No longer *Tea* Towels

I love coffee.  It is a staple of  my morning.  Without it, I am not a kind person.

I have one of those cool little coffee ground disposal things, which is a great idea in a cafe.  But on a countertop, where the surrounding walls are cream coloured, it’s a sucky idea.  No one tells you that when you are bashing your group handle on the disposal, that it sends droplets of coffee e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.

So, my solution was to cover the whole operation with a towel.  Well great idea in theory, but now I have towels with lovely coffee stains.

So, decided I would try out my serviette podge.  I got a set of three towels and some coffee picture serviettes (napkins), and this is what I made

I know I know, they’re white.  But I wasn’t sure how the pictures would turn out on a dark towel.  The podge I used was from Eager Crafters who sell at craft shows all around NZ. It’s a bit steep at $15 a bottle, but so far so good.  Hopefully though,  I am the only one that can spot the mistakes 😀

I’ve finished up some knitting, but it has to be gifted before I can post it here.  And I’ve done some other things too, but they need to be gifted first as well.  So all I have left are some stitch markers I made, and of course, the standard dishcloth that is a good-to-do-between-projects project, knit in Cleckheaton bamboo.

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The Difference Between a Groove and a Rut

10. in the groove, Slang.

a.	in perfect functioning order.

I like it when I am in a groove.  I cruise along, pump out the projects, have direction on what I want to do next.

This is what I equate as being in a groove:

Currently however, my groove seems to instead resemble this:

Between life and sick kids, I seem to have no crafting direction.  I have lots of plans, but am stuck on all of them.

Current WIPs:

Clockwise from top left:

a. An attempted bag creation in Noro

b. A dishcloth for a friend

c. A pair of small longies, awaiting for me to decide what kind of cuff/frill to do, AND to find the AWOL purple wool.

d. Recycled Sari silk that MUST be made into something beautiful.  What I made was crap, so it was frogged.

e. A top for KT4 that is fly by the seat of my pants and probably won’t work type of project.

f. A granny square dishcloth that I messed up

g. Wool from the newest Yarn Swap on TNN.  It will be a bag, with the circles as the sides, but the rose part is having issues, and hence it still sits.

h, i and j: Three bags that were at this EXACT stage before I started knitting the Wicked.  I want them to be special, so want just the right finishing touches.  So there they sit.

So I decided to try some decoupage.  Note to self, don’t do it on something shiny!  What totally poor work!

And now I am onto this wool:

And I think I am finally out of the rut, and back onto smooth pavement.  Stay tuned.

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Wicked

Well I finally bit the bullet and cast on my Wicked, a top-down raglan pattern from Zephyr Style.

I’ve been itchin’ to take that photo for ages, as my favourite mug was so fitting.

This was my first adult-sized knit, so I was quite nervous.  So many patterns are just hit or miss, but when you are using a large amount of yarn for a pattern, you want to have a nice result.

Since I knit mostly small items, I don’t have large amount of any one yarn.  A friend posted a link to a TradeMe auction for 13 balls of  pink Wendy 100% cotton yarn, with pickup just a 35 minute drive away.  PERFECT.  I was heading out to a knitting night almost two weeks ago that was in the same area where I needed to go to pick up the yarn, so picked up the yarn, headed to the knittaccino, and walked in with my new stash of yarn.  I was proudly showing it off when a few people started laughing.  Turns out the woman who listed the auction was in the room.  New Zealand is small I tell ya!

So the cotton yarn was DK, instead of the recommended worsted weight, so planned to go up one size in the pattern.  I ended up doing the raglan increases for the smaller size (L instead of XL) and it was fitting fine.  I did 6 decrease sets, some straight rows and 16 increase sets (oh that pear shaped body) at the bottom.

I was worried about the cast off.  I figured I could use a larger needle to increase the stretch of the cast off, but traditional cast off isn’t very decorative.  So I opted for a sewn cast off that is done to look like the long tail cast on.  It was a mission, I have to say.  The bottom of the sweater took a good 3 hours to cast off, with the always present fear that I would run out of yarn, seeing I am perpetually underestimating everything.  But it came out nice, and even has more stretch then my normal cast off edge.  Definitely worth the effort I reckon.

I am so not a photographer, so apologies for the pics, but these two are closer up pics of the pocket and the sleeve.

Will definitely be doing this pattern again for next winter.  Top-down raglan knits are just plain WICKED!

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