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.
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Yay – I am finally finished with my Suri Dream afghan! It took a little over two months of sporadic knitting, but here it is. I used the Bayou color of Suri Dream Hand Dyed and knit on size 11 needles. I cast on 150 stitches and just kept going until I used up all 9 balls of yarn. The afghan is pretty stretchy, but I’d estimate its unstretched size at 65″ square. <
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I’ve just added some new desktop wallpapers of the latest Felici & Risata images, the Palette Tranquil Bag, and a new image of Imagination yarn. The Imagination image shows two of the four new colors that will be debuting later this week (Friday I think). Can you spot which ones are new?
Imagination is a yarn line that marches to the beat of its own drum, as we plan to add a few new colors to it periodically throughout the year to keep things fun (rather than launching new colors with spring or fall yarns once a year). I always have such a great time coming up with the new colorways and the imaginative names to go with them. The good news is that soon you’ll be able to come up with your own colorways, as we’ll be offering Imagination in a …
I know I’ve talked about Spin-Off before, but Winter 2008 is a particularly appealing issue. You don’t have to be a spinner to appreciate the fiber information, excellent patterns and inspirational articles. This issue focuses on color. The article on managing color as you spin was particularly dangerous! The basic concept is how to work with two colors of roving, as you spin, to design wonderfully dynamic yarn.
I read the article on Wednesday and spent the entire evening dyeing four colors of roving. I knew all the roving, that’s been sitting in a bin in my closet, would have a good purpose. If you are interested in dyeing roving, here is a fantastic tutorial.
I used only one color for each group of my roving. I started by laying out the dry roving on the living room floor. I kept rearranging it until I had …
Last Sunday I laid out clothes for our trip. Having gotten the “boring” task out of the way, I enthusiastically contemplated what fiber-related projects to take with me. I knew I wanted to take my Spinsanity spindle and my Golding Aromatherapy spindle. I have bright, colorful rovings for each spindle.
I also wanted a very low-key knitting project. A Moderne Baby Blanket fits the “easy” requirement but the yarn takes up a lot of room and, once the blanket gets going, it isn’t really portable. Then I remembered my long-neglected Stonington Shawl from Knitting Workshop by Elizabeth Zimmermann. I had made a good start but then was sidetracked with Prayer shawls and baby blankets. The yarn is Shimmer – Bayou.
What a perfect travel project! Lots and lots of plain garter stitch with a lacy edge to entertain me on …
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Over Thanksgiving, my parents and I drove down to visit my sister in San Jose. It’s about 11 hours each way, so that meant lots of knitting time. I took along my mindless, feels-so-soft, comfortingly warm garter stitch afghan in the Bayou color of Suri Dream Hand Dyed. I’m using size 11 needles. With 9 balls of yarn, at 150 stitches wide, I think the afghan will end up being close to 65 inches square.
Sitting in the back seat, with no additional knitting tools available to me, I discovered that the spit-splice joining method (more elegantly known as the felted join) works wonderfully for Suri Dream, except you don’t need to (and really can’t) splice – all you need is spit, which I did happen to have with me. I know…good thing I had the back seat to myself, right? …
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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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 …
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My experience with my friend’s Prayer Shawl seems to have started a shawl knitting frenzy. It was such an easy and quick knit that I couldn’t resist using the same Lattice Pattern from The Prayer Shawl Companion to make the long-promised shawl for Xena’s breeder.
Lora’s work causes her to travel quite a lot. As a result, her wardrobe is all about black, white and grey. I had already gotten Suri Dream in Stone for her shawl but the balls had been sitting in my closet for months. I’m making very good progress thanks to college football! Would you believe that I’m already thinking of making a Lattice Shawl for myself? I want to try one of the hand-dyed colors of Suri Dream. Ummm, I love Bayou! …
Just in time for the cold weather…
I finished up my cardigan-length version of Norah Gaughan’s Serpentine Coat from Knitting Nature. I really like how the variation in the kettle dyed yarn makes the pattern look a little more rustic and earthy. I’m also pretty pleased with the buttons, since I usually have trouble finding ones that I like that aren’t too expensive. These were just cheap-o buttons from Joann’s Fabrics, but when the light catches them they kind of glow.
I haven’t done a lot of stranded colorwork, and it was nice to do a project with thick, worsted weight yarn so I could see what I’m doing and make sure that my pattern is correct. It’s also the first time that I properly caught my floats on the backside of my work – the color repeats between the …
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I have to admit that I’m not the hugest Harry Potter fan in my family. My dad and my sister have both read all of the books, and I’ve only read, um, 2 chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. BUT I have seen all the movies. Since my dad is such a big fan, I’m thinking of knitting him something from Charmed Knits for either Christmas or his birthday in March (his birthday is looking likelier and likelier as Christmas gets closer and closer!) Picking colors for a lot of the projects in the book is pretty easy since Alison Hansel used lots of Knit Picks yarns, but since we’ve introduced some new colors, I’ve been thinking a bit about which yarns I’d actually choose.
This post on Ravelry was the final push I needed to compile a list of all the Knit …
