Monthly Archives: May 2010

How do you keep yarn from running out????


A friend pointed out that this lace shawl looks like a dead animal in one of my previous posts. Ugh! She’s right though, lace looks horribly ugly until it’s blocked (and perhaps my photography skills need improvement :-). My HUGE problem is that I’m pretty sure I won’t have enough yarn. I made the body of the shawl bigger than the pattern said, so I guessed at how much yarn I would need – oops. For some reason, I have this feeling that if I knit really fast, I can sneak in some repeats of the border without actually depleting the ball of yarn. Totally illogical, and yet I find myself knitting faster and faster and checking how much smaller the little ball of yarn is. I’m just going to have to order some more yarn and hope the dye lot is close.
Pattern: …

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Spring books are arriving!

Wow is it a busy spring for new books… Closely Knit by Hannah Fettig

Books are coming in left and right! Thought I would show you some of my favorites: Start Spinning by Maggie Casey

Guy Knits by The Best of Knitter’s

There are so many more… check out the NEW books on our website.
This last weekend the Pacfic Northwest had the most amazing weather! Spring hit with all her glory… I had the opportunity to be over on the Oregon coast. Here’s a pic of the view I got to look at while knitting on my new project!

On My needles: did I ever tell you that I’m a noncomformist? always going down a different path… well this week is not any different… I found my …

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elp!? Catalog themes – soliciting your input

Hi everyone,
I’m planning out our catalog themes for 2009. Each catalog’s theme (there are 8 of them) needs to be a large enough topic that we can develop several related technique tutorials for it as well as a few free patterns fitting that theme and then, of course, lots and lots of projects to inspire you.
So, what I’d like to know is what topics would you like to see addressed in our catalogs? Are there any areas of your knitting life that need a pick-me-up? Is your knitting seasonally challenged? What new techniques would you like to learn?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments – I’m looking for a bunch of ideas!
Thanks! <

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Happy Earth Day!

Mr. MuddyBin, our rolling composter, wishes you a happy Earth Day.

Tonight’s celebration includes a viewing of “An Inconvenient Truth” – my husband still hasn’t seen it, and he thinks I just like it because I have a crush on Al Gore.
I also thought I’d share something interesting that I learned this week about Shine Worsted and Shine Sport. I knew that both yarns contain Modal, and I knew that Modal is a cellulose-based fiber that’s smooth and shiny. What I didn’t realize, until writing a tutorial for the Knitting Community, is that Modal has a great eco track record. It’s made by an Austrian company, Lenzing, out of beech wood harvested from local tree farms that practice sustainability. The byproducts from Modal production are used in a number of different industrial applications – for example, the leftover wood sugars are further refined to make …

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New knitter, new blogger

Hi. I’m Marci, the VP of Marketing here. I started in September and did not know how to knit. Over Christmas, my mom taught me on some fairly awful brown acrylic yarn and some straight acrylic needles. She found these supplies in the bottom of her closet–she hadn’t touched any of it for about 20 years. I knitted a couple of brown squares, didn’t really like it and quit. It was a lovely and fun mother/daughter moment, I just didn’t know if knitting was for me.
Then, about a month ago, a friend bought me a huge pile of Knit Picks yarn as a gift. It was so thoughtful. So I decided to give it another try. Some of the yarn he bought me was Shamrock, which has been my favorite since I started here. I love the colors, the feel, and creative use of a single hand-dyed strand–just very cool. …

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Stepping Outside My Color Safety Zone

We all have our safety colors—you know, the colors you find yourself wearing and knitting with over and over again. For me, they are on the cool side: mainly blues & greens with the occasional purple or chocolate brown (hey, just look at my blog page color scheme!). I am always immediately drawn to the colors in this range when presented with options, but sometimes I get tired of being so predictable and want to step out of the safety zone. The question is: how?
Lately we’ve gotten a lot of requests for tutorials on how to pick colors and how to pair multiple colors. While I don’t consider this a tutorial, I thought I would share with you my recent color picking process that resulted in me ordering yarn outside “the zone.”
How a store bought (gasp!) sweater helped
Considering my safety colors of blue and green, it’s probably no surprise that …

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Egads, I’ve done it!

I knit a finished, wearable piece of clothing that’s not a scarf!

I can’t believe it! I wish I wasn’t wearing black tights today so that you could see them better, but you get the idea.
Here’s how it happened. I’d been stalling on the second legwarmer, but I got a good 6 inches of knitting done on Tuesday evening when I went to listen to the Yarn Harlot speak at the World Forestry Center (BTW, if you missed it, she was as hilarious in person as she is on her blog). And then I got quite a bit done last night as I watched the final episode of Six Feet Under on DVD. And then this morning, when I went out to my car and realized I had left my headlights on (again) and my battery was completely dead (again), I thought of the Yarn …

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A knitterly weekend


After a little episode with a smoking cookie sheet under the broiler, I decided that I need some new pot holders. And, I wanted them to match my kitchen, which would require dyeing the yarn. The Fire King jadite color is one of my all-time favorites; but I can’t wear that color, so I painted my kitchen that color instead. I was so excited to try out dyeing in my new, dedicated dye pot. I followed Melissa’s excellent advice from her hand-dyeing podcast to test the dye color with the corner of a paper towel to get an idea of how it might look on the yarn. This was my first time to intentionally dye a pale, not fully saturated color. I’m pretty pleased with the results, although the yarn is a little bluer than perfect.

Yarn: Bare Peruvian …

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Fun with the Yarn Harlot

Last week I had the pleasure of seeing the Yarn Harlot speak at the Forestry Center in Portland. The crowd of 400+ knitters was truly a sight to behold! By the time she got up to speak, it was standing room only. And for good reason!
If you’re not familiar with the Yarn Harlot or her books, she’s the leading Knitting Humorist in print. (Yes, that’s really a job description! I know! Isn’t that neat?) She writes tales about the ways knitting has taught her (and many others) how to cope with many of life’s challenges by simply taking it all one stitch at a time.
At her talk, she described how we, as knitters, have a great advantage over non-crafters because of our ability to focus on stitch after stitch after stitch. She inspired the crowd with tales of research studies done on the benefits of repetitive motions, amused us with …

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QUICK! Mother’s Day is almost here!!!

As you know if you read my last post, my Mom taught me to knit at Christmas. So I thought it only appropriate that she should get the first finished project, right? Well the problem was, I didn’t think about that until last Thursday, with basically just two weeks until Mother’s Day. And I’m a brand new, and therefore, slow, knitter.
Enter, Suri Dream and size 13 needles. About 5 hours of knitting later, I have a beautiful, soft and VERY quick scarf in garter stitch to present to my Mom on May 11.

I used 1 ball of Suri Dream Chili Pepper and as I started to knit, it looked a little too much like I had run over Elmo (the red Sesame Street character) in an unfortunate golf cart accident and was then just draping it around my neck. So I added two stripes …

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