Advent Christmas Music Playlist 2022

This is all Jean’s fault.

She mentioned a playlist I made back in 2014, and I thought ohhhhhh, that was fun! I should do another one. So I did, and you can listen to it when you check out my advent calendar December 1 through 25!

So here it is:

Advent Christmas Music Playlist on Apple iTunes

I hope you like it! There’s quite a -ahem- variety in the list. New tunes, old tunes, and especially tunes that will make you laugh. I hope. It’ll definitely get you in the Christmas spirit!

Advent Calendar 2022 Announcement

Can you believe 2022 is almost over?? It’s hard to think that another year has passed. It seems like just last month I was announcing that the advent calendar for 2021 was just around the corner.

Advent Calendar 2022 is almost here! This year I have done something slightly different. For the first time, this year not only will my advent calendar have a FREE pattern on each day, it will also have a lovely PAID pattern too, which you can buy! I wanted to have a way to let the wonderful designers out there to be recognized, and if you want to, pay them for their fabulous  designs. Let me know what you think! I’d also love to hear what you’ve made from either free or paid patterns.

This is what each page will look like:

Every day from December 1 to December 25 a new page will appear. Just click where it says “Free Pattern Here” or “Paid Pattern Here” to go to the pattern. 

I hope you have a good time with my advent goodies. I certainly had fun choosing them! Have a very merry Christmas and knit the spirit of the holiday!

Squirrelly Time of Year

Hi there big guy. I’m looking at you. Sigh.

Squirrels have been chewing at our bird feeders, trying to get enough seeds to put away for the winter. I know, squirrels have to eat too, but the poor little birdies are hungry also. And the price of bird seed has gone up a lot! 

Anyway. I haven’t been knitting much, but I thought I should post so you don’t worry or forget me or anything.

The Eastport Pullover by Stacey Warner, the sweater that I was working on, is going along. I finished the back and I am a little over halfway done the front.

It’s a really fun knit. This sweater was originally called Silver Birch, but Stacey resized it and renamed it Eastport Pullover. I like how it’s easy enough to watch television and knit, but it comes out looking fantastic. Plus, the yarn (Fleece Artist Chinook) is wonderful.

 I have a couple new things that I started. First is a pair of socks. I’m using some hand dyed sock yarn that I bought in 2009 in Bar Harbor. It has pretty autumnal colors that made me want to start knitting with it:

I bought the pattern for the socks I’m making from AnnaKnitter Yarns on Etsy; it’s called Helgen and I think it means something to do with dragons, but I could be wrong. Anna lives in Germany and speaks very good English. You should watch her podcast. I have a lot of respect for people who speak more than one language; I took three years of French in high school, took a semester in college, and was brought up in a small town that was more than half populated by French Canadians, but I cannot speak French.

The socks went pretty fast when I started, but I have kind of lost interest in them, so I’m only about halfway down the foot of the first sock. It will go faster when I have the first one done. I find the second sock always goes faster; I know, I’m weird, but that’s how my mind works. I will never suffer from Second Sock Syndrome.

Poor lonely sock.

 I love these Lyyke Driftwood double pointed needles. They’ve got just the right pointy bit, are lightweight, have the size clearly marked on them, and they let the stitches slide easily but also at the same time they have just the right amount of “grabbiness” so your stitches always feel secure. I love them. I’m knitting these socks on size 2.50mm, which is US size 1.5.

I also started a Hitchhiker scarf, because it’s easy and there is no pattern to fight the yarn, which is the centerpiece of the scarf.

I’m using Expression Fiber Arts Mirage fingering (60% superwash merino, 20% baby camel, 10% cashmere, 10%silk) in the color Introspective. (Sadly, they don’t have Mirage in fingering weight, but they do have it in sport weight. They have lots of luscious yarns in fingering weight too!) It’s a skein that’s been sitting in my stash for a couple years and now it’s time to be used. Our house is staying at 50 degrees this winter, and it’s time to use scarves!

Speaking of being cold, I finished my handspun fingerless gloves a while ago. They’re beautiful! They felt itchy when I first put them on, but after blocking them, they softened up.

I’m thinking about doing another Advent Calendar this year. I’ll let you know if I get it done. Have a good day, and Happy Knitting!

A Wonderful Season for Knitting

It’s November! Time to be scared if you’re a turkey!

Typepad (which I use for my blog) was acting funny a couple weeks ago, getting worse until a couple days ago when it was hit with a big Distributed Denial of Service attack, which took down the whole site. They are working hard to get everything sorted, but it won’t look right for a bit. Please bear with us.

So, I abandoned my yellow hat I was knitting out of the last skein of Aunt Mildred’s mohair. I actually threw the yarn away, because that skein was too brittle to knit with. It was a good thing that I didn’t start with that skein, because I would have thought that it all was bad and thrown the whole lot away. 

I started a shawlette out of a skein that I don’t remember where it came from. It was a navy blue hand dyed tonal yarn, which I think had nylon in it, so it must have been a sock yarn. The pattern I chose was Easy Goes It by Michelle Higgins. It was pretty fast to knit, and I added a couple inches to the pattern, because why not.

Then … oh my goodness, look at this beautiful yarn:

It’s gorgeous. I love this yarn! This is the yarn I spun from the 112 grams of hand dyed merino fiber. I wish you could feel how soft it is, how the colors blend together, how perfect this ball of yarn is. 

I decided to knit a hat with it. After perusing the many, many hat patterns available, I decided to knit the Dean Street Hat by Nina Machlin Dayton. I put this hat pattern in my queue before I had my stroke, so over 12 years ago, but never got around to knitting it. Somehow the thought of doing all those cables threw me off knitting it because I thought it required too much attention.  Oh was I wrong.

If I had bothered to simply read the pattern, I would have found that the cables are actually a pattern stitch that is easily done which leads the eye to believe that it makes cables, but it really doesn’t. 

This is now one of my go-to hat patterns. It’s fun to knit, it’s easy, and I love it. And, it was a free pattern.

While I was on a handspun yarn high, I grabbed my skein of lovely goodness that I finished before the yummy brown skein, which was a beautiful rosy golden color with bits of purple and blue. 

I started a pair of fingerless mittens with it. I only have two pairs of fingerless mittens, and I need more, since our house is set to a much lower temperature than in the past due to the high cost of fuel. 

I’ve caked it up and started a pair of Bamboo Field Mitts by Holly Terrell. I’m about halfway up the cuff of the first one. I chose this pattern because it has some texture, but not enough to detract from the beautiful yarn. 

In my last post I said I was going to knit one of the sweaters that has been burning a hole in my stash: Silver Birch by Stacey Warner. I’ve knit it before for Stacey, but I loved the pattern and the yarn so much that I needed to make one for myself.

The yarn is Fleece Artist Chinook, a 100% superwash merino that is just Y*U*M*M*Y. I adore this yarn. I set about to knit a gauge swatch even though I had knit a gauge swatch before for the same exact sweater; I found in running a yarn shop that different skeins of same yarn can vary slightly in weight, especially if they are hand dyed, as this was. Plus I needed a new coaster for my coffee cup. I chose the color Marine.

 

I’m about halfway up the back.

I love the color.

I hope you’re having a good November and staying reasonably warm!