Sweater Finished After 20 Years!

Actually, I've just had this yarn for 20 years. My mom bought it for me in middle school to make a sweater. Unsurprisingly, I flaked out on the project. Years later I made a scarf with some of the yarn, and 5 years after that the scarf got stolen out of the US postal system. Finally in December I started this sweater for myself and I actually finished it. Amazing.

The pattern is free. If you aren't one of the 536 people on Ravelry who have already made this sweater, here's the pattern. It's pretty bare bones in terms of number of stitches, size and placement of neckline, but it's also very easy.

The most fun part was choosing the buttons. I used a bunch of buttons I took from my mom's stash last time I was home.

Of course you can always use a classic cat fastening:



In terms of satisfying and fast knitting, the Buttony pattern is definitely recommended.

hot enough to melt

I got an enameling kiln! Enameling is probably the most fun craft I've tried to date. Despite the 4 days of glass inhalation before I got a respirator, setting a minor fire, and accidentally melting something I thought was brass (whoops) I'm still obsessed.

Here are some things I've made so far.

First, I just tried regular enamel on copper.


Then I got wacky and tried embedding watch gears into the enamel. This works! However, it's kind of a crap shoot, because it's not always easy to tell what the parts are made out of, so sometimes they melt out of shape.

There's a great tutorial out there by Copperheart that got me started.

A longer post on this coming soon!