Your mitts: Need your opinion

Dear Shayne,

When we were together last year, you bought some yarn for me to make you some fingerless mitts. I'm finally getting around to it (mostly because you told me that you're cold...) I've completed one, but I need some help deciding what to do for the second one.

Here's the first one:

(Gorgeous, right?)

Sooo... here's the problem: This yarn is a very slow striping yarn. As you can see from that mitt, I only covered 4 colors in just 1 mitt. Here is the remaining ball of yarn:

I am pulling from the middle, so I am going to be knitting the blue and green yarn you see around the center very soon.

Sooo... here are the options:

1. Press on. This will probably result in the next mitt being pink, green, and blue (with the same plum-y thumb as the first mitt, because I knit the thumbs before I started anything else).

2. Skip the blue and green and go to the colors that are similar to the first mitt (pink, orange, red, purple). The mitts will not be identical to one another, but they will be closer to the same "family" of colors.

I love all of these colors together, but when used on such a small project, it really divides up the colors into chunks. Sooo... do you want 2 totally mismatched mitts (the one above + a blue and green one) OR do you want me to do some color finagling to get them close to one another?

Let me know ASAP so I can send these off to you and keep your paws warm!

love,
kelly

PS - Have I mentioned lately how I hate the new Blogger interface? Just sayin'.

Woven scarf for Kate

Dear Shayne,

Despite my lack of posting lately, I have been making stuff. Including this woven scarf for my cousin-in-law, Kate. I'm not 100% sure that these purple-y brown colors are her bag, but she's always so warmly appreciative of handmade gifts -- she's the best kind of person to make stuff for!

I bought the yarn at A Verb for Keeping Warm in Oakland, but I cannot find the ball band right now, so I'm not sure of the brand/fiber/colorway. When I stumble across it later, I'll update the post. For now I'll tell you that it felt great and made a lovely fabric -- I love the color variegation:


love,
kelly

Qiviut!

Dear Shayne,

You know what this blog needs? Some content! Fortunately, my parents gave me a gift last week that fits the bill -- qiviut!

What is qiviut, you say? (I mean, besides a word that begins with "q" that does not have a "u" immediately following it...) It is super-soft, super-strong, super luxurious yarn (think cashmere, but even better) that comes, improbably, from musk ox. (Want more details? Wikipedia can help ya out...)


Along with an amazingly generous 400+ yards of qiviut (this stuff is like spun gold), they also gave me this great book called Arctic Lace, both purchased on their recent trip to Alaska (which sounds really cool -- have you ever been there?) The book is fascinating -- not only does it include many patterns and ideas for working with qiviut, but there is also a lot of history and cultural information about the native people of Alaska. Really great stuff.

What's the occasion? Oh, my birthday. Which isn't, technically, for another 5 weeks or so, but my mom was practically vibrating with excitement about giving me this yarn, so who am I to object -- you want to throw luxury yarn my way? Go for it!

love,
kelly

PS - The new Blogger interface bites. The Preview is vastly improved, but working on the post is an absolute pain in the behind.

QIP: Continued Evolution

Dear Shayne,

As I mentioned, the original plan I had for the quilt blocks I'm working on changed once I made the first one. And now that I've completed all of the blocks, I've found that I need to change out two of them.

Here is Hipstamatic photo of all of the current blocks -- with the colors reduced by this filter (Libatique 73, if you're wondering), you can really see the problem:


It's that one super-dark block -- it's the black hole of this quilt!

I tried moving it around, but it just doesn't play well with others. It's harder to see, but the one in the lower left hand corner is also awfully dark, so it's also getting remade.

My other option would to be to make some additional darker blocks, but I'm worried about things getting too Halloween-y. So I'm going to replace these two with medium grey versions.

I hate to waste blocks I've made, so I'm thinking of making these two into Halloween pillows. First, I gotta finish this quilt. Wish me luck!

love,
kelly

Evolution of a Quilt Block

Dear Shayne,

Well! After a big spurt of posts in July, we fell silent once again. And, once again, I'm going to end our blog break with... a quilt! This one is still in progress, but I thought I'd post along the way.

So... the day after Biscuit died, I found a fabric that reminded me of the color and pattern of his fur. I fell in love with it and knew I had to make a little Biscuit-inspired lap quilt:

(Moda Fabrics' Central Park Carousel Sunshine by Kate Spain.)

I was also buying some grey fabric for this quilt and the orange and grey looked great together, so I was set!

I've never used a "feature fabric" in a quilt before, as I am a very patchwork-y girl, but I really do love this one, so I decided to give it a shot.

I have loved this quilt from Denyse Schmidt Quilts for awhile (Denyse Schmidt is a goddess, by the way -- that book is awesome):


And I recently saw this antique quilt in Modern Log Cabin Quilting by Susan Beal (another goddess and another fabulous book):


So I drew this:


However, once I made the first block...


I realized that the strips were all too wide and uniform for my liking. I think my error was that the center square needed to be larger, but... it wasn't.

Since I didn't really want to re-make that block, I decided to trim down the final grey border and then funk up the other blocks with a variety of thinner and thicker strips. Like so:

(The lower left block in that group is the one from above, but with the final grey border trimmed down.)

I have been second-guessing my decision to use a single grey fabric for each block -- I'm a patchwork-y gal and it would have been more interesting to mix 'em up -- but I've been thinking a lot about Biscuit as I make this quilt and he was always a scaredy cat, so he probably would have preferred this "safer" choice.

You know, if a cat could talk about his quilt preferences.

All right. I think this quilt is going to be 16 blocks. I've got 10 done, so there's 6 more to go. I'll post again when they're finished.

And what have you been up to?

love,
kelly