DoubleKnit “M”-Coaster is Done.

But, I waited a bit too long between posing and shooting. . . . (Oops — Sorry, M.) 

Eventually, I got a clear shot.

And I got a good match between the cast-on and bind-off edges,

although I’m not sure I could *reproduce* the 2-color loop cast-on.

Along other knitting lines, I’m dividing my time between the pink mini-gansey and a pattern for Sock Madness 4, due in the next few days.

Back Panel is done.

Night and Day

As in circadian rhythms, bedtime and rising-time.

In anticipation of my trip east to Houston and needing to get up several hours earlier than I’m used to for tasks in that earlier time zone, I spent about 2 weeks trying to move my “clock” earlier.  I even had advice from a sleep specialist (my brother in Albuquerque).  While I was in Texas, the rigid (and noisy!) schedule at our lodgings helped to reinforce this new routine.  So now, here I am, back at home, waking up “early” (for me, the night owl).  Given some other sleep issues, my days are rather short.  I can have either afternoons and evenings, with hardly any morning-time, or I can have mornings and afternoons with hardly any evening/night-time.  I’ve gone from long evening chats with our delightful, interesting, homeschooled-since-3rd-grade, best-big-brother-ever, eldest son, to long mornings with nobody else at home and my DS away at university.  Quite a change!  I feel at a loss alot of the time, as to what I should be doing — should dinner-prep begin soon?  is it getting late already?  is it time to run errands now?  when is knitting time, if not in the evening? (!)  Plus feeling sad at “losing” my son to out-of-state Higher Education — eventhough I’m proud of him and happy for him to be where he is, doing what he’s trying to do.  (Really, I am VERY grateful for the privilege it’s been — and continues to be — to be “M’s mom”.)

There has been knitting.

"Front"

"Back", the other "front"

Two “front”s!

This is 2-color reversible double-knitting.

About 4 3/4″ square.

Lion Wool

purple and lemongrass (my son’s dorm’s colors)

on US 6 / 4.0 mm needles (dbl knitting spreads a bit).

(Guess the initial of my DS’s name….)

I haven’t used this technique in a while, but my fingers began to remember it pretty quickly and I’ve enjoyed working on this.  I made up a 2-color cast on the turned out rather well.  Now I just have to come up with a matching bind off. . . .

Knitting Explorations

Knitting continues at Chez Mt. Mom.

Having finished the vest for Master Knitter level 2, both the knitting and (I hope) the writing-up, I turned my attention to another one of the required projects:  a child’s pair of mittens with a band of stranded color-work just above the thumb-separation and before the tip-shaping.  It calls for 4 colors of my choice.  Here’s my first experiment: 

Too dark overall, I think.

Back to the stash bag.

For more color-work, let’s check in with my Fair Isle sampler/scarf. 

The purple is now gradually morfing to red-violet/hot pink.  I’ve decided to change the background color from cream to lightest gray, to see how that looks.  Can’t really see it yet in the photos, but it’s there.

I came in after taking that photo, to do some more knitting, and look what happened out there: 

Storm is moving in!

Hey, it’s just started to snow!

What I did while the clouds rolled in:

These are some more reversible 2-color stitch-patterns, from Jane Neighbors’ book.

The 2 you see here are each 2-color variations on what we Americans call “moss stitch”.  That’s a k1-p1 pattern where on one row you match the stitches, knitting what look like knits and purling purls, as in ribbing, on the alternate rows you work the opposite, knitting the purls and purling the knits, as in “seed stitch”.  (I know that in the UK, the terminology is different, but I can’t always recall whether they call our seed as their moss, or our moss as their seed.  Jo?)  In the lower band, the colors change on *each* row; the light row is always the “matching” row, and the dark is the “opposite” row.  In the upper band, the colors change every *2* rows; you change colors on a “matching” row, and keep that same color on the “opposite” row.  The next band I hope to do will have me switching colors on the “opposite” rows and keeping the same color on the “matching” rows.  Then, pure seed stitch, also with 2 rows of each color.  We’ll see what those looks like!

Also finished another cap this week (last night, actually). 

3 strands wound together, knit on 11′s.  Nice and cushy!

One new, One steady, One old.

During the week, I work on my Sock Madness socks and on the vest for my Master Knitter level 2, and sometimes other items, but this weekend, these are the three projects that got my attention.

NEW

From my “charitable” queue:  a baby hat in yummy-soft DK “Classic Alpaca”. 

STEADY

The Noro yarn has segued from blue to aqua, and the pattern is revealing itself.

The next milestone for this will be when I introduce the interlocking rank of color-reversed St. John’s Cross lozenges — about 15 more rounds.

OLD

For fun, I pulled this out of my UFO stack from summer 2007.   Check out the “yellow” (1st photo) and “blue” (2nd photo) sides of my sampler of reversible 2-color patterns.  The 3 stitches I’ve tried so far are (from bottom to top) “two-color garter stitch”, “cross-rib stripes”, and “roll-over reversible”.  See how the two sides are different, but neither is ”wrong”?

 

[from Jane Neighbors' book, Reversible Two-Color Knitting]