oh joyous season!

the season of sleeping in! i have now been off work for two whole weeks, and it is nice! sleeping willy nilly, time to do stuff. so far, that has mainly meant cooking and baking and cleaning (well not so much cleaning, really) and hosting and shopping. but the house has almost recovered from the holiday influx, so it is just about time to get back into project mode. currently on the go: the sewing table project. the base is assembled (and i've already started piling crap on the shelves) - next step is to attach the top, and then all that's left are the gatelegs, hinges, and edging. speaking of which, i need a mitre box. just when i think i have all the hardware i need, something else pops up...

next: finish painting the room, and refinish/reupholster the comfy chair. i can do all of that in two weeks, right? right?!?

free knitting patterns webring

since i have *two* whole free knitting patterns up here now, i thought i'd add filmcraft to the free knitting patterns webring.

check out the rest of the ring for more free patterns!




This site in the Free Knitting Patterns Netring
is owned by filmcraft.


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double-knitting explained

okay, here's my attempt at explaining the double-knit tubes technique i used to make the kodama dolls.

basically, what you do is cast on an even number of stitches, in this case 6.



carefully slip it off your needle,



fold it in half,



and then slide it back on to your needle, alternating stitches from each half. so, your original six stitches get picked up in this order: st 1, st 6, st 2, st 5, st 3, st 4.



to make the kodama dolls, you start by knitting both legs at once, each with a separate ball of yarn. so, repeat the steps above so that you have two sets of stitches - one for each leg.





now, the tricky part.

when you start knitting, you keep the two halves separate by knitting one stitch, bringing the yarn to front,



slipping one purlwise,



bringing the yarn to the back,



knitting one stitch,



bringing the yarn to front, slipping one purlwise, bringing the yarn to the back. keeping the above example, you’d knit st 1, slip st 6, knit st 2, slip st 5, knit st 3, slip st 4, then turn, and knit st 4, slip st 3, knit st 5, slip st 2, knit st 6, and slip st 1. it takes a bit of practice to keep the two halves separate – it’s easy to get the stitches caught around one another – so take it slow.

once you've done a few rows, it's a little clearer to see how what you're knitting looks like a tube - whether you look at it from front or back, it will look like a strip of stockinette three stitches wide, even though you have six stitches on the needle.

and this is important to remember – you're only knitting half a row at a time! what feels like knitting two rows is actually only knitting one row, since you’re only working half the stitches. so when you’re knitting this pattern, remember this if you’re counting rows as you knit them – and count the rows up from the bottom to double-check your progress.

there’s a really great description of how to use double-knitting to knit two socks at once at knitty. it also has better pictures - not blurry like mine!

kodama!

now that loudxmouse has received the package i sent for the miyazaki swap, i'm going to post my blurry pics here!

loudxmouse said that she was keen on kodama, among other things. kodama are little sprites that look like this:

so i decided, why not recreate that image as a handbag?

i made the handbag out of a few different-but-similar shades of dark green fabric. i appliqued a few leafy bits on, and to hold the kodama dolls, i made leaf-edged pockets, and top-stitched them so they'd stay nice and pointy:

then, i knitted and felted some little kodama dolls to tuck into the shrubbery:

here's a close up of my favourite little guy:

again, i chickened out of trying to felt them in the washing machine, and just did them in the bathroom sink - it only took fifteen minutes! - and then propped them in front a heating vent to dry quickly.

i've written up a pattern for knitting the wee kodama dolls, if anyone is interested. i made up the pattern using the two-needle tube double-knitting technique that erin explained to me a while ago. i also took a couple of snaps of the work-in-progress, which i'll put up tomorrow, since double-knitting is easy to do once you get it, but tricky to figure out the first time.

"f***ing awesome!"

that's what tg said when i showed him the awesome totoro hat and soot-sprite bootees that i got from loudxmouse for the craftster miyazaki swap! super cool and super cute!!



can't wait to have a real baby to put in them! in the meantime, they fit my old bear pretty well... mum made "poony" for me when i was an infant, and he's still going strong, waiting for the offspring to try to chew off his ears:



and here's a close-up so you can get a better look at the hat. he's awesome!



whee! i'm so happy! in other good mail news, two of the other things i was waiting for in the mail - both of wish i spent cold hard cash on, so i was getting antsy - also arrived in the mail. we're down to a missing-mail count of only one letter. a good thing too, since i bought some sari yarn on monday, and as i was paypal-ing the seller, i started to think: "am i crazy? my mail never arrives! what the hell am i doing!" but now i am at peace again.

now, off to post pics on craftster...

whee and boo

whee! my craftster miyazaki swap stuff finally arrived! i don't have time to open it now (i should be running to the subway as i type), but will open & post some pics when i get home tonight. now, if only the stuff i ordered from ebay and the letter my mum sent would arrive...

also, boo. on the weekend i posted about my adventures in carpentry while the paint was drying on my project out in the garage. when i went back out to finish the job, my drill... died. just stopped turning on. grr! we opened it up and looked inside and it looked fine, so i've no idea what the problem is. so near and yet so far...

wow, it's a while since i've updated, hasn't it?

but it's not for lack of activity. i seem to be consumed by two impulses lately: nesting and napping. and nesting involves a fair amount of work! right now (and for the past couple of weekends... i find i really can't push myself these days, need lots of downtime) i'm working on building a proper sewing table.

have you ever noticed how most of the craft boards rarely touch woodworking? there's almost zero carpentry talk on craftster. for all the feminist talk of the stitch'n'bitch gals, there is still this huge gender divide when it comes to crafts. there are maybe 5 guys for every hundred gals posting on the knitting boards, and women still seem to avoid the more heavy-lifting crafts like the plague. i don't get it. it counts as "around the house" work, so shouldn't carpentry be traditionally done by women more than men? the only historical reason i can think of offhand for why this would be is that most of the traditionally female arts are doable while baby-sitting, but carpentry... well, not so much. the tools are loud, there's all that sawdust in the air (i dream of someday getting one of these), they don't make masks and goggles in infant sizes, etc.

but at least until thumper gets here, power tools are fun! we all need furniture! and more importantly, we all need places to work on our crafts and store our stashes!

while the garage fills with my lumber/varnish/screws/poswer tools stash, the soon-to-be-baby room is over-run with yarn and fabric. so, i'm building a sewing table (it sill be so nice to have something the right size for laying out patterns!) to put in thumper's room, with storage underneath for all of my stuff, and - this is the clever part - gate-legs so that it will fold down to a reasonable size (this is not a big room we're talking about) and conceal my crap as well. i am very very excited!!

also to come - pics of miyazaki swap stuff (when the packages arrive at their destinations). stay tuned!