Lisa Kay Knits... and Quilts!

Mitchell found his Batman costume months ago, and he warned me that he wanted me to dress up, too. I told him I would trick-or-treat with him as Cat Woman. I don't think he believed me. I made it pretty low key, but he seemed satisfied. Happy Halloween! Lisa Kay

Jared Flood of " Brooklyn Tweed " blog, knit design, and photography fame has been releasing some beautiful pattern collections, and I selected one of his simple vests for a quick project. " Huxley " is written as a simple Fair Isle project, with a traditional all-over "lice" (dots) pattern. Since I wanted a vest out of some of my hand-painted handspun yarn, I decided to forgo the lice. I just used the pattern for its shaping. I do like the dotted pattern, and I have every intention to make a vest just like the pattern, eventually. The handspun in question is a yarn I made in mid-2011 which I called, " Jungle Sailing " from the two colors of fiber that I combined in the yarn. Since there was only eight ounces (two bumps) of fiber in this yarn, I had expected that I would need some coordinating trim, and I selected The Fibre Company " Acadia " in the color "Blue Heron" to go with it, since it seemed to be a pretty good match ...

I finished "Aftur," (pattern and handspun yarn blogged here ). I used most of the yarn in each color, and it worked out very well. Ravelry project page here . I "signed" the inside, bottom hem. Here's a peek at the inside of the colorwork section. I added some extra rows of colorwork compared to the original pattern. The original colorwork would have ended at the bottom of the wide beige band, so there are two extra motif sections. Below is the modified chart. I worked the color differently than the chart in two places… I made the first row of crosses solid white. (That was because I did that row in my swatch, and I thought the cross was indistinct with the gold dot in the middle.) And near the top, the two solid bands of beige (above and below the dark red square motif) were actually worked with three sts gold and two sts beige, because I was running out of beige and had lots of gold left. Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay

Mitchell enjoys reading, and he especially likes Lego books. He goes through them and reads every caption and note. Last weekend, we picked up the Batman Lego book, and Mitchell has been scouring it, thoroughly. Gee, I wonder what might be on his Christmas list this year... Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay

I used my Southern Cross Fibre clubs "Hunter" and "Apprentice," spun during Tour de Fleece , to make a Margot sweater. Margot is a free pattern on Knitty . Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay

My dad asked me recently how many hand-knit sweaters I had. I didn't know off the top of my head. I had to go to my Ravelry account and tally them up. The answer is, "Not counting vests, twenty." Here they are, in chronological order of the knitting. Some of the older sweaters have new pictures, because I just took some better pictures of them. Each picture links to the Ravelry project page. Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay