not-so-recent knits: part 1

It rained for two days this week; the predicted overnight turn to snow didn't pan out, but I know one of these days, soon, it will.  In wool socks and galoshes I shuttle a carful of kids to school, each of us keeping a mental (or loudly spoken) countdown of days-left-until-break.  We go to bed early and wake up in darkness, we listen to carols and watch as more and more houses add sparkling lights and tinsel trees to their yards.  I think of faraway friends and family and recount holiday memories as I walk or drive or dream through it all.

And so it is winter, or almost, and I feel knitting season officially upon us.  "Knitting season" is something new to me, a born-and-raised Floridian.  But it's real, as real as the crunch of snow (and the shine of snot on my kids' coat sleeves--ew).  As many nights as I can avoid falling asleep at kiddie-bedtime, my hands are busy with gift knitting or with my ongoing project for myself (my first Big Knit--more on that later).  But before I move on to the new and in-process, I thought I would go back and pick up a few projects completed over the summer, or even last winter and spring--the ones I finished knitting but never finished blogging, for one reason or another.  Maybe it was too warm to write about knitting, even if I still found the time to do it.  But now that problem is long gone, and you would probably like nothing better than curl up with a cup of hot something-or-other and read and look and link.  Or else you would have moved on by now.  Shall we?





These are the finished mittens I previewed in this post last winter.   I finished them, they got worn a lot, and now they are WAY too small.  Such is life.  I used the basic method in Morehouse Farm Merino Knits--the Buggy Mittens, minus the bugs.  It was such an easy-to-understand technique that I was able to repeat (sans book) it this winter for the new-and-improved (i.e., made for big paws) red mittens. 

The yarns are a combination of thrifted and swapped wools and cottons--the browns are Brown Sheep Company's Top of the Lamb and the same ones I used for this Thorpe:

(also pictured: fisherman sweater, circa last fall's jury duty...)




Look how versatile it is.  Also, it's been a year and I have yet to learn the crochet stitch to finish the edges so I think we're just going to go with it like this, in all its helmet-y, hood cozy-ing glory.

The blue yarn from the mittens also turns up in this hat, Exhibit A in my case for Why Baby Knits Look Decidedly Less Cute on Big Kids:


The pattern is from Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines, the Heartbreakingly Cute Pilot's Cap.  And on babies, it is indeed cute.  But on a toddler?  Heartbreakingly weird.  Probably didn't help that I left the long ties off, but really it was doomed from the big-headed get go.  Maybe, maybe he looks like he's pulling it off in that shot, but this one shows you the real problem:



Big kid hair=big kid mullet sticking out of the back of the hat.  Like some kind of weird horse mane.  Fitting, since we were at a farm, I guess....  Maybe it would work on a little girl with appropriately long hair, but from now on I will stick to knitting this hat for babies. 

And then there were these mitts:





They were an end-of-year teacher gift last June, a special one for the teacher Owen was leaving after 3 years in her classroom.  And I'm happy to say I've spotted them on her several times this fall--gotta love it when something you make actually gets worn.  I really love the color and texture on these.  The pattern is from Joelle Hoverson's Last-Minute Knitted Gifts and the yarn is.... well, I can't find the tag and have zero recollection of what it might have been, which is a bummer.  I seriously need to add "catalog yarns on ravelry" to the 2012 to-do list.  But at any rate I loved it so much I started this hat for myself over the summer:



And it turned out to be another Fail, for gauge-related reasons.  Sigh.  The pattern (Jude Webster's Vivonne Bay Hat) is lovely but I lost track and motivation once I realized the fit problem.  I could finish it and give it to a smaller girl cousin-or-other, but I think I will be selfish and unravel it and maybe make some wristwarmers for myself.  Because it was hard enough to give those teacher ones away.

I think I'll stop there, but I have a few more queued up to share: other not-so-recents and a couple fresh off the needles.  I have also been trying to squeeze in some gift sewing, and there are so many good holiday ideas out there I could just about burst.  Anyone else have favorites to share, or anything good and gifty planned?  Let me know, because if even I don't finish all that I have planned, at least I can enjoy what others have accomplished!