2014 Year in Review

It's the time of the year to look back at what's been in preparation for looking forward to the new. It's been an awfully quite year at casa BrineyDeep (I scaled back at the end of 2013) but I'm looking forward to hitting my stride again in 2015 as my biggest 2014 project is getting awfully close to completion (yay!).

2014 was a big year for me between the new house, the new puppy, and the new sewing machine. I'm happy to say that I'm still in love with all three.

The new sewing machine translated into quite a lot of sewing this year, a theme which I expect to continue in 2015. Sewing highlights include a slew of mini charm bags and my favorite project of 2014, the bad passwords dress.

On the knitting front, I knit one Ysolda pattern this year and found a new obsession - Fiber Optic gradients. I finished a gradient shawl and, most recently, a gradient sweater and am looking forward to using more of my small stash of gradients in 2015.

All in all, it's been a good, though quiet, year. I'm looking forward to gaining more free time in 2015 and working through my to-do list of knitting and sewing projects. Here's to a great year ahead!

Gradient!

It's been a wee bit crazy around here the last few months but I'm very happy to say that one thing did come off my needles: my Fiber Optic gradient sweater. I showed you the start of the sweater in this post from September and I'm happy to say that the final sweater is just as lovely as I envisioned.

Two gradient packs was the perfect amount of yarn for this sweater (honestly, I'm just lucky I'm not a larger size). I ended up with about 10 yards of yarn leftover and a bunch of 1" scraps. I'm rather proud of this efficiency.

The one thing I don't love about this sweater is that the ribbing at the sleeves and hem flares and flips up. It does not look nice and drives me a bit crazy. I need to figure out if I can stabilize it with a ribbon backing or if I have to rip the hems out to redo them. The sweater is currently in my "need to think about" pile (yes, I have one of those and it's not small) until I figure this out.

Other than the flippiness, I'm very happy with the final sweater. I admit that the yarn is doing most of the heavy lifting here. This is in no way curing my obsession with Fiber Optic yarns.

The good news is that I have two more Fiber Optic gradient packs on hand, one in ebony to holly and the other in smoke on the water. I don't know what I'll do with them but I'm leaning toward using them together as stripes. Won't that look lovely?