Pinnet Tunic Top

Life is always hectic, and this time of year it feels more so.  Spring is coming, so there's a garden to plan, but also end-of-the-year school events, doctor's appointments, a busy season in my main Etsy shop selling reusable products and then... Girl Scout cookie season.

Due to some miscommunication, I, as troop leader, ended up with the rest of the troop's cookies in my house a week before sales ended.  We had way too many cookies and I had no idea until that moment.  Our troop did great in getting rid of them, and we had a lot of help from another troop, but things were dicey for a while.  I didn't sleep for three nights in a row after I saw those cookies!

This happened just as I posted looking for testers for my newest pattern - a lightweight girl's tunic perfect for summer days, with pretty little picots along the sleeves and hem and a button placket on the back.

It's over now, and things have calmed down. I've caught up with orders in my Etsy shop and I'm glad to say that I can now concentrate on my favorite things - my kids and my knitting -again!

Here's the tunic, modeled a size too big on my 4 year old daughter:

It turned out really cute and I'm pleased with it, if not the fit on my daughter!  (But I knit a size 6 and she wears a 5T)

It's a fairly simple pattern, but not a beginner pattern, due to a button placket on the back and picot bind offs.  I knit this one in a superwash sock yarn in a fingering weight, but plan to make my final version in a cotton or linen blend - perfect for a warm summer day!  Look for it in my Ravelry shop in late April 2017!

Scrappy!

I wish I had taken a picture of it!  I had a bin FULL of scrap sock yarn.  Some of it was from my own sock-knitting.  Some I received in trade for other items.  I also had quite a bit from the Phat Fiber boxes I was a part of years ago.

Why throw good yarn away?

All of that scrap yarn, and 3 1/2 years of knitting off and on and I'm done!

 

This is Frankie Brown's Ten Stitch Blanket.  I love this pattern and it's simplicity.  Once you have the corners down, it's a perfect project for knitting during a suspenseful TV show.  Best of all, it's a free pattern!

 I modified the ten stitch cast on to fifteen stitches, and I added a 4 stitch applied i-cord to the edge to make it look more finished.

Even though it's very nearly July, I'm suddenly obsessed with blankets.  I'm currently working on a test knit blanket for a well-known pattern maker and I'm spinning all my superwash wool top to make a Domino Star Blanket (yes, crazy, I know!)

New State, New Plans

Well, months pass and things change.  My husband's job was not renewed in Nashville, and his boss wanted him in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.  A great thing for me, because I grew up south of the Cities, and wanted to move back anyway.

We have spent the last three months living with my parents while we sold our house in Tennessee.  It has been pleasant - I have to say, I have great, understanding parents! (Who else would house a family with four children under 10 for three months and not go crazy?)

We close on our house in the suburbs next week.  It's going to be a big change!  From over two acres of land to 3/4 of a acre (a huge lot here!)  There are a lot of projects in this house but there's also a lovely sun room and a space for my husband and his musical equipment farther from the bedrooms. A nice thing, for sure!  The people who own the house now have put a lot of work into making the house energy efficient and landscaping in an ecological friendly way.

Here it seems the biggest challenge is to not slip back into using convenience items - my dad's coffeepot broke and he bought a K-Cup dispenser.  Paper towels, quick meals, etc.  The house isn't set up for a more reusable lifestyle.

(As an aside:  We all are at different levels of sustainability.  We have our powerhouses of ecological friendliness, and we have people who are still working on simply putting things in the recycling bin.  It's not for us to judge where someone is at - not only is it something very personal, but it is fluid; each person changes from day to day, based on circumstances.)

I've been knitting and spinning like crazy, too.  Hey, it's Minnesota, and winter's coming!

Pollen everywhere!

So it's just that time of year when everyone gets sick because of the pollen, thick in the air, and in a thick layer on every surface.  Amid viruses that attack while we are already down (smarmy things that they are!) we have been doing lots of breathing treatments on the nebulizer for my husband and myself and my youngest.  It always makes me feel more empathy for those people who can't breathe as the norm - I suppose you learn to live with it since you can't live without breathing, but it must be terribly hard.

Despite that, I managed to finish the first sample of a pattern I'm working on for a girl's worsted weight tunic. This was done in my handspun, a superwash merino combed top from Mosaic Moon.

The handspun:

It's not quite right - the sizing seems to be off despite getting gauge and the math, so I'll need to check that.  And I'd like to make some changes to the seed stitch panel and how it expands at the bottom (which you probably can't see anyway, for the patterning in the yarn.)  Then testing of the pattern with actual other people!  Hopefully I'll have this in my Ravelry pattern shop by early summer, so there will be plenty of time to make a cute little tunic for a little girl before winter comes again.