Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

It's that time of the year. No, I'm not referring to Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, the great triumvirate of cool-weather dark-day holidays. No, it's time to start signing up for all the great knitting offerings in 2011. Registration has just opened this morning for STITCHES South 2011. Because of where Easter falls on the calendar, STITCHES South will be a week early on 14 through 17 April. Good for us, as the spring flowering trees should be in even better blossom than the previous two years. XRX will be setting up the party at the Renaissance Waverly Hotel & Cobb Galleria Centre, just off I-285 and I-75 on the north side of Atlanta. (Clicking the link at upper left will take you to the STITCHES main portal page. Clicking the link at the top of the sidebar will take you to the description of my class.) Once again, it is my privilege to teach at STITCHES South. I'll be teaching "More Than One Way to Skin a Sweater." This is an overview o...

North Georgia Knitting Guild has been hosting an annual auction as a way to raise funds. This year's auction was held during the October meeting. This is one of the advantages to being in a smaller guild. Atlanta Knitting Guild has too many members for something of this scale, although AKG is planning a yarn swap at the December meeting. I was being pretty tight with money this time, partly because I was in the midst of closing an old checking account and opening a new one. I didn't have the new checks yet, I didn't want to write any more checks on an account I was about to close, and my money was split between the two, so that kept me well-behaved. I spent between $20 and $30 for what you see in the photograph. The three small booklets were all one lot. I find it interesting to browse even simple pamphlets. Sometimes you find something just a little interesting and out of the way. And you never know what will be lurking inside a stitch dictionary. I was pleased ...

The Whole Nine Yarns has a sock guild. This is a sock club that meets once a month for social time and for education. Each month is a different, exclusive sock pattern and hand-dyed sock yarn to go with that pattern. It is a very cool idea and has proven to be a good way for sock knitters to try different techniques. Some socks are knit toe up, some top down, some lace, some texture, some cables. For January, JennaB the Yarn Pimp designed a sock with beautiful cabled Saxon Braid cuffs knit sideways. I'll get to that in a couple paragraphs. First, I want to draw your attention to the yarn. Yup, that's it. It really doesn't look like all that much, does it? It is mostly still the same undyed white. There is a little bit of pale grey at each end, and some pale rusty orange in the middle. When it first showed up in the shop, I noticed it for how quiet it is compared to some of the complicated sock guild yarns. This is a yarn you have to knit up to understand. JennaB...

The other shop we visited in Spokane was A Grand Yarn. This one is also a little tricky to find, as the shopping center sits perpendicular rather than parallel to the main road. You need to look for the dark brown buildings with the very slanted roofs. A Grand Yarn is just a few doors in from the road. The shop had lots of lovely samples and a fine selection of books as well as yarns. This is just the sort of good friendly local yarn shop every knitter ought to have close to her home. We chatted with both Mary, the outgoing owner, and Libby and Nancy, the incoming owners. All these ladies are clearly devoted to their knitting customers. I purchased a few spare stitch holders and a copy of Myra Wood's Crazy Lace . The beautiful color and cleverly-styled photographs will lure you into adding this book to your shelf. This is definitely a book for the free-spirited knitter. If you are somebody who doesn't like lace because it involves too much following of rules, then you...

During the summer, I decided to take Elizabeth Zimmermann's advice about travel knitting. She suggested a nice shawl, as it is light, easy to transport, and gives hours upon hours of knitting pleasure. For our trip out west, Lyra seemed like the perfect choice. I had purchased the yarn and pattern from the Yarn Place during a moment of unexplained weakness on the last day of STITCHES South 2010. Now one of the things I really need to learn -- and by learn I mean totally take to heart -- is the idea that you ought to cast on such projects before you leave home. I've made this mistake the last two years in a row for Dragon*Con as well, spending four days of sitting and listening sans knitting. (I believe one year I got my Dragon*Con project cast on too early. I liked it too much and finished the whole thing in a week.) Because the trip west involved flying, I was greatly limited in what I could pack. Part of why I'll schlep the day and a half drive to Pennsylvania t...

I haven't gotten nearly as much knitting done lately as I would like. I did, however, finally manage to finish this swatch for an upcoming class. I've been surprised when I teach by how many knitters only know one or two ways to increase. There are so very many, and they each have their own best application. So I've created this swatch which demonstrates 42 different mirrored double-increases in stockinette. I did not include any examples here of hiding the increase behind a cable or traveling stitch, as that would open up another whole area of exploration. I also haven't included on this swatch increasing by knitting with more than one strand at a time, such as using the tail or using the other yarn when doing double knitting or Fair Isle stranded knitting. And I didn't include casting on in the middle of a row, such as with an e-loop, crochet cast-on, knitted-on cast-on, or cable cast-on. Some of these are quite decorative. I've used yarn overs, knitti...

I wanted to have something a little special to show in my "More Than One Way to Skin a Sweater" class back in April. This plain cropped jacket has an unusual construction method which I call "origami" because it can be represented by a rectangle that is cut and folded. You'll recall this jacket is worked in linen stitch. I only had the one large skein, so I weighed it. This allowed for me to make calculations as I knit. How much fabric did I have? How much yarn had I used? How long could the sleeves be without running out of yarn? These questions can be answered with some confidence if you weigh the skein before beginning and at intervals as you knit. I crochet cast-on at the bottom edge and treated the bottom part of the jacket as a rectangle. I planned and used about 35-40% of the skein. When I got to the underarms, I folded the rectangle as if it were the bottom of a cardigan -- right front, back, left front. I was at the beginning of a right-side ...