Tag: Nereid Fingerless Gloves

#craftygoals: February 2022

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Y’all hanging in there? January’s a hard month to survive, I think. Good job making it to February! Alas, I think February often gives January a run for its miserable money most years, which makes me feel like…

But we’re just going to keep our heads down and go to work on those awesome crafty goals, and we’ll pass this gray, cold month with color in our hands and beautiful stitches to chase away the days. Sounds like an excellent plan! Go forth!

I had a plan for February, but as I went about to start prepping for it, I asked the person I was going to make a thing for if they wanted the thing I was planning to make for them and THEY SAID NO. So…I need some new plans. (It was a dress for Rachel. She’s so thrilled with her new Halloween skirt that she said she didn’t need anything new at the moment, and anyways, that particular dress was something she was “only into for, like, last summer.” 😒 This is why, more and more, I’m against surprise crafting. It often ends poorly. Just ask people what they want and then tell them it’s going to take forever to make. Everyone ends up happy. Even if it takes ten years to finish the thing. Trust me, I have A LOT of experience with this.)

I didn’t mention it in my January #craftygoals post, but I want to try to sew up an article of clothing each month this year. (I didn’t mention it because it would have hinted that “Rachel’s Birthday Gift” was a piece of clothing. Which ended up not mattering because I had to spoil the secret anyway. Gah.) I like the idea of making well-fitting clothes, but it’s a very new skill for me and I avoid it because it’s still kind of difficult to do well. It’s way more gratifying to crank out quilts because I’m already good at them. Clothes, though…eek. Practice, practice, practice.

1. So, with Rachel’s dress off the table, I need to come up with another clothing item to make, and I need a little time to figure that out because reasons.

The other #craftygoals for February are:

2. Finish the Rainbow Coin Strip quilt. I don’t think I’ve ever posted about this quilt, but I started it in December 2019 as a kick-off for the coming year being devoted to sewing up my scraps, and almost got the top completed, actually. And then my first shipment of Blank Quilting fabric arrived and the Rainbow Coin Strip quilt went into hibernation very quickly. The Convoluted Formula™ dictates that it be the next thing I work on. I’m pleased it’ll be completed soon. It’s cute.

3. Continue (maybe finish?) the Far Far Away quilt.

4. Brick House Scrap Quilt blocks #5-8

5. Clementine Quilt Along Month 3 & 4. I didn’t quite finish the Month 3 blocks last month because of my back, but they’re close. Hopefully I can railroad through the fourth month’s blocks, too.

6. Berry Blocks. Not even started, annoyingly.

7. HST Leaders & Enders. Also not started, extra annoyingly. But we’re not going to worry because Scrappy Thursday is for working with scraps at the pace that I can work. There are no deadlines in the Land of Scrappy Thursdays, just a love of scraps. THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN, DARN IT.

Hand Stitching-wise, I’m still knitting away on Michael’s Building Blocks sock, and really should be able to finish those up by the end of the month.

I have NO idea what I’ll work on after that. I think I need a portable project for taking to work, and an “at-home” project that is more involved or larger or whatever. Maybe a pair of vanilla socks for work, and resume working on the Stalagmite socks that I started three years ago? Or the Better Days Sweater? I don’t know, but it’s gotta be something yarny. My fingers are so cold in the winter that I have a hard time with hand sewing.

January’s #craftygoals went really good. I finished the Cat Lady quilt, Rachel’s Halloween skirt (pictures coming), the Mini Charm Chiffon Baby quilt (pictures waiting on delivery), and was able to start working on the Far Far Away quilt.

Scrappy Thursday-wise, I got the Brick House blocks for the month done and almost finished the Clementine blocks. As previously stated, I did not get to the Berry Blocks or HST Leaders & Enders. Not much I can do about that. Hopefully everything cooperates in the universe and I’m able to work on them this month.

And in the sphere of Hand Stitching, I finally finished the Nereid Mitts! Huzzah!

Good luck with your #craftygoals for the month!

Nereid Mitts Update

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Yeah. They’re finished. And it never would have happened this fast if I wasn’t publicly shaming myself to get through them. Blogging is awesome.

I hope they bring you joy, Denise.

It’s so funny to read through other people’s write-ups of this pattern. Not many like it. It’s not a bad pattern at all, it’s just finicky and brain-consuming, and a lot of knitters knit in order to zen out. This is not a “zen out” pattern at all.

I’m also worried that they may have turned out a tad small. Which would be highly annoying, seeing that it took me almost ten years to make them.

Details:

Pattern: Nereid Fingerless Gloves, by Denise Sutherland (Ravelry link)

Yarn: madelinetosh Tosh Sock, “Flashdance” colorway

Needles: US 1 (2.25mm)

Modifications: Not on purpose…ha ha ha

Click here to see this project’s Ravelry page.

Fourth Monday in January

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Monstrously behind in my crafting schedule, but there’s just not much I can do about freak nerve pinchings, and I really needed to get that COVID booster shot. This week has a little bit of extra free time in it because the kids don’t have school on Thursday and Friday, so I’m hoping to get a little more crafting done on those days. We shall see.

The fast and dirty rundown:

  • Cat Lady Quilt: Done and blogged.
  • Rachel’s Birthday Gift: In-progress, near completion. With the loss of almost two weeks of creating time, I had to give up on the idea of keeping this secret, so Rachel knows about it. It’s another circle skirt, this time made from the “Cast a Spell” floral print in the “Spooky & Sweeter” collection that Art Gallery Fabrics put out last year. It works well that she knows because I needed to measure her and then I figured I’d ask her if she even liked the idea before sinking hours of time into making it. It’s been super cute–she “wanders” into the craft room and stands behind me while I’m at the sewing machine and watches as the skirt gets stitched, and then wanders away, only to reappear an hour or so later to check on my progress.
  • Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt: I ran into a hiccup on Rachel’s skirt and needed to take a break from it, so I went around and gathered up the various materials I needed to work on this and prewashed everything that needed it. Ready to baste. Could potentially finish this week.
  • Far Far Away Quilt: Also prewashed everything for this with the Chiffon stuff. It’s A LOT of fabric! So excited to hopefully get to working on this.
  • Brickhouse Quilt: Blocks 1-4 done.
  • Clementine Quilt: Almost done with Month 3. Probably finish this week.
  • Berry Quilt: Haven’t started, but will probably start this week.
  • HST Leaders & Enders Quilt: Haven’t started, probably won’t get to this month.
  • Nereid Mitts: Done! Need to photograph and blog.
  • Building Blocks Socks: Putting in the time, so they’re coming along.
Skirt with pockets!

It was a very productive weekend after many weeks of feeling poorly. It’s amazing how much you’re actually capable of doing when you finally start feeling better.

Second Monday in January

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Good morning, lovelies! Hopefully the new year is still treating you well and you’re making progress on the things that matter most to your heart. This week I’ll be (hopefully) finishing the Cat Lady quilt. The quilting is finished, and it’s trimmed; I just need to get going on the binding and label. I’m thinking I’m going to use the loads of C+S Bluebird scraps I have on-hand from when Denise made a dress for Em out of that fabric, which means I’ll be doing a scrappy binding construction because the scraps are very weird shapes–there’s very little yardage that will work for WOF cutting. BUT…it’s C+S fabric, and I have loads of it that I’ve been trying to sew through for years, so this will make a significant dent.

I had hoped to finish the Cat Lady quilt last week, but geez, what a week! Washington got a lot of snow and ice and rain and it just threw everything off kilter all week long. My kids had a two-hour late start for school four days out of five, the roads were flooding over…you don’t realize how stressed you’re feeling about stuff until you get past it and realize that you’ve been holding your shoulders up to your ears for days. And now we have to deal with rescheduling all the stuff that got cancelled, and adding it on top of all the regularly-scheduled stuff…I just wish that people would let things go when they get cancelled? Like, it’s too bad it didn’t happen, but let’s try again next year, rather than trying to fit it into the next couple of weeks that are already booked? Please? But alas…that’s a rare outcome.

Once the Cat Lady quilt is complete, I’m hoping to start work on Rachel’s birthday gift, and I can’t show you anything about it or she’ll figure out what it is. Which also means I have to clean it up everyday and not leave it lying around on the cutting table or the ironing board. Let’s see if I can actually remember to do that everyday…who else thinks that I’ll forget and Rachel will know what her gift is before it’s even finished? It also just occurred to me that I can’t work on this over the weekend days because she’s somewhat of a constant fixture in my craft room on the days that she’s home. So I guess it will take twice as long to stitch this up because I really will only have two days a week that I can work on this. Awesome.

I’m still working on the Nereid Fingerless Mitts for my bestie, and hopefully will have good news to report on them soon. This “tell people you were making them a gift if you didn’t finish it before Christmas” idea has been the perfect motivation to keep me working on those gifts. It might add extra incentive to get things done before Christmas in future years, too: I’m going to lose that special moment of surprise if it’s not done before Christmas because I’ll have to announce it on the blog. I don’t like doing that. But I do like finishing stuff, and so here we are.

Scrappy Thursday this week is for working on the Clementine Quilt. I don’t know if anyone remembers that I was one of the quilters in the original Clementine Quilters group, but I had to quit because we were moving. I hated quitting, but it was definitely the right call at the time because here we are, four years later, and it’s only now that I have the feasible time to work on it again. Fat Quarter Shop supplied me with the fabric to make the quilt, and I don’t feel right accepting fabric from people and then not using it, so it’s been on my mind ever since that I definitely need to get this completed so I can fulfill the obligation that I signed up for originally.

Update on Marshmallow: He’s doing better than he was. It looked like his hind legs were permanently paralyzed for many days, but in the last three or so days he’s started using them again, somewhat regularly. We changed up his meds the day before that development, so it looks like we’ve hit on a combo that works well for him. Pretty sure he’s gone blind though–he seems to only be responding to sounds, and he runs face first into things a lot. He got pushed down the stairs by Charlotte the other day because he walked near her, which is not a thing he used to do because she’ll bat any cat in the face that gets that close to her. (She’s such a GRUMP.) I feel like I need to set something up that will keep her away from him while I’m gone from the house because I’m afraid I’m going to come home to a murder scene or the like. Sigh.

So yeah, bad weather and geriatric cats…last week was intense. Hopefully things are a lot calmer this week!

Progress: Nereid Fingerless Gloves

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In my last post I pondered the idea of publicly sharing any handmade Christmas gifts that weren’t done yet, in a last-ditch effort to follow through on their completion because publicly talking about said unfinished gifts will keep them at the forefront of my crafty brain. And then…ugh, I made a really, really silly mistake on these mitts and every fiber in my being wants to throw them atop the hibernation pile and ignore them for another year, and NO THAT WILL NOT BE HAPPENING.

So here we are: I was hoping to finish up a pair of fingerless gloves for my bestie for Christmas this year, but I got sick for most of December and didn’t make the deadline and darn it, these are getting finished NOW. There will be weekly progress posts on these things until they are done because I started making them in August of 2012, people! It’s been almost TEN YEARS! They are beautiful and they deserve to be out in the world making my friend happy.

One mitt is done, and the silly mistake was that I didn’t start the thumb increases during the third repeat on the second mitt, so I have to unpick half a repeat and do it all over again and I was so close to being done but now I’m not and it was a very low moment for me. BUT…public pressure to continue on and persevere…hopefully I can show you much progress next Wednesday!

And, then…there’s another project that didn’t get finished for Christmas, and I’ll tell you all about it when these gloves are done! The anticipation builds!