Flashbacks - more embroidery

In addition to the small projects floating around, I've also finished a fair few big projects. These two are among my favourites. Just plain cross-stitch, but I love the colours.

A trio of cats, my first big finished piece:

A birth sampler:

This one is very special. I made it for my mother a few years ago for her birthday. You see, I'd discovered that although she's made many birth samplers over the years for lots of babies, no-one had ever made one for her! I picked this one out because she's very into astrology. I spent hours poring over astrological charts to work out the details. Thankfully my grandmother keeps the family birth certificates or I'd never have gotten the time details in secret! It came out quite nicely, I think, although the designer didn't leave much space for the words - I had to rechart a section of it.

Flashbacks, part one

While I was visiting my mother, I took the opportunity to photograph many of my pre-blog needlework projects. Most of what I have there is embroidery, but there are some exceptions!
A few years ago I was helping mum with one of the perennial rounds of organizing, cleaning and purging, this time in all of her sewing stash. We found a bunch of little kits, things that had been freebies with some of her embroidery magazines. Since at the time I wasn't knitting and had very little in the way of embroidery supplies, I swiped them!

A free embroidery needle case that I use to store my sharp quilting needles:

A scissors fob:

A little framed jobbie that mum has hanging in her sewing room:

Onwards and upwards

Onto the first big stripe of the ripple bedspread now - 33.5 rows remaining! Each row does take a while though, and I'm still not supposed to be doing much crochet. Darned elbow.

I'm partway through the 6th repeat of the shawl right now. Still motoring on, though I've started having flashbacks to the black dropstitch shawl I finished in May last year. I seem to remembering whining about hating dropstitch patterns and swearing I'd never make another shawl using them. Turns out, though, that the black shawl I made so unwillingly has become one of my favourite garments. And hub's Granny is worth it.

something new

One of the other nice things about mum visiting is that she brought over 3 of my partially completed embroidery projects. (And no, we won't be discussing how many partial embroidery projects I have.) These 3 were my favourites. One is just a plain piece of counted cross stitch, a picture of Henry the 8th and his 6 wives. Remarkable only because it is the very first project I ever purchased entirely on my own.

There's a bellpull spot sampler that is so complicated I need supervision for parts of it. (I've never done any fancy hemstitching before, nor worked with hardware for finishing.) It has the first few lines of one of my favourites poems:

"What is this life, if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare?"

I like it because taking time to look around is really important to me. Plus the sampler is gorgeous. :D

The third is an alphabet sampler with a verse backstitched around the edge. The gist of it is "Read me poems, it makes me happy". I worked about half of this in a week a few Christmases ago and then just put it away. It's silk on cream-coloured linen, and I just thought it was a bad thing to have in a dorm and then in a student shared house. But now that I have my own home and my only roommate is my (mostly) responsible and careful spouse, I decided that it was time to finally finish it. So, this morning before I went to work, I mounted it in my stretcher frame, found all the silks, remembered how the pattern went, and started working! It's even quicker than I'd remembered, though that may have something to do with the 6 years of intervening needlework experience... I'd like to get a good chunk of it done this weekend, and hopefully I could finish it in time for Christmas!

In other news, I got two parcels in the post this morning. I've been doing a bit more swapping on Ravelry, and received 2 skeins of Regia sock yarn in a lovely mottled red/orange, complete with DPNs to knit them with. I also got 2 balls of ivory Kidsilk Haze. Amusingly, these are exactly the same colour as the 2 I found for half price at John Lewis the other day. So, now I have enough ivory KHS to make a really good-sized shawl. Now, to figure out which pattern I want to knit...

Mosses and lichens

Back when I was at school, I had a thing for botany. My biology teacher would provide me with woodland manuals, field guides, advanced textbooks... Anything, as long as it had stuff about plants in it. I abandoned my love of botany at A-Level because I really didn't want to have to study anything else in the biology lab. Practical experiments are not my thing, for lots of reasons.

What does this have to do with any form of needlework? Well, when I showed this to my husband, he commented that it was all the colours of lichen. And mosses and lichens were always my favourites.

Of course, if you look at it from this angle, you can just see the fabulous egg-carton effect of unblocked lace.

After a good bath and a rinse with hair conditioner*, my somewhat scratchy shawl now feels a lot softer and drapier. 20 minutes of pinning and stretching got me this marvellous thing:

And now that the ends are woven in and it's all dry, I can proudly present my finished Noro Triangle!

Pattern - Shetland Triangle by Evelyn Clark from the book Wrap Style

Yarn - Noro Kureyon Sock, 1 skein (1 golf ball-sized lump left over)

Needles - 4.5mm 1m Addi Turbo circular

Pattern mods - I knit 10 repeats of the fircone chart instead of 8 and added a single row of garter stitch to the end of the edging to help prevent curling. Bind-off was as per instructions in the Swallowtail pattern.

I loved knitting a shawl with fingering weight yarn. Unlike with the laceweight, I was never worried about it breaking or snagging. I threw it into a bag quite happily, left it on the couch, sat it on the floor, gave it a thorough scrubbing in the sink. Plus, it seemed to go much faster and I got a bigger shawl for fewer stitches. And it's a one-skein project! Love it! I have a sneaking suspicion that I may end up using my laceweight up and then knitting lace exclusively in sock yarn from now on...

I was happy to discover that the yarn seems to be colourfast. There was no dye in the water when I'd finished soaking, and none of the colours bled onto one another - not even where bright green butted up against white. I had been a bit concerned about that.

A 1m circular needle is ideal for shawl-making. It was approaching the point of being so long it was annoying, but even at the end my stitches weren't at all bunched up on the needle.

*A tip that I read somewhere suggested washing scratchy yarn in human hair conditioner. It sounded a bit weird, but it's not when you think about it. Conditioner is designed to smooth down the outer layer of the hair so that it becomes smooth and shiny. Human hair is a protein fiber. So is wool. Ergo, hair conditioner should have similar effects on both. I wouldn't want to try the theory on silk, which always seems to be the exception to the rule of protein fibers, but then I've never met a scratchy silk.

A glutton for punishment

I am getting into the reward theory of finishing knitting. Work on afghan at pub, knit a few rounds of sock at home. Work on fingerless gloves during lunch hour, work on socks at home. Rinse and repeat.

I was looking over my 12 projects, and the biggest difficulty is going to be the two "get rid of a big lump of yarn" goals - the acrylic and the Dr Who leftovers. But for opposite reasons! With the Dr Who yarn, there is so little left of each that it is hard to plan what to make that will take advantage of the colourwork possibilities. Finishing the gloves will use up a good chunk, and hopefully will use up the last of the beige Cashmerino. That will leave me with 6 partial balls of yarn. The green and yellow are going to be used for a pair of fingerless gloves for my mum, and then once they are done I may go back to my original plan of making a scrap scarf for the spouse. That way I can quit worrying about running out!
The acrylic, on the other hand, is so plentiful that I have trouble figuring out what to do with it. The afghan is taking up a good-sized chunk, but it will leave many mostly-used-up balls at the end. I'm planning to make a cushion cover to match the blue blanket I finished last summer, again to give to my friend Lucy. And that will use up the second pillow-form that's lurking at the top of the werdrobe in my living room. And I'm making legwarmers. And a stripey Christmas stocking out of the leftovers from the Nancy Bush yumminess of the autumn. But there will still be a ton of stuff left to figure out what to do with!

I'm still looking forward to the other projects. The sweater will, I suspect, be lots of fun once I get over the hump of joining 320 stitches in a round without twisting them. The Monkeys are great, largely due to the wonder of the yarn. The Pomatomi are still ever so tempting, and I'm planning to spend my two days off next week working on the black shawl. Which, technically, will also use up some acrylic! I'm planning to spend Easter Closure knitting the half-hexagon shawl. It's the sort of project that once I've picked it up, I don't want to put it down again for a long time. So a week is about ideal.

It's funny, I've just remembered what I did last year for Easter Closure. I spent the week sunbathing in my garden while reading a stack of library books and knitting on the blue blanket. I've come a long way since then!