We’re now months later and I’ve finished my endless shrug and a pair of amazing socks, so it was due time to take a look at Otto again.
I was really happy knitting him again, since it got me back into the whole “how did I do that particular increase/decrease?” again which was just fine after knitting “jersey” for two project in line.

Off course I deviated from the original description a bit, but not too much. Most of my thoughts I’ve added to my ravelry project so I’d advise you go look there. But the most important one wast the cast-on, which I changed to use this one: Emily Ocker’s Cast On.

The increases you’ll need are:

• M1R : make one right
• M1L : make one left

And don’t forget “SSK” is not what my mom thought me which is “slip one, knit one, pull slipped stitch over knitted stitch”. For my bear project I’ve used the improved SSK.

Knitted with love.

Experiment n° 1 : ginger

Well sadly my little ginger plant can’t be fooled into thinking it’s the right season, probably mainly due to the sometimes low temperatures emanating from the passive ventilation in my apartment. It’s something I can’t shut off (unfortunately) and is quite irritating since it’s placed on the window that is the most exposed to the wind and creates a cold draft in the apartment at times.
As a result my little exotic friend hasn’t grown since I took the last picture and is currently struggling to survive. I’m quite curious how the root has grown since I’ve planted it, so I might be replanting this lovely one soon.
*edit* I replanted this lovely one this weekend, above you can see a picture of the new root of this beautiful ginger plant. The darker brown piece is the old piece of root I’ve planted, the greener piece of root has been grown since I’ve planted this lovely one.

Experiment n° 2 : pumpkin patch

Of the bunch of seeds I’ve planted, I had a total of 6 sprouts living very happily together in a tiny pot. So about two weeks ago I decided to replant the sprouts to give them more room to grow. Since then 5 of my sprouts died but one is living very strong and happily in a it’s new home.

When I was replanting the sprouts, I found that the seeds I had planted had nearly all or all split in two and the current plants were no longer attached to them, quite interesting really. As you’ll see in the picture, the roots had gotten quite long already, making it hard to untangle them. I probably broke some, which made so many of the sprouts die off.

Experiment n° 3 : strawberries

While I was walking back home with M. from stretching our legs somewhere along New Years day. I stopped all of a sudden near a fence, exlaiming “Hey look! Aren’t those strawberries?”.
Strawberries creep. They create a “tentacle” and grow a sibling at the end of it (I just found out it’s called a runner). Once the sibling starts growing the tentacle will disappear. And it was one of those tentacles with a sibling on the end of it I saw dangling through a fence.
My friend M. agreed it were probably strawberries and deciding it might be worth the try, I pinched off the little plant and planted it in a pot in my living room.

Since then my courageous friend has grown a new tiny green leaf and seems to be living quite happily next to my green giant of a plant.

After some reading on the web I found out strawberries are very susceptible to diseases in the soil and you should not just pick a strawberry plant and plant it like I did. Ah well, even if I can’t eat any of the eventual strawberries, I’ll still have fun growing them.

Experiment n° 4 : marigolds

After seeing all that green I wanted to grow some flowers as well. So I bought some marigold seeds (nl: stinkertjes, fr: œillet d’Inde). Why those? I remember mom telling me that they keep away certain insects that can be harmful for plants. So I planted the seeds next to my pumpkin sprout and that might have been a mistake.
The roots of the marigold emit an antibacterial substance which in fact keeps away the insect pests but also kills off certain plants… So I might be looking this up some more and then I’ll go save my poor pumpkin sprout from certain death!

Keep growing!

Sources:

• Tagetes @ Wikipedia (Marigolds)
• Strawberries @ Wikipedia
• Growing strawberries @ gardenorganic.org.uk

Anyway, I’m off ignoring my pc again.
See you soon.

My beautiful pair of Christmas socks are wrapped and ready to be shipped off! It feels so great to have finished these in such a short amount of time, it’s the benefit of not having worked a complex pattern this time. It’s the basic sock pattern my grandmother (and my mom) uses. I’ve wondered why they use it, because I always felt the need to discover something new. But I think my grandmother always used the same knitting pattern because it was fastest and I think that when you have to knit for 7 children, I think you’ll be happy that they’re done fast.

Having done those beautiful socks, there is no time to falter… It was nearly a tie between a beautiful bear and finishing the pair of socks that I’ve put on hold, and while the sock needles were still hot, I chose for the beautiful bear with the motivation to giftwrap this project as well.

I’ve started a second project as well, which will be dragged along everywhere I go. It’s a cardigan and while I made the calculations a few hours ago and knitted the first rows, I think I might frog the deal and calculate again. I fear that I might have been a bit generous with the dimensions… I think I’ll meditate on that during the night.

(and yes a half-stuffed animal does not qualify to be dragged along everywhere I go)

Anyway, off to bed. I’ll update on life very soon. I still have to share my field of pumpkins with you ;-)

* more freedom
* alt+f2 that isn’t a search
* less missing you
* more biking/hiking/going somewhere
* huge pumpkins and a mountain of strawberries
* many beautiful projects
* lots of smiles

and please make it stop raining!

My warmest regards,

Lisje

P.S. in a bout of rebellion I’ve installed Gnome3. I’m not sure. How is this supposed to be designed for usability? Maybe I’m getting old and rusty?

I came home late last night and didn’t get to unpack because I was tired and I had to get up early to go to work.
I however finished the first book of the Millennium Trilogy in the train yesterday and I my secret sock is coming along very well (you know where to look for them). Although I dropped not one but two stitches right before the train rolled into the station and you could hear a small but very powerful Belgian curse echoing throughout the train. But I managed to get the stitches back onto my needle before the train stopped (go me!).

To celebrate the start of a new day, I showed off my beautiful deskworm at work this morning… I confess I should’ve taken a picture of my deskworm guarding my pens en pencils @ work!
I’ve also been spotted with my new “tricotbag” on the bus!

And did I mention it’s cold in Nantes? Brrrr, I had the impression it was warmer in Belgium :|

However! Since you’re all dying to know what the actual number of stitches was that I’ve knitted, here it comes:

(sleeve * 2) + back
= (13552 * 2) + 34352
= 27104 + 34352
= 61456 stitches

That’s a lot of stitches :|
“Ikke” wasn’t so far off with 54507 stitches though.

“Ikke”, I’ll be in touch because I’ll need dimensions etc ;-)

Nothing keeps your legs warm like legwarmers! I’ve fallen in love with them all over again now I’ve been wearing short skirts again. And it’s been lots of fun knitting my “All The Way Up”-legwarmers. They don’t really go all the way up, but they are cosy!

I don’t have much photos to share just yet, since I’ve knitted just one legwarmer for now, but I wanted to share the pattern with you already! I’ll confess that it’s mainly because I’m so happy with having generated and tested the kindle/mobile version of the pattern :-)

So here it goes, I’ve got three versions in which you can download the pattern. I’ll kindly remind you that anything my mind concocts is published with an attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

• All The Way Up – PDF
  Pattern description in PDF format. Can be read with Adobe acrobat and many others.
• All The Way Up – Open Document Text
  Pattern description in open document format, can be read with OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice and others.
• All The Way Up – Kindle compatible
  Mobile compatible pattern description (.mobi), generated and tested for the Amazon Kindle. Please unzip and upload it to your documents folder on your Kindle.

If you’ve got any question, please don’t hesitate to ask!

I also want to tell you that I’ve desactived the lightbox (colorbox) I used for showing images on the site, because it aparently broke entirely. I’ve also removed the share icons from the website since no-one was using them and it thus represented a useless javascript call. In short this means that the website should respond a little faster (not too much though).

Other than that, nothing really new to find on the blog. And apparently my little pumpking sprout has gotten company of another (which is very exciting news) so I’m guessing I’ll be shopping for some pots and soil to plant them for real this weekend.
Also my legwarmers are coming along just fine. I’ll also be @ k’fée tricot tonight so don’t look for me online…

’till soon!

Btw, the new WordPress is looking good.