I couldn’t resist, and Eggatha Crispy is nearly done. I just need to knit comb and wattle, and then stuff and sew! I’m knitting on a smaller needle (US5 instead of US7) with the same yarn, Malabrigo Rios, so she’s smaller and more compact than her sister Henelope Featherington.
Currently trying to decide if her comb and wattle should be lilac like her breast, or peach like her beak. Or deep purple, for contrast. Any thoughts?
Bellini Bubbles is a triangular shawlette, knit on the bias from the point to the wide end. It features assigned pooling and bubbly eyelets.
Bellini Bubbles is knit with a single skein of fingering weight yarn that is dyed for assigned pooling. You can also extend the size with another skein of yarn, if you like a bigger shawl.
I knit mine with Yarn Snob’s Bellina colorway, which inspired this design’s name.
This pattern is available on Ravelry, link here, and also on Payhip, link here. Use coupon code BELLA for 15% off on either platform.
Thanks to tech editor Jen Lucas, test knitters Ann Berg, Carolyn Crisp, Alaina Foster, Sarah Gallegos, Ann Harting, Jacqueline Lydston, Lenore MacLeod, Ellen Peters, Jamie Peterson, Kristin Smith, Crystal W., and model Sharon Hsu.
Special thanks to Keith Leonard of Yarn Snob/Knits All Done for this beautiful yarn to design with!
Miss Henelope Featherington is our diamond debutante of the season!
I thought her name was Aubergina, but perhaps that’s her middle name. I was watching Bridgerton last night, and realized that this chicken needed to honor Penelope. So she’s Miss Henelope Aubergina Featherington.
Miss Featherington enjoys the pianoforte.
She joins her family, waiting to be knocked over by Calvin the Cat.
Is this a come hither look or what?
Notes: Pattern is Emotional Support Chicken, available on Ravelry or from the Knitting Tree LA. I used Malabrigo Rios and a US 7 needle; if I were to do it again I’d use a smaller needle so I could stuff it more firmly without the stuffing showing through. Seaming wasn’t as awful as I thought it might be. And I used scraps of yarn to close up any gaps that showed in the fabric (like where the tail feathers come together, and next to the decreases on the beak) before stuffing.
All in all, a quick fun knit.
And it was fun auditioning the eyes!
I FINALLY sewed in my ends (there are just two, beginning and end) on Bellini Bubbles because I’m taking pictures with my sister tomorrow. Nothing like the power of a deadline! But do you see what made me gasp?
See the unsecured bent petal of that middle flower? I’m going to guess I dropped a stitch somewhere above it, because…see the two loose stitch columns above the unsecured petal? Clearly there’s a column of stitches missing above that unsecured petal. There’s no stitch missing from the flower above, so it happened somewhere between the two flowers.
I hooked up the column with a crochet hook: The loose pink loop was the first to get picked up on my hook. Then I hooked up the running thread *between* those two loose stitch columns. That takes up the slack that made those two stitch columns become loose when the in-between stitch dropped down, so it’s firming up the green stockinette area, as well as rescuing my loose loop.
To secure this, I put a piece of yarn through the last loop at the top of the column (right before the next flower), pulled it to the back of the work, and fastened it there. Whew! And now I have four ends sewn in, instead of the original two.
There’s a little gap between the first 2 petals of the next flower because now there’s a stitch column where there wasn’t one when that flower was made. That’s a small price to pay for securing my flower petal. All better.
Bellini Bubbles is nearly done with test knitting, and I am seeing some stunning colors. Assigned pooling is so much fun! I’m planning to publish this next week, May 21. Get your yarn ready!
In other news, Chickalong Day 6 finds me waiting for my wet blocking to dry. Stuffing and seaming up next! I have a forever bag of poly fiberfill from some project in the distant past, so I’m ready.
I finished the body/head/beak this afternoon. Behold the spatchcocked chicken!
That bit of orange yarn is where I started picking apart the tail seam. I had crocheted it at night. Dark purple yarn and low light meant I wandered off my straight line. I started picking it out to fix it, and then realized I was picking from the beginning, not the end. Just like knitting, crochet only ravels in one direction (you have to tediously pick in the other direction). So I yanked the whole seam from the other end, and it’s much better now.
Folded in half, you can see that it really is going to be a chicken! I’ve also knit the comb and the wattle, and I’m halfway through the undersection. After that, it’s just seaming and stuffing, and picking an eye color. I now own enough eyes for dozens of chickens; you can’t just buy a couple sets online. But at least I’ll have a range of colors to choose from.
Calvin is looking forward to meeting Aubergina. You can see he’s quite comfortable with Gromit and Wocket, and the korknisse, too. Yes, my little Christmas tree is still up. Up until this week, Calvin had stopped sitting with/knocking over Gromit. But suddenly the tree doesn’t intimidate him any more, so it’s time to take it down!
She’s coming along nicely! I’m about to start the breast. More short rows! In garter stitch, short rows are no big deal. I don’t use them a lot in my knitting life; I tend to think in straight lines. I also spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at safety eyes on Amazon; she’s going to need some peepers!
We had a great weekend. Yesterday the kids came over to make dinner for Mother’s Day. My pick? Oxtails. We used this Instant Pot recipe. Yummmm. I think next time I’d sub apple cider vinegar for the balsamic. It didn’t need a deeper flavor, but the brightness was nice. And we added more fish sauce for perfect umami. It’s super fun to hang out with these guys and play with food!
Friday night my Facebook feed blew up with pictures of the aurora borealis, seen from here in Portland and points further south, too. I went out at midnight to find a bit of dark sky. I ended up on Marine Drive on the Columbia River, looking across to Government Island by the I-205 bridge.
I couldn’t see the aurora with my naked eye, but my iPhone XS picked up some color.
If you can’t see it with your eye, can you say you’ve seen the aurora? My eyes didn’t see the sky as green; it was black with a little bit of white-ish haze.
I edited the previous picture to pop a bit more, and to match the background of what my eye was seeing (the blackness of trees on the island). This pinkness matches more what friends with newer phone cameras were seeing. I invited DH out the next night to see, so I could try his newer phone.
No aurora Saturday night, but night mode on his camera works great! (No flash, and the red is from the neighboring car’s tail lights). Our kids went out to Powell Butte to try to see, but there was’t anything to see. The lesson here: Wait until your Facebook feed blows up with pictures, and then you know it’s time to go!
So I’ve “seen” the aurora, and I haven’t! But it was fun trying. It’s still on my bucket list. Did you see it?
Posted in KAL, Knit, Portland area fun
Tagged aurora borealis, chickalong, emotional support chicken, northern-lights
I’m on my way to an Emotional Support Chicken. I’ve been seeing these pop up in my Instagram feed, and they’re all really cute. I bought the pattern last month, but I wasn’t inspired to actually knit…until Franklin Habit announced a chickalong on his Patreon. Sold!
My chicken will be mostly purple, because it takes about a full skein of worsted (200 yards), and that’s what I have in a full skein. It’s Malabrigo Rios. My stripes will be that blue/purple and orange/purple; I don’t have enough of either color for all the stripes, so I’ll need to choose one for her body stripe and one for the 2 stripes near the neck. The orange stands out more, so maybe it should be by her face, but there will also be a yellow (?) beak and red comb and wattle. Too much excitement all together? Would the blue/purple be better by her face?
This half of her tail is almost done, then I’m on to the other half. This is definitely a short row eggstravaganza, but it’s wrap and turn in garter stitch, so no big deal. I’m working on a name for her, maybe Egglantina Rose, or Aubergine (a shade of purple, and also EGGplant!).
What else have I been up to in my nearly 3 week radio silence? DH and I went to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Lots of music, and we made time for beignets and cafe au lait at Cafe du Monde, and crawfish-stuffed beignets and cocktails, too.
I went hiking with a friend in the Columbia River Gorge yesterday; the wildflowers were beautiful on a perfect spring day.
So much variety.
I’m also still knitting my brioche and assigned/algorithmic knitting shawl. It’s a really fun knit, but I haven’t had a lot of time for it in the past couple weeks. Now I’m back at it, and I have chicken knitting, too. Which isn’t the same as yarn chicken. Yet.
What’s on your needles? Are you tempted by the chicken?
I worked very hard at not working on my current design project during the week before I went to the coast. I wanted to have an established work in progress so I could be sociable while I knit.
I want to combine brioche and assigned pooling, two of my favorite types of knitting! I was planning to use a V’d stitch like in Fanfare. In my imagination, they’d be airier because there would be the brioche purl stitches between the knit stitches, and I was going to dip down and out to the side to make upside down Vs. But I found out pretty quickly that it would not be very much fun to make those Vs if the pooling color happened on the wrong side of the fabric. I need a pooling stitch that will work on both right and wrong sides. And it needs to fit into the rhythm of brioche.
I used brioche increases to make my Vs instead. So sweet! I set the project aside, ready to knit at the coast.
It took 70 rows of coastal knitting, but I finally realized: All of those cute stitches *really were* increases, and they were going to throw off my shawl shaping. You can see in the picture above where all the increases have thrown off the straight edge on the right. Oops. Also, I had elongated the Pear Leaf edging from 10 to 12 rows, and it didn’t really look like a leaf any more. Double oops.
So this is my project, frogged, at the coast. Since then I’ve knit and frogged and restarted it at least 5 more times while settling on the syncopated cream colored edging pattern (not pear leaf after all) and how to handle the pooling stitches. Remember, I make the mistakes so you don’t have to! And now I’ve figured out where it’s going. I’m kind of obsessed, and all I want to do is knit this gorgeous yarn. Why yes, that’s Yarn Snob Keith’s Bellina colorway again, this time paired with cream. I love the combo; it tones down the green just a little bit. No previews yet.
What are you knitting for spring?
Posted in Knit, pattern design, yarn
Tagged assigned pooling, Brioche knitting, knitting, yarn snob yarns
I’m teaching a weekend workshop at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology August 10-11 on the Oregon Coast. The setting is lovely, nestled among the trees on a slice of land on Cascade Head near Lincoln City.
This knitting workshop offers several ways to make your plain knitting fancy! Drawing inspiration from nature, we’ll start with elongated fancy stitches that evoke the beauty of flowers, stars, butterflies, and bees.
Moving forward, we’ll delve into the art of color pooling, a hot technique that is the current darling of indie dyers.
To add a finishing touch, we’ll learn herringbone and other braids to elevate our knits to new heights. Join us for a creative journey where you’ll learn to infuse flair into your knitting, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Sound fun? Register here. The workshop fees are for the workshop only; you’ll need to book lodging of your choice. It’s a wonderful relaxing weekend away. I taught a brioche workshop here last year, see that post for a taste of the experience.
See you at the coast?
Posted in classes, Knit, travel
Tagged knitting workshop, Oregon Coast, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology
I thought I was done with assigned pooling for a while, but during my Starfall KAL with Yarn Snob Keith I fell in love with a colorway used by one of the participants.
The colorway is Bellina, named after one of dyer Keith’s orchids. When I saw it, I had to have it. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.
When I asked Ann Berg to test knit Prosecco Pop in a smooth yarn, she used a pooling yarn instead of a slubby one. I loved the idea, but I wanted more pooling, and fewer eyelets. It took a few tries to figure out the proportions, and I even changed my mind after my sample was finished, but here’s the basic idea.
I was going to use a different assigned pooling stitch, but these star flowers are so perfect here. This was knit with one skein of fingering weight yarn, dyed for assigned pooling.
The pattern has been tech edited, and now I’m looking for a few test knitters. Is that you? Let me know!
Edit: Test knit is full, thank you!
Posted in KAL, pattern design, yarn
Tagged assigned pooling, bellini bubbles, knitting, test knit, yarn snob yarns
PDXKnitterati 