesn’t look like I have really accomplished all that much in that amount of time. All that I have really done is complete a couple of rocks in the lower left hand corner.

Those rocks look good in real life, but they look much better in the photograph. I think that the camera blends the colors together a little more and makes the rocks more life-like. Now I can see the logic behind where there are light and dark colors. I can see the shadows cast by the setting sun. I can see the seams and cracks and uneven texture of the rocks. I like the result so much that I want to spend even more time on this piece so that I can see other features come to life.

In all honesty, I think that my patience for stitching with black is starting to run out (I have never seen a piece that uses as much black as this one does), but I am also very tempted to skip over the next piece in my rotation. The thought of working on Noah’s Ark is dispiriting. I don’t want to do any more over-one animals that take forever to stitch such a small area. I want to continue working on big landscape pictures. Maybe I’ll skip to O Jerusalem instead.

As I look back over my archives, I am embarrassed to realize that it has been over a year since I last posted anything about this project. The last few months have been filled with more knitting and crocheting than stitching. As a result my cross stitch projects have been neglected.

Part of the reason for this is probably that I have felt blocked with this piece (no pun intended). The carolers really caused me problems for some reason and the snowman is stitched with blending filament. I have come to dread blending filament. If I stitch with floss and filament together the filament always seems to work itself behind the floss so that it doesn’t really do anything. My solution to that problem is to stitch with floss and then stitch with blending filament over the top of the last leg of the cross stitches. This leaves me with a feeling that I am covering ground that has already been covered and I feel like I am not accomplishing anything.

I am glad that I finally sat down and finished these two blocks. Now I can say that I have stitched from A(ngel) to P(resents). I think that next time I will work on the header before I start working on any of the other letters.

In the last week or so I have been bitten by a knitting bug and I have renewed interest in working on this cardigan. I especially like the lattice cable running up both sides of this piece. While it looks nice, it is kind of a pain to knit because cabling is required on every right-side row and things can feel a little tight at times. With about seven more inches to go, it seems like I will never hit the top. Of course, I would probably be more successful if I concentrated on this sweater only.

My youngest daughter has decided that her favorite colors are purple, pink, and yellow, a combination that my oldest son has dubbed purinkellow. I have decided to knit her an afghan made out of these colors. So here is the first installment of the Purinkellow Afghan.

This afghan is really the Children at Play Afghan that can be found in the Fall 2003 issue of Knitter’s. I have felt driven to knit to the point where one square is completed and now I need to do eleven more and complete the border for it to be finished. This is the first time that I have done modular knitting. It is really quite fun to see things take shape as I knit. It is especially intriguing to see a row of knitting gradually turn into a square or a rectangle. We’ll see how I feel about this technique once I am trying to knit with a big afghan flopping around.

My wife doesn’t particularly care for it and I tend to agree that it is looking a bit garish. But who can account for the tastes of a seven-year-old girl?

It I have finished the legs for the stockings and have also been able to crochet what will be the feet.

When my son saw me making the toes, he asked me if they were granny pentagons.  I guess that is an accurate description.  From there the cylinder that becomes the foot progresses rapidly.  I think that I like crocheting the foot more than crocheting the leg.

These stockings are almost finished.  I just have to sew the legs to the feet, crochet the heels, crochet a reverse single crochet border around the top, and then weave in a few hundred ends.  I’m looking forward to doing everything but weaving in the ends.

I have joined the granny squares into four rings and then I have crocheted the legs down to the point where the heel will be.  All that is left to do on these legs is to crochet four rows that will make up the upper part of the instep.  The legs take the longest time to make, so I am sure that I am well past the halfway point on these stockings.

I feel compelled to finish these stockings.  I crocheted much in the last couple of years and I wonder if the novelty of using a hook instead of a needle is making this a fun thing to do for me.  I also think that the novelty of working assembly-line style also helps.  When these stockings are finished, they will be finished.  I won’t have to face the ordeal of crocheting three more stockings.

On Christmas Eve when Santa visited our house, he commented that the kids’ Christmas Stockings were looking like they were about ready to fall apart. These were stockings I made several years ago trying to duplicate the stockings that my wife’s grandmother had made for her when she was a kid. At the time, I wasn’t very worried about sewing in ends because I didn’t realize that things could come apart after a while.

Unfortunately, the time has come to atone for my carelessness. So I have pulled out my trusty crochet hook and started working. I decided to make the four stockings assembly-line style in the hopes that things would go more quickly. So I started by knitting sixteen granny squares, enough for four stockings. These squares will make up the stockings’ “cuffs”. Now I just need to sew the squares together and start working down towards the heel.

Over Christmas my mother-in-law asked me to make a stocking for my niece who is on the way. It took me a couple of days to do, so I should be able to finish these relatively quickly, as long as boredom doesn’t set in and convince me to go work on something else. After all, I have a whole eleven and a half months to finish them, right?

My apparent blogging inactivity has not been accompanied by crafting inactivity.  I have started working on a cardigan that I can wear at work.  It is Jack’s Cardigan from Men in Knits.  I am knitting it using Emerald Wool of the Andes Bulky from KnitPicks.  I have finished about two-thirds of the back and can’t wait to move on to the front.  I like how it is turning out.

Unfortunately I haven’t had time enough to take any pictures of it.  I also worry that the yarn is so dark that I won’t be able to get a good picture of it anyway.

All of this knitting, however, is done at the expense of other projects.  My cross stitch is feeling particularly neglected.  I also have to finish the second sock of the pair for my daughter.  On top of that I am in the middle of knitting an afghan for my other daughter and my son is constantly badgering me about when I am going to knit his pair of socks.  I pomise him that I will do it sometime in the next decade or two, which is too much for his ten-year-old brain to handle.

Once again I have come to the end of my rotation and couldn’t resist starting another piece. This is Stroke of Midnight by Teresa Wentzler.  (I must be insane—I am now working on three Teresa Wentzler designs.)

There are so many different symbols for this chart that it takes forever just to find the correct color to use in the symbol list.  Also the number of blended threads is daunting.  The way that the colors in the stairs blend together to move from light to dark is truly amazing.  It is this aspect of her work that make me like Teresa Wentzler designs so much.

This turned out to be a pretty good stopping point because I am not quite sure which way I should work.  I could finish the pillar and urn and then start working on the plant.  However, the green of the plant promises to be a challenge because there are little green leaves everywhere with most of the colors being blended threads.  This work could turn out to be quite tedious.  On the other hand, I could also work toward’s Cinderella’s dress, which would get me working on the main subject of the piece.  It is a good thing that I have some time to decide which way I will go.

My daughter has decided that she wants to be Hermione Granger for Halloween. She and my wife decided that it would be really cool if she could have a Gryffindor scarf to complete her costume. So what would and decent father do but knit his daughter a scarf.

This is a modified Year 3-4 scarf pattern that is found in Charmed Knits. My daughter likes the stripe pattern for the Year 1-2 scarf, but I didn’t want to knit in the round, so we compromised. I also modified the scarf pattern to knit at a larger gauge. The red yarn is Red Hear Super Saver Burgundy and the yellow is Caron Perfect Match Sunflower, which is the yarn that my daughter and wife picked out. I am knitting to a larger gauge because Red Heart sets my teeth on edge and the less knitting that I have to do with this stuff, the better.

So far I like how it is turning out. I can knit about one stripe at one sitting before I have to put it down. If I can manage to knit one stripe a day, it should be done in time.