Archie The Wonder Dog

This is my final 'must catch up with Q3 finishes' post and I'm now pretending it's the end of September!  I had four knitting projects on my  Q3 FAL list , and have finished one of them.  At the start of the quarter, this is what Sarah 's socks looked like: This is the second pair of socks I knitted ( the first pair, which I knitted toe up, are here ), and I decided to go cuff down for these, so I needed to learn a stretchy cast on and chose the Estonian/Latvian cast on, which looked liked this when the stitches were on the needle: I needed to slightly change the plain stocking stitch leg and did *four rounds of knit, two rounds of purl, four rounds of knit (and repeated from the *) until the leg was long enough.  This gave me a garter ridge every eight rounds and added a bit of interest.  I was slightly shaping the leg, so the stitch markers are there to remind me to decrease every ten rounds (just after the two purl rounds, which nicely hid the dec...

It can't have been a surprise to see yet another Lola pouch (okay, two!) on my  Q3 FAL list  as I seem to be a bit obsessed with making them!  This time, I wanted to use these two fat quarters of shweshwe fabric: Although I didn't mention it when I wrote the list, these two pouches were intended for Sheila , who came, with Salley , for a flying (about 18 hours!) visit in August.  We had a wonderful time, albeit brief, and we got on as well in person as we do online!! Anyway, back to the pouches.  I didn't have enough of the indigo to make two complete pouches (as well as thinking that they needed a contrast fabric to enhance the shweshwe), so I used some remnants of AGF 'Indie' that I had in my scrap boxes.   I didn't have enough of red remnant to use on the base and the binding of either pouch, so decided to go with a contrast strip across the large pouch.  This is the joy of the Lola Pouch pattern : once you've made one, you can adapt it i...

I have one final finish from my current FAL list .  At the start of the quarter, it looked like this: And now, after a very short stitching session (about an hour from start to finish), it looks like this: I love the bit of Liberty lawn round the edge!  I was supposed to do blanket stitch round the edge of the Liberty, but I couldn't get it to look how I wanted so I decided to go with some big running stitches instead.  (I tried smaller stitches, but they looked awful and as though I was trying to hide them.)  This tape measure now lives in my knitting 'bits and bobs' pouch (it was made by Jude and you can see it in this post ) where it has already come in handy! That's my final finish of this quarter (six in total, yippee!!!) so I'll be linking it up when I finish typing. If you haven't yet linked up your finishes, please make sure you visit the link and check how much time is left before it closes as I'd hate you miss out.  And pleas...

The only other thing I've finished from this quarter's FAL list is the Sakura shawl that Lynz and I did as a (very informal) KAL.  I've got to say that it was a lot of fun knitting alongside someone else (albeit via email!) and I hope we do it again soon!  ( You can see her gorgeous green shawl here .) This is how the shawl looked at the start of the quarter: And this is how it looked straight off the needles: You can't really see the lace pattern and, to be honest, it looks a bit like a heap of knitting at this stage! I put off blocking it for a while (I always do as I always overestimate how hard it's going to be and how long it's going to take!) but finally got it done last week.  First I pinned it to the carpet, using lots of pins!  It's the first shawl I've blocked which has made me think that it would be easier with blocking wires.  I can't see me buying any, though, as I'm managing with pins even if it does take a litt...

In June last year I went on a Bargello workshop run by my talented friend Beryl at her teaching studio and a month later I added the resulting project to my Finish-Along list.  It's been on every list since, including my current one , and I'm thrilled to be able to say that it's finished! This is how it started: Four FQs and half a metre of Kaffe shot cotton (tip: if you're using this, starch it well - it likes to move and stretch!) After quite a bit of sewing and cutting, I had sets of strips of varying widths (Daddy (wide), Mammy (medium) and Baby (narrow)!): Dreadful photo, sorry!  Still, at least you won't have to see it again after this! Once I got started again (it sat in a bag from July 2014 until last week!), it didn't take me long to get the panel complete, even though I had to unpick three strips (two because I hadn't double-checked my seam allowance when I started and one because I made a daft mistake). The grey pieces towards t...