Follow along and discover your next inspiration as we cast on for projects we love, explore new techniques, and dish about the latest and greatest from Knit Picks.
Meet the team »
My quick baby blanket project is finished!
I saw a cluster of a few pastel shades of Simply Cotton Sport together in the office and thought they’d make a great baby blanket. My first crochet attempt is one of my favorite blankets on our couch, so I decided to use the same basic oversized granny square but change up the colors and stripe sequence.
Read more »I haven’t knit with Alpaca Cloud in a couple of years. I’ve become a bit bored with my lace shawl collection so I went looking for something new.
The Gail shawl in Ravelry
has many fans and it seems that some knitters have made more than one!
Apparently it is a relatively easy project, as lace knitting goes.
What I want is a very neutral shawl. Something I can drag along with me when I travel. The Smoke colorway is perfect for me.
Read more »
June 12th through June 20th is World Wide Knitting in Public Week!
Yippee! It’s like a huge knitting party! You can look up your town, or
maybe one close by, to see where your local knitting friends will be
gathering. Some knitters get started right at the beginning of the week
or you may find a organized gathering on the second weekend.
If
you have never participated in KIP day, you are in for a real treat!
First, you will probably meet several new knitting friends. Second, you
get to share the joys of knitting with people you may be able to
convert into fiber addicts. Third, the one I think is the most
importantly, it may just be the first step in your becoming comfortable
knitting-in-public regularly!
Just
think about it! You may just start whipping out a knitting project
during dinner out with friends, symphony concerts, lectures – sound
like someone you know?
Just a quick heads-up – we now have an interchangeable needle sampler
available, the Try
It Needle Set. Knit Picks needles come in three materials: nickel
plated (great for speed), Harmony wood (more control over your
stitches), and Zephyr acrylic (comfortable with a bit of flex). If you
haven’t yet tried all three materials and are looking to purchase an interchangeable
needle set, this set is a great way to compare the tips and see
what works best for your knitting style.
The set
has size 6 Harmony wood tip, a size 7 nickel
plated
tip, and a size 8 Zephyr acrylic tip, and two 24” cables, along with the
end caps and cable key. The sampler also comes with a handout: Kerin also
wrote up a stitch pattern for each of the material types – lace for
Harmony wood, cables for Zephyr acrylic, and a knit/purl texture pattern
for the nickel tips – so you can put your needles through their paces.
That is a perfectly understandable question. And, you are just going to love the answer.
Read more »Thanks to everybody for following along with (and participating
in) our sock blank dyealong! We’ll be posting our finished projects
over the next several weeks, and you’ll be able to see how our sock
blank dye jobs translate to actual stitches. Just a reminder, you
can still enter to win a $50 gift card by emailing a photo of your own
dyed sock blank – here are the
details.
I’m a big fan of the Jacquard
acid dyes, and I use them all the time at home. Instead of dyeing sock
blanks or Bare
yarn, though, I usually tend to dye a lot of roving and loose fiber
for spinning my own yarn. For one of my first attempts, I tried dyeing
the roving by handpainting it with foam brushes, wrapping it in plastic
wrap, then steaming on the stovetop. I chose a basic rainbow color
palette (since I was just starting the whole dyeing thing) and this is
what I got:
(That’s my cat Eddie, mashing up my nice
fluffy roving.)
I spun the roving in color order, and once I had
two bobbins full I plyed them together in roughly the same order so that
the colors would blend and kind of “smash” into each other. I knit the
yarn up into a basic linen-stitch scarf, and this is what I got:
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MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
I am one of the photographers here at KnitPicks and
since I
have started working here I have been verrrry slowly learning how to
knit. When
I heard about the dye along I thought great! an excuse to not only pick
up my
needles again but I can try out a new craft, dyeing. I have only
tie-dyed so I really
had no idea what I was doing. After a couple of talks with the girls
around
here and reading through the very helpful book Natural Dyeing I decided
to try
my hand at some plant dyeing. My goal was to use only plants/flowers
that I
gathered from around my house but the loooong rainy May we have been
having
nixed that idea.
I’ve been talking about overdyeing a lot for the last weeek, but
today I want to share the results of a dye project I did on Bare yarn.
I’ve been admiring Kristen Rengren’s Zora
Cardigan ever since the design was published last winter, and really
want to make one this summer. I love the effect of the hand-dyed yarn
in the original, too, and didn’t have anything like that in my stash in
the right quantity, but I also have too much stash (and not enough in the budget!) to justify buying so much yarn for a new sweater!
I did, however, have 5 skeins of our Bare Merino/silk yarn just waiting to be dye projects.
That’s
what it looked like after the FIRST round of dyeing. I had to go
through two more to get what I wanted! Read on to find out more…
Tea Cozies by The Guild Of Master Craftsman
Since my teapot plays an important role in keeping me snug and warm during these rainy winter months, I think it deserves to be cozy too. And since cozies are pretty small, look easy to make, and have irresistible pattern names like Wooly Mammoth and Green Goddess, maybe I’ll even make two or three- one for everyday chai tea-pouring, one for English Breakfast themed tea parties, and maybe one in case the Queen ever stops by for spot of Lady Grey.
It comes out this Friday. I can’t wait. I snuck a peek downstairs in the KP department, and it looks amazing. It’s only $10.17. Check it out here. I can’t decide which one to make first.
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I have been toting a project, either lace or socks, constantly – daily – in a GoKnit Pouch since September. I kept having trouble with my small sock needles poking through my other little knitting bags, but not with the GoKnit Pouch. This thing is sturdy! And it keeps my knitting clean and protected, and is just the right size for stuffing into my purse if I need to. The Pouch sits neatly and unobtrusively on the floor beside me too; I pull the drawstring tight so the balls of yarn stay trapped inside the Pouch instead of rolling around while I’m knitting.
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