A yarn crisis

I’ve finally finished knitting the sleeves of the never-ending cardigan – wow, that’s a lot of stockinette! After finishing my sister’s gloves, I was determined to finish the cardigan before casting on anything. Yes, I know I’ve said *that* before! Casting off both sleeves is certainly a step in the right direction, only now I’ve hit a snag. I’m out of yarn. I only have the button band to go, so it hardly seems worth buying another whole 400g ball. So, do any of you lovely readers just happen to have a little leftover floating about in your stash, waiting for a home? It’s Stylecraft Special Aran with Wool in shade 3351 Blue Heather, Dye lot 47745.

On another note, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to using straight needles again, unless there is a very specific reason to. (Is there?) Give me my Knitpros any day. The straights are just so awkward and ungainly, especially with the weight of two sleeves hanging from them.

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Mr Incredible

I thought I’d show you another quick make I did for Christmas.

Pumpkin has never really been interested in the idea of dressing up. A pirate costume cobbled together out of clothes he already had in his wardrobe was about his limit. But when he watched ‘The Incredibles’ a month or two ago, he swiftly started talking about being Mr Incredible and telling me he wanted a Mr Incredible costume.

For those of you who need a reminder, or simply have no idea, this is Mr Incredible.

Incredibles picture taken from imdb.com

There are plenty of tutorials around on other blogs for making an Incredibles costume, but I thought the quickest and easiest way to do it would be to gather a few items of clothes and chop them around a bit.

Good ol’ Primark came up trumps for pretty much everything I needed.

A red T shirt

A pair of red leggings

A pair of black leggings

A pair of black gloves

I also bought black, orange, yellow and white felt from a craft shop to make the logo.

It’s a very simple make, really. First, I chopped the black leggings just below the crotch to make the top part into the ‘pants’ that are worn super-hero style on the outside. The legs of the leggings became long sleeves which I hand-stitched into the existing sleeves of the T-shirt.

I used a template for the logo which I found on this blog, and cut the pieces out of the coloured felt. Annoyingly (given that I ended up doing the majority of the work on Christmas Eve, having been wiped out by a sickness bug in the run up to Christmas) I found it really tricky to machine sew the logo – I think because the felt was very soft and the angles were too much to manouver round – so I had to handstitch the whole thing onto the T shirt.

I ran out of time to do a mask and a belt, though I hope to get round to doing both at some point soon. But the look on Pumkin’s face when he opened the present on Christmas Day was just priceless. He was absolutely over the moon, and pretty much insisted on wearing the costume for about 3 days straight! Definitely worth the effort!

Leftovers

The leftover yarn from my sister’s scarf was bugging me. I couldn’t do much with it til my sister had tried on the scarf and decided whether she liked it or not, so I took it up to my folks with me when we all went to stay after Christmas. Once the scarf had received the appropriate seal of approval, I decided that the leftovers were destined to be a matching pair of fingerless gloves.

I’ve never knitted a pair of gloves before, but I figured after socks, how hard can it be? I divided the yarn carefully in half and set to. I wanted to incorporate the cable design from the scarf, but on my first attempt, I ran out of yarn just after reaching the thumb hole placement. My second attempt was done in simple stockinette and got a little further up the fingers, but didn’t leave me with enough to create the thumb. Back to square one!

My solution was to raid my mum’s yarn stash (I don’t think she’s knitted for years!) in search of a complimentary colour. She came up trumps with some chunky Robin Picasso in a pinky red colour which went beautifully with the Marble Chunky.

So, here’s the third and final version.

I desperately tried to cast on two at a time in the round, but utterly failed, so had to do them separately. There must be a good tutorial for doing so out there somewhere – anyone got a recommendation? I think they ended up being a pretty good match though, aside from the colour variation in the Marble.

The thumb hole was a new technique for me, but I managed it with the help of this lovely little thumb trick. I picked up a couple of extra stitches to make sure there were no holes and it worked beautifully!

After sewing all the ends in, I had just enough yarn to crochet a couple of flowers to go on the backs of the gloves, but I ran out of time to sew them on, so I left it for my sister to choose whether to do so or not. All in all, I was very pleased with how they turned out, and pleased to have used up all of the yarn. I think my sister likes them, so I hope she wears them. If not I may just have to steal them back from her!