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 …

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 …

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 …

So, I am working through my lace yarn stash. I’m sorry I keep showing you all discontinued colors in my projects. About a year ago, when we put the discontinued lace yarn colors on sale, I bought a TON (while, not quite literally, but enough to keep me knitting for a long while, obviously). On the upside, this enabled us to bring in lots of new, delicious colors of lace yarn for your enjoyment!

I absolutely love the shape of the Curved Shawl from Victorian Lace Today. It’s the only shawl I’ve ever worn that actually stays in place during the day. I knew my hand-dyed yarn was a little busy for a lace pattern, so I decided to make a shawl in simple garter stitch, but with the curved shawl shaping. I’m going to use two hanks for the body of the shawl and …

All of us here at Knit Picks, including Sheldon, would like to wish you and yours a very happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys.

In honor of this auspicious holiday, we’re giving you a sneak peek at one of the new upcoming colorways of Imagination– Pirate King.

We hope you like it, it will be available in late February. If any of you land lubbers try to steal it before then, we’ll have to make you walk the plank!

Buccaneer Humboldt got in on the fun sporting a Kettle Dye eye patch and a stitch marker earring and protecting his booty of blueberry crumble bread.
How are you going to celebrate? Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum? …

Have you seen all the new samplers that we’ve added in the past week? So much temptation! Usually I’m pretty good about only buying specific yarn for a project, but I couldn’t resist the Spring/Summer Kettle Dyed Essential Sampler. Those rich jewel tones are my colors, and even though my sock yarn stash is huge, it’s full of multicolored yarn that isn’t nearly as versatile as semi-solid yarn. My sampler arrived on Tuesday all wrapped up in its tidy package with the patterns. Kerin did a great job writing all these patterns. My absolute must-knit is this Busy Bees pattern. Bees are a favorite theme of mine, and I really like the different elements in this sock. I don’t think I’ll knit mine in gold though, since that’s not a color that would match my wardrobe. Grasshopper and Spruce are the main …