There was much knitting to be done the week before Halloween.  A friend had a baby due Halloween day and I offered to knit a hat for the impending bundle of joy.  But it was a HALLOWEEN baby and as such a temptation could not be resisted.  This is obviously not the new born but this little one will probably be her best friend…

This hat is called the Lil’ Devil Baby Hat and you can find it on Ravelry.com or here (free pattern!).

There has been other knitting of course, I can give you a sneak preview here while it blocks and before I sew on all the buttons and patches and what not.

In other non-knitting news, I have been plenty busy.  I walked/jogged my first 5k, which turned out to be a 10k of which I did 7k (hee).  It was harder than I though and yet I am not really training still for the Race Against Hunger Thanksgiving Run, Thanksgiving Morning.  Speaking of Thanksgiving, I am hopeful that one of these years I can have Thanksgiving without somehow making someone upset because our schedules and plans don’t match.  sigh.

Budget cuts will once again be hurting our schools, with the threat of mid-year layoffs looming over everyone, also again.  I still teach art.  I still do not have a credential to teach anything else, nor would I want to especially if I had to go to the highschool to do it.  We will see what the following year brings… it’s not in my control so I am really trying to just let whatever happens happen.

I’m coming up on 1 year with my wonderful boyfriend, woot!  I am knitting him something for x-mas (shhh) and still avoiding the sweater curse.  Darby is as great as always.

Two and a half years ago I wrote the Ruffled A-line Sweater Dress pattern and was looking at the number of people who have looked at that pattern.  So far I have had over 12,000 visitors look at that page!  I am thinking that when it gets to 15,000 I’ll celebrate by knitting Darby a Cinderalla dress or maybe a costume of some sort and publish that pattern too.  Darby will be 3 this year, on the 24th if I recall correctly, so perhaps a birthday sweater will be in order.

This picture is courtesy of ihasahotdog.com and is, I’m sure, exactly what Darby wants for Christmas.


see more dog and puppy pictures

This pattern is based off of Darby’s original cable sweater, but has been sized up to fit a 5 lb dog.  This revision has not been tested, but it is just my 5 lb dog sweater pattern with a cable tossed on the back.  Here is the original picture for reference.

size 8 needles, worsted weight yarn

gauge: 4 stitches to the inch

Cast on 40, place marker and join, knit in 2×2 ribbing for about 3″

Time to increase for the chest, you will now be knitting in stockinette, and you will be starting the cable down the back of the sweater.  The increases will be on either side of the stitch marker, which will be the center of the sweater, in between the front legs.  Also, we will be placing stitch markers on either side of the cable so we know where and when to cable.

Row 1 of increases:  Knit 2, knit front and back (kfb) of 3rd stitch (or yarn over if you prefer) knit 12 more stitches, place marker, purl 1, knit 6, purl 1, place marker, knit 12 more stitches, kfb, knit 2.

Continuing with the increases as follows. on each of the next 9 rows kfb of the 3rd stitch from the beginning and the 3rd stitch from the end.  At the same time, on row 5 and row 10 your going to do a 2×2 cable cross over.  The instructions for this are on the original pattern page here.

After those 10 rows of increasing you should have about 60 stitches.  Now you are ready to make holes for the front legs.

Legs: knit 7 stitches, cast off 8 stitches, knit 30 stitches, cast off 8 stitches, knit 7 stitches

Knit 7, cast on 8, knit 30, cast on 8, knit 7 stitches

Continue in stockinette, and doing the cable cross over every 5th row until the body is of a length you want (I’m guessing about 6 or 7 inches from the arm-holes) Knit 1 ” of ribbing

Pick up the sleeves and crochet or knit in 1×1 ribbing

Hello all, I am alive and well.  Plenty of things have happened since my last post, including some knitting.

The best and most important thing was seeing my brother, together we traveled to see the rest of the family, parents, grandparents, the sister, all that.  Then we hopped on a plane and went somewhere that looks like this…

and it had some of these…

and then we went here…

to check out this…

It was hot.  I could even say it was “muy caliente” but I know it gets way hotter than the 90-95 degrees and 90-95% humidity it was when we were there.

There was knitting on the airplane, knitting during the drive to and from said airplane, and absolute ignoring of the 1500 meters of laceweight silk and #2 needles in favor of worsted weight  wool and #7 needles.

Next post will answer some questions about my patterns as well as modifications as necessary to make it fit a different sized beastie.  Speaking of beasties, Darby was super happy to have me back home and I was super happy to see her again too.  I did miss my puppy an awful lot.

I’ve been out and about at the California State Fair, a local park, and to visit friends.  Knitting has been non-existent here now that school has started.  Once I get into the swing of things at school and it cools off a little bit I’ll be back to my sticks and string.

Bottle Cap Starry Night

Spider Web

Darby and the Tortise

I have no knitting news to report.  The baby blanket of doom is hiding under the table.  I am ignoring it.  I will continue to ignore it until it no longer exasperates me.

In the mean time, I came across this free pattern on Ravelry.  It’s a Rainbow Dog Sweater (ravelry link). You can also find it on the Caron website here.

Rainbow Dog Sweater

I’m back to school, we started at the end of July, training for the 5k for my 30th b-day.  I don’t know if I will be able to run the whole thing, but I’ll give it a good try.

I finished the Leia Hat and it was very well recieved at the costume party.  Bill’s makeup also turned out great.

I started work this week and the kids come back tomorrow.  it is nice to get back into school again and back in the swing of things but this was an awesome summer.

Friday is a sci-fi costume party.  Originally I had no idea what to make and looking online only garnered sexy costumes for model, so I had a lot of searching to do.  I had seen this pattern for a Princess Leia Wig on Ravelry and decided to go for it.  So here is my version, made without buying her pattern (sorry).

In addition to that, I’ve been working on writing my own dog hat patterns with little success.  You can see just how it is coming along.  I’ve wriitten the pattern 2x thus far and need to really rethink it.  I was asked to design one without ear holes so that the ears stay nice and warm in the hat for harsh winters.

Where haven’t I been this summer?   To say it’s been busy might be a little bit of an understatement.  Lists are good, so as Crazy Aunt Purl would do, here we go with the listmaking…

1. Yosemite to hike Half Dome

2. Mount Diablo

3. Lake Tahoe (mostly South Shore)

4 Northern California Pirate festival

5, Jelly Belly factory

6. San Francisco (but just for the airport this tims)

7. LA

8. Santa Monica Pier

9. Disneyland

10. Lake Tahoe again (Mostly North Shore).

It’s been a wee bit busy, so I don’t have much in the way of knitting content to share and I am behind on my reading again.  But no worries, there is still much to do before school starts this month.  In the meantime, Darby says hello.

Hello

Fanny Bridge, where I say goodbye.

I spent WWKIP day in Lake Tahoe and found it difficult to find anyone knitting in public.  After scouring the interwebs I finally gave up and went to a yarn shop I know about in South Lake Tahoe.  I commenced to not knit there, being frustrated with my silk shawl, and instead worked on the newest baby blanket of doom.

A teeny section of said Baby Blanket of Doom.

I talked to a very nice woman who started a crocheted hexagon blanket based on the blanket from Attic24 (link on the side on my blog).  I knew exactly the blanket, which is great because the lady working there didn’t know.  She also didn’t know about WWKIP day.  So the nice lady visiting Tahoe and I talked while her yarn was being wound into cakes.  It was really nice.

There was this awesome mermaid in the window.  Love it!!

Awesome mermaid. Must make...

There was lots of hiking too, but thats another post.  But here is a sneak peek…

Me in a Tree!