Warm Fuzzies

Thermal

As soon as I realized that summer would soon draw to a close, I cast on for my first sweater.  After two months of toiling, I finally have a finished Thermal to share with you.

So how did Thermal, knit at such a small gauge, end up on my needles as my first completed sweater?  Well, a while back, I had this great idea...I would learn how to hand-dye my own yarn.  After all, wouldn't it be great to create my own colorways to use for my projects?  Clearly, all that buzz circling around about dyeing yarn with Kool-aid got to my head.  Eager to get myself started, I purchased 5 or 6 skeins of Knitpicks Bare Merino right away.  It was definitely one of those impulse purchases, because I never really got around to actually dyeing the yarn.  It sat around, untouched, for nearly a year.

Well, in mid-July, I decided to get real with myself...the natural-colored yarn would probably not get dyed any time soon, if at all.  I poked around looking for a pattern that would use up quite a bit of fingering weight yarn...Thermal immediately popped up.  I cast on. 

I wanted my sweater to be more fitted than in the pictures on Knitty, so I went down to size 1 needles for the body, and 0 for the sleeves.  Midway through my project, I got my invite to Ravelry, and happened across this lovely version.  I fell in love with Winnie's mod to shorten the sleeves (and her Thermal's color!).  I ended up knitting 3/4 length sleeves.  I had initially wanted to dye my sweater dark grey, but Winnie's version convinced me to go for more bluish color.  I dumped a touch of black and a glug of blue acid dye into a bucket of hot water, and ended up with a faded blue color.  (Dyeing, by the way, was a piece of cake.  Part of me is kicking myself for not dyeing all the yarn like I had originally intended.  I do have 2 more skeins leftover though, so I'll probably dye those after all, hehe.)

Although I don't have any close-up photos of them, I found the perfect buttons for it.  They're a pearly pale blue color, and they really match the color and texture of the sweater.  So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I love everything about this sweater: the fit, the look, the color, the buttons.  I know I'll be wearing this sweater a lot.

T.V. Jake

I've been working on some pretty time-consuming knitting projects lately, and needed a little change of pace.  So I picked up the crochet hook and whipped up a little something.

A remote-control holder!  Who said stuffies couldn't be practical?  T.V. Jake used to be a free pattern that was downloadable from here, but it looks like it's no longer available there.  But in case anyone's interested in the pattern, the bottom of my printout says that it was originally published in Crochet Home Magazine No. 58 in 1997.

I didn't have the plastic cat eyes called for in the pattern handy, so I just cut some goofy-looking eyes out of felt and used a glue-gun to secure them.

Now that we have Jake handy, our remote control now has a designated guardian, and Kyle and I will no longer have to waste time looking for the remote.  Well, theoretically.  We didn't have much of a chance to test things out.  It didn't take Oscar long to get jealous of the attention we were paying to Jake.  He took a sudden interest in the remote.  He wanted to guard the remote, too.  Or so we thought.  Enter Exhibit A:

Oscar attacked all of the buttons.  Okay, nearly all the buttons.  He was kind enough to leave the "Enter" button unscathed.  Who'd have thought that rubber was so tasty?  Needless to say, the remote is significantly harder to use now.  It's now permanently resting in Jake's grasp; we aren't going to bother with it anymore.  It gets pretty frustrating when you have to push the volume button more than a dozen times to get the volume to go down by one bar.  But you know what?  Getting up off the ole bottom to walk a couple of feet to change the channel isn't even that much of an inconvenience.  It's actually pretty refreshing to get up and stretch your legs once in a while. 

Perhaps Oscar really did know what he was doing all along...