nautical charts

Ouch!  2012 has not been my year for blogging.  And embarrassingly, 2013 seems to be following suit.  However, I'm not ready to let go yet, and so I stride forth, once again into the blogosphere and give you an update on my crazy cozy life.

I do have a project or two to ready to share, but instead, I have a little giftie.  Remember a long long time ago when I was saying how I was going to do up a nice proper version of the graphs I used to make my octopus hat and pirate ship scarf?  Well, voila, tout finis!

Here's the Octopus Chart (click for full view):

for a finished product that looks something like this:

or this:

And here's the Pirate Ship Chart:

for a little something that will turn out like this:

Yay! (You may notice that my charts are different formats.  Well, I actually had a much more detailed and therefor larger chart drawn up for the pirate ship, but it would have made the scarf too big for my little guy.  I had wanted to giver you that chart as well, but my computer is full of gremlins and the process by which my octopus chart was made would not be duplicated.  I made the small ship chart with a lot of cut and paste blocks; very tedious.)

With any luck, these will be understandable and useful.  Basically, it's just simple intarsia, using two colours for the octopus (the x being one colour and the o another) and three for the ship (the blue squares are supposed to be white, and the blank squares are blue).  Perhaps I will make a tutorial for intarsia one day, but for now, your best bets lay with a 'how to' book or the youtubes!

Happy knitting and if anyone finishes a project with either of these, I would be simply over the moon to see a picture of it!  Nautical charts indeed, oh the cleverness of me!

Ta!

fall, fall, glorious fall! oh, and an octopus

Best Season Ever!

Even out here in the ever so slightly drab west coast, it makes me so happy! So a new baby and a new house make it a lot of fun (and a lot of work, but it's fun work, so that's great!).

Due to the craziness of life in general, I'm keeping things short (never know when a 4 week old little girl is going to wake up from her nap).

House=a long way to go before any exciting progress can be reported.

Knitting=looky what I made! (I'm referring here to the knitting, not the baby, allthough, yeah, I made that too)

This is what I'm calling my Octopus Sleep Sac. It's based on the Owlie Sleep Sac pattern found on Ravelry, but when I looked at my yarn options, I saw octopus, not owl, so that's what I did.

I had been wanting to try making a pattern, and with my mom here, she was able to guide me through how to knit it up once it was made. I think I've found a whole new element of knitting to become addicted to, and am scheming of many more intarsia patterns to come (um, once I get a bit more time on my hands though). All I did was draw the octopus I wanted, and then traced over it by blocking out which squares I wanted orange and which were to be blue. Feel free to use the x&o pattern here (if you can see it well enough), but I am planning on making a nice and proper one to post on Ravelry, so you could wait for that too.

Oh, and celebrating fall, we went to the local pumpkin patch for some fun.

And fun was had!