Confessions of a Wooloholic: Gift Wrap 2012 (Part 2)

As promised, here is the second instalment of this years gifts.

First up is a scarf/neckwarmer thing that I sort of made up as I went along, so there's not really a pattern for it.

I knew I wanted to make a nice warm manly scarf without too much bulk, so I started out knitting a fisherman's rib scarf. It's just a little different than regular 1x1 ribbing, all of the purl stitches are normal, but all of the knit stitches are knit into the stitch below the stitch on the needle. It makes it a bit more complex and doubles up the warmth of the scarf because each stitch is being knit twice. Unfortunately this also makes the knitting go a lot slower. So instead of knitting a full length scarf I decided to add the buttons and some buttonholes to make it more interesting and stay put without having to wrap around a bunch of times. Invention out of laziness!

Next are the Endpaper Mitts by Eunny Jang.

After knitting the Deep in the Forest mittens (see part 1), these pretty much flew off the needles. Such a fun, simple knit where after getting used to the pattern I only needed to glance at it to see what row I was on. The only thing I changed from the written pattern was that I omitted one repeat (10 rows) of the cuff section since the recipient has pretty small hands. Also, because I didn't feel like knitting all of the repeats.

Next is Bias, a long scarf which looks much nicer in real life than it does in the picture. (I apologize for these next two pictures, they were taken hurriedly after 10 pm just minutes before they were stuffed into boxes to be wrapped up.)

This one was a very simple portable knit. Most of it was knitted on my lunch breaks or on the bus home from work. The yarn (sweet georgia silk crush) was so beautiful that I think a more complicated pattern would have hid the variegation, and then what's the point of a lovely variegated yarn? Exactly.

And last for today, Camptown Races, a cowl (infinity scarf) that just about killed me. Not literally.

This pattern only became available in November. Once I had the pattern I needed to find the yarn. As soon as I first laid eyes on this cowl I imagined it in grey and yellow and started searching for yellow yarn. You may or may not know this, but nice yellow yarn is very hard to find. Not only is the right yellow hard to find, but finding it in the correct weight was even harder. So hard in fact, that I never did find the right colour in the correct weight. The pattern called for sport weight, but the closest I came was fingering weight. Since it's a cowl, the difference in weight wasn't crucial so once I found the right yellow I didn't even care that it wasn't sport weight. I knew I wasn't going to get any closer. More difficult than finding the right yellow was giving this away. Even though the colours were chosen with my friend in mind, I totally love them too, and I don't even wear yellow. I guess when it's the right yellow, the rules change. Luckily I have enough yarn left over to make another one. I don't know if I actually will make another one, but I could if I wanted to, and that's the important thing.

After my last post I finished my last bit of Christmas knitting, which will come in a future post as it has not yet reached its intended recipient. A few weeks ago I had started to knit a little something for myself as I thought I was farther along with my knitting than I actually was, and I almost paid dearly for my hubris with my sanity. I kept it together though, and after finishing my Christmas 2012 knitting I celebrated by finishing the Deviate shawl for myself.