More Treasures from the Past and my Oldest WIP

 First off, the Lord of the Rings scarf made it to its proper owner. It has been dubbed his precious.

Now onto some very cool finds. In digging out our dining room I found an old box that made its way here via my mother's basement, and likely my grandmother's house.

This is my very first sewing box, and my first sewing machine! This My Little Pony machine is from the 80s and it's a chain stitch machine. You can see my little 5 year old writing there. In the boxe were two cut out Cabbage Patch Doll outfits, one dress, and one pair of overalls. These WIPs were 35 years old and now that I found them, I will finish them!

And since I also found my two Cabbage Patch Dolls in the box too, I cleaned them up, finished the overalls for Jesse Barfield (as I wanted to preserve his Blue Jays uniform), and passed them to my toddler. I still need to put the dress together, and I have some nice fabric scraps to make some more outfits with the pattern as well.

Sorry for the potato picture, but liberating him from my toddler for a proper photoshoot was proving difficult.

It's been fun going down memory lane back to when I was learning to sew with my grandmother.

FO: Fellowship of the Ring Scarf

 

So this is finally done! This is the Fellowship of the Ring Scarf (Ravelry link) by Ben Griffiths. 

This was a really fun knit. It is just the chart, not a full written out pattern, but it's a standard rectangle so it's not difficult to figure out.

The pattern is written for DK weight and double knitting, but it really could be done any weight of yarn and as colourwork rather than double knitting. As I stated in my WIP post about this project, I decided that since it will be going to someone in a quite warm climate, I was making something that would work better as a wall hanging.

This took me technically just over a year, but in that year I was pregnant and that always sucks any knitting mojo away. If I were to calculate actual time worked on this I would say it would take about 2 months around a full time job and 2 kids.

It's interesting looking at the pattern page and comparing my photos to see how the different weight yarn actually stretched the proportions of the image. Mine are all a bit wider looking, though that could also be my gauge, I'm a relatively loose knitter.

And now for some pretty closeups of the various motifs.

I'm really happy with this, though I learned that my purling is very different in gauge than knitting. If you look closely at the background it looks ridged. That's just a gauge thing, and something I'll have to see about working on in the future.

I think my friend will really like this and I'm looking forward to it getting to him.

Gift in Progress

 Sometimes a project comes along that must be done rather than wants to be done. The kind of project that you see a pattern and know that you will spend the next who knows how long to get it done.

This was the Fellowship of the Ring pattern (Rav Link), which is really just a chart to follow for a rather wide scarf. Once I saw this chart I knew that my coworker needed to have it.

Said coworker loves Lord of the Rings and usually reads through them at least once a year. Shortly before this pattern was released, he'd mentioned that due to a health issue, he'd not been able to read the books that year as he didn't have the focus for reading. 

Seeing this pattern and how it was basically the whole story in a series of images would allow him to 'read' the story by looking at the scarf. I'm anticipating this being more like a scroll hung on a wall or pulled out of a drawer though, as he lives in a rather warm climate.

I decided to double knit this in black and light blue Loops & Threads Impeccable acrylic and I'm quite happy with how it's coming out. My tension isn't perfect as I'm knitting one colour continental and the other English, but it's not glaring, and has been practice for both types of knitting.

There are 9 sections all told in the scarf, and I've completed 6.5, so I'm very much on the home stretch and excited to get it done so I can surprise my coworker.

I'm hoping to have this done by the end of March. Any sooner would be awesome too but as a mother of two very young children I'm being realistic.