Friday, July 4, 2008

And Then There Were Five

There's been beading, quite a bit. Knitting too, but I don't have photos.
First two pictures, my Beading for a Cure bangles. You might recall a started bangle from a couple of weeks ago; when I awoke this morning I decided that there was too much tedium involved in finishing it, and it was a little snug, so I cut it up. I love cutting up peyote stitch because you can just slide the beads off the thread. Small things etc. Anyway, the frontmost bangle, which is a little clearer in the picture below, is its replacement.
I'm quite pleased with it, as I usually have a hard time incorporating large, shaped beads into my seed-beading mindset, and I think this worked. Instead of beginning with a seed beaded foundation as I'd originally planned, and then using the larger beads as accents somehow or another, I began with the large beads and added embellishment as structure via seed beads around it.  It's surprisingly rigid, and so works as a bangle - just as well, since having to add a clasp would have ruined the aesthetic for me.

I also worked on a brand new kit:
I've taught this as a class before, so I have the instructions, so really all that needed to be done was to gather up (and by "gather up" I mean "buy") enough beads to stitch  a sample and pack up some kits.

I also reworked two prior kits in a different colourway:

These were quite popular when I first released them, probably a combination of the fact that they're both fairly easy, relatively fast (no seed-beading is fast compared to, say, putting a large bead onto a chain and calling it a necklace) and on the inexpensive side, so I hope these will prove so too. This colourway is more to my taste than the other two, which is probably Reason Number One why it happened at all.

On the knitting front, I'm within an inch of finishing The Socks That Would Not End. I tweaked the stitch pattern (the decorative lozenges down the front) to very good effect, and now I don't love sock number one quite as much as sock number two, but I would sooner count grains of superfine sugar than reknit the sock one more time, so it will have to do. Besides, ninety percent of the time it will be inside shoes or boots and under jeans so really, it's rather fussy of me even to consider it.

I'm also done with the very bright mitred squares, having joined front to back, and am now negotiating stitch counts with myself. I'm a great fan of the Pythagorean formula, finding it very useful, but unfortunately its solution dictates more stitches being picked up along the hypotenuses (four of them) than will be pleasant to perform, so I'm considering Creative Shaping whereby I increase the uncomfortable extra stitches later.

I love being at the tail end of knitting projects (it feels like I'm there with both of them, though in reality it's only the socks that are nearing completion) because then I get to wander through old and new ideas, peruse the stash, dig out old knitting magazines and books, contemplating the next project. I'm pretty sure I know what I'll do.

A few SOARs ago I cast on for a sweater at the airport before the flight out (this would have been on a Sunday, as always, since SOAR runs Sunday through Sunday) and wore the finished sweater to dinner the following Saturday night. To be sure, it was a fitted cap-sleeved tee-shirt with a sweeping vee neck and no finishing besides weaving in threads, and it was on fairly large needles (4.5 mm if I recall correctly), so it was no great feat, but the point (I'm getting there) is that it was a very successful and flattering (on me, and on Julia, as it turns out, though I have only her word for this) design which I repeated once more, this time using a lovely cream cotton-rayon yarn, a yarn that highlights both cotton's matte cloudiness as well as rayon's gleam. Sadly, it was badly behaved going through the dryer (an accident on my part, as I only ever machine dry my handspun cotton, since that too is part of its finishing so as to preclude future accidents of shrinkage such as this), and as Julia tends to like her tops (and by that I mean clothing, don't go there!) shorter than I do, she is now the happy owner of my cream tee-shirt sweater.

And I want another one.

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