Knitting, my true crafterly love

As much as I have enjoyed all my sewing recently (Halloween costumes and dolls), knitting remains my true crafterly love. I am cruising along on my Salina sweater and have already completed the back, most of the left front and the right front up to the armpits. Am really loving how this sweater is shaping up and think I will get a lot of use out of it. The wine purple color is a change from my usual gray and I think it will be a nice one.


As always, while I have one knit on the needles I have multiple knits on the brain. My latest urge is to design my own sweaters.

Next on the needles will be some tiny little cardigans for the dolls I am making my nieces for Christmas. These dolls are pretty small so I'm just going to design as I go using some yarn from my stash. I was reading over my copy of Barbara Walker's Knitting from the Top and I am so inspired. She has some amazing ideas and I want to try them all (rules of thirds, short row shaping, invisible cast-ons, lots of SEAMLESS knitting).

I think I also might knit gifts for two of my nephews: one of these robots for Oscar and something Star Wars related for Michael. The other six gifts will be sewn because it's faster.

I've also been thinking for a while about a striped pullover inspired by Jared Flood's Turn A Square hat. I bought yarn a while ago and need to do some swatching next. I will use Barbara Walker's instructions once I choose a needle size, figure out gauge and decide on design features.

In other inspirational news, I finally started cutting up a pile of old t-shirts yesterday to make these:

I was inspired by a Knitting Daily post from back in April and have been wanting to do it ever since. I'm not sure what the smaller balls will be become, but I think the larger one (made from parts of 5 t-shirts) will become a boatneck sleeveless top. I got a lot of ideas about executing this idea from perusing Barbara Walker's Knitting from the Top. I just found this blog post and am inspired to make more t-shirt yarn using that technique. There will definitely be more posts on these projects as I have time to do more with this recycled yarn.

I am just feeling so inspired these days. Not sure if it's my extra free time now that both boys are in school two mornings a week or the cooler weather or watching Project Runway, but I am ready to design and knit my own sweaters. But first, I have to finish those Halloween costumes, Christmas gifts and Salina sweater. Wish me luck!

Slithering GREEN Goodness

For some reason I have been playing with the idea of making my boys stuffed animal snakes. I don't really remember why. I think maybe because they love to play with things like jumpropes and old belts. They pretend they are all kinds of things, but most often fire hoses. Anyway, I've been playing with the idea in my head for a few weeks.

This week I decided to do some sewing because I realized I was had four baby gifts that were overdue. I went to pick out fabric for some loveys from my stash and found some nice green leftover from some other projects. So I set it aside for snakes. I cut out my loveys and got ready to sew them up when I realized that I had bright green thread in my sewing machine so...I did what any person would do...I set aside the baby presents and sewed up some snakes.


They were REALLY easy. I just cut out two strips of fabric of roughly equal size--green fuzzy for the top side of the snake and green print for the underside. I put the two pieces together with the right sides facing in. I drew a head on one end and a tail on the other. Then I sewed them together, free-styling for the body and leaving a space for stuffing.

The stuffing, in an attempt to be "green," is made up of two ripped up old t-shirts and a sleepsack, all that were too stained to donate.


I still used poly-fil for the heads to fill out the curves, but even some of that was reused from a toy Pepper destuffed yesterday. The rag filling makes for a heavier stuffed animal, but it also allows the snakes to be curved and bent in a nice way.


I don't know if I'd reuse it for most stuffed animals, but the rag stuffing worked really well for these snakes.


For tongues, I used a bit of ribbon. For eyes, I sewed on fleece circles and then added color with embroidery floss.
Overall, I'm very happy with our slithery green snakes. Ssss...