Knitting coverage continued: Leftovers

Yesterday I promised to tell you what I did with the leftovers from those three hats. The short answer is that I made a pair of gloves, and three swatches to test stitch patterns. The long answer -- that is, the illustrated one -- is as follows.

The brown Foliage hat only used half a skein of Cascade 220. I used the other half to make a pair of fingerless mitts. The pattern, which appears on Knitty, is called "Fetching."



Neither of the other two hats left enough yarn for much in the way of obviously-useful projects. Instead, I knit up swatches from the two stitch dictionaries I have. The point of these is threefold. First, I get the hang of a new pattern; with said hang I also get some idea of the relative difficulty of various patterns. Second, should I decide to keep the swatch, I end up with a record of the properties of different patterns. Most of the time, I remember to make a note of the pattern, yarn, and needle size I used: I have a bunch of file cards I've cut in half and put holes through for just this kind of tagging. Third and finally, I've joined the effort to enter these patterns into Ravelry's database; if I'm entering the pattern into the database, I feel I ought to at least make some effort at illustrating them.

I made three swatches with the leftovers from my hats: the "Vertical Lace Trellis" pattern from Barbara G. Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, and the "Larkspurs" and "Little Lace Diamonds" patterns from the Big Book of Knitting Stitch Patterns.

I made the "Vertical Lace Trellis" swatch using leftovers from the green foliage. I had a very hard time getting photographing it.


I made the "Larkspurs" pattern using the rest of the Cascade 220 from the green Foliage (and the swatch above). This is how it looks unblocked:


As you can probably guess by the photo below, the "Little Lace Diamonds" swatch with the leftovers from the blue hat. This swatch is also unblocked. I hope to get blocking wires soon: this promises to look even better once I've gotten it to shape.



Links:
Projects:
My brown Fetchings, on Ravelry
My green Vertical Lace Trellis swatch, on Ravelry
My green Larkspurs swatch, on Ravelry
My blue Little Lace Diamonds swatch, on Ravelry

Patterns:
"Fetching" pattern, on Knitty
"Fetching" pattern, on Ravelry
"Vertical Lace Trellis" pattern, on Ravelry
"Larkspurs" pattern, on Ravelry
"Little Lace Diamonds" pattern, on Ravelry

Books:
A Treasury of Knitting Patterns on LibraryThing
A Treasury of Knitting Patterns on Ravelry
Big Book of Knitting Stitch Patterns on LibraryThing
Big Book of Knitting Stitch Patterns on Ravelry