handmade by stefanie

I'm super psyched about my newest FO! The Robots vs. Downtown pattern has been in my queue since September 2012, so when the designer had a sale last year during the Indie Designer Giftalong, I snapped up the pattern and set aside some yarn from my stash so that I could cast these on in the new year. As I do with pretty much any chart, I ended up enlarging it as much as possible for ease of following along. The pattern was very well-written and included some helpful notes at the beginning, but I did find the chart difficult to follow (even the ginormous 11x17 version I made) due to the gray-on-gray happening with the MC and grid. Luckily, the designer included some guide lines to help with this issue, so I just placed markers with different designs on them to help me follow along. I also relied heavily on my Magma Chart Holder, as you probably noticed in my WIP photos. My only modification was to pick up fewer stitches for the thumb due to my abnormally small hands (and, subs...

I feel like there's hardly been any progress since last week's WIP Wednesday post, but sometimes that's just the nature of crafting, isn't it? I actually had  made some progress on my 30 Day Sweater - on Friday night I took off for the sleeves and got a few inches of the body knit on Saturday before I decided I needed to rip back and add a few more raglan increases. As you can see, I've caught up to where I'd been pre-frog (and maybe even gotten a little further!), though I feel like I've made very little progress on this project. My only other WIP this week is the slow-but-steady Robots vs. Downtown mittens: Hey, look! That's most of a robot! I must be the world's slowest mitten knitter, because it's taken me three weeks to get to this point. I really need to pick up the pace, because I have a lot of KALs and design work which will need to get done in the weeks to come...and I hate to leave these mittens languishing in hibernation! ...

I managed to make some modest progress on my robot mittens even though I didn't work on them all weekend long due to (another) stupid cold. Most of the progress since last week was made on Monday night, when I took off for the thumb and really started blazing through the chart! On a related note, something kind of exciting happened last week - the designer of the Robots vs. Downtown pattern commented on my project ! In other news, Stacey Trock's new book Modern Baby Crochet arrived last Friday! I spent the weekend crocheting a few of the smaller projects, starting with the Sweet Tweeters (which I'll be sharing on Friday) and Zabby the Giggle Monster , which is currently just a collection of random crocheted shapes: I'd been saving this skein of Three Irish Girls Lindon Merino for the right project; the colorway just happens to share a name with one of my nephews (Rhys), so I couldn't resist starting a cute little monster with it! I made a wee bit mor...