It pleases me. I’ve been following around the poor kittehs all weekend, and they are clearly tired of the camera already.

I realized that I’ve got a number of photos uploaded to flickr that I never blogged about. I’ve got a big finished project that I’m too tired to coherently post about right now, so here’s some sewing miscellany to tide you over.

I finally stitched the diamonds together, and boy, that was No Fun. The paper mockup was helpful, but I still had difficulties lining up the rows of diamonds. There’s a couple of corners where you can see a jog but hopefully it won’t be too noticeable! I’m thinking that a 1/8" shift isn’t terribly glaring. If I were to sew these again, I’d mark some darts along the diamond edges to help with lining them up. Small cutting errors really throw the alignment off in this project.

The diamond strip is destined for a pillow. The front will just be this panel and some linen, and the back will be patterned with a hidden zipper down the center. I’m also planning on sewing piping around the edge in a contrast fabric.

I’m still trying to decide what pillow #2 will be. I was originally going to simplify the diamond idea by cutting longer parallelograms (so a diagonal stripe of diamonds would be one piece), but then I saw this:

The small clipping is a pillow from a recentish Domino magazine. Rather than using striped fabric, I thought it would be a great idea to piece the stripes together myself with all the leftover linen and blue+orange fabrics. The jury’s still out on this one because it does look like a ton of work. Although it will undoubtedly be easier to figure out than the diamonds!

Why hello! It’s been two weeks since we’ve hung out, mano-a-blogo. Mr. Roboto certainly enjoyed having the spotlight during that time, but I think it’s time to push him a little further down on the page, lest we inflate his ego even more. He would like you to know that he’s flying high these days, happy that he finally found his one true love.

In the meantime, I’ve been obsessing about things a bit.

This is the beginnings of the Phyllo Yoked Pullover from Knitting Nature. This is the fourth project that I’ve knit from the book, and it won’t be the last. I’m making this as a mini-knitalong with Lolly and Jody, and a couple of weeks ago Lolly went ahead and started hers. That spurred me to finally swatch, then I blinked and had a completed yoke. Whoa!

I’m very, very loosely following the pattern - I’m knitting the yoke according to the phyllo chart and the rest of the sweater is from my own numbers. I wanted to use a thinner yarn to shrink the yoke pattern vertically so that I could wear this sweater without having to layer a shirt underneath. I do live in Texas, after all, and layering season is quickly drawing to a close. The Rowan 4 ply Cotton is working perfectly so far. I extended the lace chart by one diamond, and the patterning is the perfect length. Perhaps the color isn’t the best color to show off the yoke pattern, but I want this sweater in black, so black it is.

I knit the fun part first (similar to my Tangled Yoke construction (you should click on that link if you like kittens. gah, they were so cute!)) and now I need to think and do math, which means that this sweater has already been cast aside for something else fun. Norah did some interesting shaping in the front of the sweater to make the front neckline fall lower than the back, which I’m going to try to mimic with short rows. Then it’s all stockinette till the cows come home.

Obsession number two comes in fabric form. I’ve been very good at my yarn diet. The only thing I’ve purchased so far this year was a wee bit of sock yarn. However! All that saved money has funded my brand new fiber stash. And my fabric stash. Not good.

I’ve been thinking, dreaming, pondering about blue and orange lately, hence the sudden expansion. We have a bluish-grey couch and a light greenish-blue chair, and I’ve been planning on making pillows for them forever. Have you noticed that all of the good fabrics contain brown? They do! This greenish-blue and orange combo will be perfect accents.

I’ve had diamonds on the mind lately, too, and I’m finally getting around to figuring out a patchworky pillowy pattern. You would not believe how difficult it is to line up diamonds until you cut them out for some coasters and then try to piece them together as you watch your machine devour all of the tiny little diamond shapes. Or maybe that’s just me. Drafting pattern pieces ahead of time is a much smarter way to go.

The scraps (ha! the pillows will only use wee amounts) might go to a baby quilt. Or maybe I’ll just line them up and take more photos of them.