French Press Cozy

This was a quick project. Finally I made a knit that my husband actually used. It only took me 25 years or so.

Over the Summer, we did a full kitchen renovation. The space was ripped out to the bare walls. In the preparatory packing, we discarded a lot of old kitchen appliances and so forth.

When we got access to the new kitchen, my husband went out and got an expensive new coffee maker. He hated it. Said the coffee tasted funny. We when through soakings and vinegar rinses. Eventually, Ian went out and bought a French Press, which he LOVES. It cost about 1/4 the price of the fancy coffee maker, which is sitting in the basement. The only drawback is that the coffee cools quickly.

Hence, the cozy. It was knit of aran weight wool blend yarn. It is a simple 6" x 10" rectangle with a seed stitch border that ties onto the press. It keeps the coffee warm long enough for my husband to drink the entire pot. He does not share.

Addendum: I gave Ian a steel, thermal French Press for Christmas. The old press lets us make enough coffee for more people or will be used for tea.

Barakh

Ok, I've REALLY been procrastinating. This is the finished sample pouch. The Hebrew lettering for Barckh/Baruch is on the bottom of the pouch. It took me forever to figure out the correct way to knit this. First, I had to find a source for the word Baruch in Hebrew. Since I have no working knowledge of the language, this was difficult. The next step was to find charted Hebrew letters. I was eventually able to find the charts in a site that specializes in needlepoint. I'll post links below once I find them again. I did most of the research during the early Autumn and probably finished the knitting before November. The pouch was knitted entirely in laceweight yarn on size zero double pointed needles.

I knit the pouch using Fair Isle techniques. I hated every minute of the stranding. It was so tedious. In retrospect, this pouch should have been knit in the stripes shown, with the lettering added in duplicate stitch. It would have been much easier. Final note: The pouch was a gauge/size prototype for a bookmark. Not what I wanted. It was too thick. The stranded yarn and circular construction made it too dense for a proper bookmark.

Finally Leaves I Like

Finally I have knit a leaf that I liked. I've been playing with leaves for several years and quite a few $$$$$$ in books and patterns and yarn. In fact, I remember an earlier blog post about it.
This leaf was knit using Knitpicks Chroma Yarn. I chose the part of the yarn to get the color change. This particular skein is a leftover from a woven project.
Precious leaves have been made in worsted weight yarns in a variety of color schemes. Variegated yarn looks like clown spew. I finally ended up throwing out a good deal of the horribleness.
The leaf that I like is two sided, circularly knit with a fingering weight yarn. The leaf lies flat and have two smooth sides. For me, that is needed.
I'm now working on a leaf bookmark in Knitpicks Shadow Forest Heather, a laceweight yarn. I'm very happy with that and will post a photo as soon as it is finished. The laceweight project is the sample for a very, very special bookmark project I want to start.
I'll be alternating knitting and beading for a bit longer.

Beads, Pounds of Beads

I haven't been knitting. I've been learning about beading with a needle. Knitting is easier. This project is about 50% done. I will continue working on it. The skills are useful. It's done in tubular peyote with Czech seed beads.
If you are a certain type of geek, you will recognize the color pattern.
I am thinking about doing some snake patterns in this technique. That's been on my list for years. I will need to decide whether beads or knitting are best.

No Progress

I have done no knitting. None, nein, nyet, nada. Now it's nearly Autumn and I need to get caught up. Big time. The kitchen renovation is in the last stages. That means that the kitchen is operating, but everything is disorganized, in the basement, scattered, lost, packed, or incomplete. Does not provide motivation to spend my free time either unpacking stuff and figuring out where it goes, or working around construction materials. Thankfully, the contractors showed up yesterday and put shelves in the cabinets, so I could actually load them with stuff. Only took say, 2-3 weeks.

The phot shows my latest acquisition. For months I have been ogling the Knitpicks website, looking at the lovely colors. I simply cannot justify buying more yarn. I have yarn all over. I haven't been knitting lately. So what! I promised to make a gift for a dear friend and ordered! It all laceweight yarn in lovely, heathered colors. Project is in the planning stages.

I am also planning a bead project. I mention it here because I plan on doing beadwork to emulate knitting. I saw a photo on Craftzine and just loved the project. It did not come with instructions, so I'm planning that, too. In this case, the planning is exactly like designing a knit project. Each bead equals one stitch. Instead of calculating yards of yard, I calculate quantities of beads. After that, we'll see. The beads are on order.

Bauhaus Inspired

I forgot to post my latest project in progress. This is my third woven piece. Nothing comes out quite like I had planned, yet. The design was inspired be photos of weavings done at the Bauhaus School. After that idea, nothing else worked as I had intended.
I bought the yarn on impulse. Foolish me. My son, Andrew is home form college for the summer. In theory, he is painting for his portfolio in the basement. This requires an outlay of money on my part for supplies of paint, canvas, and sundries. Andrew and I dutifully head out to shop. He goes to get canvas and I head for the yarn, thinking that I'll just take a look..... Add another $90.00 to the bill. I got yarn in beautiful teals and purples and grey and green. Very soft. I got a lot because I wanted to make a 20" wide long stole. I took a glance at the label and saw the word "wool" and did not read carefully. Besides, that, I was pressed for time.
Comes the time to weave...and "Oh noes"! The yarn was only 25% wool, mostly acrylic. I took a second look at the brand name and.....I should have known that this was a company that produced acrylic yarns. I took another look at the yarn- it is a cabled yarn. Oops. Anyway, I just kept making mistake after mistake and learned lesson after lesson. The final woven piece is about 20" by 45", so it is a reasonable size, but definitely not a stole. The cabled yarn looks OK, but the texture of the weave is different from what I had expected. This fabric has a loose, rather unstable weave. It's nice and soft, but it won't felt and I'd be a fool to cut it. I've been folding the fabric various ways (to hide mistakes) and I will eventually sew it up and line it to make a bag. I need a new knitting bag, anyway. The one that I have been using is getting worn. The current bag is a knitted project from August 2008, knit during the Olympics. It's seen daily use for three years. I can retire it.
In other news, I have not been working on much, lately. We are in the midst of a kitchen renovation and the entire house is unsettled and in an uproar. At the moment, we have had not kitchen for two weeks. Everything is packed up and distributed in the basement, in the dining room/staging area and in the living room. Chaos.

Sorta Like a Tartan

Second weaving project. It's wearable for the most part. It's not a tartan, but gives the same feeling.
I am very much playing with color and color interactions right now. I am also not getting anything accomplished. I just took an entire week off from knitting and weaving and....just sorta spaced out.
Maybe I'll blame it on the kitchen. We are about to have the kitchen renovated. The past couple weeks have been consumed with planning and driving that process. If I don't pay attention, balls get dropped.
The renovation is required now. The house needed work from the moment we got it. At this point, the kitchen resembles the set of the old sitcom Green Acres. For real. We just need to get it over, done.
Back to the important details.... The scarf is knit with sock yarn. I used KnitPicks Palette for the warp and a skein of Chroma for the weft. The Chroma has long color changes and that makes the scarf interesting. The tartan effect comes from the few strands of light blue that I added, just to break the monotony. This is still very much a beginner's project. I am really more interested in the color effects than the fabric structure. For know. I have a real problem with some of the weaving books I have seen. The Seventies called and they want their crafts back. I simply won't make something that says 1970's macrame, avocado green, and burnt orange. I am looking for something very different. I'll have to make it myself.