Finished: S is for Salla

I've got ants in my pants because I can't show you any of the Christmas projects I've been working on recently! How annoying.

Yesterday I felt as though I needed a break from my usual UFO rota. You know when you hit a nerve in your elbow and it gives you a shock, then maintains a dull annoyance that shreds your nerves apart without being painful as such? Well, at the moment I feel like that about one particular project that is a lot of work (possibly because the yarn is laceweight...). I'll go back to it eventually, but last night I just couldn't deal. I still wanted to knit, however, so I produced a fun little thing for a change.

I have a love-hate relationship with face washers; I love them when I get around to using them (especially if I'm using a washing product that is in bar form), but I never remember to launder them enough and, let's face it, using the same face washer for days on end isn't exactly hygienic. Also, Finns don't use them and they're difficult to find in shops.

Enter half a skein of spare Novita Tennessee (100% cotton) and the above pattern by Rhonda White (told you I love to have my name or initials on everything). It took about three hours to knit, the S pattern kept me interested and, most importantly, the purled stitches are great for really scrubbing your face clean. Win! It's a bit smaller than your average face washer, but it covers my palm and fingers and that's big enough for me.

If I weren't already covered when it comes to Christmas presents, I would make a bunch of these (with the recipients' initials of course) and wrap them together with a Lush soap. If nothing else, it would be fun to see what the recipients end up doing with these little squares of cotton, the purpose of which they probably can't conceive.

Finished: Judy's Grandmother's Baby Sweater by Judy Spector

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it's a baby sweater!


My sister is pregnant with her third child (her first son) and I thought it would be fitting to knit something for the li'l one. Because I think colour-coding babies is stupid and even harmful, I refuse to knit blue for boys and pink for girls until they are actually old enough to request such colours. Since the sweater incorporates a honeycomb stitch pattern, yellow yarn seemed to be most appropriate.

The yarn is Novita Tennessee (100% mercerized cotton) in a warm yellow colourway that has now been discontinued. It's been awhile since I knitted such fine yarn, and it seemed to take forever, even for such a small garment! Stitch for stitch, I think the cardigan I finished last had more of them!

The pattern is Judy's Grandmother's Baby Sweater by Judy Spector, published in Greetings From Knit Café by Suzan Mischer. It's a cute pattern with minimal seaming (yay!), but like I said, it seemed to take an eternity, which is unusual for baby items. Perhaps it was the honeycomb pattern; I kept making false starts and frogging the first 10 stitches or so of many rows as I had difficulty keeping track of which row of the pattern I was at. All in all, it's nice that it's a bit different from the ruffly, cutesy baby sweaters that pattern books are full of. In fact, it has almost a Japanese kimono feel to it, don't you think?

As an instant gratification project after such a fine-gauge one, my next item will be knitted out of super bulky wool. Doubled. Woo!

(P.S. Does it make me a bad person that I saw some yarn that I had never paid attention to at the LYS*, noticed that it was heavily discounted and only then frantically tried to figure out what it would be good for? I ended up buying 10 skeins.)

*) Local Yarn Store, for the uninitiated.