S-N-O-W!!

This is the view from the sunroom this morning. Yep, it's our first measurable snowfall of the season. Temps dropped into the mid 20's last night. There were reports on the late news of frozen and icy overpasses and roads. Also pictures of high school football teams slipping and sliding around as they attempted to play. :)

It's late afternoon as I write this and it's warmed up into the 40s and the snow has completely disappeared. By mid-week they're predicting we could hit 60 degrees again. We're roller coastering our way to winter. That's ok, the past couple of years it has gotten really cold in October and never warmed up much until spring. A more gradual coasting into colder weather is much easier to take than going from 6o down to freezing and staying there.

I have pulled out my wool socks to wear and am wearing the two sweaters I've made lately. Taking a break from lace for the moment. Though I have ideas for a few new projects one of these days. :)

You've seen the crocheted Bella Donna Cardi that I translated. I had a little yarn leftover so I added a bit of a sleeve to it. I will make it again with longer sleeves. It's gotten too cold to wear this short sleeve version.

The second sweater I've finished is Liesl by Isoda Teague. Haven't had a chance to get someone to take a pic of me wearing it so you'll have to settle for this awful one. It's not easy trying to take a picture of yourself. :) It also points out that I still need to lose some weight. Sigh, and the holidays are coming. :(

Liesl is an easy sweater to knit in a feather and fan lace. It's knit on big needles with worsted weight yarn (up to chunky). Mine was knit with 576 yards of Aran weight yarn on size 10.75 mm needles I got from Knit Picks. For this sweater, you cast on at the top neckline and knit down. Cast off and cast on again to leave openings for the sleeves. Pick up stitches around the armholes for the sleeves. When you're done knitting, there are no seams to sew. Only a few yarns tails to darn in. I love this sweater and will definitely knit it again. The next time I will add the buttonholes. It's my fault for not reading all the instructions before I began knitting. The buttonhole directions are not in the line-by-line instructions so I didn't see them. They're in a call out box to one side. This I think is not a good way to handle this. I checked on Ravelry and I'm not the only one who missed them. I've also made a note to decrease needle sizes as I the sleeves get longer. They're a little wide at the elbow and don't want to fit inside coat sleeves.

Someone asked for a closer look at the sweater. Here's a picture of it on the blocking board. You can see the lace pattern in it.

The third sweater is still in progress---a crocheted Pinwheel Sweater by Amy Depew. This pattern is more of a recipe for a sweater and not detailed instructions. That's great though since you can make it with any weight of yarn you like. I'm using a size G crochet hook and over 1,000 yards of fingering weight handspun from my stash in various shades of blues, pinks, and purples. The sweater starts as a circle at the middle back and is worked in the round. You leave openings for the sleeves as the circle gets larger. After finishing a few rounds after the sleeve openings, I've started on the sleeves. I'm not sure I'll have enough yarn so I want to add any contrasting colors at the outside edge of the body of the sweater and the sleeves. Worse case scenario, I will be spinning a little more yarn to finish this. It would take a long time to knit a pinwheel sweater like this. I'll post pictures of it when I get it finished.

I'm getting the urge to knit some thicker winter socks to wear around the house or inside boots. They'll be toe up and start with a rectangle at the toe. (Much easier to do than most toe up starts.) And I'm thinking about using a short row garter stitch heel. I have a skein of Yarn Bee Snowflake from Hobby Lobby that I may use. It's rated as a DK weight yarn. I bought the yarn on sale because I liked the color. I do not like the strand of thin bumpy, scratchy thread they've plied with it. Ruins a very nice yarn in my opinion. I'm nutty, so I pulled the thread out of it in short sections and cut it off. I now how a nice ball of machine washable wool yarn for thick socks. Now to figure out what size needles to use and how many stitches I need to cast on to start them. :)