The Finishing

I know I do this sometimes.  I mean so much to post about things that are happening while they're happening, and then I put it off and put it off and then I realize I have a lot more to talk about than room to post it seems.  Although, there really isn't a space limit for these things.

There is a limit to your patience and willingness to continue reading me prattling on.  So, with that, I'll jump right in.

Last I left, I was stitching endlessly on pokemon. I  was on the bottom row, and needed 4 more pages.

This is the end of page 27, three more pages!

And here's the end of page 29! the penultimate page!

I did this one in an unusual order, starting with the blue edging, then moving through the browns, oranges, and yellows, finally ending on various shades of blue.

It is done.  The final stitch was stitched on January 31.

I started on a complete whim on April 20 last year.  I am beside myself, I didn't realize how dedicated I would be to finishing.  And not only that, but I knit and crafted and spun a few other things concurrently.

The moral of the story is I have a lot of time on my hands.

Apparently.

It does still need to be washed and pressed and framed, but I'm not going to do that any time soon, because in June we're planning on house hunting and moving. It'll be closer to Zac's job, about an hour North.  I don't want to deal with more things hanging around that need special treatment and room in boxes.  So, it sits folded right here.

What the heck does one do when they finish such a massive undertaking?  It's difficult to throw myself into something else that's completely different, so I did pick up the cross stitch I was working on before the pokemon:

I didn't do very much.  I decided to order some smaller sized tapestry needles for continuing, and in the meantime the BIG SPORTS are on and you know what that means!

Or, maybe you don't.  That's cool.

Every BIG AMATEUR SPORTS WEEKS, knitters and crocheters and etc come together to work on projects during the BIG GLOBAL SPORTS EVENTS!  It used to be called the rav-big-sports-which-shall-not-be-named. In fact, it was in the news a few years ago that ravelry got in trouble for using the term which I shall not use.  Clearly that term is owned by Top Men.  It's like the superb owl. It is forboden.  So, they call it the ravellenics, which I fucking hate.  It sounds so dumb.

So, for me, it's the rav-sports-which-shall-not-be-named.

Anyway, on ravelry you can join teams and there's different crafting medals to be won.

And for this special time, I casted on some mittens!  I'm playing along with Team BBMF (bok bok motherfucker), which is the LSG team.

I used a kit that I got with a gift card that my brother got me for giftmas!

This kit.

You might recognize them, because I made the hat a few years ago and blogged about it.  But if you don't remember, it's the 21 color mitts kit from Blue Sky Fibers.

It comes with a 50g skein of the gray, along with the same bundle of mini skeins from the hat kit.  I Love this hat, so I wanted mittens to go with it.  I did want to modify the mittens to be convertible so I can drive with them on, and you might think that I wouldn't get any use out of them because of where we live, but it's been getting to around freezing in the morning.  So perfectly reasonable thing to want.  I do have some other convertible mittens, but I'm finding they don't fit as well as I'd like them too.  Plus, new! Shiny!

Casting on and getting going was a bit start and stop, I had to rip back after I split for the thumb originally because they were coming out massive.  I actually cast on fewer stitches even than the pattern recommended, and ended up reducing the number even farther.

I've knit convertible mitts before, so I didn't really need a pattern for that.  After I decided on the placement for the mitten flap, I simply knit in gray for the fingerless part of the convertible mittens.  Then when I picked up for the flap, I continued knitting in the colors from the pattern so that when they're in mitten form, they look more or less like the kit.

These honestly knit themselves, DK weight yarn is so fast.

This is mitten number 1.

This is mitten number 2 right before I did the thumb.

For the thumb, I did a single stripe according to the pattern and then did gray for the fingerless part of the fingerless mitt.  Then I picked up between the stripe and the gray and knit the thumb flap.  After I did thumb number 2, I ripped out thumb number 1 and redid the flap because I didn't do the ribbing long enough and it looked weird.

et voila! New convertible mitts!

You might be thinking that there were an awful lot of ends to weave in.  In fact, there were only a few.  For the joining between stripes,  I did a modified split splice.

I think I've talked about split splicing before. It's a joining technique that works with non-superwash yarns. It's where you remove a few inches of a ply from the end of your yarns (in a two-ply yarn, you'll de-ply the ends of each yarn for a few inches and cut one of the plies) and lay the ends of the yarn on top of each other so it will end up as a single yarn when you're done. You remove one of the plies from each yarn so it's not bulkier than the rest of the yarn. Then you felt the ends together, usually by spitting in your hand and rubbing them till it's joined. The wetness and friction join the yarns as one. You don't have to use spit, you can use plain water, but I did.  No shame.

In this case, due to colors changing, I removed the plies but then I folded the yarns around each other, like a russian join and then felted them.  That way each join wasn't muddied by the color change.

Other than the mitts and the cross stitch, I have been working on the stripey sweater I casted on on New Year's Eve:

And I've bound off the bottom last night.  I actually joined these stripes similarly to the mittens, but the yarns aren't non-superwash, so I couldn't felt them.  In this case, I simply knit with longer ends for more stitches at the joins.

I did try the sweater on and it seems to fit OK.  A bit smaller than I was thinking it would be while I was working on it, but not out of the realm of fitting.  It'll fit that much better after blocking.  I do need to do some maths to figure out the sleeve decrease pattern and then I can continue and finish.  Hopefully next time I'll have another finished object to talk about!

With that, I don't have a lot else to talk about.  I did do some spinning on my wheel and various drop spindles, but not enough to talk about really.  I have some yarn coming for upcoming projects.  I'm planning on knee-high socks for both children.  And I have birthday yarn coming for another sweater.