August Surprises!

I found a couple of pictures on my camera that were taken of projects I worked on in August so I figured I would go ahead and put them up.

The first one is a horrible picture but I was really pleased with the actual finished project. My cousin’s baby shower was in August and I didn’t really think I was going to have time to do anything for her, but about a week after another cousin’s wedding I decided to try for it anyways.

At the time I thought I only had a week to finish it so I planned a really simple baby afghan that was supposed to be 3′ by 4′. Of course, I did the math wrong and the cast on edge ended up being almost 50″ long. To compensate, I knitted it up so it was about 3′ long. Close enough to my original plan that it came out looking pretty nice.

Of course, after working on it for about 4 days and getting it half done I was told that the baby shower wasn’t that weekend, it was the next so in reality I probably could have done something more complicated, but oh well.

Here’s the horrible picture of it:

The border of it is actually a really pretty chocolate brown. The entire thing was knitted with 2 strands of worsted weight yarn, brown on the borders and one strand of brown and one strand of a palish green in the center rectangles.

You can’t really tell from that picture but there is a cable going up each outside edge. The rest of it is just in seed stitch.

My cousin informed me that she is very, very happy with and while she might just be coating my ego…well it’s working!

And since I had quite a bit of the yarn left over, I decided to put it to use.

I had already been planning on making at least a scarf to give my Grandmother this Christmas. She is after all the person who gave me my first knitting needles. And although she didn’t teach me to knit, I was definitely inspired by all the pairs of slippers and warm, thick winter socks she knit over the years.

I wanted to try something a bit more complicated than my mother’s so I decided to try dropping yo’s like I had seen on a couple of scarves. I ended up twisting them as well to get a neat effect.

I finished the scarf off by adding crochet chained fringe. I had to reteach myself how to do crochet chains to do it but I really like the look.

And to use up just a bit more of the yarn, I made her a head warmer as well. I wanted this one to be more shaped than my mother’s so I tried using short rows to fill in the middle section, making it thinner at the part that goes in the back. I like how both of these projects turned out.