Just today, while I was rebelling against the idea of starting a large project I'll need to finish before the Daytona Hallogreen this weekend, I pulled an old knitted, felted pumpkin project out of the UFO pile, thinking I could motivate myself into a larger project if I finished something small — like one or two of the little wedge-type sections that are going to be the pumpkin's body.
(The pattern, by the way, is Jordana Paige's pumpkin pattern from Knitty.)
This color of orange is not the orange you're looking for. Move along.
But then I realized the pumpkin sections were all done. All that was left to knit were the stem and the vine. Well, sheesh. I knocked those out in well under an hour. Ta-da!
Trust this orange more than the other. I remembered to switch the camera settings for this photo. Good orange. Good.
Now I just need to weave in the tails, sew the thing together, felt it, and stuff it. Maybe it'll even show up at the Hallogreen this weekend, so that I can justify having worked on it this week instead of making product. ;)
I also recently excavated an old knitted vest I tore through when I was originally knitting it, except that I got stuck on picking up and knitting the ribbing. See, I started knitting it back when I was first learning, and I had virtually no experience with pick-up-and-knit, and I'd decided I was going to do the main body of the vest in a completely different weight of yarn than the pattern called for. We did all the math so I could knit the body, and that came out fine, but then when I got to the ribbing, I had no clue how to pick up the right number of stitches to make sure the ribbing — which I was doing in the original weight of yarn that the pattern called for — came out right.
The other day I was staring at the remarkably cluttered craft room, in which said UFO vest was sitting underneath my spinning chair, and I realized I could just arbitrarily pick up stitches along the armholes and neckline however I wanted, and knit the ribbing, and if I didn't like the result, I could rip it out and redo it. Duhhh.
This tactic worked, and the vest is now sitting and waiting for the ends to be woven in. No pictures yet ... but send knitwear-photographing vibes, and maybe I'll take some soon.
