Sitka National Park

Hey Everyone!

This afternoon, I finished up the pair of Sitka National Park socks.

The yarn is from KnittedWit, and on the sock base.

I have had this yarn in my stash for a while, and last time I checked, it is still no longer available.

As I work through the yarn I have, I am also looking at other brands with fingering weight / sock yarn to see what I want to try. I am always wanting to try new yarns and see how they wash, wear and hold up over time. Once life calms down, I definitely want to get out hiking again and really start putting my different socks to the test. I would love to know which brand and base are the best, and last the longest for me.

Goals and Dreams Change

Hey Everyone!

To my American readers and followers, I hope you all had a safe and happy 4th. To our neighbors to the North, I hope you all had a good Canada Day!

I had the 4th off which was nice, though I worked Friday, Saturday and today. With the truck being delayed until Saturday and then showing three hours late on Saturday, stock crew was asked to come out for am extra shift this week, as our availability allowed. I was able to go in today and got a bit done.

For so long I have been anti TikTok, but with a little convincing from one of my coworkers (she uses it to share her art), I finally created one to share my knitting. While most of my first few videos aren’t knitting related (only 3 of them are), I have been kind of getting a feel for the platform. IDK how far I will go with it, but I am still testing it out.

I keep hearing on the news, that employers in my current industry (retail) as well as others similar to mine (grocery/restaurants/ manual labor) keep complaining about being short staffed. Some people not wanting to work is just a fraction of the problem. I have been back at work post furlough for about a year now, and looking for another job in my industry or a similar industry closer to home for said year (and many years pre-COVID). My own experience this past year, has been one of Cricket’s (aka silence). I have applied to many jobs that I can reasonably do with minimal training (ie how that specific company does things), yet I have only had three phone calls, and two interviews in the past year, and all of them were in the past 2 months. Yes, I was only at Home Depot for a short time, for various reasons that all boil down to it not being a good for for me. So I don’t totally buy the “we can’t fill all our open positions”. From my own experience, they aren’t calling everyone who applies and are choosing to not fill said positions. It is definitely frustrating for someone like me, yet, I feel like the past two months have made me rethink some things.

One of those things is possibly starting my own business one day. If I were to start my own business, I am strongly leaning towards a yarn dying business. I have also thought a yarn making business would be cool, where my company would buy raw wool and processing it into wool. Or doing the whole thing, from processing the wool, spinning it and dying it. If any of it works out, it’s still a ways out.

Not counting my KnitPicks socks, all my other socks were at least dyed here in the USA.

One of the things I definitely want to do more of it test out the different bases I have knit socks out of, while hiking and really see how they hold up / last with a bit rougher wear and washing after each wear. I want to know which bases hold up the best boot socks for hiking.

A few of the places I want to go hiking and test the ruggedness of my socks include: Mt Saint Helens, Sun River, anywhere really in Alaska, in Banff / Lake Louise as well as Jasper Alberta.

Celebrating Five Years!

Hey Everyone!

I can’t believe that it has been five years since I started this blog! This blog has seen the ups and downs of my life as well as various phases of my life.

There have been times when I was working full time away from home, or even full time from home and didn’t have hardly any time to knit, to being in between jobs and having so much more time to knit.

I have learned so much about knitting and tried new patterns, tried out different yarns, made hats, scarves, wraps, shawls, fingerless gloves, and socks.

I had stocked up on sock yarn and worsted weight wool for shawls until I have it coming out my ears. I love knitting, I never want to stop knitting. I definitely want to work on my blog and devote more time to it.

I also want to say thanks to all who have been following me since the early days, it means a lot to me.

Here’s to another five years and to seeing what live brings my way.

New Year and New Knitting Goals

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Today, as I am finally coming out of the fog that is my brain while sick, I was like “It’s a new year, a clean slate, and it’s time to set some knitting and life goals for 2018”. 2017 felt like a bust on many fronts. While this year is getting off on a rocky start (with having a cold to start things off), I am excited to see what 2018 holds, and to see what I can accomplish.

My biggest goals for this year is to knit though as much of the KnitPicks palette and stroll tweed sock yarn I have, as well as knit up the KnitPicks Wool of The Andes, Wool of the Andes Tweed, and the Simply Wool yarns that I have in my stash.

This year I really want to work on Stash busting as much of the yarn I have for personal projects as possible. In 2017 I bought a fair amount of yarn, now I just need to knit it up. That is my goal for this year, is to work on knitting as much of it up as I possibly can.

This morning, I got in my last KnitPicks order for a while. This Christmas and New Years season saw a lot of yarn and knitting accessories purchasing. Now I want to put all of it to good use. I am getting kind of tired having bags of yarn that don’t fit in my current stock of plastic containers sitting around. I want to at least get what is sitting out and sitting in bags knit up, or at least be able to consolidate it into a container if I want to use a color that is currently in a container. The only reason I want to buy new plastic containers for anything knitting related is for completed projects, if I run out of storage space.

As I have spent time knitting, I have found that I prefer knitting with wooden needles, so as I have the money, and projects I want to work on I am slowly adding to my stash of wooden needles. After I had gotten the bulky Simply Wool yarn, I went searching through my needles to see what I had in the way of needles that were in line with the needle recommendation on the back of the label. I only found some plastic needles, which I really don’t care for, I went ahead and had ordered some US size 10.5 (6.50mm) straight wooden needles to use with the bulky simply wool yarn. I also had ordered another set of US size 7 (4.50mm) needles. Size 7 needles are a standard size for me, especially since I tend to have a looser tension than some other knitters. I had also gotten some of the Wool of the Andes Tweed in Autumn Heather and the Wool of the Andes in Marina.

Beings that I have the yarn (between what I have already cast on and am currently using as well as why I have tucked away in bags) for seven shawls and more than 20 pairs of socks, I will be bust this year.

Ravelry

Hey Everyone! 

This Week for pattern Friday, I am sharing with you another one of my favorite pattern resources. I have mentioned it in other posts, but I have not written a post about it yet. This week I am sharing with you guys Ravelry. It has plenty of patterns (some are free, others are not). It is also great because it has groups, and forums and such. I like that feature in addition to the patterns because there are often groups by location, or project (particularly charity knitting/crocheting). 

With Ravelry you will need an account to access patterns and the groups but creating an account is free, and allows you to save patterns to your library and keep track of projects you have completed if you so choose to use that feature. 

This is just one of the places I go to, in order to get ideas of what I want to make. 

Knitty

Hey Everyone! 

This week I wanted to share with you a website that I had been referred to by one of my former coworkers who knew about this site. The website is entitled Knitty and it is a free online knitting magazine full of knitting patterns and ideas. 

This had come up when I had been talking to my coworkers about projects I had in mind and trying to get some pattern ideas and bounce things off other crafters. 

I love getting new ideas, and seeing what others have made and what else is out there. I like getting ideas for future projects and for what I want to use some of my yarn that is just sitting for. I am always up for free patterns and trying new things. 

Day 2 of 30 days 30 hats challenge

Hey Everyone!

Today is the second day of my 30 days, 30 hats challenge. I had started a thread about it in one of the charity knitting groups I am a part of on Ravelry, not expecting a whole lot from it. So far I have had my expectations blown away by even having a few people join me in my challenge to each knit 30 hats in 30 days. While I am knitting hats for children in India, I had made the thread more open ended, in terms of the recipients of the hats at the end of the month just because each person who might want to take part has their own charities and knitting recipients that they care about, and the whole point is just to see how many hats (with a goal in mind) in the course of the month.

I will be posting pictures frequently (but not daily) on my Facebook Page, so if you would like to see the hats I will be making this month, as well as other projects I am working on, please follow me on my facebook page (by going to the page, and clicking the “like” button on the main page). I mentioned that I will be posting pictures frequently, but not daily, that is because I enough yarn to make several hats out of the skeins of some yarns, so it would be rather redundant to essentially be posting the same picture for several days in a row. What I plan on doing when I am using the same yarn for several hats is knit up the yarn, and then when I am finished my last hat with the yarn I will take a picture of all the hats I got out of the yarn and post the picture with a short caption with the day numbers and how many child/teen sizes I have in the color.

60th sweater complete!

Hey Everyone!

I finished up my size 8 sweater that I had been working on for about a month and a half. This sweater I made using Red Heart Super Saver yarn in Grey Heather as well as some hot pink and light pink that were without labels and had been donated to the cause. I had picked these colors after having seen a picture just before Valentine’s day, with three skeins of yarn in similar colors and I at first was thinking about having to go and buy the pinks (I had the grey) but then decided to go see if there was anything in the buckets of yarn that my mom and I have, to see if I could find colors that were close that would work.

This particular sweater is my 60th sweater, so with that, I am taking a break from sweaters to work through some of the yarn I have sitting in a basket and in my knitting area and make hats. The hats knit up really quickly, they help use up remnants of yarn that would not be enough to make a sweater out of. Hats are fun and easy.