Some More Charity Knitting and a Swatch

I made a preemie hat and blanket for the Stanford winter charity drive.   Personally, I think Caramel should go into the modeling business!  She is so darn cute!

And I started Tim's unpronounceable sweater.  It's actually a lot easier than I thought it would be!  I was almost fearing it, but now I am really enjoying how it's knitting up!  I see it as a good challenge; not too overwhelming but definitely keeps you thinking!

Here's the swatch I did to get gauge and to play with some of the cable patterns.

The yarn Tim picked out is called Svale by Dalegarn (www.dale.no).  It's Norwegian (of course, sinceTim has a thing about Nordic countries.  Have I mentioned he wants some Icelandic wool just because of the sheep's name?). 

The yarn contains 50% cotton (aka "bomull" in Norwegian), 40 "viskose" and 10% "silke".  Shows up kinda shiny-like but man the yarn is splitty, especially when knit with size friggin' 3 needles!

Try to pronunce "Hajlte"....

Mr Timmy, the love of my life, picks out this little beauty he'd like me to make for him.  It’s called Hjalte from Guy Knits : The Best of Knitter’s Magazine.

I started reading through the pattern yesterday and it’s instilling fear in my poor knitting hands…. Not my first or even second choice, but alas, the dear hubby unit wants a sweater…. I hope he knows how much I’m willing to suffer for him!!

I’m planning to do the gauge swatch tonight and maybe knit a sample of the charts in the pattern. Did I mention it calls for FINGERING weight yarn?!?! Oh just kill me….

And just to update on the charity projects, I finished 2 more hats and a preemie blanket.

Here's a one of the hats (so cute!  such good use of left over yarn from stash!!!)

 

Nico

Leo's new baby boy Nico, on the blanket I made him.  Ain't he a cutie??

And here's a close up of the blanket pattern:

The Eyelet Zigzag stitch is in a multiple of 7 stitches. I wanted a 3 st border around the blanket.

So I cast on 3+(7x)+3 number of stitches. X is the number of pattern repeats that made the blanket as wide as I wanted.

Basic pattern is:

Knit 6 rows of garter st 
Knit 3, repeat pattern until 3 st left. Knit 3.

Astrological

I love Ravelry....

Summarized snippets from http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/for-the-love-of-ravelry/327299/26-50#48

-faerwear

"Curious - another post here introduced me to the ‘happy birthday’ feature - i was blown away by all the virgos!... Casy, would you (or anyone else) be able to tell which astrological sun sign is most represented here on ravelry? i’m so curious now."

- Mutilple guesses from  people, with most putting $ on Cancer as the biggest birthday-er.

- casey

"I don’t have a handy way to cross reference dates with astrological signs and I’m too lazy to type in all of the start and end dates. Here is the list of birthdays - go nuts. (There are 94,000+)

http://export.ravelry.com/misc/birthdays-20080908.csv" 

- less than an hour later

- Jesh

"Never underestimate the temptation that the pursuit of statistical fact provides to a maths major. 

Sorted numerically, in descending order: 

Cancer: 8525 
Virgo: 8219 
Leo: 8141 
Gemini: 8128 
Taurus: 8125 
Libra: 7951 
Aries: 7864 
Pisces: 7828 
Scorpio: 7475 
Aquarius: 7436 
Capricorn: 7314 
Sagittarius: 7253

of course, I should note that this data is not scientifically accurate since it is a self selected sample etc., etc. ;) all it proves is that Cancers are the Ravelers most likely to have inserted their birthdays into their profiles."

- another hour passes

- knitforneurons

"Ok, here’s what I got. Out of 94,260 birthdays in the data base, here is the breakdown:

Aries - 7889 members (8.4%) 
Taurus - 8101 members (8.6%) 
Gemini - 8150 members (8.6%) 
Cancer - 8560 members (9.1%) 
Leo - 8130 members (8.6%) 
Virgo - 8164 members (8.7%) 
Libra - 7985 members (8.5%) 
Scorpio - 7516 members (8.0%) 
Sagittarius - 7474 members (7.9%) 
Capricorn - 7064 members (7.5%) 
Aquarius - 7441 members (7.9%) 
Pisces - 7774 members (8.2%)

Sounds like you guys’ hunches about the (Northern Hemisphere) summertime signs’ prevalence was correct, at least for the Ravellers that report their birth dates"

- In my mind... hum... numbers are different....

- Jesh

"Yeah, the differing dates is why my numbers and knitforneurons’ are off ever so slightly. I’m not sure where she picked her dates from, but I just copied mine from wikipedia. still, the results are similar."

- Me

Oh my goodness.... read on for more.  This is FACINATING!! 

Dawn

Can I just say I LOVE Dawn of the Knit Naturally podcast? I love her straight-up, no-nonsense, shoot-from-the hip sense of humor and the Texan accent. Her Texas Purl Gurl blog is my new "must-read."

Oh man, she cracks me up.