zipper shut

Sylivi is finished !!!! I'm so happy

I sewed in a zipper with the help of some lovely tutorials I found on the net, like the one of the talented Grumperina, who also links to Claudia and her great zipper how to. You may also find the tutorial of knitpics very helpful, they have a pdf.

pheeew!

Sylvi was blocking the last three days and today I started the last little bits on it. I sewed the collar down and looked scared at my yarn, getting lesser and less and my last petal on the needles. And what can I say, lucky me had enough yarn! pheeew! (not that I really am a lucky one these days, my boyfriend sort of broke our relationship on christmas ewe, but that's another story) Nevertheless I made all petals, no more yarn needed, and I don't have anything left except the swatches. The last petal doesn't have enough yarn tail to sew it to the body but I think some ends of the other petals might do. I am sooo glad my yarn lasted long enough, I was frightend of raveling the swatches. So long, maybe tomorrow will follow some pictures of the finished piece. Otherwise have a good start into next year!

where fox and mouse meet

I'm doing better again and obviously the cold had a very good impact on my creativity. I made some new amigurumi. I'll call them little animals and they are sooo cute =^__^=
Someone on etsy asked me if I could make a fox and I said I would try after I had my christmas stuff all done. At first I thought I would go for a "humanoid" fox, like my fairy only with fox ears and tail and everything. But after some researches and my first crochet stitches I decided to go for a baby fox, with a small body and a big head. I liked the form so much that I started to make a mouse and a giraffe and a little mouse, and I believe that one or two more little animals will follow.

cough'n'sneeze

so I'm ill and in bed. No knitting but a little crocheting.
I made one more of my "little animals". It started as a fox and now I have something that is going to be a mouse, I think there will be one or two other little animals as well, like a monkey or a giraffe.


to talk a little about Sylvi, I'm about to start neckline shaping at the fronts, but the numbers make my head blur at the moment, also I think I will need to add some rows and also decreases at the arms and back, because the pattern is written for a hood and I want to go with a tighter ribbed collar.


oh, and I made cookies two days ago:


I call them cristmas pillows, they were inspired by the vampire cookies from baking bites. I used the dough, only with 1/2 cup more flour. The filling is a ganache made from cream and the double amount of chocolate with roasted and chopped almonds and cinnamon and coriander.

put all remaining sts on holder

I finished the back of my Sylvi! and already started the fronts =)


yesterday I also sew a nose to a little new amigurumi I started on the train to Hannover: a fox, isn't it adorable? still blind and no legs but sniffing it looks cute!



and I have holidays!!!, four full weeks filled with nothing else but knitting, crocheting, cooking and eating and sleeping late. It's also winter and I could tell that even clearer after I read some of the blogs I subscribed to. Snowflakes everywhere!

I also made one - a virtual one. (while waiting for the dye process to finish on my hair)

snowdays is a cool site to create greating cards with a selfmade snowflake on it.

This is mine:


If you want to put it to paper it's also a good way of testing your cuts before making them / before it's too late. (btw. instructables posted a nice tutorial on paper snowflakes)

gauging Sylvi cardigan

Just a quick note if you like the idea of a Sylvi cardigan just as much as I do. I noticed this while knitting and am very happy that my gauge is off and I didn't try too hard to get gauge.
I'm not completely done with the back yet but since the main pattern is the back and I realized this I feel I should keep this in mind and note somewhere.

It's a really good idea to have more stitches per inch than the original pattern calls for (a cardigan normally isn't as wide as a coat). The pattern calls for 12 sts / 10 cm and I have 14. I needed to make changes to the pattern (like starting the bobbles for the flowers two rows earlier) to keep them from hiding themselves within the sideseams. And now having made some more rows I find that next time I knit this I would try for 16 sts per 10 cm. Just to have more scope for the flowers and leaves.

expedition hamburg

spent the day on the hamburg christmas market, very nice, I had an awesome apple punch, with cinnamon and cream and caramel topping

but now it's picture time:





I also wanted to show you the progress on the back of Sylvi, I followed the pattern for the first 20 rows and added decreases at both sides of the main pattern to have a waist shaping, then I followed for some more rows and started to increase again ignoring the decreases of the pattern, and knitting front and back directly left and right to the leafy section, sometimes before, sometimes after the bordering purl stitch. Now I'm about to start the arm decreases. The first flower is two rows lower than the original pattern, otherwise it wouldn't have fitted onto the jacket any longer and the bubbles would have been directly on the side seam. Now the flower is directly at the waist and I think two of the petals will be sewn 'around' to the front.


In Hamburg we first went to the Hamburger Wollfarbik, I was about to get my birthday present there: 250gramm of the finest 2ply 100% merino lace yarn, see the gorgious color?




edit to say that the lovely blue yarn will turn into the South Seas Stole by Laura Patterson (ravelry link)
and to share this fantastic hamburg christmas market Santa Frog:

no milk today

well, I had milk for breakfast it's just that this song was in my head ever since early morning. Today I'm in Hannover on a congress, tomorrow as well. I just wanted to keep you updated. I made some progress on Sylvi, but I'm not finished yet because I needed to forbid myself to knit! Why? you ask?, because I needed to crochet and get some christmas presents finished that were custom orders. A cute yellow seahorse, a turtle and the blue fish you saw on the Sylvi swatch are going to Berlin to make three little people happy. And not knit was quite a torture! Believe me, because you need to know that I woke up on last sunday morning at half past five (!) with Sylvi on my mind and how to shape the back, waist section.
Also something very cute happened this morning when I was hanging around the main station waiting for my train to arrive: a lady asked me if I were from Rostock (which I am) and if I wanted to be the "face of the day" tomorrow (which I said yes to). So tomorrow there will be a picture of me in the local newspaper with some info on my job, that I was on my way to this congress and also that I crochet creatures. Really made me smile!
and super duper as well: I get to stay at a friends, we're going to chat and have wonderful diner (fish plate). We haven't seen each other for a couple of month.

see you tomorrow with pictures of dolls and green Sylvi and newspapers

=^_^=

whoo-hoo

If you want to see a picture of me drinking coffee, have a look at etsys new storque issue. Pearlswirl is the author and she gives a little insight in what it's like to be a crafter in germany, she's making her jewelry in Stuttgart and she actually asked me if she could write something about my little shop - dah! of course she could!

calculating

I've finished the sleeves and started the back, whoop whoop!

but to get there needed some math. I wanted to stick to the original shaping of the armholes for the sleeves and also for the back, the only problem: gauge.
My gauge is off and so I needed to calculate everything up to my gauge, so seven sts BO under the arms turned into eight sts in my version. The "real" hard nut to crack was the raglan decreases. I never made raglan before so I didn't had any experience to profit from, and the fact that the pattern calls for decreases every second row for so and so many times and every other row for x number of stitches made me worry. Until I realized that in my gauge, thanks to my enormous row gauge, I could simply decrease two stitches (one left one right) every third row. Nothing more nothing less.

Also thanks to my "enormous" row gauge I can use most of the orignal pattern for the back. I can start with the pattern as it starts, only I'm mirroring rows 1 to 60. I will continue with row 103 and knit until the end. The 'pattern crossing' needed little manipulations for a leaf and one cable was eliminated. The drawn pattern looks pretty. I can't wait to see it knitted.


BTW: my gauge is 14 sts and 22 rows per 4 inches, so my cardigan should have a final lenght of nearly 50 cm.

colorful

I don't think to show you some more 60 rows of seed stitch on sleeves are very interesting so I'll share some photoshop trials I made when I needed to decide on a color for my second try on Sylvi:

when you click on the image it'll be huge

btw. I'm ten rows away from starting the raglan shaping of the armholes

musketeer sleeves

I don't really know what to post about since I found knitting in the round pretty non-spectacular lately and making sleeves is knitting in the round. But nevertheless I made some nice progress: started the sleeves with my new green yarn and it feels absolulty gorgeous, but it's knitting not so nice, the yarn is not plied so it's more or less like holding 12 strands of yarn together, but it works out pretty nice, it slows me down but knitted it looks beautiful.


So what did I do this time? I changed from 2*2 ribbing to 1*1 ribbing on the new yarn, I think it matches better with the seed stitch. Also I changed needle size to 7mm needles to get close to gauge. And, maybe the most important thing, I increased to the full width fo the sleeve right at the beginning. This way I could do all the increases within the ribbing and not within the seed stitch (I found it looks weird, maybe because of the biiiig stitches, but I don't really know). So now I have these musketeer-like sleeves, you know tight cuff and wide sleeve. I also made some rows of seed stitch before I added a leave motif, this way it will show off at the back of the sleeve and won't hide itself in the bending of the beginning of the sleeve. The leave motif is one I found on the hood of the pattern. I only changed the increases to cabling and cabled instead of decreasing (I could have just made purl and knit stitches to create a leave but I found the shaping of it very adorable) and due to the fact that I don't increase, which means I don't have yarn overs in the middle of the leave I added 4 single purl stitches to give some texture to the motif, pure stockinette looked a bit boring.