Hello again

You may be feeling a little abandoned right now, but not to worry, here I am. The compulsive knitter has been knitting up a storm! Not only did I finish the illusion monkey baby blanket (pictures to come, darn cat keeps laying on it every time I try!) but I started my first lace shawl and another baby blanket. I also started going to a stitch n bitch, which is a lot of fun. Get to meet new people (yay for being social) and do my favourite thing....knit, duh. My boyfriend was off last week so we did a lot of things hence my not being around to write. 

The lace isn't as complicated as expected, for other beginner ace knitters I suggest the Ashton Shawl I'm doing, a free download on Ravelry. The designer Dee is amazing, she includes very detailed instructions on what to do and how to read her charts. Now you will need to know a bit beyond the basics for any lace work. Yo (yarn over), k2t (knit two together), and ssk (slip, slip, knit) are needed for this shawl but once you get into it they feel like second nature. Now I started my shawl on straight needles just to put off buying new circulars for this project but I got close to outgrowing the straight needles pretty quick. I definitely suggest using circulars if you are doing a lace shawl. 

My newest baby blanket is proving to be a little bit of a pain. I'm not a huge fan of the yarn (got it from the bargain bin lol), and incorporating some cables as well as another pattern into it. Eventually I'll get the pattern down but it is taking awhile. I'm writing it down as I go so I can remember where I am. 

I feel like I'm going to love the pattern once it's done, just getting there will be the problem. I love the colour as well so hopefully with some washing it'll soften up

Well I'm off for another day of job hunting and knitting if i don't get a migraine from the fire alarm tests going on in our building today. Enjoy your day everyone, I'm signing off.

Monkeys for.....cats?

I LOVE this yarn! I'm knitting with Bernat Baby Sport in Baby White and Bernat Softee Baby in Pretty in Pink right now. Both are nice light weight yarns with only a slight halo, the staticky effect normally associated with acrylic yarns. I haven't had any issue with the fibres splitting either, which has been an issue with some of the other 100% acrylic yarns I've use in the past. This blanket is knitting up a bit slower than the others I've done recently, but that's to be expected. I haven't had to make any changes to the pattern yet, which I love (kind of a perfectionist). My cat certainly seems to like it. 

Still a WIP but I can't wait to finish it. 

Illusion knitting

So right now I'm really into a type of knitting I recently discovered called Illusion Knitting. Illusion Knitting is very simple to do, combining knit and purl stitches to make a design that can be seen from an angle, but not from straight above. The best instructions I've found are by Steve Plummer and Pat Ashforth at Wooly Thoughts.  They describe it as knitting in ridges, each line on a pattern being a ridge (two rows of knitting), one light and one dark. I started with something totally simple and made my own pattern of paw prints. I took this pattern:

I'm a little ambitious, what can I say, and with never having attempted illusion knitting before, I decided to try my hand at a baby blanket. To make this pattern work for the illusion I took each row and worked a light and a dark ridge in that pattern. Every right side row is a knit row so the chart is the wrong side, worked left to right. So say the first ridge would look like

Row 1: k27

Row 2: k9, p9, k9

The second ridge:

Row 3: k27

Row 4: p9, k9, p9

And so on till you worked the pattern. Now with my blanket the paw print pattern is staggered for the length. My blanket ended up being 31" x 35", but I really liked the finished product. I knitted it on US 7 needles with worsted weight yarn. I used yellow and white.

So from the top, you can barely make out the pattern:

On an angle though....

From the back, you can sort of see the pattern as well:

I'm pretty proud of it though.

So I figured I'd try something a little more complicated. If you look on Wooly Thoughts website, they have done some pretty amazing works of art with this illusion knitting. So I started following their instructions using a program called Inkscape to create a grid and pattern, but it got a little confusing so I emailed them. Steve is super helpful and got me started with my pattern. He offered to check it out as often as I wanted to help with any corrections that may need to be done. Just a sneak peek at this one, we took this monkey to make the pattern: 

New Beginnings......

Well hello there, if anyone is actually reading this, please forgive me. I've never blogged so this is a learning experience for me. I'll just start off saying that there is a lot of new stuff going on in my life. I was commuting between three cities for work,  home and boyfriend, and it was driving me CRAZY. I just couldn't take it anymore. So I picked up my things and moved in with the boy. This move meant leaving my family, friends and job. Now I have lots of time on my hands while looking for a new job (not exactly an easy thing to do).

This, of course, means I could pick up my needles and knit to my heart's content!

So here we go, off on a journey together called....Life of a Compulsive Knitter.