Needlework Tuesday

It's time for another instalment of "Needlework Tuesday", which I first saw over at Heather's blog, Books and Quits. Well, It's been over a month since I checked in. Really, I didn't forget about this. Despite having said last time that I've been procrastinating more than crafting, I managed to get quite a lot done (for me at least).

I finished the afghan from Bernat's Mystery Afghan Knit-Along. Here it is finished:






















Heather finished hers quite awhile ago. You can see her beautiful afghan here.

I also finished knitting the shrug from the Lion Brand website. It's such a simple pattern, but I managed to mess it up in a couple of places. You can't really see it, so I left it rather than rip it out. Also, I had a little trouble with the yarn. It's basically two different strands of yarn, which are twisted together. Neither of the yarns is smooth (they have little bumps on them) and I think that resulted in some split stitches, which snowballed into more stitches in the end than I started with. Sheesh! I don't think that's happened to me in a long, long time. Perhaps 20 years. I have a lot of this yarn left, so I'll have to remember that with the next project.

Anyway, back to the shrug. As I suspected because it's so unstructured, it doesn't look good on me at all. Basically it's a large square and I'm still deciding what to do with it. Here's a photo of it folded up on my craft table:















I also started one other project. Not having learned my lesson with the other shrug, I started another one from Lion Brand. This one is basically sleeves that are joined at the upper back around the shoulders. (Again, I think you have to join the website to see the pattern). I didn't have enough of this yarn, so I added some stripes in a coordinating yarn. The whole thing was supposed to be done in garter stitch (knitting every row), but I decided to do the stripes in stocking stitch (knit a row, purl a row). Here's a photo of my progress so far:






















It's knitting up very quickly because it's chunky yarn on 10mm needles. So far, I like how it's turning out. I hope this one works out better than the last one.

I have one more knitting project in the wings. If I have the yarn for it, I'm going to be making yoga socks. I've been knitting for 30 years, but I've never made socks. These ones have no toes and no heels so they shouldn't be too complicated. I'll post an update when/if I've made some progress.

That's it for this week.