Mooseknits

Hand on My Heart

2011-02-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

Well, here's another pattern. On Ravelry, I decided to participate in the Guild Wars challenge, where members of the Ankh-Morpork Knitters Guild group have joined up into different groups to compete in earning points by completing projects that meet certain criteria within a limited span of time. The first challenge, issued three days ago, was for winter accessories with a Valentine's Day theme. I decided to join the Assassins Guild, mostly because Amy (aka sputnik) set it up. If you're not a Discworld fan, the main things you should know about the Assassins Guild are that its members have excessive amounts of style, and they always wear black.

Unfortunately, the first thing that sprang into my mind when I read the challenge was a pair of fingerless gloves using a heart to shape the thumb gusset, and lacy ribs to complete the girlyness. If it occurs to you that this sounds a lot like the construction of Green Thumb, then you're absolutely right. Suffice it to say that girly mitts with lacy hearts do not really say "Assassin" in any meaningful way.

I tried to get around it by making the first one up in purple, in honor of a character in Night Watch, who has some connection to the Guild and wears a lot of purple. But the knitting gods laughed at me, and I didn't have enough purple yarn. So I made the second one in pink.

Four days from inspiration to published pattern is a new personal best.

Perchta

2011-01-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

Can't stop the pattern uploading! And here's the next one.

Perchta is a Victorian-style collar (or a "bertha" collar, as they were known.) The cables and short-rowed neck ruffle are knit first, and then the lace patterned cape section is picked up and knit along the other long edge.

Lisa was such an excellent model, and Barbara performed sterling service as a proofreader. (And did even more to improve the presentation of Ochiba, I should have said before.)

I'm one square away from finishing my crochet skirt. Look for a couple more patterns soon!

Hexabranch

2011-01-22T15:26:00.000-08:00

I'm on a roll. I have one of the crocheted scarves done.

It's called Hexabranch, after the scientific name of the spanish dancer, a sea creature that swims around with the most outrageous ruffles.

Since it's a scarf, and crocheted at that, I've priced it at $1.00.

Ochiba

2011-01-21T16:57:00.000-08:00

I have been crafting, heaven knows, just not blogging about it. But my main New Year's resolution was to publish more patterns. So I dusted off a file I'd created in 2009, got a friend to model the piece, and agonized for a week or so about how to present 22 different sizes in one pattern.

Ochiba is a seamless skirt, knit from the top, with A-line shaping that grows naturally out of the leaf motifs. I actually went on a bit of a leaf-themed tear after Green Thumb, but this is the only project that I thought was completely successful.

I ended up writing a template that requires the knitter to plug in a number and actually calculate two quantities. I do this with some trepidation, but the alternatives are either not offering a large range of sizes, or writing pattern instructions that have 22 different numbers in parentheses three times per line. I've also priced it at $2.50. We'll just see how this all pans out.

The big roadblock for me with patterns has been photographs (ever since someone on Ravelry kindly and accurately pointed out that most of my photos look like snapshots taken in the backyard.) Now I actually have photos for two more patterns (both crocheted scarves, as it turns out) although these will also involve charting with crochet symbols. I am the proud owner of a new computer, which makes my life so much more wonderful in so many ways, but it does mean that I no longer own a working, all-purpose drawing program. I may have to buy something. I'm also almost done (and have been for, oh, most of a year) with another skirt, this one done in little squares, and that will get written up as soon as I can rope another friend into posing for me.

I do realize that crocheted skirts and scarves are not the most lucrative section of the pattern market (which is, of course, pretty far from being lucrative in any real sense of the word.) But they're original, and I'm pleased at how they've come out. I need to come up with another Green Thumb, so I can live a life of luxury off of my pattern sales.

One reason I've been so absent from this blog is that I'm starting a produce store in downtown San José. It's called Veggie Box. I can't actually tell you exactly when it will open at this point, but I hope it will be some time this summer. It's even got its own Facebook page, if you want to follow along at home.

Cachiyuyo

2010-02-26T19:35:00.000-08:00

Behold my latest pattern. It's a little scarf crocheted out of foundation crochet stitches, and a product of my leaf obsession that started with Green Thumb. I had been waiting until I finished the two companion designs before publishing this, but I got a flattering number of compliments on it when I wore it around the market at Stitches West this morning, so I released it into the wild.

It's futile to make promises about further patterns or even regular blog posting right now, but I thank you for reading this!

Merry Christmas

2009-12-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm glad I remembered my password. Hello there! I've been busy making Christmas presents and designing things (often at the same time) but not too busy actually writing up patterns or taking photos. But I have some here, so allow me to show them off.

This is my trainer, who, while telling me the story of her wardrobe consultation, and the Cleaning Out of the Closet, revealed that she had never before realized how fond she was of "soft wraps." I knew she didn't mean the ones with grilled veggies. She confessed this morning that, although she hadn't been dropping hints when she said that, she had cherished hopes for something handmade. Nice to be appreciated.

After I gave my best friend some mitts back in January, she told me her kids kept borrowing them. So here's one for her daughter

and one for her son. The green ones are Green Thumb, the blue ones use the thumb shaping from Jocelyn.

I made a slew of other things, but most of them are from another new design. Given my recent history, I am loathe to make any promises, but they are at the top of my mental to-do list.

Cross post

2009-10-21T19:04:00.001-07:00

Well, it's not knitting with local yarn, but I'm calling it a cross post. I planned, sourced and prepared the menu for a fundraising dinner for 60 people this past Saturday, and the dinner was held at Eulipia in downtown San José. Mike Borkenhagen, the chef at Eulipia, was incredibly generous in making this dinner a wonderful event. So I knit him a hat as a thank you.

I read in the Lion Brand blog that Afghans for Afghans is having a very quick drive for wool items for kids 7-14. Very quick in that everything has to be in San Francisco by 29 October to make it on the boat. After a very silly mitten indeed yesterday, I refined my technique in using my scrap basket, and am about one third of the way through a much more functional pair of mittens. They match perfectly, because I am knitting them at the same time from both ends of each ball of yarn.

I'll try to get a hat done before the deadline.

Guerilla knitting

2009-08-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

I finished the project I'd been working on all summer, and now I'm writing up the pattern. As part of my quest for better photographs, I'm going to have a friend model it on Sunday, so I hope the pattern will be out early next week.

I saw some guerilla knitting in downtown San José last night. Evidently, it's been there a while.

Hello, dolly

2009-08-06T10:45:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I'm so very obvious.

It's not often I can cross post to both of my blogs, but maybe some day I'll find some local organic wool and knit something with it. I brought home a bunch of wheat stalks from Saturday's harvest at Live Earth Farm, and this morning I finally sat down and made my corn dolly.

While it would have been prettier with less smutty wheat, and while practice obviously makes perfect, I think it will be a nice ornament for the farm. I'm going to give it to Debbie, who runs the CSA, at the pickup this afternoon. I feel compelled to add that I don't ascribe to it any of the pagan magickal abilities I read about while searching online for instructions.

And one day, it would be fun to make some of the shapes I remember from the Renaissance Faire of the late 70's.

image via www.wicstun.com

ZOMG

2009-08-04T18:50:00.000-07:00

And how could I forget this morning to talk about the latest Interweave Knits? Well, one particular thing. Leaving aside the photo of the Barcelona jacket that made the model's head look as tiny as a very tiny thing, indeed, it's this deeply weird ad that caught my eye.

Click through, if you must. I'll wait.

In case it's too blurry, it says

Dear the precious.
No more Acrylic!
ZAOL pursuit more ecological
healthy close to the nature.
We will try to make yarns
your hands feel more happy
like ZAOL means friendly
from Korean ancient word.

Doesn't IK offer proofreading as part of their services? Did anyone else notice this ad? I looked on Ravelry, but all I saw were a couple posts looking for a sweater pattern.

Jiggity jig

2009-08-04T07:38:00.001-07:00

I'm home again, back in the late-summer-before-school-starts routine.

While I was on my last vacation, I knitted up the alpaca I bought in Canada, using a pattern from the new VK that had arrived in my mailbox at just the right time. I had bought the yarn to make a thank-you gift for the friend I had visited in Kingston.

She was, in fact, flying back to Australia on Sunday, with an 11 hour layover that we were going to use for a whirlwind visit in San Francisco. We did manage to do that (spending an hour at the Academy of Sciences and having a lovely dinner at Waterbar) but I managed to forget to bring the hat along to give it to her. Fortunately, her husband is still working in Santa Cruz, and I'll have lunch with him on Thursday, so there is still a chance to have it hand carried Down Under (where it is winter, a large part of the reason I made it.) Failing that, I do know that the USPS will take it for me.

As for the hat itself, the alpaca yarn is much bulkier than the pattern calls for, but, since the tam is started from the center, I just kept knitting until the circle was big enough, then did the one decrease round and ribbed until I ran out of yarn. The brim is folded over, and I bound it off together with the inside stitches instead of sewing it. This was, in part, because I didn't have my little notions box along with me in Capitola (but mainly because I love to find ways to do everything without sewing.) It's a cute pattern, and the alpaca will make it pretty darn warm for those fierce Aussie winters.

I also do know that there is a yarn store in Capitola, and I even visited same when I needed to borrow a crochet hook to pick up some laddered-down stitches on my other project. (See lack of notions box, above.) Since I am almost physically unable to leave a yarn store without buying anything (especially when I've come in and borrowed a tool) I got a couple balls of Soxx Appeal.

It's a funny thing that I can't think of a yarn store around here where I could walk in and say "What's the most local yarn you've got?" and expect to find anything. I will freely admit that our agricultural riches don't extend far into the fiber world, but that doesn't mean that there isn't any locally-produced yarn around here. Nine Rubies does prominently feature Baywood yarns, which are locally hand dyed. But with the huge interest in local food production, you'd think that some store in the South Bay would seek out what exists and feature it. I'll mention that to Beth at Green Planet the next time I'm there.

And, along these same lines, if your interest in the products of sheep goes beyond wool to cheese and meat, I encourage you to check out Rebecca King's "Adopt a Ewe" program. Rebecca has started an organic dairy down in Watsonville, where she keeps a herd of happy sheep on a beautiful green hillside. Her cheeses are delicious, and she also sells delicious organic lamb. Farmers don't have a steady paycheck, and Rebecca has come up with this idea to help her with an infusion of capital up front. In return for $500 during the last half of 2009 (when the sheep are not producing milk) subscribers will receive six monthly deliveries of cheese and milk starting in January 2010, plus either a whole lamb (custom butchered, and Rebecca's butcher makes excellent sausage) or an organic wool and cotton comforter. Plus invitations to special farm events (Rebecca used to be a chef at Cafe Gabriella in Santa Cruz.)

She's a great person who is working hard to bring good food to the world in a way that treats the land and her animals right. If you're in the area, I hope you'll take a look.

Blogging in between vacations

2009-07-25T10:14:00.001-07:00

I just got back from four days in Kingston, Ontario, where I was visiting friends. The fiber-related part of the vacation was a visit to the very charming Rose Haven Farm Store in Picton, the largest town in Prince Edward County (not "Island") which is a large peninsula between Toronto and Kingston.

When I asked for the most local yarn in the shop, the owner pointed to this grey wool

saying "That is from my sheep. In fact, it's the sheep on the left on that card." So I bought the card, too, as well as a hank of very soft alpaca from a farm near Kingston.

I loved "the County," as they call it up there. It was beautiful and green, with lovely farms, all against the blue, blue backdrop of Lake Ontario.

And now I'm off to another agricultural wonderland, with a blue watery backdrop: Santa Cruz County. Ah, summertime.

Sheesh

2009-07-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

OK, no excuses.

I have been faithfully moderating my groups on Ravelry, and reading friends' blogs and favoriting projects and patterns. And knitcheting; uncharacteristically, I have two projects going right now. One is a summer version of Gallivant in the bamboo nylon sock yarn I finally found.

And one is a new design, riffing on the leaf increases in Green Thumb

It's on US size 3 needles, so it's not booking along.

And, I'm not sure where the impetus came from, but I found that I had to sew a skirt today. I even used some rickrack from my trim stash!

(It's not actually that yellow.)

No promises, but I'll try to update this once a week in the future...

Jocelyn

2009-05-29T09:38:00.001-07:00

Although I hate blog posts about not blogging, I feel compelled to say that most of my writing energy is going into my sustainable food and water blog these days.

I finally have finished the pattern for the lace-backed mitts that my South Bay Knitters friends had encouraged me to write up. Two of them brought their test-knitted pieces to the meeting last night, and I was very pleased at how they looked. I hope I've found all of the errors in the pattern, but please let me know if you find any more.

Jocelyn has a shaped thumb gusset and a lace panel down the back of the hand. You can customize the mitts with your own favorite lace panel. With the forgiving stretch of 2x2 ribbing, exact gauge is not critical for this pattern, and you can use any yarn from fingering to light worsted weight, as long as it has some elasticity.

There's a place for everything

2009-05-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

Proof that every yarn has a way to shine, I made my mom a Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf from the one ball of the Mondial Bamboo that I'd already tried using. She was very happy with it.

And it was a good fit for the yarn. But if anyone is interested in nine other balls of this yarn, then please let me know.

Caveat Emptor

2009-05-08T11:21:00.001-07:00

I've been wanting to make a summery Gallivant for a while now, and, when my Rav friend cajunbatchick told me about Mondial Bamboo, I thought I'd found the right yarn. The Rav database said it was fingering weight, and, from the projects listed with it, it was clearly self-striping. So I ordered a bag from Green Planet Yarns, my LYS, and picked it up yesterday.

This morning, I got out my crochet hook and started my foundation row. The colors were a little more cartoony than the springy I had hoped from the photo on teh interwebs, but I was happy enough. But when I got to the end of the orange, I was not happy to see the yellow come in briefly, then return to orange, then go back and forth before settling on yellow. The further color changes were even more variegated.

Plus, it's much heavier than fingering. That's not actually that big a deal, since it's bamboo, and it's going to drape and grow, anyway. But it was certainly an object lesson about rushing out to buy unknown yarn.

So what did I do? I found another yarn, Happy 4 ply from Wendy. It's a sock yarn, 25% nylon and 75% bamboo, and there were many projects on Ravelry to show that the stripes in the color I chose are clean, clean, clean.

I've also finished a new sample of the lacy mitts, which pattern I will write up as soon as I get a good photo. It will be called Jocelyn, for the person who wanted it most.

Toot

2009-05-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

It's hard to say this without sounding as though I'm tooting my own horn, but I can't believe the response to my new pattern. I actually posted about it in the Designers forum, asking whether lowering the price had increased sales for other people. The answers I got were that the pattern's wonderfulness itself was the reason it's so popular, and that I should increase the price.

I'm not ready to do that. Since I think all of my patterns are pretty clever (the un-clever designs are never worth the trouble of writing them up) I'm wondering what makes these little mitts such a hit, when no one has ever bought a copy of Balai at all.

Not that I'm complaining, not at all. I'm just gobsmacked, I guess.

Green Thumb

2009-05-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

So I spent this past month working on yet another new design, and then waiting until it was all done until I decided to blog about it. It's called Green Thumb, and it's a pair of fingerless gloves.

Now I know that fingerless gloves are so 2006, but it took me a while to get a cellphone, too. I made the gloves for my mom last month, and then I started thinking about thumb gussets. Instead of increasing at the sides of the gusset, I thought, why not increase in the middle? And, instead of increasing in plain stockinette, why not increase in rib? So I made a pair of lacy gloves that I thought would be the pair I'd keep for myself.

(OK, it's the kind of photo you take at night when you don't want to disturb the cat in your lap.)

It turns out that another docent at Año Nuevo (where I was working on them) liked them so much that I've decided to give them away. But it got me thinking about other ways to shape a gusset. And once I'd thought of the leaf, it seemed so obvious. I made the first pair out of black Wool-Ease, to give to a friend who's going to spend the next six (winter) months in Peru. No photo of those, but I made another pair of Rowan Cashsoft 4-ply.

(The cat jumped off my lap after that second flash.) Of course, I thought of a further refinement of the pattern after I'd made the green ones, and I just finished the grey ones today.

I'm pretty chuffed at the pattern, but even more so at the reception. I fussed over the thing all afternoon, finding fiddly typo after typo, then uploaded it to Ravelry and posted about it in the Designers forum just before I went out to dinner. And came back to find six sales! I set the price at $2.50, instead of the $5.00 I'm charging for the other patterns, and maybe that's below some magic threshold. Anyway, it was a big thrill to come home and see that.

Giddy

2009-04-02T12:01:00.000-07:00

So I got an email last week from Mary-Heather, who is the non-Jess-and-Casey part of Ravelry. And she was asking whether I'd like to see my skirt pattern Gallivant up as Jess' Selection for the month of April.

Well, yes, I would like that.

And I've sold another copy, and seen ever so many entries under my "user activity" tag in my Ravelry pattern store.

In other knitcheting news, I made a pair of fingerless gloves for my mom's birthday. I used the yarn sent to me in the Igor Thwap last month; it's a silk-wool blend (Créme from Crystal Palace) and I really like how it works up at a tighter gauge.

And I made four afghan squares for a swap in the Tunisian Crochet group that I moderate, but I neglected to take photos.

I'm now working on a design that's been patiently waiting for my attention for more than a year. I haven't decided whether I'll try to submit it anywhere or just publish it myself, so I'm not going to say anything else about it right now.

Stitches

2009-03-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

I had a nice time at the Stitches market on Friday. The night before, I finished my ribbed pullover (I am especially proud of my sewn bind off) and here I am with my blue sock earrings, ready to go to Santa Clara.

While I was waiting in line (having somehow forgotten about the existence of printing tickets out from teh interwebs) I saw Amy, aka Sputnik on Ravelry, and we did the market together, providing enablement for each other.

Although I heard that the market was some 40 vendors lighter this year, it was still the same physical size. Evidently, many people took bigger booths. There was certainly no feeling of anything other than overabundance again.

I didn't take any photos, or really think of any kind of narrative for our shopping, so I'll cut to the chase of what I was compelled enough to buy.

k2tog has a great selection of Crystal Palace yarns, including two new ones. Mini Mochi is a self-striping sock yarn that is very soft.

I bought eight balls; I have an idea for a skirt design. They also have a new weight of Panda Silk. It is just a luscious yarn.

I bought a bag, and I don't care that they're both green. Then I wandered around for quite a while, thinking that I was done with the spending. But the JoJoland booth had some cashmere on sale.

It's on sale because they made a bad choice for the string that holds the tag on, and the color ran on the yarn. I'm planning to dye my four skeins with Easter egg dye.

In between all of this, I saw several people from my knitting group, who all told me that Fae was looking for me, having very kindly brought a kitchen scale for me to borrow to weigh my unhappy yarn. She finally caught up with me, after having schlepped the scale all over the Santa Clara Convention Center. Thank you again, Fae!

She showed us a pompom yarn that she had bought at the Great Yarns! booth, and I wondered if she were going to make a bathmat, too. But she said that there was a sample knitted of the yarn that lined up the pompoms and looked really cool. I couldn't picture what she meant until I saw it for myself. When I came back to the market with my daughter yesterday, I bought her a skein for a scarf, which I knit up today.

If you click through, you can see there are eight stitches on the needle, two between each pompom. When I was puzzling over what to do with my previous pompom yarn, I got stuck (both literally and figuratively) on pulling the pompoms through loops, whether knit or crochet. But this technique keeps the pompoms in between the stitches, kind of like beads, so you're only knitting the cord in between. It took me about an hour to make the scarf. Do I get a prize for finishing a project bought at Stitches while Stitches is still going on?

I really love how the pompoms line up. I seldom feel the need to make the same thing for everyone I know, but I'm already thinking of several more people to make this for. The yarn was about $10, so it's quite a big effect for the price and effort.

While we were at the Great Yarns! booth on Friday, Amy confessed that all of the novelty yarn was starting to look good to her. I told her she needed to go outside and get some air. But then I bought a skein of a ruffling yarn.

I like this one better than the previous incarnations of ruffling yarns I've seen because it's a woven, rather than knit ribbon. The ruffles come our softer, I think. I'm imagining it as cuffs and a jabot collar for a vintage inspired sweater.

I bought some buttons, too, of course. Who could resist this octopus?

Yesterday, as I said, I went back with my daughter and spent an hour with her Auntie Karen, who's teaching at Stitches. I hope we'll have a chance to spend some more time together later this week.

Slow stashing

2009-02-25T13:02:00.000-08:00

So Stitches West starts tomorrow, although I'm not signed up for any events, so I'll just be attending the market on Friday and (probably) Saturday and running into friends. I won't be working at the Yarndogs booth, either, so I'm back in the ranks of the proletariat. I will miss breezing into the market as I casually wave my vendor badge over my shoulder, "So sorry, must dash."

As is my wont, I went through my entire yarn stash this past week, so that I'd have a full-sense memory of how much and what kinds of yarn I already have. Any, for the first time in a long time, I made an "unhappy pile," as described in the slow stashing manifesto.

In the unhappy pile go all the yarns that immediately cause your spirits to sag. These yarns appealed to your sense of “should”—I should buy this, I should knit something out of this, and, even now, I should keep this. As soon as you find yourself muttering the word “should,” put that yarn in the unhappy pile. Also in the unhappy pile go yarns that, through no fault of their own, carry emotional baggage. Yarns were innocent bystanders to tough times in your life. Yarns that you've already tried to use a few times but always ended up frogging. Yarns that you feel you should use even though the spark just isn't there. Those yarns need to go.

Even now, some of the yarns still call to me. The cotton chenille: wouldn't that make a cool throw with multicolored mitred squares? And the heavy cotton coned yarn: I could knit a quick bulky pullover. But I still have thoughts like that about my knitting machine, and I can move on.

I'd be happiest if I could manage to sell these, although the fact that so many of them are unlabeled coned yarns might make this less likely. I'll give it a go, and we'll see what happens.

Weekend on the Central Coast

2009-02-25T12:34:00.000-08:00

I spent the last weekend in Cambria, visiting my parents. Despite having heard many times from members of my knitting group about this wonderful trim store in Morro Bay, I had somehow never made it down there. But this time, I managed it. I didn't take any photos of the store, but this blog post gives a pretty good idea about it. It's a treasure chest of a shop; I understand my Vera and Nancy raved about it. And then, it turns out that Nancy is now the knitting teacher to Lina G, the owner of the store. A small world.

Anyway, of course I bought a whole mess of trims.

(click through if you want to drool up close.)

When Lina asked what I was going to do with it, I replied, "Go home and put it in a drawer with all of my other trim, of course." Although, to be fair, I do have an idea already about the wide vertical ribbon with the phoenixes on it. (Phoenices?)

On the way back up to Cambria, I stopped at another place I had heard about, Harmony Headlands State Park. Although the state has owned this land for years, the park only opened last November, evidently because of tireless work on the part of local activists.

There is one path that runs about two miles from the parking lot out to the sea. It goes along a gentle valley

skirts a short gully

and runs along a bluff over the Pacific.

There were quite a few people visiting the park. It's beautiful to be able to stand over the Pacific with no hint of cars nor any buildings in sight.

Thwap meet

2009-02-25T11:35:00.000-08:00

The Ankh-Morpork Knitters Guild group on Ravelry (who brought you the Pratchgan) had a swap with the theme of Igor. Igor, on the Discworld, is a compendium of all of the monster movie assistant cliches, from hump to limp to lisp, but amended by Terry Pratchett to include surgical prowess in the service of self- and world-improvement. This translated into a swap focused on leftover stash, candy shaped like body parts, and typing everything using th instead of s, leading to sentences in forum posts like "having done quite a bit of Thubbthtituting, i would pothtulate that motht teacherth would gladly JOIN the Aththathinth Guild, if allowed to…um… practhithe, ath it were, on their chargeth."

I took part in a very informal swap back in knitlist days, and got nothing in return, so I was shy about the whole idea. But the Igor Thwap was so appealing that I took the plunge. And today I got a package.

In it was a card

Some lovely hand-dyed yarn and a scarf that is actually a spare brain.

(good thing I already have a spare brain receptacle!) The spare brain came with spare yarn, too, for emergency surgery.

Some chocolate hearts and a bar of lime-lavender soap!

Thank you, Ambala, for a very enjoyable thwap!

The sweater I wore

2009-02-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

I finished my Languid raglan in time to wear it in Portland.

I do love the fabric; it's very drapy and soft. My gauge was off, however, so the yoke came out way huge. Since I've already had (unpleasant) experience ripping out this yarn, I decided to tighten up the neckline with elastic thread instead of reknitting it. I'm very happy with the fit of the sweater.

Since I needed a project to work on during the trip, I started a square neck, set-in sleeve pullover in Chinese wool yarn from the Yarn Place. I was a bit more obsessive about the gauge with this one, so it's more true.

I know it looks tiny, but 2x2 ribbing (my favorite stitch pattern) is very stretchy. I have walks at Año Nuevo on Sunday (and I hope it doesn't rain) which will give me lots of time to work on it.

The bright city of War Drobe in the far land of Spare Oom.

2009-02-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

I spent last weekend in Portland, with my best friend. We get together for a weekend every year; this year's trip was devoted to fabric and yarn shopping, as well as the usual eating. We stayed at the Benson Hotel, which has a great location downtown, happily rode the MAX and Portland Streetcar, and loved Park Kitchen the best of our dining experiences.

But the big fiber news is that we went to Yarnia. I'd read about it in Craft, and it was just as wonderful as I had hoped. At Yarnia, you peruse shelves of fine coned yarn, holding the strands next to each other to see how they combine.

Once you make your selections, Lindsey Ross, the very sweet owner of the shop, loads them on to her fabulous custom yarn combiner

and winds you your own custom cone of yarn.

I chose strands of mohair, merino, cashmere and silk. Then my best friend, who doesn't knit, but appreciates handknitting, put together her own cone for me to make her some fingerless gloves.

Although Yarnia was my favorite stop, I have to mention the two fabric stores we went to. Josephine's Dry Goods carries utterly beautiful fashion fabrics, and Bolt, on a street that we didn't even realize was so trendy, has a very nice selection as well. We also looked at Knit-Purl, and I have never seen so many high-end yarns in one place. Very impressive. Unfortunately, the Button Emporium and Ribbonry was moving last weekend; all we could do was press our faces up against the glass. There is certainly ample reason to go back to Portland, maybe in the summer when it's not so cold.

And, yes, we did go to Powell's.

Full retreat

2009-01-05T16:14:00.000-08:00

And then the day after New Year's, I went up to Ben Lomond for the South Bay Knitters annual retreat at the Quaker Center. You may recall the weather-related drama of last year's retreat, and so will be pleased to know that everything went smoothly. It was a lovely time.

I did have to rip out all of the knitting I'd done at Año Nuevo, due to an undetected yarn over in row 3, but the project went quickly, and I'm on the first sleeve.

The fabric is luscious, very drapy and soft.

And I bought some yarn at the Yarn Place, since she stayed open specially just for us, and gave us a discount, and I was the only person in the store, (yeah, yeah.) I got two balls of lace weight merino with those long color changes, and so I thought I'd play with them and swatch during one of our coffee breaks on the yarn crawl. Bad idea. I pulled out huge wodges of yarn, in my attempts to get at the ends of the center pull balls, then stuffed them carelessly back into the bag when it was time to go.

Saint Jocelyn spent over an hour of valuable knitting time helping me wind the barfed up parts back into useable balls, with her magical case of surgical crochet hooks that she used to untie knots I couldn't even see. And then Saint Cris, who had already made the whole retreat happen, anyway, helped me when the partially-wound ball of my project ripping-in-progress flew off the ball winder and got itself tangled. I was pleased to provide diversion and merriment to the group.

Año Nuevo photos

2009-01-05T15:58:00.000-08:00

On New Year's Day itself, I took my husband and two friends on an after-hours walk, after my two regular walks were done. Here I am in my official red jacket:

SInce it's still pretty early in the season, we got to go far out on to the point, although we still had to skirt some bulls that were shifting around in the brush. I'm sure by now, those areas are closed. We watched a beta bull try to put the moves on a female (if you click through to Flickr and look at the large size, you can see his little nose and rather comical expression, and the female beneath him is roaring her displeasure.)

This caught the attention of the alpha bull, who reared up to shake his nose and put a stop to this nonsense. In the foreground you can see a nursing pup.

Out on the point, the low sun made for an atmospheric view, and there was lots of sparring among the males.

That's Año Nuevo Island in the background.

My next walk is the 19th, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I hope the weather is as nice.

Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T17:48:00.000-08:00

I gave my first official walks at Año Nuevo today. Everyone said that they'd had a good time, and we even saw a minutes-old pup. We were on our way to the last overlook when there was an explosion of gulls around the seals, which is the infallible marker of a birth. So the group before us saw the actual emergence of the pup, and it evidently made its appearance at exactly midnight, Spanish time, according to the Spanish guests on the tour.

I even got to do some knitting in between walks, the project I started to take to my knitting retreat this weekend. It's a raglan pullover in Artfibers Alfabeto, which is a silk-mohair blend, knit at a loose gauge. It's supposed to rain on Friday, but nothing like last year, I hope.

I wish you all peace and joy in the New Year.

From the archives

2008-12-27T20:44:00.001-08:00

As you might expect, this is a house of handknit Christmas stockings. In fact, one of the very first things I ever knit was a stocking for my husband. It was back in the day when I didn't take into account things like different weights of yarn, and didn't know that there were two kinds of decreases that slant in different directions.

The heel and toe are twisted, because they're shaped with only k2togs. I think that all the stitches are twisted, too; I used to knit into the back loops. I was so proud of myself for figuring out a way to work intarsia in the round. I cut lengths of yarn, and I'd start using each in the middle, then use the second half on the following round.

And, of course, I charted the moose and the tree myself.

My mom had friend knit a stocking for my son, but, sadly, the friend died before my daughter was born. So I knit her a stocking myself.

Somewhere, I have a photo of two-month old Naomi in the stocking.

And then I had to make a stocking for my own self. I have one from my childhood, made just for me by my aunt. It's sewn felt, with a great dimensional Santa on it, and my name in glitter. But my mom won't give it up, and she's stopped bringing it up for me to use. So I used the lengthwise technique and made some colorful stripes.

I've just put a bunch of old winter knits in my Ravelry projects, too.

We'll pretend that he is Parson Brown

2008-12-16T15:58:00.000-08:00

As I was driving home from San Mateo yesterday afternoon, along 280, I was struck again by how inappropriate the usual white Christmas iconography is for California. Once the winter rains start (which, admittedly, was very late this year) the brown hills turn green. Winter is a season of birth and renewal here. By Valentine's Day, the plum trees are already in bloom.

However, today I've decided that we can celebrate a white Christmas after all.

Product vs. Process

2008-12-14T14:04:00.000-08:00

I've got the bulk of my handknitted gifts done; it's so satisfying to see them all lined up.

First off is the sweater for my son.

It's very blue outside today; the colors are actually much brighter. I'm pleased with how this came out, having made my peace with the impossibility of preventing Lorna's Laces yarns from pooling. It has a tie-dyed effect, ¿verdad? I used one of the cool Riri zippers with the multicolored teeth

After I cast off the sweater, I grabbed a crochet hook and made a rainbow beanie.

(I'd forgotten about Mr. Glass Head until today's photo shoot.) This is for my best friend's son.

Then I decided that his sister could also use a crocheted hat, so I followed my own pattern for Balai. Fortunately, I didn't need to refer to the tutorial, but I had to refresh my memory of what I did at the color changes.

Since this is a Stash Reduction Christmas (mostly,) the gold yarn is leftover from the afghan our knitting group made for one of the people who makes our yearly retreat possible. The variegated was actually the oldest yarn in my stash. I bought two colorways of it in Siena in 1989, my second year of knitting. It was a Filatura di Crosa yarn, I'm sure, and I knitted an allover cabled sweater with these two colors of already-multicolored yarn. Way too much going on in that sweater. I never did wear it much. (I should point out that I was living in Tucson at the time as well.) But it looks nice in broomstick crochet.

I was going to make my best friend herself a pair of fingerless gloves, but I found a beautiful handmade wire bracelet at a local artisans' sale, so I knitted a little pouch to put it in.

And, finally, I finished my cashmere Fan Neckwarmer last night.

Again, it's not really that blue. This is going to my son's science teacher, who is a knitter herself, and my favorite person at the school. I love the reclaimed cashmere yarn; I'm trying to decide what fabulous thing I can make for myself with the 1 1/2 skeins I have left.

I'm not done with presents. I have a flannel shirt cut out for my dad, a pair of flannel pants to make for my son (a loud plaid to go with the loud sweater) a couple more cloth grocery bags for my mom, and then two more things to knit. A pair of fingerless gloves for another friend and something for my daughter's teacher. She wears handknit sweaters from her own mom, so she appreciates handknits, too. Luckily, only the teacher gift is that time-sensitive. People are coming here for Christmas, so I can be working feverishly until midnight on Christmas Eve if necessary. I'll let you know.

Advent

2008-12-01T20:58:00.000-08:00

Unlike gloomy today, yesterday was beautiful. We all went to Año Nuevo.

My kids probably won't stand for going on a real guided walk, once the breeding season starts, so we went at our own pace. I gave a bit of my spiel, but I certainly need to work on it more before I give my own mock walk at graduation on Saturday.

We did see an alpha bull.

He was breathing through his nose and making it shake like jelly. He also scratched his flippers together, looking like a 5,000 lb Mr. Burns. The seaweed he's lying on was the stankiest thing I've smelled at Año Nuevo, and that's saying something.

I've put an elephant seal widget under all the patterns in the sidebar; we'll see whether it gets updated as the season progresses.

One of my fellow docents in training is also a very near neighbor, and, while it is technically correct to say that we've been carpooling, it is more accurate to say that she's been driving me back and forth these past three months. As a thank you, I'm knitting her an elephant seal scarf.

I must have spent at least six fruitless hours trying to construct a chart for this first attempt at shadow knitting. And yet, once I took up needles and yarn, I realized that I could just follow a regular two-color chart, that the complexity was misleading. He's a little elongated, my alpha bull, but I think he's pretty cool. My kids were gobsmacked by the appearance of a seal from the unassuming stripes.

And, since it's now officially the festive season, I've got another project on the needles, too. This is the Fan Neckwarmer, using Ellie's Reclaimed Cashmere, as advertised.

And I won't haul it out right now and take another photo on my messy desk, but the slip stitch sweater for my son is almost done.

Celestial

2008-11-09T11:31:00.000-08:00

I finished my Moons and Star cardigan last weekend. By and large, I'm happy with it, although there are always things that I wish I could change. I love very much the wool-silk yarn I used.

I have also been sewing, and positively slaved over this silk blouse.

Again, I won't bore you with the details of what I regret.

So I've officially started my Christmas knitting, a top-down raglan for my son in possibly the loudest yarn I've ever had the pleasure to work with, Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted Superwash in Rainbow.

The yarn is beautifully soft. I'm working it in Heel Stitch (k1,sl 1) on a size 11 needle, and the fabric is coming out very squishy and cozy. The slip stitches mix up the colors; I find that all of Lorna's Laces yarns pool something awful when knit in plain stockinette. Jed wants a half zip with a kangaroo pocket, and claims to be happy to wait until Christmas to receive his present.

Balai

2008-10-24T12:39:00.000-07:00

As you can see by my newly-expanded sidebar, my pattern Balai is done. For such a small object, it took a lot of work to get it right. But I'm very happy with how it came out.

I'm slogging away on my Moons and Star. I'm working a band of moons at the back waist shaping, then I'll increase outward for a peplum. So I have a good 10 inches of knitting left to go. My mind is starting to turn to holiday knitting, so I'd like to get it done.

That can be the only excuse for why I bought more yarn last night, at Green Planet. Beth has really sought out some wonderful eco-friendly yarns, and I was really struck by Ellie's Reclaimed Cashmere, which just what it says, cashmere yarn reclaimed from thrifted sweaters. She re-plies it into beautiful, tweedy colorways. I've been thinking of how many people on my gift list I could make the Fan Neckwarmer for, and the yarn assured me that it would be happy to be knit up in that pattern.

In other news, I've been sick as a dog for the past week. I'm very tired of it, and I'm ready not to be sick anymore.

Ooh la la!

2008-10-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

I got quite the bee in my bonnet with this broomstick crochet in the round, and worked and worked to get a beret that I was happy with. I have, indeed, decided to call it Balai, and, since it was quite a bit more involved than Besom, I'd like to charge cash money for it.

But before I do that, I'd really like to get it test crocheted, since this technique is pretty different from either regular crochet or regular broomstick lace. So look for the pattern some time in the next few weeks.

Fabulous

2008-09-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

Last night at my knitting group meeting, Sylvia asked me whether I still liked old knitting magazines. I replied that I did, and she asked "How old?" "Any age," I said, "Forties, Fifties..." She said "Sixties?" and I said "Sure!"

So she gave me a bag with 17 issues of Vogue Knitting, from 1960 - 1969. Words cannot express how fabulous these magazines are. Even in the moment she gave them to me, I told her "Sylvia, these are worth money." But she said, "Oh, no, you take them." I didn't press her farther.

Each issue has around 50 knitting patterns. There are sweaters, coats, dresses and suits. It's easy to mock the hairstyles and the colors, but only in the latest issue, from 1969, is the flower power style starting to creep in, Even then , the daisy flower loom pants

are more than outweighed by the incredibly stylish suits

Some of the sweaters do look dated.

The combination of cowl neckline, raglan sleeves, mohair and textured stitches really says "Sixties" to me, especially if it were in a pastel color.

But this page could run in the next VK, and who would be the wiser?

(Except for the headline, of course.)

The men's sweaters don't fare as well. The concept of fitted clothes for men has really gone by the wayside, even in high fashion, so these look very dated.

Of course, I don't know anyone who'd wear any man's sweater from Knitter's in the last 10 years, either.

One of my favorite features in VK was "Then and Now," where they took a design from the past and either reworked it or just republished it as is. There are at least 6 designs in my set of magazines that were so treated; it was clearly a fertile era. I miss "Then and Now," but now I have the real thing.

Thank you, Sylvia!

Besom

2008-09-25T12:13:00.001-07:00

I've written up the pattern for the successful broomstick hat. I gave it to my friend Emily and then coerced her into modeling it.

(She's so cute!)

The pattern is called Besom (which is an old word for a old-fashioned broom) and it's available both as a free Ravelry download, or off to the right. Be sure to look at the tutorial over there, too.

I'm now going to use this technique to make a beret, which I will probably call Balai, because that's how my mind works.

Last night, I think I got down far enough on the first sleeve on my cardigan so that it's time to do the lace detail at the cuff. The elephant seal researchers from UCSC were talking, and, like all research scientists, could not stop talking. Class ended 45 minutes late. But those seals are amazing animals. They spend 90% of their time at sea underwater. Ninety percent!

Tutorial

2008-09-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

Well, if you were really trying to learn how to work broomstick crochet in the round from that last post, I'm sorry. I didn't provide nearly enough information. So I created a tutorial for it. This one is for two-color broomstick circles, worked in the round from the center outward. I'll do the one-color version next. The tutorial is a 1.5 MB PDF, available here, and on the right in the new section in the sidebar.

Shiver me timbers

2008-09-19T16:33:00.000-07:00

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, which I celebrate somewhat sporadically. Ravelry made a big deal about it, putting a little three-master icon next to the site name, and giving people parrots on their shoulders when they uploaded new ravatars with "pirate" in the name.

The elephant seal is in honor of my docent training at Año Nuevo State Reserve. Said classes involve driving over the Santa Cruz Mountains at least once a week through the end of the year, as well as sitting for 2 1/2 hours, listening to fun nature facts. Did you know that female elephant seals transfer 40% of their body mass to their pups in 28 days of nursing?

It's good time for mindless knitting, in other words, and now that I'm on the sleeves of my Moons and Star project, I'm saving it for class time. Or that's my story, anyway.

Which means that I'm doing other things in the meantime, like when I'm taking the train up to San Mateo for lunch. I checked out a book from the library, with the somewhat offputting title of Exciting Crochet

It is, pretty much, exactly what you'd expect from the cover. However, at the end of the book, after all the badly-photographed 80's-style projects, Ms. Kent put forth her method of working broomstick crochet in the round.

Now, every explanation I've read about broomstick crochet asserts that it can't be worked in the round. I guess if you were really using a broomstick, that would be true. Jennifer Hansen (the Stitch Diva, who is my hero) understands that this is nonsense, and has one of her excellent videos explaining one way to work in the round. Muriel Kent, however, showed a way of starting flat circles with broomstick lace, and I've combined that with the way that I work broomstick in the round with a circular knitting needle.

To recap for those of you not familiar with the technique, broomstick crochet involves drawing up long loops of the working yarn, one per stitch from a row of single crochet, and keeping them on a large knitting needle (or broomstick, if you're old school.) Then you work a return row where you take a group of loops off the needle (3, 4 or 5, most commonly) and work the same number of single crochet as loops in the group. This row becomes the foundation for the next row of loops.

So how do we make a flat circle with this technique? By increasing at the proper rate so that the work curves around to join itself. Muriel Kent says to start by chaining 6, drawing up 3 loops in each chain, and working the loops off in groups of 3 with 6 single crochet in each group.

Well, first note that blithe "draw up 3 loops in each chain." As anyone will realize who has tried to knit twice into the front of the same stitch, poking your hook repeatedly in the same place and drawing up another loop just gives you one really big loop. I did manage to start a circle this way, but it took poking my hook into three different parts of each chain, which I don't recommend.

Be that as it may. By working 6 single crochet in each group of 3 loops, you've set up a foundation row that will double the number of loops on the next round. That's her formula, doubling the number of loops in each round until the piece is the size desired.

I decided to try a broomstick crochet hat, Using worsted weight yarn (CE Lush) a size H crochet hook and a 15mm circular needle, I started my circle and merrily increased every round, ending up with a circle that was as ruffly as a very ruffly thing, indeed.

I had neglected to take into account the size of the knitting needle. My loops were shorter than Muriel's, so my rows were too wide for their height. The circumference of a circle has to increase π times the rate of the diameter. With knitting and regular crochet, the proportions of the stitches stay roughly constant with different thicknesses of yarn (assuming you're not working ultra-tight or way loose) and you can count on making a flat circle by increasing 4 stitches per round in knitting, 6 in single crochet, 16 in double crochet, &c. But broomstick size can vary independent of the size of the stitches, so I need to figure out the proper increase rate for a given combination of yarn, hook and broomstick.

Which I've been trying to do. I managed to make a usable hat

but it's a baby hat.

Increasing one more round at this same rate gave a circle that was too big for my head.

although I could go on and make it a tam. More research is clearly needed.

Feast or Famine

2008-09-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

Finally I have photos of my WIPs, so I feel motivated to post.

You may recall that I have expressed the opinion that a black cardigan would fill a hole in my wardrobe. I bought a big cone of wool-silk yarn from Elisabetta back on my yarn crawl, and so I've started a top-down, set-in sleeve cardigan.

This is an awfully glary photo, but I wanted the lace to show up. This was hard for me to get started. Originally, I was going to use the Vine Lace pattern from Barbara Walker's first Treasury, because it's a four row repeat, and the two pattern rows are identical, just offset by one stitch from each other. Even though I was copping out with the shaping and increasing in plain stockinette until I had another nine stitches for a new repeat, I just couldn't get the pattern straight. I got about halfway through the yoke, and then ripped it all out.

Then I decided to keep the lace to vertical panels with plain stockinette in between. I really had my heart set on something vine-y and botanical, but I just didn't like the way any of my botanical swatches looked in the black yarn. So I went with something geometric, the Wheel Web pattern from the third Treasury, and the Star medallion from the second. Instead of Moon and Stars, it's Moons and Star.

Then, while sitting in my craft room with the door open and getting mad about the drone of flies inside, I decided to make a curtain for the door. In Italy, at least 20 years ago, many shops had curtains made of fat, chenille-like ropes to keep the flies out. I dragged out my Bond EmbellishKnit!

and started cranking the i-cord from my stash of leftover sock yarn.

It's miles faster than knitting it by hand, but an almost-full ball of sock yarn still takes about a half hour to turn into i-cord, so I had some time to think. And my next thought was that I'd like to try using the i-cord to make a garment, by coiling it into a spiral and sewing it to itself. I reserved some sock yarn for this purpose; I don't think I have enough for a sweater, but I can probably get a skirt out of it.

I really like the look of this i-cord; it looks like Noro (but so much softer.)

I have several new activities that will involve sitting in classes or meetings. I really need an unobtrusive project to work on. I'm still following the star chart on the cardigan, which doesn't fit the description.

Pratchgan

2008-08-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

Back at the end of December 2007, the members of the Ravelry group the Ankh-Morpork Knitter's Guild were feeling glum about Terry Pratchett's recent revelation that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Being crafters, we decided to make something for him. Originally, there were going to be 100 six-inch squares, with eight of them spelling out "I ATEN'T DEAD" in the middle. (If you're not a Discworld fan, then just play along.) The squares were going to be done by February, and Shirley, a Raveler who lives in Scotland, volunteered to collect all the squares and assemble the afghan. I was an early volunteer, so I got to make two. A letter square

and a colorful square that didn't really have anything to do with the books, but looked weird and magical.

Well, the project grew, in space and in time, as projects will. And this weekend, Shirley presented the assembled Pratchgan to Mr. Pratchett himself, at the Edinburgh Book Fair.

More can be found here at Shirley's blog.

I'm honored to have been a part of this project!

A warped view

2008-08-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

I'm all over the photos from the Craft release party. Here's me and my loom.

A Looming Presence

2008-08-09T20:27:00.000-07:00

I drove up to San Francisco today to attend the Craft Magazine issue 8 release party at the very curious Curiosity Shoppe in the Mission.

As seen on the cover, Travis Meinolf himself was there

patiently teaching people to cut out their own heddles from index cards

and then weave!

(These iPhone photos really look as though they were taken underwater!) I got a few inches done before relinquishing my cuphook on the wall to another weaver.

The latest issue of Craft has a pre-printed heddle on cardstock, ready to cut out.

I met Natalie and the other Craft folk, and I brought my little tabletop loom along, since it had never been to a party. Travis gave me some tips for warping it, and now I'm all fired up and ready to go. (I bought the loom on ebay several years ago, and it has sat in my craft room, lonely and forlorn, ever since.)

The Curiosity Shoppe is curious because it is so precious that I can't understand how it sells enough to pay the rent. But you can check it out yourself, if you've a mind; the weaving party returns tomorrow (Sunday the 10th.) Then you can go to Mission Pie afterward and bring home a Suncrest peach pie. Mmmm....pie......

She sells seashells

2008-08-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

Well, they're not for sale; it's not even my pattern. But I finished my domino shells project and even blocked it. (This is becoming a habit!) The silk and alpaca yarns responded to the blocking really beautifully.

I'm very pleased with it. I'm sure that you can see that I ran out of yarn up at the top, but I'm happy with how I handled it, although it would have been fun to make the partial shells that the real pattern called for.

Another first for me, is that it makes a twinset with my Chequers cardigan.

Of course, the tank is knit out of yarn leftover from the cardigan; how many other twinsets originate that way?

Three or so years ago, Vera gave me a ball of yarn with very silly pompoms. I puzzled over what to do with it, since the pompoms are so big that they couldn't be drawn through loops in either crochet or knit. It occurred to me recently that I could carry it along within single crochet, just as the unused yarn is hidden in tapestry crochet. So I decided to make a bathmat.

You will be unsurprised, I'm sure, to hear that I bought the white cotton yarn I'm using. But I was surprised to find that, not only does Bernat make an organic cotton yarn, sold at big box stores near you, but also that I could order it through Amazon. I had to do it, just because I could.

I spent a week in Eureka with my best friend and her family, and we went to a really great store in Arcata, called Daisy Drygoods. It had scads of vintage knit and crochet patterns (along with trim, buttons, vintage clothing and fabric) and I scored a beautiful 1947 Fleisher pattern book.

Although they're all knit at 7 or 8 sts/in, I'm sorely tempted.

Tommy Trojan

2008-07-18T15:39:00.000-07:00

My Dad's birthday is Tuesday, and he's a tough guy to give presents to. But I saw this on the Craftzine blog and knew he had to have it. He's not an obnoxious Trojan, as so many of them are, but he and my mom the Bruin have an ongoing rivalry. One reason I chose to attend a school without a NCAA football team.

The Workbasket

2008-07-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

I have 10 years' worth of The Workbasket, from 1954 until 1964. Someone in my knitting group brought them to a meeting once, and I snapped them up, loving vintage patterns as I do. Yet, somehow, I never sat down and went through them all. Since going through magazines has been my major way lately to avoid picking up the stitches for another domino motif, I found this particular stash over the weekend and read them all.

The theme is crafts for home and for sale, but it's a weird split. The needlework patterns are incredibly fine and detailed, mostly crocheted and tatted doilies, but with lots of knitted doilies and sweaters, then some oddities, like huck embroidery, netted hammocks and hooked rugs. There is equal space again devoted to gardening and to recipes. The recipes are, surprisingly for a mid-century women's magazine, almost all from scratch. They often look quite tasty.

The crafts featured seem way too time-consuming for anyone to make them for sale at a church bazaar. The reader-supplied tips for money making verge on the bizarre, however, with lapel pins made out of pecans and cupcake carousels decorated with magazine cutouts.

Then there are the ads. Hoo boy! The most common ad is for selling greeting cards to make money. For some reason, coffee urns as prizes feature prominently.

There is a Postum ad every issue. This one is my favorite.

Lots of weight loss ads, as you might expect. But, just as I would wear a year 1954 size 16, fifty years has brought some change to our understanding of what being overweight means.

Two categories of inexplicably numerous ads are for hearing aids and accordions. Coincidence?

There are ads for needlework supplies. This one strikes me a quite defensive.

There are career opportunities which have nothing to do with selling greeting cards.

And finally, there are ads that you just won't find in Interweave Knits.

If you don't want to buy any yarn, don't go to yarn stores.

2008-07-09T16:34:00.000-07:00

You know how unutterably tiresome I've been about "not buying any yarn?" Even though I bought all that alpaca to finish my last project, and I was still claiming not to be buying any yarn? Well, I'll shut up about it now.

My sister-in-law is in town, and what do you do to entertain out of town knitters? You go on a yarn crawl. (Let's leave aside the fact that she grew up 10 miles from here, and isn't staying with me, needing to be entertained, anyway.) Karen had never been to Yarndogs while I was working there, so we were off to Los Gatos this morning. What did Deborah have now? Why, Colinette's Jitterbug in the colorway I had admired at the Maker Faire. Somehow, although I was able to go for months at a time working at Yarndogs without buying anything, the same could not be said for taking my sister-in-law to visit.

We ate lunch and pastries at Fleur de Cocoa and went on to Elisabetta, where I hadn't been in at least five years. It was much the same as always, and, as always, I ended up buying something. Love, from Filatura di Crosa, was on sale for half off, and a big cone of wool silk reminded me that I wanted to make a black cardigan.

We went on to Green Planet Yarn which seems to have even more yarn than last time I was there. My knitting group meets there now, however, so I was able to fondle everything and leave it all there, secure in the knowledge that I could come back and see it again in a couple weeks.

This is really why I don't go to yarn stores, since my not needing any more yarn hasn't changed. Beautiful stuff, though.

Revisiting the revistsas

2008-07-08T16:25:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, just as I go through my yarn stash to remind myself how much yarn I own, I go through my magazines to remind myself of cute patterns I've noted in the past. As you can see from the post below, that's a lot of magazines. I have Knitter's from 1996 until 2004, when I stopped subscribing, Vogue Knitting from inception until now (thanks to back issues I bought from a long-ago knitlister) albeit with some gaps, Piecework and Threads from about 1996 until 2001, the complete Interweave Knits, KnitSimple, Interweave Crochet and Family Circle (Easy) Knitting. I have a year of Anna from the late 90's and Burda Moden from 1990 until 2001. Plus assorted random knit and crochet magazines.

All told, I must have over 1,000 knitting and crochet patterns. I think that almost half of them are cabled sweaters; it's amazing how many variations on a theme one can come up with. Looking at them all in a short period of time, as I did last week, left me with some new impressions, aside from just how many cabled sweater patterns there are in the world.

My favorite magazine, in terms of the quality of the designs, in Interweave Knits, although VK is a close second, followed by the Nancy Thomas era of Knitter's. The shapes are fitted, the details are fine, as are many of the yarns. I also like best the layout of the pre-Eunny Jang IK, once they settled down with the typography after the first couple years. I like the models and the photography, and I don't think that the new grouping of designs into stories is an improvement. Vogue Knitting has always done it, but going from standalone designs to smaller groupings instead of issue-long themes hasn't worked for me, either with IK or Knitter's.

The less said about Rick Mondragon's chunky, oddly-seamed, garishly colored pattern choices, the better. He's a wonderful person, and has a lot to say about design, but I've not seen anything I'd be tempted to make in Knitter's for most of this century.

There are more crochet patterns out there than I remembered, especially in Family Circle Easy Knitting.

The 1990's Burda Moden was also my main source for sewing patterns. and I'd be tempted by the food photography, but never got over the European measurements and oven settings. But 95% of their knitting patterns are drop shoulder, mid-thigh length sweaters with some sort of either cable (of course) or all-over stitch pattern. They were my main exposure to knitting patterns when I first started to knit seriously, but I've never made one. The few patterns that don't fit the mold really stand out, and I have a couple of them queued in my head now, especially ones that combine knitting and crochet.

I'm not sure why I subscribed to KnitSimple. Maybe I can switch the subscription to Knit.1.

Piecework mainly tempts me to embroider, as does Anna (which, since it's published by Burda, has the same problem with its knitting patterns.) I'm surprised that Piecework never featured techniques like broomstick, daisy loom, hairpin or Tunisian crochet.

It's pretty awe-inspiring how much technical information was crammed into magazines in the 80's and early 90's. Back when VK was the only game in town, it had several meaty articles every issue. And Threads has articles to return to again and again, about fitting and design and techniques.

Stash of Stashes

2008-07-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

One can posit the set of all sets, but it leads to paradoxes. So I'll just talk about my stashes separately, not as the stash of all stashes. Paradoxical my stashes may be, but not is a way that would involve Georg Cantor.

So I have a jam stash.

It's the compulsive enhancement that qualifies it as a stash. I volunteer for a group that gleans fruit from backyard trees and small orchards, and I end up with a lot of fruit. Last Tuesday it was 45 pounds of ripe apricots. I make a lot of jam.

There are smaller stashes. Like buttons

and trim

(kind of messy, that one.) I have lots of fabric

knitting and crochet magazines

and books.

Of course, the main stash is the yarn stash. It's all in the same room. but cannot be encompassed in one photograph.

I could put it all on Ravelry. i could. I know that larger stashes than mine have been. But I'm not going to.

And another thing

2008-07-04T20:16:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about what I had posted, and realized that I had left out a few things.

I never see a pattern, decide to make it, and go out to buy yarn for it. In fact, I can think of only one time in my life I've ever done that, for my seed stitch tank, for which I went totally overboard and ordered the actual color card for Berroco Pronto and then ordered the yarn.

I buy yarn for its own sake, like how Jocelyn says her real hobby is collecting yarn.

And I know I'm being quite tiresome about this, but I'm trying not to buy any more yarn at present. This means that I am not au courant with current trends in fiber like bamboo or milk, and this actually puts somewhat of a crimp in my design activities.

I left out the category of Yarns I Physically Enjoy the Action of Working With, which would be merino wool, hands down.

And the idiot knitcheting is really just what I prefer in the moment. I enjoy very much the process of designing a sweater, of considering what the yarn would like to be, of perusing the stitch dictionaries and doing the calculations. I enjoy learning and using new techniques. But when I want to sit down and just work with my hands, then I'd rather not have to think.

Just thought I'd clear that up.

Disconnect

2008-07-04T10:52:00.000-07:00

There are different categories for me, in the world of things made of yarn, and they are very discrete. In no particular order:

Yarn I like to buy. I love handpainted yarn in the skein and luxury fibers. I also like yarn on sale (usually a separate category itself.) All of these lend themselves to smaller purchases.
Fabric I like to wear. I will wear wool, and I like to wear cashmere and alpaca, so it's not a complete disconnect. But I love stretchy cotton and don't actually like the feel of excessively drapy fabric.
Fabric I like the look of. This is mainly to say that I don't like the look of most handpainted yarns knit in stockinette, or really in any combination of just knits and purls. I like non-pooling stitch patterns like slip stitch and Tunisian crochet, or motifs.
Patterns I like to work. I like idiot knitting and crocheting. A lot. I like to grab my project and be able to work an arbitrary amount, without having to count or cut the yarn or do anything fiddly. The body of a top-down sweater in an easily-memorized, single color stitch pattern is my favorite. Except then I am getting antsy to finish it, since I'm a one-project-at-a-time girl.
Patterns I like to wear. I like to wear garments that are fitted, sweaters with set-in sleeves.
Garments I actually need in my wardrobe. I need a black cardigan, and I have for quite a while now. I don't need any more tank tops or skirts. I need solid-color pieces that I can wear with the huge number of prints and multicolors I already have.
Patterns that catch my eye Well, fitted patterns, yes. Peplums, waist shaping done with gathers in the back, 30's and 40's styling.

So, not completely mutually exclusive, but impossible to satisfy all at the same time. How does my current project fit in?

It's a tank top design by Vivian Høxbro, called "Domino Shells Top" from the Spring, 1998 issue of Interweave Knits. (The fact that I usually design my own sweaters is another wrinkle, but I've been going through all of my magazines this week, which is the subject for another post.) The yarns are from my stash: bronze silk, cream merino and chocolate-brown alpaca. All were purchased separately over the years (the merino was on sale.) I had a few balls of each. They're the leftovers from my last project. i also chose this pattern because I was going away last weekend and wanted something I could start without doing any calculations. I even used my swatch as the beginning of the garment, once I figured out how many more I'd need.

It's mostly silk, so feels good to wear. The slip stitch shells mix the colors up (although they're all solid.) But it definitely violates the rule about idiot knitting, Each shell starts with very fiddly picking up of stitches, and there are already a bazillion ends (six for each motif.) I don't like to stop in the middle of one (just because, not that I lose my place) and each motif takes about 20-30 minutes.

It's not particularly fitted, and the size of the motifs constrains how close I can get to my actual bust measurement. I don't need another tank top. And I also chose it because I'd never done any modular knitting before, and I wanted to give it a try.

There are other factors, too, Such as the season, and how old the yarn is, and whether I have a bee in my bonnet about anything. Last week, I was on fire to knit a lace hat, á la Annie Modesitt. Now I'm caught up remembering an old Burda pattern (from 1993) that combines knit and crochet lace strips. By the time I finish this project, though, who knows?

First time for everything

2008-06-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

I'm taking the Wardrobe Refashion challenge!

I pledge that I shall abstain from the purchase of "new" manufactured items of clothing, for the period of 4 months. I pledge that i shall refashion, renovate, recycle preloved items for myself with my own hands in fabric, yarn or other medium for the term of my contract. I pledge that I will share the love and post a photo of my refashioned, renovoated, recylcled, crafted or created item of clothing on the Wardrobe Refashion blog, so that others may share the joy that thy thriftyness brings!

Signed,

Diana

Of course, my overachiever instinct was to sign up for the full six months, but I decided to start medium.

Now, there's something you don't see every day

2008-06-18T11:21:00.001-07:00

So I'm blocking my drop-shoulder sweater that I've knit from the bottom so that I can knit the sleeves separately and sew them on. Apologies for the garish contrast of my blocking futon, and the piece really isn't as wonky as it looks; the camera was tippy.

The fabric is so nice. Mmmmmmm.....

Coming back

2008-06-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

Now it can be told. My big project was running for Director of the Santa Clara Valley Water District. But I didn't win, so now I have time to do things like blog about knitcheting.

So. I have been keeping up on Ravelry, at least, so I've been putting up the FOs I've been accumulating, as well as a project page for what I'm currently working on. I have lots of yarn. And in that lots of yarn is lots of luxury yarn, which I've done a much better job of collecting than using. A year or two ago, during one of my "go through the whole stash" exercises, which usually happen before Stitches, I put together yarns that I had collected in smaller amounts into, well, not kits, exactly, since I didn't really have projects in mind, but in sweater quantities of compatible colors and weights.

Last week, after I had finished a spate of smaller projects and was, quite frankly, longing for the campaign to be over, I rooted around and came up with a bag that contained some bronze tussah silk from ArtFibers, some very light taupe merino from someone's sale bin, and some fingering weight alpaca in a natural dark alpaca-brown. I swatched the Dice Check pattern from Barbara Walker's second Treasury, and really liked the fabric I got with a size 10 needle.

Even though I was ready to knit a sweater, I wasn't actually ready to do anything complicated, so this project is an uncharacteristic one for me: knit from the bottom up, and I plan to work drop sleeves. I didn't even want to think about working the slip stitch in the round and dealing with the jogs, so it's going to be a cardigan. And I have a great fondness for color patterns worked back and forth with three yarns, so that you never have to cut, so that's what I'm doing.

I doubt I'll write it up; it's not an interesting construction technique, and the beauty of the fabric depends on these obscure and sometimes anonymous stash yarns. But I'm very happy with it so far.

After all that

2008-03-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

Another post to say that my patterns are now available for sale on Ravelry itself.

A much better photo of Quietude

2008-03-09T18:28:00.000-07:00

Knitter's has a lot of online coverage of Stitches West, including professional photos from the Fashion Show. Here is a much nicer photo of Quietude:

It's from the back so you can see the lace medallion.

I hate blog posts about how infrequently the poster has time to update it, but I feel compelled to tell you, my loyal readership, that I've embarked on a rather time-consuming, non-fiber-related, project that will probably keep me from posting very much until early June. But I'll still be knitcheting, and on Ravelry as much as I can be. See you soon.

Final Stitches Post

2008-02-24T17:55:00.000-08:00

So I wasn't actually done with Stitches on Friday. My daughter wanted to go, so we hit the market for an hour this morning, before I had to go work at Yarndogs again. I took a picture of our lovely booth:

That's John, my daughter, and Kristine posing. Then we walked around and I got a another photo of me with my hero, Jennifer Hansen, the Stitch Diva:

We look fabulous, if I do say so myself.

An hour isn't that long, but it was long enough for us. I got to show off my daughter to my knitting friends.

And then another busy day at Yarndogs, where almost every customer had already been to Stitches, and was coming to the store to buy more yarn!

The camera does not lie!

2008-02-23T08:38:00.001-08:00

Working at Stitches for a day is exhilarating. Mind you, setting up a booth, working at Stitches for four days, and then tearing down a booth would be a nightmare, but I'm very fortunate that I have the opportunity of doing only the best part.

First thing, Deborah discovered some way cute handpainted shoes in the booth catty-corner to us, so we went over one at a time and bought some:

I was wearing my Diagonal Striped Kimono (the pattern is available for download off to the right!) and I got many compliments on it, many more than last year. Of course, it stretched as the day wore on, often flapping past the ends of my tiny, Tyrannosaurus arms, so sometimes the compliments were, "Oh, I love your .... shawl?" But I took them in the generous spirit in which they were intended. (I've since washed the kimono, which actually belongs to my mom now, and I'll send it back in mint condition.) I sold a (hard) copy of the pattern, and pointed another person to this site, before I realized that we had it at the booth to sell. I described myself as a baby designer all day, so these were more of my baby steps.

I did actually go back and buy the Camel Spin. It was a close thing; if it weren't for the camel component, I probably could have let it lie. It's very nice, though. I love that silk smell:

Most of the day I spent stamping ravelry passports. I don't know how much extra business the passports generated for Yarndogs (often I felt as though I was handing out Hershey bars to trick-or-treaters) but I'm sure the event was a success for Jess and Casey. The passports are beautifully done, and thoughtfully designed so that you get to keep the booklet and just turn in your contact information when it's done. Casey said they spent a fortune on them, and I believe it.

We had Kristine from Curious Creek and Linda from Zukii Designs in our booth, and it makes such a difference to have the person behind the product there to talk to customers. We also had all of the Mission Falls 1824 Wool and Cotton, and two yarns from SWTC. The booth looks great, although you'll have to take my word for it, or go to Stitches and see it, because I didn't bring my camera.

I saw lots of friends and people I admire. I told Jennifer Hansen that she's my hero, and got a silly photo of my being amazed at the wonderfulness of her booth:

I talked about ravelry to Ann Rubin. I briefly saw my own sister-in-law.

And then, after standing for eight hours, I went to the fashion show to see Quietude make its appearance. It was very nice to be able to sit down. Kristine was sitting next to me, and we agreed that it was exciting, butterfly-inducing, to wait to see the product of our hard work come out on stage. Like at Cirque du Soleil, flash photography is forbidden at the Stitches West fashion show, due to the danger it poses to the models up on the high wire, so here's my blurry iPhone photo of Queitude, known here at the Baby Doll Top:

Not quite as bad as a UFO photo; you can even see that the top is orange. Anyway, it was well-received. Rick Mondragon said "Isn't that nice?" At least it wasn't put on upside down, like Corsica was at first.

And then a surprisingly good hotel banquet meal, and off to bed!

Digital cameras can take more than one photo

2008-02-22T08:49:00.000-08:00

Stitches West 2008 has started. I worked at the yarn store for a while, then hot-footed it over to Santa Clara to get to the ravelry meetup. It was great. I know I'm the nth person to say this, but Jess and Casey are so, so sweet. I told them how much ravelry means to me, and my hopes that it would be a cool, disruptive force in the knitting world. And I took this incredibly unflattering photo of the two of them:

And only the one. Everyone in the world wanted to talk to them, so I didn't keep bugging them.

Then I sat at a table and crocheted, and Amy, aka Sputnik, came up to chat. She was wearing a beautiful Alice Starmore sweater that got many compliments as the evening wore on. The ravelry meetup morphed seamlessly into the Stitches West intro do, and Amy and I went up to show off our sweaters. I was wearing my Optic, which I finished four days ago and have barely taken off since. I really should block the side cables, since they pull up to give a real Persian flare to the silhouette, but how can I block it if I'm always wearing it?

The Stitches teachers all filed in to be introduced, and I clapped wildly and yelled when my SIL's name was announced, earning me some weird looks. And after the do, Rick Mondragon led the whole room of us into the Market by a side door.

Amy and I saw maybe half of the floor in 2 hours. I didn't buy any yarn, and it was actually pretty easy not to, although I may end up going back for some Fleece Artist CamelSpin. But I may not. How much hand-dyed yarn does a person need? You gotta love the name CamelSpin, though.

But trim, that's another story. There's a new vendor at Stitches with the most amazing display of trim and buttons, Nifty Thrifty Dry Goods. Beautiful stuff. And I got my ravelry passport stamped everywhere except Blue Moon, who were swamped. This is the biggest Stitches ever, anywhere, and the market really is overwhelming.

So I'm headed back there is a few minutes, to work the booth for 8 hours, then to see Quietude in the fashion show!

Espalier

2008-02-12T17:41:00.001-08:00

At our staff meeting at Yarndogs on Sunday, Deborah asked me to knit up a shop sample in a new cashmere yarn we are carrying, Artyarns Cashmere 5. It's not a cheap yarn, so she wanted a one-skein pattern, but more of a wrap than a scarf. I found a super-easy lace pattern and the result is available for free download in the exciting new sidebar to the right.

I'm not a big fan of blocking, but, boy, last night I blocked that piece to within an inch of its life.

Fig 1

2008-02-03T11:12:00.000-08:00

This is the back of Optic, the crochet square that I started with:

And here is the front, where I've used short rows to bring the front edges down to match the downward point of the back square:

And, while I'm at it, here is the half of the Tunisian square:

Hip to be Square

2008-02-02T21:00:00.000-08:00

The real reason I don't post as often as I have something to share is that I don't take photos as often as I should, Despite my constant exhortations to others to post photos.

Since February began yesterday, and no one else in the Tunisian Crochet group on ravelry posted a new afghan square pattern, I decided to do it myself. I did post a plea for more contributions, so we'll see what happens as March approaches, but I didn't want this project to die after one month. And it's not as though I ever have any trouble coming up with ideas.

So I decided I wanted to make a motif with mixed Tunisian knit and purl stitches. First I charted a simple, nine-stitch wide heart (for Valentine's Day) and put six of them across a square. It looked very plain, so I switched to knit on purl stitches for the second set. And then I decided it looked naff. So I got out Alice Starmore's Charts for Colour Knitting and chose a motif that was slightly smaller than my square size. And I switched to a reverse stitch instead of Tunisian purl, for more contrast.

It was very difficult to work. My big downfall with Tunisian crochet is missing stitches, and that happened to me over and over. Then I ran out of yarn halfway through the square. (Have I mentioned lately that I'm not buying any yarn?) And then I decided that the contrast between the knit and reverse stitches just isn't strong enough to make the pattern pop out, mostly because the lines are too narrow.

So then I got out graph paper, I tried making Excel cells stitch-shaped, and I noodled around with the Knitter's symbol font in TextEdit, and a couple hours later, had a motif charted out. It's nothing like the half-finished square, and I haven't even started my own yet. But it's a pattern in ravelry, and, as soon as the free PDF uploading functions again, it will be available.

But I have another project, patiently waiting for me. I'm down to the skirt section (for want of a better word) for my oddball coat, which I think I'll call Optic. I'll have to rework the collar; the last row is too tight, so it doesn't lie down properly. But I do like the way the different height crochet stitches produce the short row effect for a shawl collar. It's got some chunky cables going on, too, and short rows everywhere, so there are knitting stitches pointing every which way. And I really love the Rio de la Plata yarn that's the plain knit body of the coat. Very cushy.

I know these observations would make more sense with photos, and tomorrow morning, I'll try to get some.

Wow!

2008-01-25T19:38:00.000-08:00

I've sold two copies of Ruffles! I'm so excited! A huge Thank You to the folks who've bought it!

The Eco-Farm conference was a lot of fun. When I found out that it's been going on for 28 years, I felt the same way I did when I learned that Spanish has two forms of the verb "to be." That is, how could I not have known that? As far as fiber-relatedness; I went to a session on The Wonderful World of Sheep (and Goats) where one presenter talked about her Miniature Babydoll Southdown Sheep, which she rents out to weed vineyards, since they're so short. They sound really cute. She also has cashmere goats, but no fiber yet. The other speaker was a homesteader in Santa Cruz who raises Romeny crosses and just got a Wensleydale, which she's very excited about.

This last person handspins the wool and sells it at the Westside Santa Cruz farmer's market. She's not interested in ramping up any kind of production, which I respect, given her reasons for choosing this lifestyle, but it reinforced an idea I've been kicking around in my head for a booth at Stitches next year for small scale organic yarn producers who don't have any kind of big distribution. I haven't got much further with it than merely writing the previous sentence, but I do know multiple people who have experience with booths at Stitches, so I have a next action to take on this.

And I got a lot of knitting done. I'm making something that's probably too bizarre to write up as a pattern, but maybe not. And there were lots of knitters there. I freaked someone out in the exhibitor tent by asking about her fingerless gloves, "Oh, are those Fetching from knitty?" You could see her reevaluating the current paradigm as she switched gears from cheese samples to knitting. She was flattered that I had noticed them, though. Lots of hand-knit and -crocheted hats on wet farmer heads, too.

Ruffles

2008-01-22T20:51:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving very early tomorrow morning for a conference on farming, of all things, but I forced myself to finish editing, formatting and uploading a new pattern, Ruffles. This is a top-down, seamless, crocheted pullover or dress with set-in sleeves. It was ably test-crocheted by Michelle, aka milobo of ravelry, and so it's making its debut in the rapidly-growing selection of patterns off to the right.

Oddballs

2008-01-19T19:15:00.000-08:00

I'm not really what could be described as an anal-retentive personality, but I do not like having multiple knitcheting projects lying around. The fact that I made a ravelry WIP for my oddball project has meant that every time I look at my projects page (to quietly enjoy how many have been marked as favorites by other people; There! I've said it.) it's right there at the front of the queue. And now that I've finished the Afghans for Afghans blanket (my other, somewhat long-term WIP) it's what comes up in the little popup one sees when one's mouse lingers too long over my avatar.

So I picked it up again yesterday, after finishing Quietude, and was immediately unsatisfied with the crochet square I'd made before. It's called the Russian Square in the Harmony Guide, and it's a granny square with alternating 3-stitch columns of front and back post dc. But the corners, where the stitches are added, are done in plain dc (since you can't make a post stitch if there's not already a dc to work into) and the row gauge for post stitches and plain dc is radically different. Which means that the corners pooch out something fierce.

So I had been thinking about Joan Schrouder's Great American Afghan square, after knitting a little one for the Pratchgan, and hunting up my old knitlist patterns, and I got to wondering how one would do the same thing in crochet. It's not hard; instead of working (2 dc, ch 2, 2 dc) in each corner, just work (4 dc, ch 2) instead. Changing colors every round makes the twisting a bit more subtle, but it's certainly visible.

I had toyed with the idea of doing the whole coat in dc, but I think I'm going to pick up and knit out from the square. The sleeves will somehow happen while I'm knitting; I'm trying to decide between knitting the body and picking up a normal-style sleeve cap, knit with short rows, or working a sort of dolman sleeve up over the shoulder. I'm not a complete believer in seams' providing the necessary structure of a garment, but this is going to be a longish coat, and I don't want it to stretch out too much. We'll just see.

Quietude

2008-01-18T19:56:00.000-08:00

I've finished my second pattern for sale! It's available off to the right, just over there. It's the first one I've done having download sales in mind before starting it, so it's something of a milestone for me. There are more patterns crowding my brain, waiting for their own chance, so I feel much more like a Real Designer.

Quietude will appear in the Stitches West 2008 fashion show on Friday night, 22 February. Yarndogs will have kits assembled, probably in multiple colorways.

I'm pleased at how it turned out.

Ghost in the machine

2008-01-14T12:40:00.000-08:00

Way back when, innadawnatime, as Gaspode would say, I was an active member of the knitlist. It's funny how long it took for something cyber-fiber related to come along that I found as compelling (that something being ravelry, of course) but at the time, it was like a new world opening up. I had learned to knit 10 years previously, but it was the onset of my first pregnancy that really kicked up the knitting hormones. I used to read the page "What's new with NSCA Mosaic" (imagine the world where a single page tried to keep track of new websites with a list updated once per day!) and one of the sites I saw (Emily Ocker's page) led me to the knitlist.

I met Joan Schrouder, Sally Melville, Leigh Witchel, Janet Szabo, Amy Detjen. I got all psyched up to go to Stitches West when it moved from Portland down to the Bay Area. I met my wonderful knitting group. I hopped on bandwagons like Bergere de France, Webs, the Enchanted Forest Aran, Wool-Ease socks.

Then, as happens with mailing lists, the messages that came to my in-box contained more and more repeats and downright spam, and, after a couple years, I unsubscribed. But by then, I was (as Knitting Daily would have it) a Fearless Knitter, and continued to "knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises."

And I also continued to design, as I have from the very beginning. (Ask my former grad school officemate about the vest I knit him, with no decreases for armhole shaping. Spaceman shoulder flanges in grey and purple tweed Martha Hall wool!) The knitlist sponsored gift exchanges, which took the email-friendly form of submitted patterns and recipes (Nanaimo bars!) And an actual mitten exchange, where I received a beautifully-knit pair of tvåändsstickning mittens big enough to fit Hagrid.

So there are three patterns of mine that still live their independent lives on the interwebs. One is for my own entry in the mitten exchange, Mittens for Lise. One is for a pillow cover I made as a wedding present for a long-divorced cousin. And one is a baby pattern that makes a hood, a hooded cardigan, and a hooded bunting, depending on how far you want to go. I used to get the occasional email asking questions, especially about the bunting. But it's been a long time.

I'm still proud of them all, and now that ravelry is going to host PDF downloads, it's time to reformat them and put them there. I should make a new bunting, too, although my best friend may well have the original that I could photograph.

the end is nigh

2008-01-13T19:57:00.000-08:00

There are 71 pages of bag patterns on ravelry. That's a lot of bags. I saw a really cute purse at a restaurant yesterday, and immediately started thinking of how I'd recreate it in knitting, but I wanted to make sure that there was nothing like it already out there, at least for the easily-accessible "out there" I have available to me. Just two designs that are something like, and both are much more clunky than I'd like to make, although felted knit is a difficult medium for delicacy. Leather handles would help; that's my main dislike of felted bags for my own use as a purse, the fuzzy, stretchy straps.

I can think this way, because Quietude is almost written (I have to write the word-for-word lace instructions, for those who won't read charts) and the baby blanket is on its very last round. I have a huge number of design ideas, all clamoring for attention, as well as a renewed interest in things I made for myself (with long-unavailable yarn) that I now think would be good to write up. I wish I were a better photographer. I took photos of Quietude on my dressmaker's dummy, and, well, it could look nicer. Say, with a model. And someone who could actually take photos. I'm hoping that exposure at the Fashion Show will drive sales at Stitches, but it would be nice to have a better photo for later on.

Mr. Gumby

2008-01-10T18:59:00.000-08:00

Today, I forced myself to start grading my babydoll top pattern. I started designating Thursdays as days to concentrate on original designing, but I've been filling them mostly with Christmas knitting. I did work a round on the A4A baby blanket, since that leaves only 3 more to go. I'm not a multi-project knitter; I like to finish projects before starting new ones. So writing up this pattern, which I've decided to call Quietude, is something I have to get past before I can start on any of those other projects I posted about a couple weeks ago.

I would love to write up patterns the way that I think about them, which is "Cast on the stitches for the width of the back, knit down 2/3 of the armhole depth, then do the last 1/3 with increases for the armholes every right side row..." but I know from direct personal experience that the knitters who buy patterns want stitch-by-stitch instructions. But I also want to provide a reasonable array of sizes (although this pattern is only going up to a 40 inch bust) and I'm not all that happy with the way I handle the row numbering. For online download sales, it would probably work to write up each size individually, but I'm also selling this pattern in hardcopy at the store I work in, and the owner is not going to multiply the number of copies she buys by 5 sizes.

I got through the armhole shaping on the back and right front before my brain started to hurt too much, but I should be able to finish it tomorrow. Then I'll have to photograph the piece. The friend I wanted to use as a model didn't end up coming down for Christmas, so I may have to use my dressmaking form. But it's a deep magenta color, which won't show up the lace patterning very well. I will look for a big white t-shirt to pin over it.

You load 16 tons, and what do you get?

2008-01-08T20:17:00.000-08:00

Sixteen double crochet stitches doesn't seem like all that much. I can do that many in about 30 seconds. So the baby blanket I'm crocheting for Afghans for Afghans is the simplest, potholder-type square, and it increases 16 stitches every round. But these increases happen on 14 rounds of green, 13 rounds of blue, 12 rounds of magenta, and I'm in the middle of the 11 rounds of orange. That's 712 stitches on my current round, which takes me significantly longer than 30 seconds.

I didn't finish it at the retreat, although I did finish the first square for my Tunisian CAL afghan. No one has stepped up to volunteer a square yet for February, although I'd love to have an entrelac square from one of the other group members. I may end up designing this afghan myself.

I have nothing to add to Lisa's account of the retreat, except that I only realized on Saturday that several people had tried to get through the mysterious Sequoia conference center (Why is it so big? That's the mystery to me) on Friday evening. I had somehow convinced myself that they were all staying in Scott's Valley because the road from Felton was closed. I wish that I had tried to call them after we got there.

Orderly Retreat

2008-01-04T10:46:00.001-08:00

It would be the heaviest storm in two years, wouldn't it? The NWS was uncharacteristically hysterical this morning, using double exclamation points not once, but twice in the forecast. And so I'm getting ready to drive to Ben Lomond, which has already received 4.75 inches of rain in the last twenty four hours, just so I can sit around and crochet. I could crochet at home! But, no, this is my yearly knitting retreat. My dad has already called to tell me to be careful. The only thing that really worries me is the 45 degree slope up the to Quaker Center.

Back Sunday, with any luck.

2008 Projects

2007-12-23T16:24:00.000-08:00

I do have a couple more unphotographed (and, in one case, unfinished) Christmas presents, but I'll take care of them tomorrow, in between the Christmas cooking.

I've spared you, my far-flung readership, my internal broodings on What This Blog Is Supposed To Accomplish, if only because I find blog posts about blog posts to be too, too weary-making. So this one is supposed to accomplish recording the projects I want to make in the first part of 2008. New Year's resolutions, if you will.

1) Afghans for Afghans blanket. Not too much to say about this, other than there is a new appeal due in February, and I have 14 more rounds in dc (increasing 16 sts per round) until it gets to be big enough. I'll take this to my knitting retreat (shhh! it's crochet!) next week, and finish it.

2) The Curious Creek babydoll top I've made for the Stitches West 2008 Fashion Show. In itself, it just needs ends sewn in and the trim added, but I have to grade and write up the pattern. I have a friend coming over for Christmas whom I'll ask to model it for the photos that XRX asks for in January. The promise of a ravelry pattern store is providing extra incentive.

3) My Oddball Challenge #1 Coat I have the crochet square almost done. I figure it has to have a diagonal equal to my back width, and so it needs to be a bit bigger, then I'll have to work out the sleeve shaping. I've become newly-emboldened to write out patterns before knitting them (by the fabulous success of a design I wrote up for a customer at Yarndogs) but this one will have to be worked out on the needles.

4) My square(s) for the afghan that the Terry Pratchett fan group on ravelry is making for him. I get the N' in "I ATEN'T DEAD"

Now we get to purely speculative crafting, where I've done nothing beyond putting balls of yarn together in a bag, if that.

5) Broomstick Lace Pullover. This will be a top-down, yoke-necked pullover in some beautiful yarn (is there any other kind?) I bought at Artfibers last December. I've already done broomstick lace in the round with my skirt, and I think that the even increases I worked out for that skirt will also make a nice yoke.

6) Haripin Lace Cardigan. I want to use the Colinette Giotto I bought for Jennifer Hansen's Lotus camisole to make a fitted hairpin lace cardigan. I have some ideas about adjusting the width of the hairpin loom in mid-strip.

7) An Anthropologie-inspired cardigan. The ravelry group is having a KAL in 2008, and I have some ideas for a mess of pumpkin Cashmerino Super Chunky I have (despite reading horror stories about its pilling.)

8) Something like This Skirt done in a mix of three coned yarns in my stash. (Should I point out that these are all from my stash? That's another resolution.)

9) Annie Modesitt's Twisted Float Shrug. From the Fall 2005 VK. I have a bunch of yarns I've collected to do it. I spent a couple hours yesterday being a Christmas Elf for a customer at the shop, sewing in the sleeves for a similar sweater, and I've developed definite Views about how the sleeves should be done.

10) More Crochet Sweaters with Set-in Sleeves. My Ruffles patters in being test-crocheted by at least one ravelrer, and so I hope to get it written up soon. I want to experiment with more lightweight yarns, like some laceweight Malabrigo (does that name really mean "bad coat?") from my yarn-buying expotition with Fae, and some other laceweight hand-dyed I bought at Full Thread Ahead. (Schaefer? I've already wound it into a ball, so the information is probably lost forever.)

Well, ten seems like a good number. The beginning of the year doesn't usually throw up too many sudden knitting obligations, so I hope to move most of these projects out of my head and on to hooks and needles.

Christmas presents

2007-12-07T16:19:00.000-08:00

I'm on ravelry all the live long day, it seems, posting away in the forums. But taking photos of my knitting and crochet, or, god forbid, blogging? Not so much.

So first, all of the Christmas presents I have made so far.

This is a crocheted scarf, for my best friend. The pattern is from M. K. Carroll, who briefly made the pattern available to ravelrers last month. She says the pattern is an old one called Queen Anne's Lace, but I couldn't find anything by that name but a granny square-type motif when I searched the interwebs. I love the way that the motifs attach to each other to make the strip. Crocheting this pattern is a lot of fun; the motifs are quick but interesting, and it's hard to stop. The yarn is also very nice.

This is little crocheted purse for my six-year-old niece. I'm going to put some money in it, too. I started this one with a foundation single crochet row (rather than a chain) and then went around the other side of the foundation row before starting to work circularly, with no ch-2 steps at the beginning of rounds. I made the strap the same way, attaching each end as I got to it then made a semicircle of double crochet also attached at the sides. No seams! The yarn is an ancient rayon chenille from some kit that someone gave away at a long-ago knitting retreat. I've already used yarns from the kit to make my mom a shawl and a friend's daughter a backpack, but there are always leftovers.

This is a votive holder for my massage therapist. It's knit with 28-gauge wire in garter stitch with a bead on every stitch. The weight of the beads and the looseness of the gauge make it slump somewhat, but that means it will also fit the more standard votive after this one is burned up; this one is rather tall and slender.

These are fingerless mitts for my daughter's fourth-grade teacher. I used this pattern as a starting off point, but since the gauge is totally different, I'll just call it inspiration. These are my first thumb gussets. (And I've never knit entrelac, either.) The sharp-eyed reader will see that the trim is the same yarn as the scarf above.

These are earrings for my older niece. They're crocheted with gold 28-gauge wire. I made a pair for myself with (two different) big hooks; the smaller hook made a more delicate flower shape, although the beads are kind of crowded.

This is kind of a cheat, since I made this as a shop sample earlier this year. But my best friend's son is still into pirates, so I hope he'll enjoy it more than I would.

I'm also going to give my mom the diagonal kimono (pictured at right; why not download the pattern?) and I'm planning on another set of fingerless mitts for my trainer at the gym. I'm torn about my son's middle school teachers. Heaven knows they deserve the care that goes into a handmade gift, but I've yet to see any evidence that they use the ones I made last year. On the one hand, I despise gift cards (why not give money?) But there are classes of people to whom it is acceptable to give gift cards while it is offensive to give money, and teacher certainly fall into that category. It will probably be Trader Joe's gifts cards all around.

And then there's the other stuff I'm just buying. It's kind of the Buy Handmade Pledge except for the books and electronic gadgets and stuff.

Designed

2007-10-08T19:15:00.001-07:00

OK, it's done. Look over to the right. Let's see whether anyone buys it!

Designs on life

2007-10-08T17:47:00.000-07:00

I like to design things, and it seems like a natural progression to write up my designs and try to sell them. But I've been on that cusp for a couple years now, without making definitive moves either toward or away from that goal. I'm ambivalent because the work involved with publishing seems out of proportion to the rewards. I can make a sweater to fit myself without much more thought than goes into a gauge swatch and two calculations, but writing clear instructions and, above all, sizing are whole other kettles of fish.

There are thousands of free patterns out on the Web, many of them quite good. There are enough people that are happy to share their design work, and more than enough people who think that yarn is the only part of a project worth paying for, to depress the market for patterns for sale.

And yet, and yet. Jennifer Hansen, my hero, makes a splendid go of it. Well, I say this, but I have no idea what kind of money she makes. I know she has a young son, so I hope she wouldn't be losing money at it. She does everything herself, creative and technical.

So I'm taking some more baby steps. On the recommendation of Ysolda I'm going to open an account on payloadz and sell my diagonal kimono pattern. I guess I'll put the "store" (such as it is) here, on the sidebar.

Baby Stitches

2007-09-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

I make a quick trip up to Oakland this afternoon, to hit the market at the TKGA/CGOA Knit & Crochet Show. My stated reason for the 45 minute drive each way was to obtain a larger size Tunisian crochet hook, from the Stitch Diva, aka Jennifer Hansen, my hero. But, as luck would have it, they were sold out, so I had to settle for an order and the promise of free shipping. So I bought some yarn. I got some yak yarn from Y2Knit, some hand-dyed cashmere-silk from Argosy Luxury Yarns some hand-dyed bamboo-wool-acrylic fingering weight yarn from the Knitter's Studio (which they are having dyed just for them) and a bunch of very soft wool from the mysterious Yarn Place of Sunnyvale.

Rather a lot, really.

The market reminds me of Stitches seven or eight years ago, although it's even smaller. I like the variety of classes they offer at this conference, and I took one last year, on double-ended hook stitches from Darla Fanton. But the classes I find compelling are few and far between, no matter where they are.

I obviously found the market compelling today, however.

Pt. Townsend

2007-09-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a weekend in Pt. Townsend, WA, where I attended my sister-in-law's wedding and did some shopping, not necessarily in that order. My sister-in-law knitted her own wedding ensemble, and it looked fabulous. I hope she'll be able to wear the pieces for other occasions, after all of that work.

Pt. Townsend now has two yarn stores, plus what has to be one of the nicest farmers markets around. Since I work at a yarn store, I try to buy local yarn when I travel, and, while there was local roving for sale at the market, the only yarn came from Kingston, which is pretty close, as things go. It's even dyed (green) with osage orange.

I knitted more on my ballet tee-shirt, while I wasn't reading the new Terry Pratchett book.

Oddball compulsion

2007-09-17T21:35:00.000-07:00

The Afghans for Afghans vest is drying right now, and I will sew on buttons tomorrow, photograph it on one of my kids and send it off. I was contemplating making another one before the deadline, but I have a new compulsion.

I joined the Stash Busters! group on ravelry, not really because I feel I need to go one a "yarn diet," but because I really have a huge stash and I like to make things out of it. Some of the members of the group have posted about holding out rewards to themselves of only being able to knit with or buy some particularly yummy yarn if they knit all of their stash yarn. I do not exaggerate that it would take me many years to knit up all of my stash yarn, so that's not the point.

But I have been thinking about the many oddballs and onesey-twosey balls I have (not leftovers) and about doing some projects that combine them in creative ways. This is, of necessity, about color, although I'm easing into it by doing the first one with a lot of grey yarns and three balls of colorful, self-striping wool.

(As an aside, when I went through my stash in a fairly major way last year, I was pretty amazed by the sheer quantity of grey yarn I found. That and red.)

So I'm thinking about a jacket, since these are all wools, and one is pretty itchy. The colorful yarn, the boucle and the ribbon will be combined into some sort of slip-stitch pattern (although Tunisian crochet is another possibility) and I'm also thinking of knitting the fronts on the bias, with the diagonal forming the neckline, and the colorful part the neckline border. Then I thought about putting a diamond in the back, and running the back diagonals off of it.

I would still rather work my usual knit-in, set-in sleeves from the top, so a challenge would be establishing the diagonals with short rows, and how to insert the diamond. If I keep the body armhole increases out of the bias section, I'll have some extra room for waist shaping.

And the truth must be told, there is some extra grey yarn in the sale bin at Yarndogs that I'm thinking of buying to add to this (despite the abovementioned superfluity of grey yarn.) But I'd have to get a full 50% off to make it worthwhile.

And while I'm thinking about this new project, I'm knitting away on the ballet t-shirt. I made a lot of progress on my trip this weekend; it should be done in a couple days. And there's still warm weather to wear it in!

Afghans for Afghans Vest

2007-09-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

I finished the right front of the vest last night, and today I have been knitting them together with the back, done in 2x2 rib. My initial thought was that a ribbed back would make for a snug, warm fit, but it's pulling in quite a bit. Knitting the edge stitches of the back together with the side stitches of the front is also creating little holes, so I'll probably end up running a piece of yarn up each side. Technically, it's still not sewing!

I work at the yarn store tonight, so I will take along the hated crochet sock, which I've not even added as a WIP. Of course, we're not technically supposed to knit or crochet while working.

ObFirstPost

2007-09-12T16:57:00.000-07:00

Boy, I haven't been to Blogger since 2003. But I'm not running for governor this time, I'm chronicling my knitting on Ravelry. Fewer links to the LA Times, more successes, one hopes.

Anyway, I spent today taking photo after photo with my iPhone, of sweaters laid flat on the floor. They would have looked better on me, but my phone doesn't have a flash, and I thought the photos-taken-in-the-mirror looked pretty lame. If I get a friend to come over and photograph me, I'll update things. Then I sent the photos to flickr and put in lots of project info and notes.

Still to come, the sweaters stored in my workroom, as well as all the yarn lurking therein. How does anyone have any time to knit?

I've also created a few groups, since I couldn't find groups for some of the things I'm interested in, and it's gratifying that people have joined them.

Finally, I have to crow here that a design I've submitted to Crochet! magazine's design contest was awarded an honorable mention, and will be published in the July 2008 issue. Woo hoo!