What I did Yesterday...

I regularly get the LBY Studio blog from the Lion Brand Yarn Studio. This wee project caught my eye on Tuesday and appealed to me in many ways. It's about memories and I have a lot of them relating to knitting. My mother taught me to knit when I was six years old. She also owned a fiber retail business called By Hand in Philadelphia, PA when I was in my teens. I spent many an hour either knitting samples from our new yarns or helping our knitting customers to be more successful with their projects. The memories of being taught to knit and the various projects I worked on over the years is a very long thread of my life. When I was in England two years ago, I was working on a pair of kilt hose for my Da whilst riding the train down from London. A wee lassie watched me for awhile and then asked me what I was doing and how long I had been doing it. I thought about her questions and realized that I had been knitting at that point, for fifty years!

I also am enjoying passing those memories on to the next generation as I have taught both my daughter, Erin and my niece, Mimi to knit. I think both of them will far surpass my skills in the end. After all, Erin has become an extraordinary independent yarn dyer with her own business called The Asylum for Wayward Yarn and Mimi has just finished up a lace shawl project called Evenstar that also included 3000 beads.

So, onto this project. I grabbed some of Erin's hand dyed yarn that was leftover from a hat I knitted for my dear old friend, Rocky. I just cast on 15 stitches and did 4 rows of seed stitch and then 4 inches of stocking stitch and 4 more rows of seed stitch. After casting off, I folded the fabric in half and crocheted the seams and then the loop. Wallah!

There will be a meet and greet for this project at the studio in NYC in May, which sadly, I will not be able to attend. After that, the wee bags and their stories will go to the Wales National Wool Museum for an exhibit during the summer. I, of course will not be able to visit the museum while the exhibit is there, but the thought of my bag being part of it makes me smile. Hopefully I can convince Erin and Guy to make a run to Wales and see it for themselves.

One Skein Baby Bolero

Here is the Baby Bolero from One Skein for my friend Amber's first baby. The baby's due in June, so I am ahead of the game. Yeah for me!

The yarn called for in the book, One Skein by Leigh Radford, was a Blue Sky Organic Cotton. I used Lion Brand Yarn's Nature's Choice Organic Cotton in the Pistachio colour instead. I couldn't resist using the 30% off with coupon for LBYs at Hancock Fabrics for the Martha Stewart Yarn Show tie-in from last Monday (03/23). The only real difference in the yarns is the amount on the skein. This sweater took one plus skeins of the LBY Nature's Choice Organic instead of just one of the Blue Sky Organic Cotton. I have used the Blue Sky yarn as well and it is a lovely yarn to work with.

I finally bought this book after I realized that I had taken it out of the library about nine times. I have already made five of the thirty projects contained therein. I realized it was silly to not own it, even though I have a self-imposed moratorium on buying books right now. Knitting Daily from Interweave Press had it on sale tho right around my birthday, so I took the opportunity to buy it and ran.

Here's the link to Interweave's Knitting Daily: http://www.knittingdaily.com. The email newsletter is a very useful one for me. There are also links to some great patterns. There are free ones as well as patterns for sale.

Making this sweater was a learning experience for me. I had never done a provisional cast on before. I really need to read up on these for the next time I try a provisional cast on as it was fiddley to pick the stitches off the cast on and onto the needles again.

I really liked making this sweet little sweater. The little motif at the back neck is an Arabic symbol of protection. Babies need all that they can get, of that I am certain.