Lisa Kay Knits... and Quilts!

Amy King of Spunky Eclectic recently published a great sweater pattern, Less is Mor e in Knitty.com. The pattern alternates yarns, intending to use yarns spun from "one bump" (four ounce) fiber purchases. What a clever idea!  I've been spinning up some single-dose fibers (and I split one two-bump fiber into two 4-ounce color batches) to get yarn to make a "Less is More." I ended up with five Falkland wool yarns. Yarn group shot, top left to right, bottom left to right: Southern Cross Fibre Diversity: 178 yards Southern Cross Fibre Jewelled Seas: 154 yards Hello Yarn Critter: 214 yards Hello Yarn Foe (pink): 182 yards Hello Yarn Foe (blue): 111 yards So, you can probably see where I came up with the sweater name! I'm in the middle of the second color, and ready to separate the sleeves and the body... Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay

... and a couple pictures of Mitchell... .... just because I can't help myself! Happy Knitting, Lisa

I finished my Boreal sweater, just in time for the end of the spin-along, tomorrow. Because of the snow/ice, today, lots of folks were leaving work, early, and I got out of there and came home... and took some pictures of the sweater! Ravelry Project Page Previous posts: Spinning and Yoke Progress Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay

We took some stale crackers and cereal to the lake to feed the ducks. It was a pretty day, but quite cold. Somebody needed to prep the bread before throwing it... A duck had to duck . Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay

The Accent Pack #14 yarn has begun to turn into a Boreal sweater. I cast on the first weekend in February. I'm working it top down (even though the pattern is bottom up), mainly because I know I'll be tight on yarn... I can always make it shorter in the body and/or sleeves, or use the contrasting yarn for bands. Here's a picture of the yoke down to the armholes. I'm on a bit of a timeline, because the Semi-Solid SAL/KAL ends February 23rd. I'd better get knitting! Happy Knitting, Lisa Kay

I finished the raglan sweater I started while "waiting" for my Boreal yarn to be ready to knit. I used the same "Forever Tweed" pattern that I used for Grevillea Gradient, except I changed it to a plain neck instead of turtleneck. I named this sweater for the yarn, which is a combination of two bumps of Spunky Eclectic "Twilight" plied with two bumps of Funky Carolina "Some Simple Song." I cast on 16 fewer sts than the instructions (two raglan increase rows worth of stitches, raising the yoke up four rows. I worked eight rows of the k3 p1 rib (except on the RS instead of the WS, since I won’t be folding over this collar). Then, I went right into the raglan shaping, adding short rows in the first three raglan increase rows, then working raglan shaping until the pattern-directed number of stitches for the underarm separation.  I had to stop the sleeves at 3/4 length due to running out of yarn. This yarn was four bumps of fiber, where the Grevil...

I keep socks as a traveling project. My sock "knitting bag" is a cosmetics bag that was a giveaway at a makeup counter at Macy's, and it holds two half balls of yarn and my sock needles very nicely, as well as fitting inside the top of my purse. I started these socks last June, and they have been languishing away while I had a hiatus from traveling. I even finished two other pairs handspun socks in the mean time. I had worked on these on a couple of different trips in 2012, and I realized at some point that I had counted my rows a little differently on the foot of the first sock (after the gusset) than I had on a previous trip, and the cables were all one row shorter. Rather than frogging about a third of a finished sock, I decided to just make the second sock to match... which added a bit of anxiety to working the second sock, on top of it having hibernated most of the last half of 2012. So, another trip came up, and I dutifully took my sock knitting bag out of hidin...