Lmst

@KarenStrickholm Oh I see you asked about the hashtag. we dropped “fall” from it to make it more globally inclusive. So it’s was #FinishOrFrogAlong

I was very enthusiastic when I found this old project for #finishorfrogalong but, well, it's march now and it might be that I left it unattended again (as always, when there are decisions to be made). But now, right on time for the warmer weather in my area it is finally done! Would I do some things differently? Yes (but the wool does not allow that). Do I still like it? Yes!
https://troet.cafe/@ina548/113181731311485846

The upper body of a woman wearing a long sleeved black shirt and above that a sleeveless crochet top with a turtle neck in a petrol color. There are diamond shaped flowers in the lower part which end in a triangle a bit under the neck

@thegiddystitcher well done! I am still in hell!

#FinishOrFrogAlong #Knitting

A big pile of pale pink and blue yarn on a lap with two balls of yarn sitting on a pop up table in front of the messy pile.

All frogged, wound, and I'm already thinking up alternative ideas for the yarn even though I already have way too many WIPs.

Thanks for the push, @alexisbushnell 😁

#Knitting #FinishOrFrogAlong

Hand-wound yarn balls of varying sizes, some light grey and others a deep vibrant purple. There are thirteen or so balls in total but some are quite tiny.

@thegiddystitcher Morrie is in charge of the blue!

#FinishOrFrogAlong

Morrie, a small fluffy, mostly white dog laying on his back looking very chill with a pile of pale blue yarn beside him.

Goddess help me!!!
@thegiddystitcher

#Knitting #FinishOrFrogAlong

A large pile of crimped pale pink and blue yarn on a Little Mermaid duvet cover.

Right, managed to get the ends off my needles. Frogging is a-go!

#knitting #FinishOrFrogAlong

A messy bundle of pale blue and pink knitting on a Little Mermaid duvet cover

What is that, a cardigan for ants?

No, it's actually a very out-of-my-depth and overly optimistic attempt at the Urban Houndstooth Cardigan by Sarah Wilson (https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/urban-houndstooth-cardigan)

Started in probably 2014. The yarn was wrong, my tension was wrong, my skills were nowhere near where they needed to be, and it would never have fit.

It's being frogged in approximately two minutes time, in solidarity with @alexisbushnell and her similarly failed laundry bag.

#Knitting #Frogging #FinishOrFrogAlong

Hastily snapped photo of a messy work in progress knitted cardigan, started top down and with an all over purple and grey houndstooth pattern. There are a few balls of yarn attached and lying haphazardly on the floor.

My rainbow lace gets pulled out once again now that the more urgent mitts are done. Will I actually finish it this time or will I be still knitting it in #FinishOrFrogAlong 2025?

Also, happy endings book club sent me a regency hockey romance with time travel. None of these things are my favorite (my husband's the Pride and Prejudice fan), but I trust the team that picks the books so I'm giving it a shot anyhow! Hockey pun not intended but I'm not going to change my wording now that I've typed it. 😂

#knitting #books @knitting #HappyEndingsBookClub

A rainbow lace shawl is curled around a copy of Puck & Prejudice by Lia Riley, a book with a pink cover and a male hockey player and a woman in a regency gown looking at each other.

#WIPWednesday Still on the scrapball cardi. I didn’t complete it for #FinishOrFrogAlong BUT it is still in progress, and that’s something.

An in-progress shot of some knitting. The shape cannot be determined, but it’s in all sorts of shades of blue, green and grey. It’ll probably be very nice if it’s ever completed.

@consumablejoy Great list! Lots of good ideas, not so structured that it's oppressive.

BTW I'd love to be on your destash recipient list, if you're collecting names. The yarns you sent when I first started again remain some of my faves. I'm still building out the stash. Each skein is like a new paintbrush, isn't it?!

#FinishOrFrogAlong was a huge gift to me. Not only did I clear the decks, I've also started 2025 with new creative habits to get more joy from the craft. Thank you again for that!

Make some hexiflats for my beekeepers quilt, especially some with handspun. Work on the origami scarf I have in progress. De-stash by sending yarn to interested parties. Host #FinishOrFrogAlong in the fall again assuming interest continues. Possibly do one sweater (Doppio or other chunky). Maybe make progress on one of my Starmore sweaters (one cabled, one fairisle) which has been languishing. Decide what to do with my other current WIPs of which there are many many. (2/2)

@Johannab I love these random challenges! I actually got a huge impact from #FinishOrFrogAlong this fall.

I have finally cast off my massive 3 skein lace scarf!! (I cast it on in June)
Unblocked length approx 8 feet!! (Just in time for Summer!?!)
Still need to weave in ends and block.

Pattern: Hanen Lace Wrap
Yarn: Moonrise Yarn Co 4ply in 'Rain Fade'

This was a fun pattern to knit - a nice rhythm to the lace and not too many different rows to remember. I could've made it shorter but decided not to.

#knitting #FinishOrFrogAlong

A large scarf of handknitted lace in three shades of indigo from dark to light lies on a colourful cushion.

Remember, friends, there’s more than one way to be done with a project!
#Knitting #FinishOrFrogAlong

A pair of knitting needles on top of a pile of recently unraveled yarn in a purple /navy/green/white color way.

Finish or Frog Along Wrap-up https://curiousity.ca/2024/finish-or-frog-along-wrap-up/ I still spend more time knitting than using fountain pens but you wouldn’t know it from the blog posts I write! So let’s do a bit of an update. In September / October a group of fediverse folk do “Finish or Frog Along” (formerly Fall Finish Along, but now with a better name for people … Continue reading … #embroidery #FinishOrFrogAlong #knitting #spinning #weaving

Crown Wools wrap: a bias-knit parallelogram-shaped wrap done with 12 different rainbow colours of yarn in different stitch patterns.

Finish or Frog Along Wrap-up

I still spend more time knitting than using fountain pens but you wouldn’t know it from the blog posts I write! So let’s do a bit of an update.

In September / October a group of fediverse folk do “Finish or Frog Along” (formerly Fall Finish Along, but now with a better name for people in the southern hemisphere!) and honestly, I’ve looked forwards to it since last year. I started with 5 things on my list then added 2 more as I finished things:

Clasped Weft weaving
Sweater Ornament
Pigeon Embroidery
Purple spin
Crown Wools
Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)
Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)

FinishOrFrogAlong is run by ConsumableJoy and I really appreciated the prompts that went with it for helping me think regularly about finishing and get a community doing the same. Plus it’s just really fun seeing everyone finishing things and cheering each other on. Especially since it’s a multi-craft affair so the projects are all so different!

I kind of want to have something similar for stash usage on the other side of the year and I’ve been trying to think about how to organize that. But for today’s post, let’s just talk about what I finished or didn’t finish!

Clasped Weft Weaving

Not finished.

Image Description: A weaving in progress on a rigid heddle loom. it uses two colours of variegated yarn, one grey/brown and the other blue/green. It’s a sampler showing multiple types of pattern that can be made with a pick up stick.

I was really hoping to finish this piece which I started in April during “weaving month” as I rotated through my lesser-used crafts. But while I pulled it out and got it all set up, I only actually wove less than an inch during Finish and Frog along, so rather than being the thing I finished first like I thought when I set up the list, it became the biggest “fail” on my list.

Some of this was because I didn’t really know what to do next — I’d been iterating through exercises in a book and had to return it to the library, and when I bought my own copy I realized I should have taken pictures of all my sticky note flags so I’d be able to restart easily, and instead I had to puzzle it out.

But the other thing is that my current weaving setup doesn’t fit very well into my life, so I have to be more intentional about making time for it and I can’t do it while curled up with the dog in my recliner in the evenings, and as a result it feels like a hassle. There’s some things I can do about that: I can put the loom in a better spot where I can reach it when I’m in crafting mode not during dog cuddle time, I can grab audiobooks so I can multitask, and I really need to spend some time getting a bag so it’s easier to carry the loom and the yarn and shuttles and everything all together so it’s an option when I’m feeling overstimulated and just need to hang out upstairs or downstairs on my own for a bit.

But in the end it winds up feeling much the way I feel about quilting: I don’t hate it but it doesn’t quite fit into my life and it feels like a chore. A stranger commented “to everything there is a season” on one of my griping quilting posts with the explanation that it’s perfectly reasonable to save quilting for another part of my life when I don’t have a young child and a puppy and a full time job and a pandemic. And after two months of thinking I should make time for weaving and then just not doing it, I think it’s time to accept that this is not the season of weaving in my life. And that’s ok: I don’t have to be completely obsessed with every skill I learn or thing I do.

I will note that it’s a bit strange that I don’t feel this way about spinning, which similarly is hard to do curled up in a chair with a book. But the solution with spinning has been to enjoy it during a couple of sprints rather than do it year round: I enjoy Tour De Fleece, I get in a bit more during Finish or Frog Along, and last year I also did the 100 day stashdown from Jillian Moreno’s patreon. I think I may need to find some similar sprints for weaving if I want to do it, or (as I have with quilting) let it just be a sometimes craft in my life. I was really tempted by the Sweet Georgia winter weave-a-long that is happening now, but I’d need to finish what’s on the loom now before I could start it.

I’m still *intending* to finish up what’s on the loom now, and after I spent time writing about it I finally did pick it up in the last week of November. But it’s mostly taking a back seat while I finish my holiday knitting and stuff so I don’t know that I’ll finish it in time to really join the weave-a-long or if I should take the opportunity to pack up the loom in preparation for moving next year.

So, total fail on *finishing* this project, but it forced a lot of good introspection about whether this craft was suiting me and how to make it work better in my life.

Sweater Ornament

Finished!

Image Description: A small embroidery kit including a nice round yarn holder, a piece of felt pre-printed with an embroidery pattern (a sweater with a sheep and yarn on it) and a small bag with a camping motf.

This is from cute Christmas ornament kit that I bought last year. I finished one then, one this year, and maybe I’ll do the last next year. I remembered to put the year on this time!

Image Description: A small Christmas ornament style embroidered felt sweater with the year stitched on the back.

I have to say, I really loved these kits: Knitted Bliss really puts together a nice set with the nicer thread holders, a magnetic needle keeper, needle threader, and everything for the 3 ornaments. This may be the nicest embroidery kit I’ve ever had, with a lot of thought put into how it would be used so the whole experience is just really lovely. (No thin paper to hold thread! Everything well labelled, and big photos to go with the instructions.) I highly recommend this kit and will probably get more from her when I’ve got space for more embroidery stuff.

Image Description: My finished embroidered sweater ornament viewed from the front. It has a yarn bowl with a sheep on it filled with yarn on the front of a white (felt) sweater with pink ribbing at neck/sleeves/hem. There is a small clothes hanger stuck in between the two halves of the ornament that were sewn together, so the hanger can be hung on a Christmas tree or otherwise displayed.

Pigeon Embroidery

Not finished, but that’s the expected result.

Image Description: Pigeon embroidery in a hoop. The chest feathers have been mostly finished but the rest isn’t done yet. There is a bee & honeycomb magnetic needle minder attached to the hoop near the pigeon’s head.

I mostly wanted to put this one into the finishing rotation to avoid hand strain without feeling like I should be working on something on the list. Embroidery fills a weird niche in my crafting repertoire as a hand break because it uses my muscles differently yet keeps my hands busy so I don’t wind up with repetitive strain, so I usually have one on the go with no particular deadline for finishing. I usually finish one or two of these per year unless I’m feeling particularly excited about one or doing something very small.

Purple spin

Finished!

Image Description: Long draw spinning in progress: my wooden spinning wheel set up with some hanks of fiber sitting on top as a prepare to spin.

This was another long draw spin from Tour de France Femmes this summer. I’m really enamoured of long draw and am starting to feel actually proficient. I wanted to do a 3 ply since I have the EEW lazy kates and could do it more easily, and I intentionally chose to let the colours mix in plying. It looks nice, but I think I like more of a gradient than a blend so I’ll probably plan differently next 3-ply. Still, I’m looking forwards to knitting with this and maybe I’ll like it more once it’s knit up!

Image Description: Plying setup on an EEW Lazy Kate: three plies of purple singles waiting to be plied.Image Description: Purple 3-ply spin all done and twisted into a pretty yarn skein. There are multiple shades of purple all mixed.

Crown Wools

Finished!

Image Description: Crown Wools wrap: a rainbow wrap made with 12 different colours of yarn and 12 different textures. It’s a large bias-knit parallelogram but has been curled into something more like a circle for the photo.

This was my year-long project, slightly condensed so that it would finish in September for the event. I loved doing this and have it displayed in my office, but I do need to acknowledge that while I love the curated sets of rainbow minis that come with these sorts of things, they’re pretty much my least frequently worn items because they’re just a bit too big to be practical for the way I move and do stuff.

I’ve picked out a blanket and some rainbow stash yarn for next year’s ongoing project (it may take more than a year, I’m not sure yet). I may also consider some complicated colourwork sweater stuff for future ongoing project planning if I can figure out a nice way to divide that up over a few months. Inches per body or maybe something with colourwork that I can split up?

Rainbow Shawl (bonus goal)

Knitting still in progress, but charts are finished!

Image Description: My design for a rainbow wrap in progress, showing colours going from red to blue. I had made a mistake on one side (you can see a bulge marked by a lollipop stitch marker where the problem occurred) and had to rip back two sections so I wouldn’t run out of yarn.

After I finished 2 things on my initial list of 5 I added a few extras and this is one of them! This was a personal design project that I started before my local yarn shop went online-only, before the pandemic. I feel like I was an entirely different person. But I’d taken enough notes and had the physical object, so I fixed up the charts and knit a bunch more repeats. I’ve got a few colours left but i decided to do a Clapotis for Knitty’s Clapotisfest and I want to make winter socks for my mom before shipping gets overloaded in December, so I’ll finish this later. I’m really happy with it and would like to actually make a good free pattern out of it eventually but I have to at least finish the knitting to take pictures before I get to that point!

Frog knit RPG scarf (bonus goal)

Frogged!

Image Description: The scarf pre-frogging, showing that I only barely finished one motif and it didn’t look like much. Although the photo makes the contrast look ok, it was veyr hard to see in real life.

This was a neat knitting RPG concept where you rolled dice and got different charts to go with the story, but I chose yarns that weren’t working for me and I wasn’t having a good time so I bailed on the MKAL. I usually frog stuff right away but for a variety of reasons I didn’t do it right then.

Image Description: The yarn just after frogging (ripping out). It looks a lot like dried ramen noodles, all wavy.

So many years later, I had to frog and steam the yarn so it’s ready for re-use. Though I’m not sure what I’d use it in since I’d bought the yarns to be used together then didn’t like them for colourwork. Maybe some brioche instead? Problem for future me.

Image Description: The frogged yarn sitting on my ironing board with a clothes steamer, used to steam the yarn and straighten it out so it can be more easily re-used.

In conclusion…

One frogged, 3 finished, 3 still going (although one of those at least had charts finished, so that should probably count!). I had a great time finishing and frogging this year and I like that this is becoming enough part of fediverse crafting culture that I wasn’t the only one looking forwards to it.

#embroidery #FinishOrFrogAlong #knitting #spinning #weaving

A weaving in progress on a rigid heddle loom. it uses two colours of variegated yarn, one grey/brown and the other blue/green. It's a sampler showing multiple types of pattern that can be made with a pick up stick.

A small embroidery kit including a nice round yarn holder, a piece of felt pre-printed with an embroidery pattern (a sweater with a sheep and yarn on it) and a small bag with a camping motf.

A small Christmas ornament style embroidered felt sweater with the year stitched on the back.

🧶 WIP REPORT 🧶

Making a nifty little tarot card bag. Near-instant gratification!

It's the Diamond Pane Window Tarot Bag by Joy Vernon. Yarn gifted by a #Mastodon friend. Beautiful yarn! The window pane lace lets you see what cards are inside.

Now that I'm bringing #FinishOrFrogAlong to an end, this is part of my new strategy, to always have 2 WIPs going - one for me, one a gift. 😊

#Knitting @Knitting #Knitstodon #FiberArts #FibreArts #NeedleArts #Maker #Creator #Crafts #HandMade

Close up of window pane lace knit in a marled blue and turquoise yarn on DP needles, feels like wool.

Remember the one thing I declared for #FinishOrFrogAlong and then only touched once in two months? I actually made some time to weave this afternoon!

Hatch is peeved because it takes up the space on my lap that he believes is rightfully his. 😅

#weaving #fiberarts @fiberarts

#FinishorFrogalong

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