The perils of workplace knitting

I bring my knitting to work, where it mostly sits on my desk all day because I am too busy to knit, but I bring it to lunch and use that time to decompress.  My co-workers mostly think I am weird.  Except for the ones that want me to knit things for them.

Recently one of my co-workers came to work wearing a simple hand knit shawl that fastened with a button, and my boss asked if I would make one for her.  Seemed easy enough.  She picked out and bought the yarn.  Her one concern was that the model on which I was basing my project was knit in stockinette, and curled at the edges, and she wanted hers to lay flat.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided that I would knit the shawl in seed stitch.  Which was fine, for the first 1/3 or so of the project...and then, it got incredibly boring.  Brilliant move!  I finally made a serious push to finish this after it had languished in my wips for 3 weeks, and knit half of it in 3 days.  Go me!

And I have to admit, it came out really nice. Soft, squishy and warm.  And my boss is happy, which can't be a bad thing, right?

The making of a sweater coat

About a year ago, my mother asked me if I would knit her a sweater. She told me she wanted it to be super colorful.  She told me she wanted other people to look at her and wonder what the hell she was wearing. She told me she wouldn't care, because she could wear what she wanted, and what she wanted was a "coat of many colors."

Foolishly, I agreed.

My original idea was for a sort of patchwork effect. So I started by making up a chart for myself:


This worked out okay, and I liked the overall look of it, but had tension issues, resulting in some gaps between the colors, which I wasn't happy with.



Also, I needed to invest in some bobbins, because this got old, real quick.


I tried doing some stripes, instead, but that did not appeal to me and I didn't even take any pictures of that step.

I wanted a more random looking color pattern, than what I was seeing with the stripes, so I took the lengths of yarn that I had from the first incarnation of the sweater and russian joined them together, until I had a nice ball of yarn and then started knitting.  When I ran out of yarn, I would put together another magic ball, and then knit some more. This was time consuming, but I was very happy with the end product:


Also, clearly, matching buttons was not going to work, so I went out and bought 7 different sets of buttons, and used 1 of each.





Perfect.

This was definitely a labor of love, that I am unlikely to repeat, but it was worth it when I got this picture of my mom, wearing her sweater.

She tells me all of friends want to know where they can get one, and she tells them they can't. Unless they have a crazy knitting daughter.