Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

As you might guess from the lack of blog posting, the holiday season has been full of distractions. I spent three weeks over Thanksgiving at my husband's Maryland man cave. In addition to celebrating the holiday with family, I did accomplish some knitting stuff. I was most pleased that I worked on writing up a scarf pattern that uses an interesting entrelac technique. I had been most annoyed at myself for the lack of progress on that pattern, and it felt good to spend time writing and test knitting and making progress. Then I got home to Atlanta to discover that files written in Pages ’11 on my husband's computer don't open in Page ’09 on mine. (A pox on whoever in Cupertino, California decided that was a good idea.) Fortunately, Cuddly Hubby came home for two weeks during the end-of-year holidays. I've been able to open and export the file, thus restoring the three weeks' of work I did writing and test knitting. Of course, now that I'm in the middle of the ho...

Artists talk about "happy accidents" -- art projects that don't go exactly the way the artist expects, but they still turn out very well. My most recent foray turned out that way. I teach at The Whole Nine Yarns in Woodstock. The shop is hosting its annual Christmas in July event later this month. For that event, I needed to come up with a free pattern. Something quick. And simple. Okay. If you've been reading this blog, you know that quick and simple is rarely my approach to knitting. So this was a real design challenge for me. I poked around in my folder of patterns and came across some old yarn ball patterns. These are patterns where you knit a ball by making a series of short-row wedges. Each section is similar in shape to the skin of an orange or lemon wedge. I looked around the shop and picked out a skein of Arucania Limarí multicolor (color 556). It's a bulky weight yarn. This colorway is turquoise with dabs of rusty red. I knit up the ball shape, closed o...