Who's writing...

My photo
North Salt Lake, Utah, United States
I'm a woman with degrees in creative writing and cultural anthropology, experience in retail sales, merchant processing, teaching English as a foreign language, and archaeology, who teaches writing and computer classes at a local college, and works for a herpetology society. I also like to read, cook, knit, watch movies, make baskets, take photographs, craft, travel, and blog. I currently live in Utah with my husband, T, and our two dogs. Oh, and I'm a Cancer, which explains the crab thing.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Christmas knitting

As usual, I was a busy knitter for Christmas this year.  I made presents for several people, and had a lot of fun doing it.

I started with an addition to the knitted nativity scene I started for my mom last year. I got the original patterns from Running Jack Knits, and adapted them this year. The wise men were just variations on the pattern for Joseph.
Full wise men set
I started with this guy. I obviously made his skin dark brown, and his beard black.  Then I did a robe in brown and white yarn, which came out a little too long because I was using two yarns at once and didn't think to asjuct the pattern.  I knitted a long, flat piece in white, which I then wrapped around his head as a turban and sewed on.  I skipped the sleeves on his clothing, and made a gold bottle by knitting a very small tube in the round, and then decreasing and finishing the top few rows as I-cord.  I then stitched the bottle to his hands.
Balthasar, the Arab Wise man

The next one I decided to make in shades of purple, with beige skin and a white beard, and I just switched to purple yarn to finish his head, instead of making the hat a separate piece.  I made his cloak pretty short.  He ended up looking like a wizard, so I did some gold embroidery on his hat, but I'm not sure it really helped that much.  For the box, I made it like some of the baby booties I have knit before: I did a small garter stitch rectangle, then picked up stitches around all 4 edges and worked them in stockinette stitch for a few rows to make the sides, and finally finished by knitting in garter stitch from one short end, picking up the side stitches by using K2TOG at the edge of each row, and I think I closed the end with a kitchener stitch.  It ended up a little big, but it works.
Melchior, the Persian wise man
 For the last wise man, I went with beige skin and a brown beard, orange clothes, and a green and white striped cloak with a braided white belt.  I knit a miniature hat with a white rolled edge and an extended pointed tip, but it ended up pretty big for his little head.  When I sewed it on, I added a lot of extra stitches to try and shape it the way I liked it.  I made him a silver bottle, which started the same as the gold bottle, but I wrapped the yarn a few times around the neck instead of doing I-cord, for variation.
Caspar, the Indian wise man
The hardest part was the camel -- I couldn't find a camel pattern that looked like it would come out to the right size for this set, so I started with the donkey pattern, and just winged it.  It starts from the butt, so I added a bunch of increases to one side of the tube, and then decreased back down, and was pretty successful with the hump.  I tried increases on one side and decreases on the other to make the long neck bend, but it didn't really go the way I wanted it to.  I then did the head, with more shaping to get the big nose, and I think that worked out pretty well.  I then picked up a few stitches on either side of the head to make the ears, did two long, fat I-cords for the front legs and just sewed them to the sides (this yarn was very forgiving for that kind of thing), and pretended he didn't need back legs.  A few pieces of yarn threaded through the butt and braided together made a cute tail that you can't see.  I did a lot of stitching to get the neck curved the way I wanted it (again, thank goodness for knobbly yarn), made a little seed stitch blanket that I just sewed onto his back, and used a single strand of the same yarn for the harness and reins.  Scale-wise he's a little big for the wisemen, especially his head, but I'm still happy with him.
the requisite wise man transportation device
My next gift was something small and easy for my cousin's little girl, who is just about two.  I have made the mouse and octopus from my Toys to Knit book before, but I think I like my yarn choices a little bit better this time around.  According to my mom, these finger puppets were a big hit with my family at Christmas.
Finger puppets
The last item was a quick project so that I would have an extra gift for my dad, and I am honestly quite disappointed with how it turned out, but it's all my fault.  I found a web site called ODDknit with patterns for fossils, and decided to make the trilobite for my dad.  He has one on his desk, and they are one of his favorite fossils.  However, my first mistake was choosing my yarn badly; the grey I picked for the body of the fossil was slightly speckled and very matte, so the trilobite body pattern doesn't stand out well.  I am okay with my use of thick-and-thin tan yarn for the rock, which adds texture.  But the biggest mistake was how I picked up the stitches.  It was very difficult to see the pattern as I was trying to pick the stitches up around the edges, so that was a pain to begin with.  Once it was done, I realised I had been holding my knitting the wrong way as I picked up the stitches, a common problem for me, so that if I now started knitting in the round, the square edges of the swatch that are supposed to end up inside the rock would be on the outside.  I basically started knitting by taking the yarn in the opposite direction I'd been working in, but that left me with an odd outline around my trilobite, instead of the smooth transition from fossil to rock that should be there.
crappy trilobite
I am honestly tempted to try it again with different yarn, and picking up the stitches correctly.  Maybe for my dad's birthday or something.

There is one more project I am still working on, but I'll show that to you guys when I'm done with it.  So, what did you knit this year for Christmas?

No comments:

Post a Comment