Apples to Apples is my favorite game of all time. For the past three years, my friends have come over to my house to celebrate my birthday by drinking apple cider, eating apple pie, and playing Apples to Apples.

This year, I decided to knit a special Apples to Apples hat to wear to my third annual apple party. I found this pattern for the Apple of My Eye baby hat on Ravelry, and I modified it to fit me by casting on 74 stitches instead of 66. I started it last Sunday, knit through a 2 hour roller derby league meeting Sunday night, worked on it at craft night last Tuesday, and I finished it Thursday night, just in time for the party Friday night.
Here I am modeling it in my kitchen before the guests arrived. Ignore the lump, that’s from my ponytail …

The leaves are turning beautiful colors outside our office, and this week we got to look at beautiful colors inside too! Believe it or not, we just had our yarn color picking meeting for next fall. Yep, we pick colors that early. I can’t give away what exactly we did, but I can tell you that we didn’t discontinue very many colors, and we did add a lot.
This photo shows the boards we get from our manufacturers with color samples. So many choices! We mainly choose from these boards, but sometimes they don’t quite have the color we’re going for, and then we choose from a variety of other sources.
And here’s a photo of Kelley pondering what colors to add to my favorite yarn line, Palette. Palette is just getting better and better with …

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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