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

My Birthday Weekend

Another year, another birthday! I turned 25 again (for the millionth time! haha!).

On my actual birthday Jimmy took me out for a nice dinner on Main St. Markham (not to be confused with Main St. Unionville!) and I spent the remainder of my evening watching the Leafs loose on tv and knitting :)

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday with friends :) Ed came over for our 3rd ever E&K Knitting Club meeting. Yes, we formed a knitting club, and yes we're the only members. But more members are more than welcome to join us! Our meets always goes as follows:

First 30 minutes - talk and catch up on what's been going on in our lives. This is usually when I start boiling some water for tea
Next 30 minutes - knit and drink tea
Next hour - head over to Tonia's for some all-day-breakfast brunch

LoL so half our meetings usually consists of eating :D

So when Ed came over yesterday she presented me with my birthday gift: a hand knit cowl scarf. I love it!!



The colours and cowl are absolutely stunning! Funny thing is, the last time I was over at her place, she was showing me her new additions to her yarn stash, and when she showed me the yarn she used to knit the cowl, I told her how much I loved it. Little did I know it was for me! Thanks Ed! <3

This weekend I finally got around to knitting all the colour offerings for my wrist warmers. Finally! I just finished knitting the "teal" ones (still gotta finish them off). I'm putting teal in quotes because it's actually more teal than green. Hm.. I'm going to have to think of a new name for those ones! Here's a photo of just some of the colours my wrist warmers come in - It's missing the coal black, silver gray and the "teal" ones :D

I *Heart* Autumn!

Actually I should specify and say I *heart* October :D And no, it's not because it's my birthday month (because I tell ya, after I turning 25, I started dreading turning a year older every year!). Autumn here in Toronto is the season I love the most - and I love it for several reasons:

1) You can start wearing your knitted goods without sweating up a storm
2) The air is crisp and clear
3) Perfect hiking weather - not too hot and no bugs!!
4) Oktoberfest (reminders of my days @ U.Waterloo)
5) The beauty of the leaves changing to all sorts of lovely reds, oranges and yellows - makes driving anywhere so much more enjoyable!

These past two weekends I've gone out hiking with my family to take in all this wonderful fall weather/scenery. I have to admit yesterday was quite brutal - my fam and I were at Hockely Valley and we hiked for 5 hours :S My legs are sore today! LoL

I thought I would share just some of my autumn photos I've taken over the past week. Photos were taken at Rouge Valley Conservation Center and Hockley Valley (on the Bruce Trail).


Beautiful fall orange/yellow - Rouge Valley CC


Hiking at Rouge Valley CC.


Abandoned vintage car engine - Hockely Valley - Bruce Trail


Tin cup - Hockely Valley - Bruce Trail


Side trails - Hockley Valley - Bruce Trail

My First Etsy Sale! (+socks!)

I've been on Cloud 9 over the past few days - I finally made a sale in my Etsy store! I made my first sale last Thursday, and I was super excited. I sold a pair of wrist warmers :)

So every morning when I wake up the first thing I check is the status of my Etsy store - it's a bit of an obsession really! But it's become my morning ritual. Thank goodness for Windows 7 starting up so fast! When I checked on Thursday morning, I noticed one of my items were missing. And my first thought was "oh dumb-dumb Kare! You were probably editing the details for that item and forgot to "accept" the changes, so it's not showing up in your store!" But then I looked closely and realized that I made a sale! Yipee!!

And since then I've sold another pair of wrist warmers, and I have a custom order lined up. I'm so excited!

And I have been busily knitting wrist warmers since then!

But what I really want to do is get back to knitting socks. Since it has been getting colder, I finally had the opportunity to wear the socks I made earlier this year. Wearing them made me miss knitting socks. I thought I would post pics of my fancy-shmacy socks, which I knit using the magic loop method. Actually, the yellow pair is the first one I made using the magic loop method. See - I told you I like making things challenging for myself! I took the hardest pattern from Wendy Johnson's book "Socks From The Toe Up".. or what I thought was the hardest pattern to knit. The yellow ones knit up quite well :)





These red ones however, where for some reason, challenging. They were a basic lace sock, but I kept screwing up. At one point, and this was after I knit the heel and everything, I screwed up on one sock and I just couldn't fix it. I got so frustrated so I ended up taking apart the entire sock.

A word of advice: when you get frustrated, don't just go taking things apart. In quoting the movie Anchorman, right after Ron Burgundy jumped into the bear pit he said "I immediately regret this decision". That was exactly what I said (and then I thought of the movie... and I had a laugh! haha). It's better to try to fix your mistake. Taking it apart when you're almost done should be the absolute last resort. Anyway, I made it through knitting this pair and they're my second fav pair (after my lovely yellow ones)

Tale of Two Hats (Paris, France)

The plan after making my first ever pair of wrist warmers was to make a matching slouchy beret. I found a pattern on Ravelry.com that had a bit of a cable knit to it. Because my yarn gauge did not match the one on the pattern (it was a lower gauge yarn than what was recommended in the pattern), I again, attempted to readjust the pattern by casting on more stitches and adjusting the cable pattern and where to increase the stitches. I felt like after adjusting the wrist warmer pattern, I was a pro.

Boy does being overconfident backfire sometimes!

What I had failed to do is to adjust the number of increase stitches - I kept that the same for the pattern. Needless to say, this slouchy beret turned out not so slouchy. Ok... it wasn't slouchy AT ALL :s It was tight, and the top was loose. I looked like Toad from Mario Bros! LoL Oops! Lesson learned indeed!

Before I went on my trip to Paris in Feb, I had looked up some yarn stores that, if Ed and I had time, we would go check out. Based on my research, the yarn stores in Paris are phenomenal, and it was definitely a pity we didn't get to check out any of them. I was slightly disappointed about not going because after buying yarn in San Antonio, I thought it would be fun to buy yarn from places I travel to. And this is where fate comes to play. For some reason unknown (possibly because we were freezing our buns off outside and needed to warm up!), we found ourselves in Printemps, a department store in Paris. We were just about to leave when I spotted my loot - yarn!! And it was so cheap!! I picked up two balls of gray merino wool yarn to make a replacement hat.

I just had enough to finish my hat :D And this one fits much better, and it slouches... sorta! :D



The one on the left is the first one I knit - can you tell it's too small? LoL