Put the Needles DOWN

I haven't posted here in a long time because I have been far too busy knitting. Which you'd think would be a good thing for a knitting blog, but blogs don't work if you don't write in them. I thought about doing a big post about Christmas time, but instead I'm going to give it to you in pieces.

The first gift of yarn-mas was from my friend Kat, who bought me the stitchmarkers from Nerd Girl Yarns which I had hinted she should get me. And by hinted I mean that she asked me "What would you like for Christmas?" while we were online one night. And I responded "These" with a link to the stitch markers. I may have pictures of the beautiful Tenth Doctor stitch markers at some point, but they will be in any of my in progress pictures to see here.

The second gift of yarn-mas was from me to myself. It was the first installment in the same Nerd Girl Yarn's Who's Your Doctor? yarn club. I pay a certain amount and every month I get an exclusive color inspired by Doctor Who on the yarn base of my choice. So sock yarn is coming. Here is the first yarn:

It goes from deep blue to deep purple to red/pink, with some yellow/green and gold in the middle. It is based on the first new season of Doctor Who's episode "Boomtown." It was so beautiful I couldn't bear to hide it in my shoe as the sock I'd intended it for. This created much angst about the "perfect" project for the yarn. It was fortunate that I still had knitted Christmas presents to finish, so I could push it to the back of my mind and wait.

After a failed experiment in a fingerless glove, I finished my mother's gloves, which you may remember from my last post. And that decided me. I wanted gloves. Sock yarn, with nylon, is not as soft as regular merino wool, but it is stretchy and strong, and would suit a glove perfectly. One Ravelry search later and I had a glove pattern which would hold my interest and not clash with my yarn. And so I cast on for the Froot Loop Gloves.

My knitting was obsessive. It consumed my non-working hours. I probably spent six hours or more a day on it for the first glove of the pair.

Then I re-christened my gloves the Outer Spiral Arm glove for two reasons. One was that the blue and purple colors were creating a spiral around my arm, twisting back on itself and pulling the whole glove together. Thinking of this spiral got the Galaxy song  from Monty Python's Meaning of Life stuck in my head: Warning: some aspects of this video are Not Safe for Work.

As I knit I was also struck by how many color combinations reminded me of NASA's Hubble Telescope pictures of nebulae:

The second glove was easier and slowed my obsessive pace. I had the pattern more or less memorized, and watched some tutorials over on knitpicks that smoothed out my technique a little. And here is the finished project.

They are warm, though the loops do let in the bitterest of cold winds, and they are very comfy. For enthusiasts: The yarn is Nerd Girl Yarn's Bounce and Stomp fingering weight sock yarn, 60% Superwash Merino 40% nylon in the "Boomtown" colorway. The body of the hand were knit on size 1.5s and the fingers were knit on size ones. The pattern is Froot Loop Gloves by Natasha Sills.