Fall and Christmas Knitting

I caught the knitting bug in a big way this fall and have been knitting like crazy. It all started when I realized that the shows I was working on were slow enough that I could knit while calling them (in other words, the cues were far enough apart, that I could actually pick up my knitting and do more than a handful of stitches before I'd have to put it down again). Because of the time of year, much of what I ended up knitting were presents, which is one of the reasons I haven't posted any of these yet. (And in fact I'm putting a delay on this post until I give my brother his present on Tuesday). My biggest accomplishment by far was finishing the pair of socks that I'd started last fall. While I did have to put quite a bit of time into them, the main reason it took that long was because I simply put them down for many months. To put it into perspective, while it took me almost exactly a year to knit the first sock, it only took me about a month and a half to do the second one (and there was a break in there to knit a birthday present). Anyways, here are my first pair of socks!

My first every pair of socks! Link to the Ravelry project here.

They were very daunting before I started and while I was making the first one, but once I started the second one, it because much less terrifying. I'm actually looking forward to making more socks in the future.

I mentioned pausing the socks to knit a present. The present in question was for my Mum's birthday. I made her covers for candle jars.

Shown here with candles lit in them. Ravelry project here.

The other big present I knit was for my brother, Thomas. He's recently moved to the east coast, so I've been using his birthday and Christmas as opportunities to ply him with warm weather gear. Last Christmas I knit him a hat. This year, I knit him a scarf, similar to the one's Mike and I have. They're all made out of three skeins of an alpaca/acrylic blend that's nice and toasty. The pattern I used for his scarf involved knitting rectangles of varying lengths. The person who made the pattern had just done their lengths at random. I decided to have some fun and determined the length of the rectangles by pi. So the first is 3 inches, the next is 1 inch, then next is 4 inches, and so on. I ended up with pi all the way to the 16th decimal place.

Not the best picture, but it gives you the idea. Ravelry project here.

One of the only other non-gift items were these legwarmers. I had favorited a pattern a long time ago and decided to make it out of some yarn I'd gotten on clearance. These knit up really quick. I finished them in under a week.

Quick and easy legwarmers! Ravelry project here.

I wound up making four hats. The first was a baby hat I knit in a couple hours for the Christmas show. Disaster struck while I was making that hat when I broke one of my interchangable needles. I should have known better than to knit bulky yarn with wooden needles, but it all worked out in the end because I got a replacement pair for Christmas. The second was a hat that I made for one of the girls in the box office. It was fun having her pick out a pattern and yarn. The pattern turned out to be super simple, which meant it knit up really quickly. Also a really quick knit were the other two hats I made, both from the same pattern with the same brand of yarn, just in different colors. The red one was for my Secret Santa and the blue one is for the Stoneham Theatre Yankee Swap. I made the blue one a little longer so that you could fold up the brim more comfortably.

Baby hat

Erin's hat

Secret Santa Hat

Yankee Swap Hat

So many hats! Another thing I made multiples of were star ornaments. All the parents and grandparents got a framed photo of Mike and me (we actually got professional photos taken and everything) and a knit star ornament. I tried out three different star patterns. The first one was the one I ended up liking the best. The cream, red, and purple star are all made using this pattern. I liked it the best because it was simple, it came out looking like a star, and it was pretty easy to make it look tidy. The second pattern was this one, which I made the green star out of. I didn't like this one as much because it looked too much like a flower or leaf to me. I also wound up liking this one the least because of the contrasting colored edging, which I felt like it needed so it wouldn't blend into the tree. The last pattern I tried was this one, which made the blue, sparkly star. This star wound up being the smallest and most difficult because of the kind of increases it called for. I also felt like the product just wasn't quite as tidy.

All the star ornaments together!

It was definitely a few months of quick knits. The stars were each only a day or two, the bulky hats all took me only a few hours of knitting each, and the next item took me only one performance to complete. I knit a cup cozy for my Production Assistant Sarah. She's a big coffee drinker and she's a Slytherin, which is why I chose that particular color scheme.

Slytherin cup cozy. Ravelry project here.

The final thing I completed recently (the same day I composed this post in fact) I'm actually going to wait to post as it's also present-like in nature and won't be opened until later this month. I'm currently working on a pair of arm warmers for myself that I'm really excited about. It's a fun stitch pattern and I'm pretty happy with how they're coming out.