A couple weeks ago, Kelley and I talked about the joy, the wonder, the magic of blocking lace (podcast 69), so I thought I’d share my finished lace project and include the dreadful before picture too. This is the Juno Regina pattern by Miriam Felton from knitty.com in the Sterling color of Gloss Lace.

Lace blocking wires hard at work. They make blocking lace so easy compared to pinning every inch.

Here’s the lace while it was still on the needles. Big difference, huh? <

I’ve been saving up this one until it was seasonally appropriate!

When the Spring 08 issue of Knitty came out, I got all excited about the Tempest sweater. I picked out my colors, swatched, blogged, and knit myself into a frenzy. I should have carried the colors up between stripes, a lesson I learned the hard way as I wove in about 3,000 yarn ends.

I have a bad habit of finishing sweaters to the 99% point and then leaving them to languish without buttons for ages. Even though I knit it up pretty quickly, this sweater fell to the same fate and I stuffed it in a corner of my craft room for about a month before finally picking up some appropriately-sized wooden buttons.

Here’s the part of my story that’ll make a knitter’s …

Happy Halloween, everyone!

We had our first ever Halloween costume contest here at Knit Picks, and I think Angela is going to post about that today too so you can see everyone’s costumes. My post is about the versatility of Palette. You may think Palette is just a colorwork yarn, but it is so much more! When I was looking for a costume to wear last night, I pulled out an old bridesmaid’s dress from the back of my closet (the bride didn’t wear white), and I immediately thought of Princess Leia. When confronted with how to make the infamous “cinnamon buns”, I just pulled a couple balls of Palette in Bark out of my stash, and voila!
Everyone here got such a kick out of it that Alison made a how-to video for your viewing pleasure…
Palette isn’t …

To celebrate Halloween, Knit Picks (and our sister companies, Connecting Threads and Artists Club), hosted a staff Halloween costume contest. Even our warehouse in Ohio got in on the fun, we’ve been e-mailing photos back and forth all morning. Alison and I took tons of pictures and video of everyone who dressed up. We even had a little parade!
Of course Sheldon was all set, he had lots of costumes to choose from since we’ve knit all the shells in his animal and career outfit kits.

Alison was a dinosaur doctor. She had charts with dinosaur skeletons for differentials, and a lollipop as a reward for good dinosaurs. This costume was inspired by her hubbie who told his parents he wanted to be a dinosaur doctor when we grew up when he was little.

Katie was Olivier the Frenchman. Ooh-la-la!
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My brother’s wife is pregnant with the first grandchild of the family. She’s due at the end of December and they are having a boy. I wanted to complete the project and give it to her when I saw them at Thanksgiving.
The project is from Mason Dixon Knitting. I used Comfy in Planetarium, Fedora, Cashew and Honeydew. The colors were chosen by the mom-to-be, they match her nursery theme perfectly.
The Comfy gives this blanket a beautiful drape. I keep saying it feels “slinky” to me. And we know from the accidental washing of my purple Comfy hat that this blanket can be abused and washed without worry.
Whew, my next couple projects are going to be MUCH smaller. <

I finished a new pair of socks just in time for our cold, fall weather. I call them my “Wicked Socks.”
I used Imagination in “Wicked Witch” for the main color and “Frog Prince” for the contrasting heels, toes & cuffs. By using a contrasting color for the toes & heels, I only needed one skein of the Wicked Witch for very generously high socks. (My shoe size is 9, so it’s not like I have tiny feet either.)
I must have loosened up considerably by the time I knit the second sock because my sock is a little bigger and the yarn pooled in slightly thicker stripes. You can see this on the left foot in this photo (sorry about the blurry photo–I’m sure you know how hard it is to photograph your own feet!):

Oh well, I …

We’re always working on something new around here, and lately one of the projects has been a group of new Knit Picks tools. For the first time, we’re focusing on tools – making improvements to the old faithfuls plus developing a couple of brand new things. One of the main improvements you will notice is that the prices will be much lower – yay! You know it already – that we work directly with the factory, cutting out the middle man, thus keeping prices low. But one thing you may not know is how much fun that is. It means visits to the factory, which I got to do last week.
Here I am in Taichung, Taiwan at the factory showroom to approve samples:

Sheldon went with me. Here he is inspecting a set of double ended crochet hooks designed for knitters – for fixing mistakes …