Quilt Progress!

I realize it's not exactly knitting, but it is taking up my time these days.... I'm working on a quilt from the book: Denyse Schmit Quilts (http://tinyurl.com/kfk4s). It's awesome. And I just sewed all 36 squares together this morning. By no means is it very straight or am I a good sewer, but the pattern is fairly forgiving and it is my first quilt.





Other than that, I also finished my hat for Tacos last night watching Italian for Beginners. When I see her again I'll get a photo of her wearing it. I think it came out pretty well and I liked the instructions for how to decrease, but keeping the cable pattern fairly well.

http://www.knittinghelp.com/
knitting/forum/viewtopic.php?t=143

I finished my first felted project today! It was based on the Booga Bag found at:

blacksheepbags.com/
booga_bag.html

that I saw at a yarn shop just outside of Hood River, OR. At the Foothills Yarn and Fiber, foothillsyarn.com, which is awesome and has alpacas!!! On a recent roadtrip with Sky we ended up there after being rearended going 2mph leaving a parking lot which totaled my old-school Trek road bike. I'd ridden down the Pacific Coast from Astoria, OR to SF, CA and thus was pretty gutted. What better to do than find an alpaca farm and get inspired to buy my first skeins of Noro yarn?




Anyhow, about the bag...

I changed a few things about it as you can see. They recommed 10.5 US needles, but I used 11. I knitted it fairly loose as I'm learning how to knit the continental way. I can tell it's way faster, but it's still kinda tough to get used to. Still can't purl that way for the life of me. If you look at the woman's bag, she's got this funky i-cord for the handle, but I didn't really like this and I saw another idea for the handles elsewhere using grommets and locking key chain rings, which is what I wanted to do, but I wasn't that excited about the end product, so I just went with a simple lining to make it usable. I ended up making handles using 10 sts in garter stitch. It's alright. It seems like it'll hold up pretty well too.

Still working on my first pair of socks. The first one looks good. Enough so that my dad was impressed; a pretty tough thing to do. I convinced him that he should accept a vest from me that he can wear on dates and show off to women that his daughter made it. My mom's partner was convinced I should work for Patagonia. It'd be slow going. The first one took me 2 weeks. The other one I'm slowing down on getting overwhelmed by other projects, namely a quilt at the moment.


Booyakasha!!

Socks are a ton of fun to make and very portable. Next time I go on some big bad bike trip I'll bring a pair along to knit. And probably do something a bit more complicated than just knit.


Finally, a friend is in the country from Japan and lost the hat I made her last time she was here, so I'm just about finished knitting her a new one. I'm using up yarn in my basket, hence the funny coloring. I found the pattern for the braided cables here:

http://www.knittinghelp.com/
knitting/forum/viewtopic.php?t=143

It's kinda cool. A little bit more interesting than the average hat.