Hi all,
Thought you might like to know that we just put the 50 gram balls of Essential Kettle Dyed sock yarn on sale for $3.39 per ball. We are clearing out of our stock of 50 gram balls because the new 100 gram balls are here. Don’t worry – we will continue to carry Essential Kettle Dyed sock yarn, just in a larger put-up to help avoid potential differences within dye lots. The hand-made nature of kettle dyeing can result in differences in color intensity between balls from the same dye lot. Larger skeins will help reduce that.
For the 50 gram balls, our warehouse staff are doing their best to choose skeins that look similar to each other (similar lightness or darkness) if you order two or more of the same color. …

When we went to Mexico a few weeks ago, I wanted to have something simple to knit. It was a short trip and I just wanted to listen to audible books and quietly knit. I didn’t have time to order any yarn so I scrounged through the office stash. I found four balls of Felici Paradise.
I cast on a pair of toe-up socks while waiting to board the plane. As I knit on the plane I realized that, purely by accident, I had chosen colors that perfectly matched the setting of my vacation. Beachy colors! I found myself more drawn to knitting those socks than any other vacation project I’ve every dragged along with me!
What an interesting thought. What if I took the time to match my travel projects to the destination? When we were in Ireland last summer I took along my Aran …

I don’t normally announce new books in a blog post, but this one is special. We’ve been anticipating Cookie A.’s new sock book for several months now, and once we knew it had shipped to us from Interweave’s warehouse, we were watching the truck’s progress every day. And, there were wings on that truck! The books just arrived!
Cookie is well-known for her fascinatingly constructed socks – they’re works of art, architecture and a marvel of knitting engineering. Please let me know if you’d like a knitalong for this book; we could definitely get that set up if there is interest. <

I’ve finished the Pumpkin Gloss socks! I will be dropping them off to my friend this afternoon. They don’t look too good on the sock blockers because I didn’t actually wash them. Cindy is really going through a hard time and I don’t want her to have to wait even one more day for her socks.
I just remembered that I promised myself the microwave popcorn popper from Sur La Table as an incentive to finish the socks. It turns out that Cindy’s troubles worked much more effectively.

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I’m at the point in the pattern where I can add a few extra repeats to increase the width (height?) of this shawl. In fact, I’ve already added two extra repeats, but I’m wondering if I should add more? There will be the last section of the lace body which is probably another 2 inches plus a border later that is about 3 to 4 inches. So, the total width would be about 25″ if I continued on now without adding any more repeats. I love my shawls to be really wide so I can scrunch them up (lace scrunches so nicely) around my neck and shoulders to stay warm.
Do you think I should add more repeats or go with the width as it is?
Pattern: Lady’s Circular Cape from Victorian Lace Today (except I am only doing 9 repeats instead of 12 hoping that …

When my dad was here last month, we worked on my taxes together. While he was going through my paperwork and filling out some forms, I started knitting this hat using Wool of the Andes Bulky hand dyed in Galaxy and Kim’s Hat pattern from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts.
I’ve never thought of myself as a purple person, but I love this colorway. I used it around Christmas time to knit this hat for my sister.

The spiraling stripe looked really cute on her, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted for my hat, so I doubled up the yarn to break up the pooling and knit it on size 11 needles. It knit up so fast that I was done with the hat before my dad was finished with my taxes!
I’ve put on the finishing touches now. It’s still been …

Alison brought in her Crown Mountain Farms Corriedale Roving. I talked her into letting me keep it to start playing with my blending of bright roving colors and the chocolate brown. I ordered more roving from Crown Mountain Farms so I will have enough to make a sweater and give one “hank” of roving back to Alison.
You can see that my English Paper Piecing experiment is coming along nicely. I do love working along, one hexagon at a time. It actually goes much faster than I had expected. I’m using the Fat Quarter Quilt pattern from Paper Pieces.
I would like to head home to start playing but it’s only 2:30! <

We have a new poll at the bottom of the page. Tell us which of your knitting tools gets the most use! <