PDXKnitterati

Today’s question on 2KCBW: “Write about your typical crafting time. When it is that you are likely to craft – alone or in more social environments, when watching TV or whilst taking bus journeys. ”

Looking back over past couple weeks, here’s where I’ve knit:

• On airplanes. I got a lot done; it was a cross-country trip.
• While teaching a class at the LYS (waiting for students to get to the next instruction point).
• In the chair at the ophthalmologist’s office. (I thought about asking her to take my picture, but decided that she already thinks I’m odd enough.) Also in the waiting room, and while waiting for my vision to return to normal so I could drive to work.
• At knit nite. This is the best!
• While watching Castle with the Teen, or watching Glee on my laptop
• In church…(it really does help me focus)

I find I tend to knit more when I’m waiting, or traveling, or doing something else, as it keeps me from being impatient and helps me to focus. If I’m just home, I tend to surf the internet instead. But when I really need to get something done, I’ll pop in a dvd and that’s just enough to get me to sit still and knit. I watched the Tudors series from Showtime on dvd, and that was highly productive for knitting. Knit nite is fun for knitting, but there’s a lot of distraction there, too. It’s good to have the time set aside, though.

My favorite knits are not quite mindless, but not projects that take a lot of concentration, either. I like a good multi-tasking knit project. I can even knit and read on my Kindle! I find that stitch markers are a great help; I can knit along until a marker lets me know that I need to pay attention for a moment. Here’s the current knitting:

Yes, it starts with a ruffle!

What’s your favorite kind of knitting?

This is the last of the Second Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week posts. It’s been really fun! I think I’ve knit less this week because of all the blog reading and writing, but I’ll catch up next week. Big thanks to Eskimimi for planning this, and for all the fun topics!I hope you’ve enjoyed reading along.

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Do you know everything there is to know about knitting? Probably not. Do I know everything about knitting? Definitely not! Today’s 2KCBW topic asks us what pattern or skill we’d like to tackle. For me, that skill would be steeking. Yes, I want to cut my knitting. With scissors. Really.

I have a plan for this, though. I’m certainly not going to start with an Alice Starmore Fair Isle sweater. That would be foolish. No, I’m thinking of something much smaller. Teddy bear sweater? No, smaller, still. A swatch. Just a swatch. Because no one will feel bad if things go awry. (I teach a class on fixing mistakes, and I have students bring a bulky swatch that we can torture. Much less threatening than trying to learn to fix mistakes on your current beloved laceweight project. The techniques are the same, but the anxiety level is quite different.)

I’ve started my research. The second Mason Dixon Knitting book has a good hand-holding walk-through of the process. And Rick Mondragon discusses reinforcing steeks with crochet in Knitter’s magazine, Spring 2002. (Yarn pictured is from the aforementioned underbed boxes of leftovers. No new purchase here!)

(I’m still thrilled that I met the MDK ladies and got my book autographed!)

Have you steeked? Does it require reinforcement with crochet or machine stitching? I don’t see a reference to reinforcement in the MDK book…Discuss!

Also: How do you learn new techniques? As you can see, I go and read up on things. (I did this with parenting, too. It worked pretty well.) I google search and YouTube. Taking a class would be good, but my LYS doesn’t offer one in this. Hey, maybe I should teach it…after I learn how!

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That’s the topic for Day 4 of the second annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week. The question sent me to my Ravelry projects page, and strangely enough, I know where most of those items are. I seem to knit mostly for me or for family, and things stay in house. Or I knit as a design project, and then I usually keep it. But occasionally things get away.

I loved this sweater that I knit for myself, Aguave by Katharine Hunt, from Knitter’s magazine Summer 2005. It was gorgeous in mercerized cotton (and not as bottom heavy as it looks from this angle). I wore it a few times, but I realized that it was way too big for me. I was swimming in fabric! Even the shoulders were too wide, so I tried stabilizing them with fabric seam binding. Nope, still swimming. I’ve since realized that most knits look better on me with either zero or negative ease. I’m not completely averse to frogging an entire sweater (been there, done that), but it was so lovely, and my friend Anna thought so, too. So I gave it to her! I just emailed her to ask if she still wears it…

Here’s one of the oldest knitted things I have.

I knit Gromit in 1996. The pattern is by Alan Dart, and was published in the magazine Woman’s Weekly in the UK. I was on the KnitList (still am), and someone offered to send me the pattern. (Thanks, Norma! I still think of you fondly.) Two other knitting mom friends also knit Gromit at the same time, and while they all looked like Gromit, they were all completely different from each other! Our little guys loved them. Before you ask, I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the pattern any more. But Gromit still sits on my piano, where I see him every day.

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“How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised?”

I don’t stash a lot of yarn, so I don’t have a lot of yarn to keep track of. I like to choose yarn for each new project as I go. If I buy too far in advance, my fancies usually take me in a different direction when I’m ready to start a new project, and then the purchased yarn never gets used.

Most of my knitting stuff lives here. Needles in Lantern Moon silk needle cases, notions, a few skeins of sock yarn, UFO’s on temporary hiatus, FO’s, a basket of hand knit socks in the lower right corner, because they take up too much room in my sock drawer. I bought this shelving system at IKEA, and I love it. The empty cubby? It has a Lantern Moon rice basket of miscellaneous stuff that needs to get put away.

This is how the shelf looked last summer when I set it up, and pretty much how it looks, now. The only yarn that doesn’t live there lives in a couple underbed boxes; it’s mostly leftovers from past projects. I tend to buy an extra skein so that I don’t run out before the project is finished. Another lesson learned the hard way. It’s better to have too much than too little!

I generally have one or two projects going at any one time; more than that guarantees that something will get abandoned. I hate that. Current projects live in whichever knitting basket has my fancy. I have a lot of Lantern Moon baskets, LOL. You can see several on the shelf: the green Polka Dot Ring tote, my all-time favorite square Lantern Tote, the black fabric Gidget tote, several of the iconic rice baskets in different sizes and colors. I’ve acquired a couple more since that picture.

The Anna tote, and

the fabulous Bindi.

The one downfall of my basket system is that I tend to dump from one basket to another, so I can take the one I want on any particular day. Leftover yarn and tools from finished objects tend to stay in baskets and get dumped from basket to basket, too. It’s time for a clean sweep. Um, maybe next week. I’m blogging this week!

What about books? They live downstairs, on their own shelf. I have a lot…

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