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by Kelley on March 9, 2011
Warm and happy. Nice new slippers to celebrate all of the snow we had at our home the last couple of weeks. And, in my enthusiasm for Chroma in fingering weight, I had completely forgot that we also had it available in worsted weight. Alison pointed this out to me as I blocked my Gentle Reversible Shawl and was trying to figure out my next Chroma project. This is my free Seed Stitch Hot Water Bottle Cover pattern. I used the twisted stitch version to give the fabric even more texture. It only took a few hours to knit the cover so I was able to use it to keep warm during the worst part of our winter storm. I used one ball of Chroma Worsted in the Mesa colorway plus a little bit more. The good news is there was plenty of yarn left in the second ball to make a hat. |
Category Archives: Finished Objects
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by Kelley on March 9, 2011
Love this pattern - Gentle. If you follow Diana's excellent instructions on how to divide your yarn like I did when I got started, you won't run out of yarn. This quick, colorful project was exactly what I needed as winter continues with snowy, cold days. |
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by Stacey on March 1, 2011
Being the coordinator for the IDP program has really introduced me to some great designers that I may not have been familiar with before. I mean, I'm a knitter (and, as of late, a crocheter) and over the past couple of years, I've been getting many of my project patterns via the web so it was a natural fit for me. So you can imagine how hard it is for me now to decide what to make next! One designer I was not familiar with when I first started on IDP back in November 2009 was Erica Jackofsky - but now she's become one of my very favorite designers and I get excited every time she submits a new design. Her patterns are fantastic - not only are they super cute, but they are honestly really fun to knit (and now crochet, as she recently had a series of crochet patterns released). I've made several of her patterns and they will certainly not be the last. And I finally got pictures in between storms here in the Northwest! First, I had some Capra in Honey in my stash without project so I had to make Scalliwag because I wear a lot of hats & especially love slouchy ones. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on February 25, 2011
This fall and winter, almost every project I cast on was one I intended to give away. That makes for thoughtful gifts and happy recipients, but not much blog fodder until the gifts have been given! Here's a quick recap of my gifty F.O.'s from the last few months: |
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by Alison on February 16, 2011
My husband Dan and I bought our first house last year at the end of February, and the upcoming anniversary of our move has prompted a rash of home improvement fixes of the "What do you mean, you never finished the (insert project name here)?" type. Our bathroom needed major work when we moved in: new flooring, new shower surround tile, new drywall, new paint, new cupboards. We've been working on it in fits and starts, but in the last two or three months we've finally gotten to the point where we could start thinking of comfort or style instead of just function. I found a cotton voile print that I really liked and put it up over the existing linen curtain as a temporary fix, but ended up liking it so much that I wanted to pull the colors into the rest of the room. |
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by Alison on February 15, 2011
I've been trying to actually use my handspun instead of, well, hoarding it in bins. I tend to treat my handspun as a finished project instead of like yarn to be knit (or crocheted, or woven), and it's starting to overtake my craft room. This yarn was one of my very first handspun skeins. I had some undyed superwash merino roving that I had gotten from a friend, and I tried dyeing it using the instructions I found on the Yarn Harlot's blog. I was nervous about the roving floating apart and the colors mixing into a muddle, so I chose these instructions because they involved stuffing the roving into pantyhose in order to keep it from moving around in the pot. I used squeeze bottles filled with Jacquard dye solution to paint the roving (right through the old pantyhose), wrapped the weird sausages in plastic wrap, then steamed them over boiling water. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on February 7, 2011
When I took this job at Knit Picks, I knew pretty instantly that knitting was going to quickly become one of my new favorite hobbies. Since completing my first hat a couple of weeks ago, I have already made another one and started on a third. The first two were just my way of testing my skills and trying out new stitches. Because they are a little too big for my head, I have decided to donate them to charity in hopes that they will keep someone else's slightly larger head warm in this winter weather. The one that I am working on now is the first one that I am using a pattern on and I am really excited to see the end result. In case you didn't see a picture of my first hat on our Facebook page, here's what it looked like: I unfortunately haven't captured a good picture of my second hat yet but here is what it looked like in the process: My third hat is a cloche pattern that I got from Ravelry. The pattern link is here: Cloche Hat So far, I have just completed the brim section but I hope to get a good start on the body of it tonight. My new-found love for knitting is starting to rub off on others in the office and a couple of people have even stepped up and finished projects that they were working on for quite some time now... |
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by Alison on January 18, 2011
Angela and I went to the TNNA winter show in Long Beach, CA last week. It was a little different for us than other shows we've attended - this time, instead of just walking the floor as a retailer, we were exhibiting as wholesalers! We've just started selling our needles to local yarn stores, and it's possible that they're already at a shop near you. Alisha made this initial list of LYSs that carry Knit Picks needles, and we're adding new stores faster than we can udpate the list! |
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by Stacey on January 6, 2011
Chroma has been out for about 2 weeks now - have you tried it yet? I am honestly so in love with it. I can't stop knitting with it! First I tried the fingering weight for my Fishy Mitts that I already wrote about. But when I finished, I wanted to keep playing with it! Hats are one of my favorite things to knit (sadly, no one I know wears hats...so now I have a lot of them) so I decided to try out some different hat patterns with Chroma Worsted. First - I decided to do a Turn A Square by Jared Flood. I've actually never tried this pattern before, though I have done a few by Jared Flood. Alison has an addiction to this pattern so it seemed like a perfect time to try it out. |
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by Knit Picks Staff on January 5, 2011
Knitting the Autumn Sun shawl in Chroma worsted was completely addicting. The whole shawl is knit in garter stitch with simple increases on each end to create the triangle shape as you knit (the pattern is available on Ravelry as a free download). With no fancy stitch patterns to memorize or charts to check and re-check, I sat back and watched the colors in the Mix Tape colorway transition from yellow to green to pink to brown. |
