Friday FO's Procrastination Buster

Remember my super awesome cast-on? Well, it turned into this hat:

Nate, in all his sassy glory.

Poor Nate has waiting four years for a hat. It was one of those things, I just never got around to it. But finally, it's done! I loved that pattern, it's my favorite basic hat pattern thus far.

I also finally got around to finishing this blanket for my lovely Heather:

I highly recommend this pattern if you are trying to knit a blanket in a hurry. You can see that at one point in time I was in such a hurry that I started my i-cord border before I cast off! And then I let it languish for a long time, for reasons. But it's finished now and keeping Heather warm and cozy!

Another project I finished was this cute Generations Bag for my cousin's Natalie's wedding!

And finally, this scarf which is the first thing I can ever remember knitting solely for myself and not as a gift or for a craft show! I made up the pattern as I went using beautiful yarn I bought at a LYS in Lansing called Sticks and Strings. I used the yarn as inspiration and knit long stretches of garter stitch and seed stitch (which I am currently obsessed with). The interplay between the textures and colors are exactly what I was hoping for!

I foresee more FO's in my future now that classes are done for the semester. I'm going through a major knitting phase so if you have any TV or movie recommendations for while I'm knitting, I would appreciate it. I just started season one of Moone Boy and oh my lord I love it! I'm trying to ration it out, but I'm not being terribly successful.

Happy Weekend!

FO Friday! Christmas and the Devil's Winter edition

Hello everybody! At long last, here are the things I knitted for Christmas!

I knit this French press cozy for my boyfriend. It keeps your coffee nice and cozy (haha) til you're ready to drink it! This is the pattern I used (and am using for my own French Press cozies (SP?!)). It worked really well! The buttons are because his other French Press has a handle that connects at the bottom. For this one you can just slide it on and off.

My boyfriend is not a weird mannequin head, obviously. He just owns one.

I also knit him this hat using alpaca from a farm we visited this summer. If you're in the Frankfort area, go visit the alpaca. They are TOTALLY adorable, the shop is super cute, and the owners are very nice. I ordered this yarn online and the owner included a personal note letting me know the name of the alpacas that provided the yarn! Such a sweet touch. I sort of used the pattern from this book but with a 1x1 rib. I tried to make the large size first in a stockinette and it came out HUGE:

No good. The hat I mean, my modeling is SUPERB.

So I frogged it and I'm really glad I did. I actually had nightmares about whether or not the finished product would fit (because that's normal) but it did! I love that book as a starting point, but sometimes things come out goofy. I am willing to take the blame, maybe (probably) I'm bad at measuring gauge? Who can say.

I also knit neck-gators for my brother-in-law and my brother-in-law to be. They're like super small infinity scarves with flaps to tuck into your coat or in the case of my dad and bros-in-law, your hunting gear. In the words of my friend Mike, they're basically a knitted dicky. I made one for my dad last year or the year before and he likes it a lot. After I made these my friend Nate asked for one and so did my mom for walking the dog. Probably because we are having The Devil's Winter up here in Michigan and are always cold and covered in snow. Which is great for knitting, but not always so great for other things like driving and not getting frost bite. So it's neck-gators all around! Except for these two, wearing their respective partner's gators:

They have clearly lost their neck-gator privileges.

Friday FO's

Like most knitting bloggers around this time of year, there is not much I can show you. The projects I have finished are gifts, the projects I am working on are gifts...I can't even show you some of the yarn I'm going to use because: gifts.

Quick side note: I definitely told some craft friends in November that I wasn't going to knit any Christmas presents this year because that way lay madness in years past. Hahahahaahahaha, I have three knitted Christmas present finished, two on needles, and at least three or four more to try to knit before the big day. It's a sickness, I tell you.

What I can show you is the way I torture my cat when he just so happens to be sitting next to me when I'm knitting gauge swatches. Did I say gauge swatch? I meant cat bonnet:

O. Henry you are a good sport.

Second quick side note: Henry's full name is O. Henry because he's named after this guy. So when I would normally say "Oh, Henry." I use his full name instead. Because I am a dork who lives alone with her cats and needs to get out more.

There will be SO MANY FO's the Friday after Christmas, my friends! SO MANY, I SAY! Good luck to all of you who are in the heat of the holiday knitting frenzy. Rest your hands frequently, drink lots of tea and if you feel like you need to slip a little whiskey in your tea, well, it's the holidays!

Friday FO's

Phew! Only one FO this week: I've been working on this baby blanket for a couple of weeks now trying to race my nephew to the finish line (for me: binding off, for him: being born). He won by a long shot. My sister's first baby, the lovely Evelyn, took 24 hours of hospital time to be born. My new nephew, Alden, took 2 minutes. 2 MINUTES. To be fair, my sister labored at home for a lot longer this time, but I am here to tell you as a first hand witness that Alden was born two minutes LITERALLY after Laura got to the Maternity Ward. It was completely crazy.

Anyway, I finished his blanket the following Sunday at a family dinner and he got to enjoy it right away:

(His face is less yellow and blurry than that in real life. But it is completely that cute.)

Welcome to the world, baby boy! You have a billion aunties who love you and can't wait to keep you cozy with knitted things!

Confidence/Comfort/Happiness and some FO's too!

One thing I like about the human brain is they way it finds patterns and meanings in things. I'm a few years removed from my Anthropology classes so I'm not going to go all Social Science in here, plus this is a blog about cats and knitting so, like, deep thoughts only get a couple of paragraphs a month if ever. I have a tone to maintain and I choose for that tone to be light and happy and usually knitting related.

Or, you know, Harrison Ford related

Sometimes you pick up on different facetes of an issue and it can feel like there's a conversation going on about the things with which you find yourself concerned. It's  like once you know someone who is pregnant it seems like all you see are pregnant ladies: these things were always out there but once your brain is stuck on it, you notice it like you hadn't before.

I recently read this article and while I found the whole thing very interesting, the point that struck me the most was #10 about confusing comfort with happiness. Even as I was reading the article I thought, "Well, yeah, I'm happy when I'm comfortable," thus proving the author's point.

"Comfort sells easier than happiness. Comfort is easy. It requires no effort and no work. Happiness takes effort. It requires being proactive, confronting fears, facing difficult situations, and having unpleasant conversations."

Then I thought of how happy I feel when I accomplish something I thought I couldn't. The other day I ran for 20 minutes without stopping and I felt fantastic. But definitely not comfortable. I have really intense driving anxiety and when I arrive at my destination I always feel exhilarated that I did something that scared me so much. Not comfortable while it was happening, but fulfilled that I did it. So: touche, Mark Manson.

Then I read this blog post by Meredith (if you're not reading her blog, you really should, it's wonderful). She just finished her "Blogging for Confidence" series wherein she challenged herself to do things that made her uncomfortable.

"I don't think I even realized it, but I had no idea who I was until I started confronting my fears head on."

As I read over the things she had done for her challenge, I had a moment of envy. "I could knit in public, I do it all the time! I could go to movies by myself, that doesn't scare me," thus totally and completely missing the point. It isn't about the exact thing you do, it's about challenging yourself. It's about the fulfillment you get when you do something that is hard or scary for you.

Back to the idea of patterns: there are a things going on right now for me that are challenging in a three separate areas of my life. It's all too tempting to want to back off, or go back to sleep, or to give in to feeling overwhelmed and not act or to try to get Meredith to do the things that scare me while I do the things that scare her. But it's worth it to forge on ahead, feel some discomfort and hope for some happiness. I love it when life aligns like this, that when I'm facing challenges, my brain makes connections that allow me to see issues in a whole new light.

End seriousness. Have another picture of Harrison Ford as a mental palate cleanser.

Anyway, the real pattern to be celebrated is the pattern of weeks and weekends (I know, it was a stretch, shut up), and it's Friday, so here are the O's I've F'ed this week (do you all know that FO is knitting speak for Finished Objects? NOW YOU DO.):

All my dishcloths are falling apart so I made myself some more!

This is a sample for one of my JoAnn's classes: it's a cable stitch of the month pattern.

I put the finishing touches on another bag. I love using a different color for the handle.

Have a great weekend, everybody! I'm headed up north for some sun and sand and as little internet as possible! What are you up to this weekend?

Friday FO's- Bag Lady Style

Here are the FO's from this week's knitting:*

They are based on this pattern here. They're super fun and fast to make and I think they'll be perfect for beach bags or grocery bags. Not to mention my i-cord and Kitchener stitch muscles have gotten a serious work-out and I am getting good. A few people have mentioned that I should line them with fabric. Which sounds like a great idea for practicality but then again I'm lazy and hate post-knitting construction and don't want to sew.

I have one more of these bad boys on the needles and then I'm going to try designing a few things I have in mind. Mmmmm...designing. I love it.

In addition to designing (seriously, I luuuuurve it and just want to keep talking about it), this weekend I'll be working on some other projects, doing some experimental cooking (stand back), cuddling my cats, trying to sell some of my old junk at a garage sale, and watching the first season of True Blood. And designing knitting patterns (I was going to call designing knitting patterns my non-human boyfriend but then I realized that's hardly an exclusive label. That category also includes: whiskey, my bed, and the fall. Yes, I am in a committed relationship with a season. YOU DON'T KNOW OUR LOVE.)


What are you doing this weekend?

Oh, and here's this:

I've been meaning to post this for a while, but I recently took a week off of work and found that even though I've lived alone for a while, when you are home alone for a few days straight things can get even weirder. Also, when I tried googling this video, the search returned a disturbing number of websites about loneliness. I think this video proves that living alone is not lonely. It's awesome.


*I feel like it's time to just admit that I am terrible at taking photographs. Terrrrrrrrrrrrrrible. These were taken with my iphone because I can't find my camera charger (again) and my phone was right there. I would like to promise you, my readers, that I will take some photography classes, buy a better camera, keep track of my camera charger, etc. but let's be honest: I probably won't do any of those things. I know, that's not very blog-savvy of my but I have too many interests competing for my time to add photography. Here's an adorable (but horribly taken) picture of a cat to make it up to you: