My First Dog Sweater

My very good friend, Steph approached me a few months ago to see if I could do her a huge favor.  She asked me knit her dog, Spyro a sweater.  Now those who know me know how I feel about dressing up dogs (I'll just keep those opinons to myself).  But, I agreed to because Steph is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and she was frustrated with finding a sweater that fit her dog (they were either too short or too long).

Now I have never knit a sweater before, and after looking at a few patterns online, I couldn't find a pattern that fit my vision for a dog sweater.  I wanted something that would buton along the back because I am all to familiar on how hard it can be do get a dog to wear something!   I thought it would be easier to put on if the buttons were on the back. 

I took some measurements of Spyro and based on the yarn gauge I calculated how many stitches I needed,  how many rows to knit and where to place the leg holes.  I started knitting at the collar, then increase stitches every few rows (evenly) until I had enough stitches to fit around the body.  At first I thought I would knit the item as two pieces, then stitch them together, but as I was knitting I realized I could knit it as one piece.  I even added button holes along the side. 

And here is the finished knitting result (minus the buttons)

Side profile of the sweater. 

Here's Spryo with his new sweater :)

The only problem is that the sweater might be a tad bit too small for Spryo because of al his hair!  So the seam on the back looks like he's about to burst out of the sweater.  LoL hopefully after washing and blocking it the sweater will fit better!

Is There An End In Sight?

This year I have decided to knit most of my x'mas gifts.  Not only does it add a personal touch, but I thought it would be fun!  So the other day I decided to write out my knitting schedule for all the x'mas gifts + x'mas gift pre-orders I have to knit.  Oh my goodness, I'm going to be knitting every day until mid December!  It's all good!  

I've managed to finish one gift - the shawl.  Knitting my first shawl with lace yarn was eventful!  As I was getting close to finishing the shawl I noticed a mistake 20 rows down.  And I noticed this mistake at 11:00pm on a week day.  I knew I would bug me the whole night and prevent me from sleeping, so I had to perform emergency surgery on it right away.  Instead of taking it apart (which would have been a disaster because it is a lace pattern!) I took out the one stitch row-by-row all the way down until I got to the mistake.  I finally finished it last Saturday - took me a week and 2 days!  I borrowed blocking rods from Ed so I could stretch and block it properly.  Weaving in the blocking rods was almost as frustrating as fixing that mistake! LoL

I contemplated showing photos of my complete work because they are x'mas gifts (although I'm not sure if the recipients of the gifts read my blog...), but I figure.. they don't know which gift they're getting!  So here are some pics of the finished product.  The first picture is the shawl being blocked, the second one is just a close up of the shawl detail :)

My current project - a scarf w/ a hood!  I'm almost done!  It's taking me a bit longer because I'm making up the pattern as I go.  I love those kind of projects!

Shawl It Is

So in my last post, even though I had decided on knitting a shawl, I still wasn't quite sure.  And things were working against me on this one.  First off - I realized I didn't have the right needles (or so I thought!).  So I thought... alright... socks it is!  But then I called Ed and she offered to lend me her needles.

The pair of circulars she gave me was a size... I don't know.. but it was HUGE!  It reminded me of those giant pencils they gave me in first grade to write with.  I really struggled to use them, and I felt like a beginner knitter.  Here I was knitting with such fine yarn with these giant needles.  I was completely the opposite of graceful!  After about 4 rows, Ed and I looked at it, and agreed that these needles were just too big for the type of yarn I was using.  So I downgraded in a major way to a size 7 needle.  Omg - a million times better!

I'm still getting used to knitting with such fine yarn.  It was quite finicky and if you make a mistake, holy crap is it ever hard to fix!  I got this triangular lace shawl pattern from Ed (who got it from Ravelry) that knits from the base of the triangle to the tip.  So every other row I'm adding 4 stitches.  The longer the rows get, the more finicky it gets!  This is what I've done so far, but I have a feeling it's going to take me a while to finish this one! 

Twiddling Thumbs

I'm at a bit of a loss right now and I'm twiddling my thumbs. I shipped off two mitts today (I'm up to 9 sales! Woohoo!) and I'm out of yarn to knit my wrist warmers. Don't worry, I've ordered more! :) I'm just waiting for them to come in! I've already gotten some requests for x'mas gifts for friends, plus a request from my mother-in-law for a pair of arm warmers for her birthday :).

So... now what? I need something to knit! Don't get me wrong, I have stuff to knit! It's just... what? I can knit one of 2 things - socks or a shawl. I've never knit a shawl before, and I had purchased some lace yarn a while back just for that purpose. I'm supposed to head over to Ed's place tonight to hang out and knit :) We were supposed to go to Romni today, but I've been feeling under the weather this week and the thought of taking the subway downtown wasn't sitting right with me.

Hrm... shawl it is.. :D