Category Archives: Everyday

Starting the Weekend Off Early

I got up early this morning to finish knitting a sweater dress and surprisingly caught sight of the beautiful sunrise.

I guess I needed a little break from Christmas colors because I picked up this ball of hot pink wool a couple of days ago. I am almost finished, a few more rows to go. This is for the Little Darlings and it is the same style as the winter white sweater dress I just showed you yesterday in the group shot (minus the “fur” trim).

Now, back to Christmas… this is the fabric that I will be using next. I think that I am going to make a white mohair sweater to go with it.

In 2013 I used this same fabric for this Little Darling ensemble, so the white mohair sweater will be a totally different look.

Everyone, enjoy the weekend!

Bye for now!

The Progression of Fall and A Doll Photo

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After some windy days our trees are getting barer and barer. It’s really looking like fall now even though this week was quite warm. Earlier in the week I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures outside around our house.

All of our crab apple trees are filled with tiny red fruit which the birds and squirrels enjoy munching on.

The magnolia trees have finally felt the effects of the season. In a matter of days the leaves turned yellow green. Today, a few days after this photo was taken, the leaves are brownish yellow with many covering the ground. They’re going from deep green to bare in no time.

Without planning it I made four winter white sweater dress/Santa hat ensembles. Well, I had to have the four girls pose for a photo together, they looked so cute. Riley was beyond excited. Believe it or not, it has been at least 5 years since I’ve made her anything new.

Hope you’ve had a nice week!

Math & Knitting

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Yesterday morning was spent getting a knitting pattern together, so that Talyssa can have her very own fuzzy mohair sweater. I wanted to use a larger needle size since Talyssa is a bigger doll, and I didn’t want to be knitting her sweater for days and days and days on end. My mohair/silk yarn is lace weight and it is already quite “airy” for the smaller dolls, so I thought that holding two strands of yarn together to make a heavier yarn would work great on larger needles.

I started figuring things out by knitting a swatch with the same needle size that I use for Talyssa’s basic wool sweater and then evaluated it. The fabric was a bit dense and stiff, I thought. I knit another swatch on a size larger needles and thought it looked just right, nice and “airy”.

The next step was to start with Talyssa’s basic wool sweater pattern and adjust the stitch counts and rows using the new gauge. After some division, multiplication and number rounding, I had a pattern to start with.

I love doing this kind of math work! Who knows why! I would think that it would make me want to pull my hair out, but for some reason I find it mentally invigorating.

Now to knit. And, I did, all afternoon and evening on Tuesday, and hoping and hoping that it would come out perfect. At “bedtime” on Tuesday I only had 12 more rows to go, and it is all body knitting, easy! The sleeves got finished on Tuesday night, they seemed to take forever, turning my work constantly, it seemed. Talyssa has long arms.

I finished up Talyssa’s sweater before Wednesday afternoon started. I did a quick try on before blocking and it will fit her! Yay! Now I will get started on her dress. I took a photo of Talyssa’s sweater next to one for the Little Darlings to see the size difference. Yes, they are quite different in size, but what I thought was even more interesting was the difference in lot colors of the yarn. Talyssa’s was knit with a couple of skeins that I just received and the Little Darling’s was knit with yarn that I received earlier in the year.