Blossom Rug -- a new pattern!

Someone mentioned that my Blossom Facecloth would make a cute rug if the pattern was upsized. Hmm...could I do it? Yes!

This fun and easy pattern gives you a quick-to-knit flower throw rug. The rug requires doubled worsted weight cotton yarn in two colors (two balls of each color). I used most of 4 balls of Sugar'n Cream with size 11 (8 mm) needles). You'll need size 11 circulars in 24" and 16" lengths and a set of double points.

The petals are shaped with short rows. You start by casting on enough stitches for all the petals onto a 24" circular. Keep this cast on loose if you want your petals to lay flat!

You knit one petal at a time over part the cast on stitches. Then knit in the round decreasing to the center. Switch to a smaller circular or double points as the rounds get smaller. Only four ends to weave in when you're done.

The rug measures about 22” across. That's Pookie modeling the rug. He likes it!

The introductory price for the pattern is $1.99. Click the link below to purchase a pdf download to download with a Paypal payment.

A Simple Cowl to knit -- Cowlabunda

It's cold here today. The temp outside is a frosty 23 degrees as I write this. It's also spitting a few snowflakes. Sigh...winter has arrived. :(

Given the weather and thinking ahead to holiday gifts, I grabbed a ball of yarn out of my knitting basket last night and knitted up a simple cowl. (I hear these scarves are a hot fashion accessory on the runway this season. Knitters are ahead of the trend as we've been knitting these cowl/wimple/tube scarves for several years now. :) )

Tube scarves are great winter accessories. They hug your head and neck to keep you warm outside without having to wear both a hat and a scarf. When you go inside, simply pull the tube down around your neck and wear it as a turtleneck. It has the added advantage of keeping you warm if the room is chilly.

Cowlabunda

I used one ball of Yarn Bee Luscious and a set of size 11 (8mm) circulars for this project. This novelty yarn is sold by Hobby Lobby. It's 100% nylon, bulky weight, 186 yards (3.49 oz), and is very soft. All the fuzzy bits on this yarn merge together to form a great thermal mesh that traps heat next to your head and neck. (If you don't happen to have a bulky weight novelty yarn in your stash you can create your own using one strand of a fuzzy novelty yarn and a second strand of baby or sportweight yarn. Experiment to see what you come up with that will work.)

Cast on 60 stitches a little looser than usual. Join in the round. Don't twist your cast on! Knit around and around until you have about 5-6 yards of yarn left. Cast off loosely. Tuck in your yarn tails. That's it!

Knitting Tip: When my yarn ball is getting small, I pause to put a marker on my yarn where I need to stop knitting for the bind off. Find the end of your yarn and measure what you need to bind off from there. Tie a loop in the yarn or a contrasting piece of yarn around it at this point. Knit until you reach this marker and start your bind off.

Mine came out about 17" long and 26" around.

Want a flared bottom cowl?
Add a little flare at the bottom to cover your shoulders. When your yarn ball is shrinking fast and your tube is long enough to cover your head, add some extra stitches to flare it out. *Knit 5 sts, yo* around to the beginning. (Add a marker to your needle before you start so you know when to stop increasing.) Then knit until you have 6 yards left and bind off.

Have fun with this and stay warm!

Tile is going in!

I'm so excited! The tile floor is finally being installed in our patio room. The installer is cutting the edge pieces today. He should be ready to grout the tile tomorrow. I'm hoping we're able to start moving furniture in by the weekend! Woo-hoo!

I really love the tile I picked out. It's Mohawk Mandelane in the Red Rock colorway. It's gorgeous! The tiles are not all the same color though they have the same colors. I love the warm tones it has in it. BTW, the splotches on the tile are only water drops. I'll have to mop the floor once everything is finished.

The only downside to having work done at your house is you are stuck at home. Our weather is supposed to turn much colder with snow in the next 24 to 48 hours. I do need to run to grocery store for some supplies before that happens.

In moving all the heavy cartons of tile, hubby managed to give himself a hernia. :( I wasn't much help since the boxes weighed about 60-70 pounds each. Our GP has referred him to a specialist for evaluation. He may be having surgery to repair it later this month. Hubby can't help move furniture when we're ready. I'll be recruiting some help for that project. Otherwise, it will probably be sometime in January before he'll be able to lift much of anything. I don't want to wait that long to be able to use our new room.

In the meantime, I'm spinning up this gorgeous merino I bought at Midwest Folk & Fiber in 2008. I love the color of this! This is the first merino I've spun for awhile. I've forgotten how much I like to spin merino. Lately I've spun Falkland, Corriedale, Shetland, Rambouillet...

I can't believe it's already December. November seems to have flown by. Our weather was warmer and nicer in November than October. More sun for sure! My fingers are crossed that this winter will not be as nasty as last year. By this date last year, we had already had 24 inches of snow! I did see it spit a few flakes yesterday but there has been no measurable amounts yet. I'm in no hurry to see it!

Over the weekend we pulled the brussels sprouts up by the roots. They are now hanging upside down in our garage. We can harvest them from the stalks as we need them. I read about storing this way in Mother Earth News. I cut some broccoli side shoots. If you keep them cut off and don't let them flower, they will produce side shoots until a good freeze kills the plants. I also harvested a bunch of tiny cabbages. When we cut the heads, we leave the root and a few of the larger leaves. Tiny cabbages will grow at each leaf node. Since all of these all cool weather crops, they have no trouble lasting well into fall and colder weather. A plus is the cooler temps make them taste even sweeter! The only things left in the garden are some green onions and carrots. Hubby is talking about heavily mulching the carrots with leaves to protect them from freezing. Then when you want carrots, you uncover the carrots, pull what you want and cover them up again.

Anyone who has never eaten fresh picked produce from a garden doesn't know what they are missing. The varieties that most supermarkets sell are only pale shadows in flavor of their homegrown counterparts. Supermarket varieties are selected for their ability to survive transport and not for flavor. Growing your own has a number of pluses: 1) you can select the varieties you want to grow, 2) lots of tasty produce to eat now, 3) some to preserve or store for later use, 4) you can control what goes into your food (no chemicals or toxins), and 4) it gives you some exercise and fresh air.

The seed catalogs for next season are already beginning to arrive. I'm looking forward to sitting out in our patio room watching it snow and browsing the colorful pages of seed catalogs and dreaming about next year's garden. :)

Slow progress & surprises...

I'm trying to wait patiently for flooring to appear in our patio room. I've picked out the tile and am waiting for hubby to talk to the installer. Plus there is the little detail about actually ordering the tile. Hubby is off on Thursday and will probably place the order then. It's supposed to take a week to come in. Let's see, one week from Thursday is Thanksgiving. Oh, no! Holidays always mean shipment delays. At this point, it may be mid-December before the floor is in place and we can finally start using the room.

That's Boo looking out the new door and Pookie laying down on the rug. The tile near the bottom is what I've chosen for the floor. It's a nice warm color and will go nicely with the ceiling fan. The darker color should absorb more heat from the sun this winter when the angle of the sun is lower. It also shouldn't show every footprint. I chose a darker color since everything else in the room is white. If I had chosen a light flooring, you probably would need sunglasses!

Hubby has been busy painting all the drywall repairs we had fixed recently. The holes were from previous remodeling projects. Here's a picture of how nice our pass through window now looks from the kitchen to the family room. All it needs is a board or tile at the bottom to be complete. It's so nice not to have holes in my walls anymore. Once gardening season is totally over, hubby promises to start knocking out some of the other home projects.

There's not much left to do in the garden. We harvested the last of the potatoes yesterday. Between mice damage and the weather, most of the potatoes are in the small to tiny range. Oh well, lots of them will become seed potatoes for next year.

Still to harvest are the brussels sprouts and carrots. It's time to put the garden to bed for the winter. The trees have lost most of their leaves and color. I enjoyed the colorful display for the short time it was here. Here's the odd coloration that lots of leaves had this year. Gorgeous, isn't it?

I have a lot of pattern designs in the works. More than a few are waiting to be test knit or crocheted. I've started a pattern testing group on Yahoo to make it easier to share these patterns with my testers. There are some fun ones that should be released soon.

At the end of October I received an unexpected and thrilling phone call out of the blue from a book publisher. How exciting! An editor had seen my blog and patterns and approached me about working on a knitting book for them. I'm very flattered and honored to have been considered for this opportunity. Very few publishers contact potential authors about writing books for them.

I did a lot of thinking about the offer for almost a week. (I didn't think of much else during that period! LOL!) I carefully weighed the pros and cons. I am familiar with how much work goes into writing a book. I've worked with a number of authors typing, formatting manuscripts, creating indexes, etc., and also on the production and editorial side for two different publishers. It's an incredible amount of work. Most books don't make much beyond the initial small advance on royalties. You have to love what you're doing.

The book would not have been totally about my own designs. Yes, some of them would have been included. The publisher had a specific concept in mind for the book's theme and structure. Laying out the tasks that would be involved to complete this book, I began to see that taking on this project would become a full time job to do it well. Dealing with multiple designers and hunting down the patterns to include in the book itself would be an incredible task.

Then I thought what would happen to my designing, knitting, and personal life, while I was working on this book over the next eight months? Would there be any time or energy left for anything else? This is a big concern. Life is about balancing what you have to do with what you want to do. Too much work and you burn out.

After careful consideration of the workload, the time commitment, the advance, and having to sign away the rights to about a dozen of my designs, I decided to turn it down.

I'm happy having time to design and knit without any deadlines other than the ones I set for myself. I've never been interested in being rich or famous. :)

Fall color and progress

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. The weather is crisp or frosty in the morning, sunny and warm during the afternoon, and cold at night.

This year it has been cold, overcast, windy, and rainy. I wouldn't be surprised if November is warmer than normal and more like October should have been.

We have had a lot of brilliant autumn color this fall. It came on very quickly and is leaving (LOL!) just as fast with rain and wind. Here's a picture I took of the tree across the street between rain showers this week. The colors almost glow, don't they?

The yellows, golds, and oranges are spectacular this year. Not a lot of red though I have seen some unusual pink tinted leaves. Another oddity this year is that some trees/leaves have mottled coloring on the leaves. See how these have tinges of different colors? Some leaves are rimmed along the edges with one color. I'll have to see if I can take some more pictures of these leaves so you can see what I mean. It is a very colorful, though brief, display.

Progress! Our patio room is one step closer to being finished. The electrician and the installers returned this morning. We now have electrical outlets and a ceiling fan. The special order windows have been installed, the ugly wall covered up, a new handle to replace our tarnished door handle, and all the windows are sparkling. The next step will be shopping for some ceramic tile for the floor. Once that's installed, we'll be ready to move into our new space.

Homeward Bound Scarf

Announcing a new lace scarf pattern. After much thought, I'm calling in Homeward Bound.

Bird wings soar over river and mountain lace motifs in this scarf to tell of the long flight home.

This simple lace scarf is knit from a single skein of fingering weight yarn (200 yards) on size 7 needles. Don't you love projects like this that use up those odd balls of yarn you have in your stash?

The scarf has no right or wrong side because it's in garter stitch (knit every row). This is a good project to tackle if you've never knit lace before. The blocked scarf is 6” x 60”. The pattern is five pages long and includes both written line-by-line instructions and a lace chart. (A stole version is in the works.)

I used one skein of Jojoland Melody Superwash yarn for the sample. I love how the long colorways shade in this scarf.

You may purchase a pdf download copy of the pattern with a Paypal payment of only $2.99. Just click on the button below to pay and download a copy.

Construction continues

The patio room is up but not 100% finished. Here's what it looks like from the outside.

See the narrow boards at the top under the eaves? Those will be replaced with windows soon. They had to be special ordered to fit after the frame was up.

The next step is having an electrician come to wire up some outlets, a ceiling fan, etc. I'm waiting for a phone call as to when that will occur. Then Champion will come back to install those upper windows and fix the inside wall where they ripped the siding off the house. This is what it looks like right now. It can't be fixed until the electrician gets through poking holes in the wall. It will be covered with a white wall covering to match the rest of the room.

Once that's finished, we have to address the floor. Old rough, stained, concrete is not a nice surface for furniture. We've been debating our options. Carpet would be the cheapest option but not good for our allergies and hard to keep clean. A tile floor would be best if we can swing it. It will last a lot longer than concrete and be much easier to keep clean.

With our patio room having a south facing exposure, we will be able to take advantage of passive solar to help keep the room warm in the cold season. The lower winter sunlight will shine into the room and warm it up. We have a temperature sensor out there now that shows how much the temperature jumps when the sun is out. (Not much sun lately, but it has happened.) A tile floor in a mid to dark color would absorb more of the sunlight (heat) and radiate it back out at night to keep the room warmer during the colder months. The Hunter ceiling fan we're having installed in the room has a ceramic heater in it too. That will help add some extra heat in the winter.

Our kitties are enjoying exploring the new space. See the purple kitty hut in the corner? And a cozy rug to sit on and look out the new door. Plus a box and a folding chair serve as other viewing places. We're not moving any real furnishings out here until the floor goes in.

I'm so looking forward to being able to use this space for family gatherings, parties, and knitting/spinning frolics with friends. In the meantime, I have to be patient and wait until everything is finished.

Thursday morning I spotted our first snowflakes of the season. :( So far for the month of October, we have been below normal everyday. Not much different than the whole of 2009 for us. Our daytime temps recently have been in the 40's (she says incredulously)! They should be in the low 60s. I am so hoping that November turns out to be much warmer and includes a nice long Indian summer.

Here's a picture of a knitted scarf I finished last night. I posted it today for my test knitters to try out. I was thinking of calling it Starlight. Hmm, maybe Tilting Stars is a better name. What do you think?