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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Look who came to visit – a pair of goldfinches! (Can you see their heads just above the window sill?) Aren’t they cute?
They were in the tree just outside the window, then they hopped over to the ledge to look at themselves in the mirrored glass and eat bugs off the window sill. <

I’ve had an unhealthy obsession with the Bayou colorway of Shimmer, and I’ve been scheming and plotting ways to work it into my not-so-lacy world. Now that Knitty has released their Spring surprises, Tempest has pushed me over the edge.
I thought I was so sneaky, and then the requests for yarn substitution help for Tempest starting rolling into my email inbox. On top of it all, Melissa wrote up a nice post on double-stranding our lace weight yarns for subtle color variation. At last, I had the work-related reasons I needed to do a little swatching.
I used Shimmer, in the discontinued Flower Garden colorway. I double-stranded it on US 6 needles, as per Tempest’s suggested needle size. Melissa and I talked a little about this yesterday, and we were both skeptical about knitting what would essentially be fingering weight yarn at a worsted weight gauge. The fabric could turn out …