Tag Archives: Knit

Surfacing…

Posted on May 6, 2011 | 11 comments

It’s been a busy few weeks around here: holidays, a women’s retreat…but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been knitting. I’m finally happy with my lace shawl project, having knit it to completion, twice. Well, three times, if you count the first one that I completely frogged! Here’s the second version:

It’s a very shallow, wide piece of knitting, and there are a lot of ways to wear it. Scarf? Shawlette? Whatever suits your fancy. Thanks to Bobbi for modeling!

The third version has a less ruffly ruffle, and is currently on the blocking wires. The pattern is out to test knitters right now; we’ll see if I made sense! The impetus for this design is the upcoming Sock Summit. I wanted to do something with sock yarn, that wasn’t a sock! I asked my friend Lorajean Kelley (Knitted Wit) to dye a cloudy Portland sky, thinking that the yarn/pattern combination would make a great Sock Summit souvenir. This design will be called Zen Rain; I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Speaking of Sock Summit, I am registered for three 3 hour classes, plus the Anna Zilboorg lecture and the opening night reception. My classes will be Photographing Your Fiber, Designing with Japanese Stitch Dictionaries, and Choosing Among Choices (sock design). Looking forward to all of it! I’ll also be roaming the marketplace and perhaps helping LJ a bit in her booth, too.

I didn’t take many pictures on retreat, too busy working! But here are a few. The labyrinth at Menucha Retreat and Conference Center in Corbett, OR is a great place to contemplate one’s life.

And the late afternoon light was absolutely magical.

I hope your weekend was grand, too. And here we are, on the verge of another one. Happy spring!

11 Comments

Posted in Knit, pattern design

Tagged Knit, Menucha, sock summit, zen rain shawl

ruffles…

Posted on April 7, 2011 | 11 comments

or not. Remember this?

I nearly finished it. Do you know that a ruffle formed by decreases, like the one above, won’t match a ruffle formed by increases at the other end of the knitting? At least, mine didn’t. Guess I should have swatched all portions of this project before jumping in head first! It’s all been ripped, and I’ve started over, sans ruffle. The good news is that it’s really quick knitting in this Knitted Wit Silky & Single Worsted, so it will be done in a couple days. Pictures later.

My Aunt Rose is in town visiting. She’s the person who taught me to knit, way back when. Of course, we went yarn shopping. We stopped at Twisted, where she and Uncle P perused the patterns.

Cousin S found the Malabrigo Rios.

This is going home with her.

We went to the iconic Voodoo Donuts. This was my first trip there; it’s fun to have out of town guests so you can be a tourist in your own town. The wait was only about 10 minutes, unlike on the weekends. It’s counter service only; you take your pink box of donuts and go elsewhere.

We bought bacon maple bars. Sounds weird, but think of Saturday breakfast with bacon and pancakes with maple syrup. They were quite tasty!

And finally, an update: I’m donating all proceeds from online sales of my Pacific Shawl pattern in March and April to the Red Cross for Japan disaster relief. So far I’ve sold 57 patterns, so $342 will be going to the Red Cross. Thanks so much for being a part of this. I’m waiting until the end of April before sending the money, so there’s still time if you want to participate.

Back to work today, and knitting.

11 Comments

Posted in Knit, pattern design

Tagged Knit, pacific shawl, sakura

Lacy Entrelac

Posted on February 11, 2011 | 18 comments

When I saw the new Chroma yarns from Knit Picks, I knew that it would be perfect for entrelac. It’s a 70/30 merino/nylon single ply yarn with a very long, slow color repeat. It comes in 16 color combinations; this one is called Midwinter.

I liked the look of this yarn so much that I designed a simpler version of my Infinity Entrelac Infinity Scarf for Chroma Worsted. It’s big, soft and squishy, and I absolutely love it.

This is my new Lacy Entrelac Infinity Scarf, and the pattern is now available for purchase through the Knit Picks Independent Designer Program. It’s priced at $3.99.

I’ve also added instructions for this lace as a bonus to the original Infinity pattern. If you purchased Infinity online, you should have received a message that the pattern has been updated.

I had some Chroma Worsted left over, so I am knitting Athena again. I’ve knit so many of these, but they’ve all gone out as gifts. Maybe this one will be mine?

Oh, one more thing: I’m having a drawing for some greeting cards and tape measures over at the Lantern Moon blog. Stop on by for a chance to win!

18 Comments

Posted in Knit, pattern design

Tagged chroma, Knit, knitpicks idp

Potpourri post

Posted on February 4, 2011 | 11 comments

A little of this, a little of that.

We’re in college visit season, as you could see from my last post. We have another trip coming up, to another warm place. I think theTeen wants to escape the rain!

Too bad theTeen no longer knits. He used to knit, a long time ago. He even knit one red worm. (Naomi Dagen Bloom’s worm; she used to live in NYC, as did we, and now she blogs here in PDX as A Little Red Hen. Small world!) Anyway, I found out about this scholarship opportunity recently.

Five $3,000 scholarships are now available to hardworking students who can knit or crochet (that’s $15,000 total)! Jimmy Beans Wool has teamed up with many people in the fiber arts industry to provide the Beans For Brains Scholarship for deserving knitters and crocheters! This merit-based award is for students who will be attending an accredited institution in the Fall of 2011. You can get more information and an application by visiting the Beans For Brains Scholarship page (the deadline for submissions is April 1st). Not attending college but know someone who is or will be? Spread the word and help the next generation of fiber artists fund their dreams of higher education!

Maybe I should get him started again. I’m a knitting evangelist! What else? I finished the project I was working on at last week’s knit nite, but I’ll blog about it next week. This week? I finished the first sleeve on my Heather Hoodie cardi, and started the second. It goes really quickly, when I actually knit on it!

Oh, you want to see the *knitting*?

I also started on a project for Sock Summit. I’m using Knitted Wit’s lovely Bling (sparkly) yarn; she dyed both of these for me and I am having a hard time choosing which color to knit first! I think I’ll eventually use both of these, separately. The one on the left has blue overtones, and the one on the right is more gray.

My tiny start here isn’t quite what I want, so this will get ripped out and I’ll start again. This is my favorite part of designing: the dreaming about what it’s going to be, and starting and re-starting until it matches the dream. Frustrating sometimes, but that’s okay.

What are you knitting now?

11 Comments

Posted in Knit, pattern design

Tagged heather hoodie, Knit, scholarship, sock summit

Entrelac madness

Posted on January 29, 2011 | 4 comments

Looking at next month, I hereby declare February to be entrelac month. I’m teaching two entrelac classes at Twisted. One is for Athena, which is entrelac in the round, on Saturday, February 5.

And the other class is for Infinity, which is entrelac knit flat (so it has side triangles), with a bit of lace in the center rectangles.

Want to sign up? Contact Twisted. Hope to see you soon!

4 Comments

Posted in Knit

Tagged Athena, entrelac, infinity, Knit

Hot new colors for spring

Posted on January 21, 2011 | 11 comments

At least according to Pantone! These are the top 10 colors for women’s fashion this spring, as chosen by NY designers. I learned about these at a mini-session with Vogue Knitting editor Trisha Malcolm at TNNA. She gave us these color cards. (You may get a truer reading if you go to the Pantone website.)

The color of the year is honeysuckle, or Pantone 18-2120. Pretty.

What else did we learn? White is the biggest trend for spring. Plan on seeing lots of it, especially with navy, because navy is the new brown. Remember when brown was the new black? We’re so over that. You’ll also see navy with citrus (green or yellow) and honeysuckle.

Other fashion trends for spring: sheer layers, especially lightweight cowls, scarves, and wraps. Less shape: we’ll be seeing comfortable billowy shapes replacing the refined look of fall 2010. Trisha says that the long sleeveless vest will be the “it” garment, and knitters will make it more interesting with embellishments like lace or cables. Sounds good to me.

Here’s the back of the card with the rest of spring’s trends.

And when you’re done with spring? The color for fall is wine. Trisha says that the good news is that wine is a color that looks good on almost all skin tones.

Do you follow fashion colors? I still mostly knit with blue and purple, because I like them. Wine looks good, too. In fact, this reminds me that I should finish my Heather Hoodie. I set it aside last spring when I realized that it wouldn’t be done before the weather got too warm. I’m cold now, so that’s a great incentive to pick it up again, and I can wear it next fall, too, when it’s the very fashion-forward wine color! (Really, it’s called Bing Cherry, but that’s our little secret.)

Instead of a vest, I’m making this with long sleeves. I’m so glad I wrote good notes before setting this project aside! I picked them up at the shoulder, worked a modified drop shoulder sleeve cap, and am knitting them flat down to the wrist. Yes, I could have done it in the round, but I like my 26 inch circular and didn’t want to have to change to dpns part way down. And I like mattress stitch seaming on stockinette.

One more tidbit from TNNA: The Noro rep told me that Silk Garden Lite is coming back this spring. I’m pretty pleased, because that means that my Infinity scarf is no longer designed with a discontinued yarn. I’m feeling so au courant…

11 Comments

Posted in Knit

Tagged color, heather hoodie, Knit

Tempus fugit

Posted on December 30, 2010 | 7 comments

Time flies!

DH and I escaped the pre-Christmas bustle and spent a week on Maui. It was warm, and mostly sunny. Perhaps not the most knitterly weather, but I managed, somehow. Here’s the view with and without knitting.

It was a perfectly relaxing week, which was just what we needed. The guidebooks all say that you should go up Haleakala (the volcano) to see the sunrise. You’d have to leave at 3 a.m. to make this happen, and drive a long winding road. In the dark. We decided that the only way we’d see the sun rise over Haleakala would be from our front porch. The sky was glorious just before sunrise.

And the sun itself wasn’t half bad looking, either.

We did go up Haleakala one afternoon, and it was beautiful in the crater. There are so many colors of sand and rock! We hiked down a bit; coming back up was a lot more work. We started at 9700 ft., but I forgot to check my iPhone altimeter to see how far down we had gone. (Yes, there’s an app for that.)

On the drive back down, the clouds had come in and the sun was shining on the water in a most hazily glorious way. I couldn’t tell where the horizon was because of the clouds. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at, because it was so bright, so I just took pictures and hoped for the best.

Here’s my other favorite sunset of the week, down in Wailea.

New needles

Posted on December 17, 2010 | 15 comments

If you read my other blog at LanternMoon.com, you know that the new ebony and rosewood interchangeable needle sets have come in to the warehouse. I’ve been knitting with a prototype of these needles. The joins are really smooth. My yarn doesn’t catch on them, and I haven’t had any come apart while knitting with them. (This used to happen to me with other my Boye aluminum interchangeable needles, a long time ago. I’ve become a wooden needle convert since then.)

The needle tips I’m knitting with are the new Featherlight wood, which is certified as sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council. The interchangeables won’t be in this wood, at least not for now. I just happen to have gotten lucky and borrowed these to play with. Check them out.

I knit my Mini Mochi fingering weight Infinity Entrelac Infinity Scarf with the size 4 tips.

And I’m now knitting another Noro DK weight version with the size 7 tips.

I like them a lot. They’re not quite as slick as my ebony needles, but I like the slate gray color and slight texture on them. I haven’t been knitting too much this week; the view is a distraction.

Stay warm!

15 Comments

Posted in Knit

Tagged Knit, lantern moon, needles

Infinity and beyond

Posted on December 3, 2010 | 3 comments

I wore the Mini Mochi Infinity scarf yesterday, doubled as a cowl. It was perfect for the chilly, rainy day: a soft warm cloud of coziness.

TheTeen took some more pictures for me, because I didn’t love the ones we took before. I had been in a hurry to catch the last bits of daylight on the last non-rainy day this week, and although I didn’t love the pictures, they were all I had. I like these better, so I swapped them into the pattern, and into my previous post.

And I also played with the cowl/hood look. I like it!

I haven’t knit a stitch since I finished on Monday. I’m not ready to start the two design projects I have in my head; I’m too busy this week to put that much thinking into it. I just want to knit something. It’s too strange having empty needles. I think I want to knit another Infinity! I love entrelac; each little square or triangle is like a mini-project. They go so fast, and you can really see your progress. I’ll knit a shorter version of the Noro Infinity in the same yarn. I already have the yarn; I bought a bag of 10 balls at Sock Summit last year. I used four in the original, three are going to a contest winner, and that means the last three can be mine!

Knit on…

3 Comments

Posted in Knit, pattern design

Tagged infinity scarf, Knit

Infinity, revealed

Posted on December 1, 2010 | 28 comments

We were away for Thanksgiving weekend, and I had some time to knit. There was even a little snow.

It was cold enough that a tiny snowman might need a scarf.

The snowman is wearing the fingering weight version of my new Infinity infinity scarf, in progress. No, I’m not repeating myself. It’s named Infinity for the infinity symbols on the center rectangles, and it’s an infinity, or loop scarf. Here’s the first version, in DK weight Noro Silk Garden Lite.

It’s really long!

It doubles up to make a wonderfully cozy, drapey cowl.

I finished the fingering weight version; it’s knit in Crystal Palace Mini Mochi. I knit it shorter than the Noro version, and I love the length. It doubles to make an airy, light as a cloud cowl.

I’ve been dying to show these to you, ever since I finished the first one! The pattern is available through the Infinity pattern page.

To celebrate my new design, I’m giving away two copies of the pattern, along with yarn to make your own Infinity. One will come with 2 balls of Crystal Palace Mini Mochi (in the green and purple colorway shown) and the other will have 3 balls of Noro Silk Garden Lite (as shown above). The Mini Mochi is enough to make the scarf as shown, and the Noro will make a shorter (but still plenty long) scarf (I used 4 balls for the sample, but I think it’s longer than it needs to be). Do you want one? Leave me a comment and let me know which one!

Don’t wait to buy the pattern if you want it now. If you’re a winner, you can choose a different pattern from my collection, and I’ll send it when I send the yarn for Infinity. Of course, you can knit anything you want with the yarn; I won’t send the knitting police after you if you choose to knit something else!

Contest closes next Tuesday, December 7, at midnight. Go!

28 Comments

Posted in Knit, pattern design

Tagged entrelac, infinity, infinity scarf, Knit