Knitting Projects: Cabled Hat

This is a much more recent project, a hat made for my sister for Christmas.  We were fortunate to have my family come visit us in France for Christmas - making the holidays away from home not just bearable, but an adventure!  We spent a week in our city of Montpellier, France, then we all traveled together in southern Germany for the second week.  As this Christmas was exceptional (and suitcase space was limited), we decided to keep gift-giving more simple.  Each person bought stocking stuffers for another person in the family, souvenirs and such that we found during our travels.  Great idea!

Spinning Projects: Pink Merino

Here's a spinning project that I tried hard to finish before we left in September.  I had to pass it on to my mom to finish.  Good thing she's taken up spinning too!  It's been really fun to learn this new craft together.  My sister, on the other hand, is not the crafty type.  She's been dragged through many a hobby store, sometimes patiently and sometimes not.  At least she's figured out how to benefit from it - casually mention you'd like a hat made out of such-and-such yarn, a quilt made out of such-and-such fabric, etc.  My mom and I are always looking for excuses to take on new projects!

Anyway, she was a good sport when we dragged her along to that fiber farm back in the spring.  She picked out a bright pink 8oz merino roving and asked for someone to make her some slippers.  The plan was for me to spin it and my mom to knit the slippers.  I got so far as to spin one spool-full, experiment using a ball-winder to make a center-pull ball, spin a 2-ply yarn using the ball (one strand from the middle, one strand from the outside), and spin another spool-full of singles.  Here are a few more photos of that process.

Craft Projects: Paper Snowflakes

Here's a simple little project I did as a free way to decorate for Christmas.  True, it's a little late to be sharing Christmas ideas, but consider it a celebration of seeing a few rare snowflakes in Montpellier today! There's nothing revolutionary about paper snowflakes, but I think these turned out pretty well!  A couple years ago, a friend taught me to fold the paper into sixths, not fourths, which makes all the difference.  There's plenty of good tutorials out there that a simple Google search should find you, but if you do have questions about how I made these, feel free to comment!

Crochet Projects: Baby Blanket

Here's a pretty simple crochet baby blanket that I made for our then-soon-to-be-born nephew in September.  This was the first crochet project I've done in quite a while.  Since starting to spin, I've been inspired to try knitting again.  Although I love the process of crocheting, and I'm much better at fixing my mistakes, I do prefer the look of knitted things and how home-spun yarn seems to go further in a knitted project.  Nevertheless, for a large project like a blanket, crocheting is such a better, faster choice for me.  It was nice to learn a new stitch (the harlequin stitch) too!

I knew our nephew's bedroom would be nautical themed, so I chose a striped-ish pattern in nautical blue and white, with the gray to soften it a little.  The blue stripe is off-set from the middle just a bit, which makes it a bit more interesting and modern.  The pattern can be found here (you have to be a member of Bernat to see it).

It looks like he's enjoying it!  (Photo cred goes to my brother-in-law)

Knitting Projects: Hat and Legwarmers

Hello from France!  As predicted, a lot of time has passed since my last post.  I've been crafting quite a bit, but have not been focused enough to photograph and document everything.  Now I'm finally getting organized enough to share some things, with hopefully a few regular posts to come.

First of all, here's a project I finished just before coming to France.  With our nephew due to be born a few weeks after we left, I wanted to give him something homemade beforehand.  My next post will be about the blanket I made him.  Not wanting his 2-year-old sister to feel left out, I made her something too - a hat and matching legwarmers.  She was in rare form the night of our good-bye party, and I've never seen her so excited for something I made her.  They fit her really well, and hopefully she's enjoying them in our absence.

The hat and legwarmers are made out of a beautiful single-ply wool yarn, perhaps Noro (the yarn was given to me without the label).  I haven't worked much with variegated yarn, and the colors really made the monotonous legwarmers a lot more fun to make.  I like how they're just a little bit different.

Here are the patterns for both:
Hat pattern
Legwarmer pattern