I finished my first lace project!

I was inspired by Franklin Habit’s Night Cap on Knitty.

So Alison helped me alter the pattern to make a scarf, knitting straight instead of in the round and helped me choose yarn and needle size.

Alison said to show off the beautiful pattern I should choose a yarn with sheen. She also said I could get away with a worsted, so I chose Shine. Here’s where the problem came in. I found some Shine in my stash that I had received from our stash swap party. The color was Sea Scape. I happily started knitting away. I came to the end of my second ball and went to order more, only to discover that we haven’t carried that color since 2007. Oops.
After asking advice from a couple …

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. <

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 Bare …

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 …