A Christmas Dress

The holidays sneaked by me with minimal knitting this year.. but I did manage to finish the Rainbow Dress just in time by Christmas eve. Didn't have time nor energy to sew in the ends though, so the little girl wore it around the house with a bunch of ends trailing around her. It's a tad too big (hence the sexy off-the-shoulder look) but I absolutely love it.

Pattern : Rainbow Dress by Tikki

Yarn : Sublime Soy Cotton in Pomegranate, and RYC CashCotton in Apple

Needles : 3.5mm

Here's a picture of her guzzling down Bucks Fizz to end off the year. Happy Holidays!

Cables & Lace Update

I've been good and knitting away on the Cables & Lace Kimono Cardy.. it's a really fun knit and now that I've done something like this I don't think I can ever do a stockinette-only sweater/cardigan.

It was kinda scrunched up and tight-looking at first, but after a light steam blocking, the lace opened up and the yarn kinda 'relaxed' - this is pretty typical of Sublime yarn, I think, maybe because of the silk content?

Here is where I am as of today, I have to finish off the belt/tie (which is like 200+ rows of 7 stitches!), and then pick up and do the ribbing around the neck area. Glad that this should be done before baby is due!

Cables & Lace Kimono Cardigan

There's no other way to say it - I'm a masochist.

My little one is due in about 5 weeks, and when that happens, I don't know if I will even have time to breathe, let alone knit. So the most practical thing to do (knitting-wise that is), would be to knit baby items, or small quick projects like hats, scarves, dishcloths.. you get the idea.

Instead, I cast on for this.

It's my biggest and most ambitious project to date - I've only ever done 1 cable project, and about 3 lace projects in my entire knitting life. Not to mention that this pattern is 10 pages (!) long, is for the 'Intermediate' knitter (I consider myself newbie-ish with a phobia for anything tough) and requires more than 1000m of yarn. All I know is, I saw the pattern, I have the yarn for it, and I cast-on. And after the first 10 rows (at which point the pattern says 'following pattern as established above), I spent another 2 hours trying to figure out which charts to follow and when.

Thankfully, the knitting itself is not tough, it was the actual interpretation of the pattern that got me freaked. So I went to the stationary shop and bought post-it flags and pasted them all over my pattern, and would painstakingly move the flags down each row whenever I worked it. If the flags should drop or anyone should move them by mistake, I will kill them.

In other less stressful knitting news, I found stray balls of yarn in my stash.. they were about 10 years old. Took 2 hours to crochet this little summer hat in a nubbly cotton yarn. It finished up so quickly and turned out so cute that I wanted to go out and buy more of that yarn (go figure).

Feeling high from my superfast hat, I started another bobble hat of my own design. As I was crocheting the third row of bobbles, I noticed that it was an entirely different shade of green from the top of the hat. Knitting 101 - pls make sure that dyelots are the same? Yeah - try telling that to stray little balls of yarn whose labels have disintegrated.

So the bobble hat sits unfinished as I try to convince myself that the yellow-ish tinge in the third row of the bobbles is actually a "design element".

War of the Voices of Baby Items

Pattern : Easy Baby Knits by Claire Richardson

Yarn : Sublime Merino Silk DK (slightly less than 1 skein)

Voice 1 (aka Angel Voice) - "ohhh this is going to be so squishy and cute"

Voice 2 (aka Demon Voice) - "isn't this yarn kinda hot for our weather?"

Voice 1 - "a little, but it's quite light weight so it shouldn't stifle the baby"

Voice 2 - "it's too small, how are the baby's hands gonna stretch in that"

Voice 1 - "most babies curl up their fingers, and anyway the yarn stretches"

Voice 2 - "baby will snag a nail in the loose weave and will probably end up yanking out her entire nail"

Voice 1 - "but look at those cutie matching ribbons I found in my stash that matches the yarn perfectly..."

Voice 2 - "what if baby chokes on the ribbon when it comes undone"

Voice 1 - ".....but, but.."

Voice 2 - "besides which, Mothercare sells those for like $10 for 3 pairs, you're gonna take forever to make them"

Voice 2 - "and your mom will put those in the dryer and shrink them, then they definitely won't fit anymore... /evil snickering

Voice 1 - /concedes defeat and is silenced forever

Game, Set, Match - Demon Voice
And I thought that knitting baby items would be easy...

Sublime Service

Pattern : Flair from Knit and Tonic
Yarn : Sublime Cashmere Merino Silk Aran (75% merino, 20% silk, 5% cashmere), Shade 0017
Needles : 5mm Clover Bamboo circulars
Mods : Left out the buttons as big buttons look silly on me. Will use a brooch instead

When I first saw this pattern, I could almost see Kate Moss or Sienna Miller wearing this chunky swingy cropped cardigan atop their skinny black jeans, with boots, a beret, and a 'oh, i just woke up & threw this together' attitude. You see, I was on the hunt for my next project and wanted something 'of the moment' and fashionable, and this totally fit the bill.

There is a special chemistry between the Sirdar Sublime yarn and Clover bamboos - the stitches just hover above the needles and magically form an even fabric without me even trying. The yarn was very soft and yet it wasn't so insubstantial that the cardy would fall apart after a few washes. It was one of those magical projects where even plain stockinette was fun, and as a result, I completely lost track of the yardage and didn't realise that the yarn was being gobbled up. There was not enough yarn to finish the sleeves... Crap.

Abandoning my knitting, I googled "Sublime" (and got some mighty weird & definitely non-yarn-related searches in the process), sent multiple emails to any retailer who carried it, and waited anxiously, my mind frantically searching for other alternatives. Another colour, no sleeves......hmm...

One of the online retailers was kind enough to forward my request to Sirdar, and their sales manager sent me an email, telling me that he had sourced & found 3 additional balls of yarn - in that particular dyelot. YIPPEES. Plus, he mentioned that he would be dropping by Singapore & offered to bring it with him so that I could save on the cost of shipping. Seriously - isn't this the best service? To put it into perspective, Sirdar only has 1 retailer here... so our market isn't big, and yet he was kind enough to do that little extra for little ol' me. If I didnt already love this yarn, I will definitely buy more from Sirdar just for this.

Well, now that I have enough yarn, guess I better go finish the sleeves on this cardy before the trend for cropped jackets is over eh?