Converse All Star Baby Booties!

I know blog, I’vve been a terrible knitting blogger.  I haven’t been knitting as much as i should and I definately haven’t been blogging as much as I should.  It’s just that I’ve been a little bit stressed out and while I have had this obnoxious cold lurking around for the past month or so it didn’t decide to finally manifest itself until Monday.  Tuesday was a haze of tea and tissues and by Wednesday I was coherent enough to knit while I lay with my tea and tissues.  So here is what I finally made…

The most awesome Converse All Star Baby Booties

Aww, yeah! They are the coolest most skater punk rock little baby booties ever.  They are going to my friend Liz who is due in January, I think. Anyway, her baby shower is coing up so I had to hurry and get them done.

So tomorrow I’m back to work, sigh.  I figured if I went in today then I’d just be worse tomorrow.  I was thinking I needed to call and get my flu shot….obviously that will have to wait until immune system is back to normal.  Should know better than to try and schedule my own sick times for vacation.  My body doesn’t ever listen to me.

In other news, I am almost done with my Helena sweater for my co-workers baby.  It’s been ripped out far too many times because I bought the yarn before I picked the pattern and they tried to make it work.  Le Sigh.

My belly dance costume is coming together even though i haven’t been to practice in a good month.  I ordered a turkish vest (now that I know what that is) went out with some friends to the local goodwill shops and got scarves.  I used a place called tribal bazaar and they were really cool about substituting when they were out of stock on a belt. I’m looking forward to performing eventually, with a good amount of trepidation.

Why I love Autumn

Besides the fact that its my name….which is an awesome name.

I love Autumn because of all the colors, love the rich oranges and reds and yellows (and that I look good in them).  Having done a teensy bit of traveling by myself in the last week (another reason I love Autumn, fall break) I get to pull over at any roadside attraction or farm and go check it out.  The awesome pictures below were from a big farm roadside attraction complete with corn maze, petting zoo, and about a hundred little-bitties on a field trip from a local-ish school (it couldn’t be local, there wasn’t anything else around there)

Pumpkins!

I love the decorative gourds.

Converting Knit to Crochet and the Other Way Around

Every once in a while I get a crocheter asking me if I could rewrite my dog sweater patterns into crochet patterns.  Previously, I recommended going to a knit-to-crochet conversion site.  Now, with the always sage advice of Sandi Wiseheart, I can say Don’t Do That!

Here is part of Sandi’s Knitting Daily Newsletter about converting crochet to knit….

Is there a knitted version of the Spanish Moss Coat? A knitted version of any crochet pattern is a horse of different color! Meaning: It would basically be an entirely new pattern. Sure, you could take the schematic (ahem!) and use those measurements to figure out knitted stitch and row counts of a given yarn at a given gauge. But there is no direct “translation” from one crochet stitch pattern to a knitted stitch pattern, and no easy way to “convert” a crochet pattern to a knitted one (or vice-versa). So, unfortunately, no, there is not a knitted version. (There’s similar styles, like Katie Himmelberg’s Hideout Coat, which you can buy in our pattern store, but even that one is not “the same”!)

Knit your heart out over the weekend, folks.

–Sandi

You can check out more of Sandi’s sage advice here : Knitting Daily with Sandi Wiseheart

Finished Objects!!

Finally, some pictures for you all to enjoy!

This is a hat I made while we were camping for a friend who was devoid of hat, I am still working on one for her little one, Dane.  She appreciated the hat immensely that evening when temperatures dipped below freezing.

Also finally finished is my braided cardigan using Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Percentage System.  I searched through all sorts of patterns before finally giving up and using my own.  Originally i had these fantastic cables on both sides of the button placket and a beautiful 5 strand cable going up the back of the sweater, but I didn’t take into account the pull on the fabric and at half done, I realized that the sweater would be way too small and I frogged it.  Curses!  I loved what I had done.  next time, sigh, I’ll make a swatch.

Finally, I got to pet a kitteh or two this weekend, which always makes me happy.  Every knitter should have a kitty….even if it’s just for a day.

September Answers

Hi everyone, this post is in response to some questions regarding how to knit my free pattern for Darby’s cabled sweater.  Sadly, the e-mail didn’t work and I couldn’t find her on ravelry, so here I am, making it open to everyone.

Hi September,

Ok, the sweater is knit in the round on three double pointed needles (like this: http://knitting-and.com/wiki/Knitting_With_Double_Pointed_Needles ) instead of being flat and sewn up afterward.  If you have a very small circular needles I’m sure you could use that or 2 circular needles at once Like this: http://www.az.com/~andrade/knit/twocirculars.html or the magic loop method (which I haven’t tried) like this: http://knitting-and.com/wiki/Magic_Loop
You can see why i might prefer knitting with the double pointed needles, it looks like the easiest out of the three, but everyone has their own prefence and many find the other methods comfortable.

B/O means to bind off your stitches, you might just say cast off instead: http://www.knittinghelp.com/videos/casting-off

Hope it all helps!
Autumn

In other news, I am on vacation!  I don’t know why our district has a fall break but I’m not going to argue with it.  I’ve been able to visit some friends and finish a sweater and hae taken some time to get my car worked on, so I would say it is a fairly successful vacation.  What I am finding odd is that I’m only getting 8 hours of sleep instead of my usual 10-12 hours of vacation time sleep and I am doing quite well with this.  Generally, as a vacation rolls on I go to bed later and later until it’s 2am and I’m making myself go to bed so that I wake up before noon.

Pictures of a super adorable toddler sweater coming very very soon.