Guess what's blocking...

Yup, it a vest! I finally finished it. Details and action photos to come soon.

I mentioned last weekend that I was felting my French market bag. It went through the washer and dryer twice, on the hottest heavy-duty settings, but it's still not quite as dense and firm a fabric as I would have liked, but nevertheless it's quite functional and kind of cute:

French Market Bag from Knitty, made in recycled bulky weight wool. Modifications: I used 5.5 mm needles to accommodate the thicker weight wool, and only 192 stitched instead of 200, mainly because I ran out of the colour I was usuing for the base!

I sewed in a lining, made from some leftover dress-lining fabric:


And what's that in the bag? I might have done a little eBay shopping recently. It's my last purchase for a while, I swear! I got a good deal on these 6 balls of laceweight wool. Black lace.... I'm thinking there's a shawl in my future. It's a chinese brand, and is incredibly soft. I've been walking around petting a skein of it.


And while I was at it, I got a couple of balls of sock yarn:



Fabel Superwash by Garn Studio. I've never tried this brand before, but I really like the colourway.

I should apologize because I'm not feeling too wordy lately - I'm spending my days writing and re-writing technical stuff - so I hope you enjoy this style of short snippets with photos. I'll try to get good FO photos of the vest as soon as it's dry. And I may have wishfully started a summer top over the last few days. What a joke! We had 10 cm of snow last night. Will it never end?!

knit knit knit

Well, now that I've taken care of the pile of sweaters, you'd think I'd be looking to jump into a big, new, intricate project, right? I thought I would. I usually like knitting that makes me think, or teaches me something new.

I'm buried deep in thesis writing right now, nearing the end (or at least that's what they tell me. Sometimes it feels like it will never end!). So I'm spending very long days at school six days a week, writing, tweaking, editing, thinking deep thoughts. It's finally starting to come together, and it's pretty exciting after such a long, and at times very frustrating slog. The result is that at the end of the day I still need to de-stress with knitting, but I have no brain cells left to spare for thinking about cables and lace.

In the interest of burning through some more stash and giving my mind a break, I've been working on some simple little projects.


This is the Bamboo Baby cardigan from One Skein Wonders. Simple, but cute. It's the leftover cotton blend from my Sitcom Chic. I did use slightly more than one skein, but I also altered it a little to make the sleeves bigger, and I wasn't using the recommended bamboo yarn. It still needs blocking and buttons. I don't typically knit a lot of garter stitch, but I think it's cute, and it was very quick and easy. If you can knit a dishcloth, you can make this.

I also started a French Market Bag from Knitty a couple of weeks ago.


This is bulky wool from a thrift shop sweater I recycled last year. I'm not sure how well it's going to felt (I know, I know, I should have felted a swatch before I started), but I'm not going to worry about it too much. It's a perfectly nice tote bag even before felting. I just need to knit the second handle, and I might get around to the washing machine fun on the weekend.

And then there's my vest. It doesn't look like much right now, but it's been comforting to knit row upon rown of stockinette in the round. I used to hate plain stockinette, but I'm starting to understand the appeal!


The Denise needles have been a little bit frustrating on this one. They needle tips are great, but I find that the cables, which are thicker but more flexible than the average circular needle are a bit tacky and the yarn sticks to them. So all of the stitches bunch up by the right needle as I knit and I have to keep stopping to push them around. They seemed better with the cotton on the baby sweater, so perhaps this wooly mohair blend is particularly grippy. They might also work better with bigger gauges, and therefore bigger stitches. Oh well. I'm not aiming for speed right now anyway!