you act like you're hip to their tricks

I actually finished the knitting of this gift in time for the recipient's birthday, but then it languished as I thought that I had messed up the grafting. After deciding that it had to be finished over Thanksgiving, I realized that I had just pulled the grafting too tight, so it was actually fine after being loosened. (Apologies for everything that I said about the Knitty grafting garter stitch tutorial before that realization.)

Two attempts at weaving in the ends and I finally had a finished product that I liked well enough to gift.

It's the Millwater eternity cowl, made out of Plucky Knitter Primo Worsted in Dandy Lion colorway. I love this color and wish that it were one that I could wear. But gifting it is second best. Rav details here.
(wrapped double)

I am actually working on another gift that uses Dandy Lion in Primo fingering so I've had the chance to enjoy this color a little longer.

And now in a color I can wear, the Narragansett sweater in Primo Worsted Narragansett Gray.
I've yet to get a good picture of this one, but it is wonderfully soft to wear, even if it does fall off my shoulders all the time. I loved knitting this pattern, despite its long hiatus due to the summer heat, and expect that I will enjoy wearing it as well. I made the sleeves full length, although I'm not entirely sure that they shouldn't be three-quarters length for proportion's-sake, and I left off the hip detail. Rav details here.

And, finally, because handknits-in-action always make me happy: an action shot of that cardigan where it fits much better and where you get to see MRB's newly-discovered fish face.
Hope you all had lovely Thanksgivings!

so lost on a trail walked by so many

I took more pictures of sheep in the last week than I have in the rest of my life combined. (And all of them were basically in one day.) However, since this is a knitting blog, I'll try to limit the pictures to the ones that are slightly less tangential to knitting.
Despite its clear proximity to our hiking trail, Wamps did not pick up any of this fiber to spin at home.

(Apparently, animals are allowed to graze on the National Parks lands during the winter.)

Even almost on-point: That's a cowl that you've seen briefly before, knit out of Plucky Cashmere Fingering Weight in an improvised pattern (colorway: London Calling). (I did sew in the ends just so I could wear it on this trip.) And a Wispy Cardy in Plucky Merino Lace (colorway: Summer at the Shore). Plus the wristwarmers that Wamps made me years ago. (See their first trip to the UK here.) Here's to traveling knitwear!

running out of yarn hasn't stopped me yet

I actually finished some of my Christmas gifts by Epiphany this year, largely because I didn't put as many on my list as last year. (We'll see about some of those last-year-gifts getting done by Valentine's Day, okay? Okay?) But I didn't manage to finish these two in time to gift them in person, which really disappointed me. Luckily, the recipients didn't mind as much.

For my grandma, I was so inspired by this cowl that I forgot that I have a really hard time finishing garter stitch log cabin squares.
Albers Cowl, knit in various colors of Plucky MCN fingering. Ravelry details here. I ran out of several colors of yarn, leading to interesting (and time-consuming) modifications. I am glad that my grandma likes it as much as she does, because that was the only thought that got me through it.

For my grandpa, I knit the popular Turn A Square pattern out of Plucky Cashmere fingering. (Ravelry details here) I had to modify the pattern for the thinner yarn and then had to modify again when it became clear that I was going to run out of Rustica, the brown yarn. But every grandpa loves an ombre, right?
(And thanks to both my parents for modeling these before they were mailed off. After my dad modeled the hat, it was strongly suggested that he probably needed a similar one to line his Christmas hat from last year... I accepted this as the price for asking someone to model cashmere and did knit a liner out of the leftover blue yarn, but got no pictures before sewing it in the old hat and returning it to my dad.)

things that I have actually finished

There aren't many, that's for sure. But here's one:
I actually finished this one before Christmas, but just realized that I never posted it. (Partially because I never got post-blocking pictures...) It's a baby blanket, made for Miss Margrethe, out of Blue Skies Alpaca Dyed Cotton. I modeled the project after one that I made a few years ago, but left off the patterned squares since I thought they would conflict with a more vibrant color scheme.

The wall of Dyed Cotton at Webs is handy for picking out color combos, and that's where this yarn came from. Dyed Cotton is a pretty darn great yarn for the baby knits, since it's machine washable and in a wide range of bright colors. It's also incredibly soft and knits up quickly.

Now that my Dyed Cotton ad is over, I'll move on to a more (and less) recent project:

This is a cowl/snood made out of leftovers from 4 Plucky MCN Worsted projects. I started it so that I would have something that I could easily knit in movie theaters (stockinette tube knit on #9s) and I stuck very strictly to only knitting it in movies. So I've been working on it since about this time last year and I'm not quite sure what I will do now that it's finished. But I really couldn't keep going. It's actually a little painful to wear as a cowl now because it's so tall and there's not enough drape. (It's okay as long as I'm not wearing a top that has any kind of neck. But a turtleneck plus this cowl? Ouch.) In order, the colors are Hazel Drive, Rock of Ages Fascination Series (#2), Nectar and Montgomery. Maybe I'll try to get a modeled shot.

But, first, I have a few other things to finish...

so much for doing well on deadlines

As my blog-silence may have suggested, I haven't really had a lot of time to knit this summer. Between the move-that-lasted-forever, the job-that-did-not-slow-down-during-the-summer, and many lovely trips and visitors, I had a hard time fitting knitting in. So when I take stock of my progress on summer knit goals, the picture isn't pretty. In fact, it's downright pathetic. I can't think of a time when I made less progress on a set of self-imposed goals. Here's the (limited) progress that I made:

I'm 11 rows away from finishing my end-of-August goal:I wish I could say that I'm as devoted to this project as Wamps was to her version, which clocked in at 150 rows. But I've decided that mine will be lovely at just around 100.

My save-my-sanity cowl grew, almost without me thinking about it:
It's still a-ways from being finished, but maybe that's for the best.

During the last weekend in August, an unusually long (since moving to the Beat, that is) spell on public transit produced this baby hat:
This wasn't one of my knitting goals, but since it's the closest I came to a FO this summer (only have two ends to sew in!) I'm including it anyway. It's the Umbilical Cord hat in Sheep Feet, Royalty colorway. Having rushed out the door without writing down the pattern, I counted on CH's memory to get me the right number of stitches. Luckily, that was a safe bet. What was not as lucky was how I felt about this yarn once it was knit up. In the skein, I thought it was beautiful, but I think the brown is much too dominant in the final knit. (EW, enter your massive protest here. I don't care. You can't see it in person, so you don't know how overwhelming the brown is.) However, the yarn was the product of my first-ever trip to Webs (which was also EW's first-ever trip to Webs). It is a miraculous place.

Also, I took Labor Day weekend off from everything, and that helped me to jump start some fall knitting.

This lovely is all finished except for the finishing: The yarn knit up just like I imagined, and I learned why so many people love one particular classic knit. You'll have to wait for details until it's gifted, though.

And I'm about halfway through another knit using these colors:This knit reminds me why Blue Sky Dyed Cotton is still high on my list of favorite yarns. All but the green were purchased during my second-ever trip to Webs.

Finally, today was the Coventry Farmer's Market's Fiber Fest. I actually went back to get the most amazing cod in the world, but I couldn't resist a little local yarn:It's the Painted Sheep's Shimmer Yarn in Merlot. It's a superwash merino/tencel blend and I think that I know just the knit for it.

What are you all working on this fall?

an inch here or there

As you all may have guessed from my relative silence, there hasn't been a whole lot of time for knitting lately in the HartBeat. And, unluckily for me, all the projects I had going were fairly complex. So even when I had some time to knit, I was too exhausted to think about trying to work out what was going on in those patterns. (A few times, I picked them up, only to fall asleep before I'd figured out where I was in the pattern.)

Finally, I forced myself to take the time to wind up some lovely Plucky Knitter cashmere lace and am now using it to knit a cowl of my own design. This turns out to be a pretty good solution because the cowl should be relatively simple to show off the yarn, and if I pick it up and don't know what to do, I can make up a new "design feature." I've got a couple of inches done and am hopeful that it will tide me over until I have the time and energy to return to my more complicated projects. (Here are the Rav deets.)

I do have one other project that's very nearly ready to be blogged: a scarf for my grandma that just needs to be blocked. Hopefully in the next day or two!

A little bit of gift knitting

My little sister can be hilariously (and sometimes annoyingly) demanding, but in this case, it worked out for her. I started this cowl without a clear idea of who it would go to, and then happened to be knitting it when visiting my sis in February.


The Plucky Knitter, Merino Seacell in Elegant Elephant
Chickadee Cowl

She went on about how she wanted the cowl and I should make it for her, and then proceeded to knit about 10 stitches herself. Of course, I couldn't convince her to try using the linen stitch the pattern calls for, but since by that time I'd decided she had picked out her birthday present, that was just fine.*

The linen stitch is a new fav of mine, and I highly recommend it. It's super easy, which made this perfect bus and awkward-break-between-classes knitting. Just cast on however many stitches you want, and then
R1: knit 1, slip one with yarn in front (repeat)
R2: slip one with yarn in front, knit one (repeat)

And repeat! Gorgeous and genius.



The little guys nestling into the cowl are Trilobites, and I love them. I should crochet little whiskers to make them more authentic, but...well, I don't have a crochet hook. Whoops!

I also have to preview the other project I've been working on, the Mother of Pearl scarf by Grumperina in my Hear Me Now Plucky Knitter MCN. (You remember.)



I cannot describe how much I love this project. The yarn becomes more gorgeous every time I pick it up (which, seriously, how is that possible?) and I so so love how it works together with the pattern. The way this picture glows (at least in my eyes) really expresses the essence of this scarf. In fact, the only negative that I recently realized is that eventually the yarn will come to an end. I found myself rather distraught and have been creating other knitting distractions in the hopes that I can just knit this forever.

And then, a funny FO picture. Yay!


*May this be a lesson to you all: I am highly suggestible.

loveliest neckwear models in the world

(From left to right, ravelry deets: superstar cowl; wink scarf; humperdinck neckwarmer; stormy wisp; latte neckwarmer)

I definitely had a theme for new year's gifts this year and was willing to sacrifice all practicality to that theme. And so even poor Emily, who probably usually has a pretty warm neck, got a neckwarmer out of me. (But even Tanzania has a rainy season, right?)

Let's keep this (relatively) short, shall we? All yarn is from the Plucky Knitter. (Inspiring colors, delightfully soft, what's not to love about the Plucky yarns?)

Two Bainbridge scarves, one with the remix mods of FlintKnits:



The pink is Single Ply Merino in True Love; the orange is Merino Seacell in Pumpkin Latte. The pink is knit in a broken rib, which I thought really suited the single ply yarn. It took me much longer to find a stitch pattern that I liked with the merino seacell and I finally ended up using a bramble stitch. In the round, working the back side of the bramble stitch is actually easier than working the front. Here's how it works:
Round 1: knit
Round 2: repeat p3tog, (k1, p1, k1) all into one stitch
Round 3: knit
Round 4: repeat (k1, p1, k1) all into one stitch, p3tog

I fell in love with Through the Loops! mods to the Wisp pattern and was so happy to try them out with Fingering MCN in Storm the CastleAnd then two patterns that I improvised:









A red cowl out of Fingering Merino Superwash in Va Va Voom, featuring a star stitch and a modified version of the cherry blossoms from the hanami shawl. And a purple neckwarmer in Bulky Cashmere in Humperdinck with vintage buttons, loosely inspired by the Fidget pattern.

I'd love if we had occasion to take pictures similar to the top one more often, but I'll take what I can get. Many thanks to the Churchmans for hosting our crowd (and judging our fierce Iron Chef battle)!

Staying warm on the southside.

We'll have to have a holiday edition soon, but in the meantime I wanted to share a quick and totally satisfying knit with you lovely people.

I fell totally in love with this pattern, sweetly named "Holding Hands and Feeding Ducks," but I didn't have the bulky yarn that could hold up to it.


And then, when I was in Texas, I spied this pepperminty Manos at my mom's new yarn store and couldn't walk away without it. Post NYE, I found myself in Chicago cozied up in front of a television, and this cowl was born!


I cast on 40 stitches, and ended up with a perfectly fitting cowl for Chicago. With a few strategically placed buttons, this kept my face warm from the biting winds that = winter in that fair land. (Of course, my actual neck was covered by a stormy wisp--but two knitted objects for one neck is acceptable in the windy city, or so I believe.)

If I made this for someone else, I think I would go with bigger buttons and maybe try a button band. These little buttons like to slip out of the not-actually-button-holes.

I hope I will be back there and able to wear this happy cowl again soon!

secret gnomes love cashmere

In my office's "secret gnome" gift exchange, I pulled a co-worker who I thought would appreciate a little cashmere something. Luckily, I had a great skein of Plucky Knitter Aran Cashmere that was waiting for a project. Unluckily, I only had six (very, very busy) days to crank something out. So I turned to my old favorite, the Odessa pattern by Grumperina. Not to repeat myself yet again, I decided to forgo the hat's decreases and turn it into a little neckwarmer. It's as if I knit something different, right? Right? (Deets on Ravelry if you want them.) Having very little time to finish this project meant that I had no time to get decent pictures, but here's one to show off Connecticut's first snowfall of the season:

As someone who is technically from Wisconsin, I can authoritatively say that people in Connecticut do not know how to drive in the snow.

Posting about this Grumperina pattern reminds me that I never posted about my last Grumperina hat, also knit in Plucky Knitter Aran Cashmere. (Maybe this is what Wamps means when she talks about me overdoing it with the aran cashmere hats...) Anyway, here's my Weather Report hat, the name inspired by the combination of its lovely color (the Golightly colorway) and a pattern that reminds me of precipitation:It's Grumperina's latest hat pattern, Tretta, modified for the bulkier yarn. (Mods here) I probably don't *need* two cashmere hats, but I'm keeping this one for myself because I can't find last year's. (It's in a box, somewhere, I'm sure.) Even once I find that one, I think I can justify keeping both, since that one was a little baggy when I wore my hair down and this one is too short when my hair is in a ponytail. Indeed. What a justification. But the top of this hat also makes me really happy:I've knit quite a bit for holiday presents this year, but the secret gnome gift is the only one that's actually made its way to its recipient. Perhaps I'll post about the others in the new year. While three of the yet-to-be-posted projects are repeats of past projects, only one of them is a repeat of a Grumperina hat....

"realistic just means not very pretty"**

I'm taking the excuse of being at home to post about my mom's birthday present. You've already seen it in various forms, but here's the finished product.The pattern is the Old Shale Smoke Ring and it's knit in Plucky Knitter Merino-Cashmere-Nylon. The yarn is from the PK yarn club, to which EW and I share a subscription. (This offers us the opportunity to fight over who gets to keep what yarn every month. Really a good idea all around. But it also lets us get beautiful yarn.) This particular yarn is the Colonel Brandon colorway, from the months that the club was featuring Jane Austen colorways. I received this yarn while studying for the bar from home this summer and wasn't in love with it right away, but when I was talking about sending it to EW, my mom said, "Oh, but it's so pretty!" Well, that decided that, and EW got Miss Marianne instead. (Which clearly turned out for the best.) And I grew to love this yarn, with its variation and depth that were not immediately apparent: highly appropriate given its namesake.

I got the idea to add an Elk brooch to the cowl from a Raveler who'd used such a brooch to good effect. Although I thought I'd ordered it in plenty of time, coming from Australia took even longer than I thought so it didn't show up until the day before my mom's birthday and the whole package was delayed getting to her. I could have sent it without, but didn't think the effect was quite as good: ** Declaration by my five-year old cousin. She was coloring turkey shapes with her twin brother and asked whose was better. I said, "Well, they're both good in different ways. Yours is much more of a fantasy and his is much more realistic."

Miss Marianne

What once was a pile of string.....


...is now a beautiful thing!


Ok, sorry, couldn't resist. I am rather happy with how this lovely cowl turned out.


I really enjoyed knitting with this pattern–it was easy to remember, easy to pick up in the middle of a row or repeat (crucial for transit knitting) and, perhaps most importantly, look how pretty! The color variation in the yarn (Miss Marianne Dashwood, from the Plucky Knitter) really looks lovely in the finished, blocked version. Soon it will be off to its recipient, who will hopefully enjoy a little Marianne in her life.

all inside out

I've knit a couple of things inside out lately. The first one was by accident. This is what it was supposed to look like.But the more I knit, the more I liked the reverse side better.

So I turned it inside out before gifting it (belatedly to Andrea to go with her new Orla bag).
The second one was on purpose. As I was working on converting a stitch pattern from straight needles to circulars, I realized that knitting the reverse side would allow me to knit much more than purl. And since that's a trade that I'll always take, reverse side knitting it is! Here's what that looks like:
You'll have to wait to see what this looks like when it's turned inside out since it's not ready to be gifted yet.

"when she thought about it at all, she thought that knitting had probably saved her life"

I've had a tough day. Nothing dreadful happened; it was just a series of small irritations followed by a huge irritation. There were two highlights to the day: amidst my irritations, I had an unexpected hour when all I could do was knit and I learned that my supervisor knits. (When telling her how glad I was that I had knitting to lower my blood pressure, she chimed in that she'd knit after a fight with a family member and it was remarkable.) Here are the fruits of my calming time:
(So, honestly, only about an inch of that was actually from that hour of knitting, but you get the idea...)