Blog

TILT: Blocking

Thing I Love Today: the magic of blocking!

The baby blanket is done. I’ll have better pictures by Friday, but I thought a walk through my blocking process might be interesting.

I use these foam mats I bought at the hardware store to block everything. They were cheap and they do the job. The only problem is that they have some kind of magnetic attraction for one of my cats, so after two years they all look pretty much like this:

All four mats, with guilty cat for scale

Here’s the blanket as it came off the needles: crumpled and narrow. This pattern (my own) includes quite a bit of 1×1 ribbing, so this was to be expected.

Size before blocking: 22" by 32"

Then I measured carefully and spent waaay too much time using every pin I own to stretch it to size.

Kitty inspecting my work. She doesn't look impressed, does she?

I got a nifty new steam iron a few weeks ago. It does vertical steaming as well as horizontal, which is awesome for quick sweater touchups before photoshoots.

Steaming/spraying in progress:

And here’s the finished blanket drying. See how well the pattern opened up?

Non-iPhone pics coming soon!

Work-in-progress: Baby Blanket

Sigh… so I was hoping to have this as an FO for today, but that definitely isn’t happening, so I thought I’d do a post about its progress.

This is a blanket for my best friend, due to have her first baby (a girl!) in May. (Kari, I don’t think you read this blog–but on the off chance you do, act surprised when I give it to you, okay?)

The yarn is Knit Picks Simply Cotton in Duchess Heather. I’ve been on a Knit Picks kick recently–can you tell? The mama-to-be (who doesn’t know anything about the blanket) informed me a few days ago that she’s painting the baby’s room lavender, so I think it’ll go nicely. She also registered for mostly organic clothes and blankets, so the fact that this yarn is 100% organic cotton is a bonus.

The design is my own, a heavily-modified version of a stitch pattern from one of my design books. It’s an easy-to-memorize 16 row repeat, interesting enough to keep my attention but not enough to be frustrating. I’m about 75% done, and only now starting to get sick of the pattern–that’s pretty good for me. Blankets of any size usually drive me up the wall. They’re basically just giant swatches, right? Makes me long for some shaping.

Stay tuned for the pattern, coming soon to a Ravelry store near you….

My recent SEX

Er, Stash Enhancement eXpedition, that is, he he (always liked that acronym).

I was staying in Mountain View, CA for a few days, so after a quick Ravelry search, I set out to visit the most interesting-looking yarn store in the area: Green Planet Yarn! They’re in this fabulous building:

Picture shamelessly stolen from their website, as I forgot my camera…

They have a great selection, laid out in a very appealing way. My only quibble was that they hardly had any Madelinetosh, but the nice lady at the front desk told me they were expecting a big shipment in a few days.

I ended up buying a sweater’s-worth of scrumptious yarn, Stonehedge Fiber Mill Shepherd’s Wool (Rav link) in Plum. It’s for a new design that’s been simmering in my head for a while and is bursting to get out!

Plummy goodness

And can I just say how happy I am to have a camera that can take pictures AT NIGHT? I have a homemade lightbox, but my old point-and-shoot couldn’t handle night pictures anyway. It makes me happy :-)

The camera did have a little trouble with my other purchase, two skeins of Malabrigo Silky Merino (Rav link) in Ravelry Red (appropriate, no?), but I’ve heard red yarns are notoriously tricky to photograph during the daytime, much less at night.

It's a little redder than this in person.

All in all, it was a very satisfying trip :-)

FO Friday: Hipster Stripe

My FO for today is the prototype for my newest sweater pattern: Hipster Stripe!

This design is actually a re-working of a sweater I designed a few months ago, Anyone for Rugby? (link goes to Ravelry project page).

The original

I really, really liked that sweater… but I didn’t think it through. To maintain the wide stripe pattern for different sizes without changing the look, I had to increase or decrease the number of rows for each stripe. This meant that the extra-small size would be substantially shorter than the medium sample… and the plus sizes would have been down to the knees.

I made a promise to myself when I started designing that I would offer my garment patterns in a wide range of sizes. So when I figured out the workable range of this sweater would only be up to extra-large, it didn’t sit right. I went ahead and had the pattern test knitted, got it all ready to self-publish, and then couldn’t do it.

So this is the sweater reborn! Thinner stripes make it much easier to upsize and downsize, which is what I’m working on now.

The specs:

Pattern: My own! I’m thinking this one will be ready in about a month. It will be published through Knit Picks Independent Designer Program.

Yarn: Knit Picks Swish Worsted in Black and White. This yarn is oddly, eerily similar to the Malabrigo Rios I used for the wider-stripe version. It feels very similar, looks almost the same, and blocked identically. I thought it would make a good substitute, and I was obviously right!

Notes: This is a fast, easy sweater. It’s top-down and each section (sleeve increases, neck increases, body) are done one after the other, which hopefully will make it suitable for less-experienced sweater knitters. For the original, several of the test-knitters made this as their first sweater–and their FOs look gorgeous!

I like this pic–but I can't decide if there's too much cleavage to make it useable. Thoughts?

TILT: New Camera!

Things I love today: pictures taken with my brand-spankin-new DSLR camera!

Malabrigo Rios in Indecita

I sold off some yarn I wasn’t going to use, and hubby and I dug deep for the rest of the $. I am SO IN LOVE with this camera. We went for a walk in our neighborhood yesterday, and I literally stopped every ten seconds to take a new picture. I am now officially the most annoying person to take a walk with ever.

The camera body is a Canon Rebel T3. We could have spent $100-$200 more to get the version that’s a little newer–but the major difference seemed to be the number of megapixels, and for my purposes, 12.1 is quite enough, thank you very much.

Malabrigo Twist in Grapes

The 18-55mm lens that came with the camera is amazing, much better than I thought it was going to be, actually. We also ordered a 50mm f/1.8 lens, which is what I used to take these yarn pictures. It does an amazing short depth of field, as you can see:

Madelinetosh Tosh Vintage in Betty Draper's Blues

Tosh Vintage in Betty Draper's Blues and Antler

Madelinetosh TML in Citrus

Okay, I may have gone a little nuts with the yarn photography…

We’re going to take the camera out to the beach on Thursday and do a photoshoot for a few of my new designs. I can’t wait to see what they look like!

FO Friday: Grandmother’s baby bootie

Today I have a finished object to show you…

…but it doesn’t happen to be one of mine. It’s my grandmother’s.

I never met my paternal grandmother. She lived in another country, many thousands of miles away. She died when I was ten years old. A few years ago, I was looking for something entirely different in my dad’s closet and found this single, delicate, hand-knit bootie.

My current foot size, for scale

When I asked my dad about it, he said she knit a pair of booties for me when I was born. When I outgrew them (probably in a week or two–it’s teeny-tiny!), he put them away in a drawer and had forgotten all about them until that moment. In the 25-plus years that intervened, one went missing.

When I picked up knitting needles eight years ago, my dad didn’t mention that his mother had been a knitter. Like so many women of her era, she probably knit to keep the family in warm clothes and accessories. He likely wouldn’t have marked her handcrafting as anything odd or different (unlike today, when people gape at me when I knit in public and will often interrupt me to ask incredulously, “Are you knitting?” I’m always tempted to say something snarky like, “No, I’m swimming laps, actually”).

Dad said I could keep this little bootie, and I’m glad. Maybe I had nothing else in common with my grandmother–but at least we both understood the language of knitting and the feel of yarn sliding through our fingers. Maybe she enjoyed making delicate pieces on tiny needles–or maybe she cursed the whole way through the project and longed for a good worsted wool, like I would have. Either way, it makes me feel closer to the grandmother I never knew.

Look at that pretty seam–puts mine to shame!

In Which I Use Algebra

In what seems like a former life, I spent some time teaching algebra to pre-teens and teenagers. The number one question anyone who spends time in this particular pursuit hears is, of course, “When am I ever gonna have to use this?” (sometimes accompanied by a curse word, depending on the teenager).

Most of them sounded a lot like this.

I usually had to go with “well, you need it for college,” or “it’s helpful for logical thinking practice”, or a cooking or construction example that 95% of the students wouldn’t be able to relate to at all.

But I was thinking yesterday… geez, I wish I had been designing then. Because I use algebra ALL THE TIME now. I have a whole notebook full of algebra equations. It’s a thick notebook, even. I use algebra to figure out sweater dimensions, to upsize and downsize a sample so it’ll fit people of many shapes and sizes, and to calculate the exact ratio a sleeve cap should have to its corresponding armhole.

Here’s what I was doing yesterday when I started thinking about this: working out yarn requirements for the different sizes of my Bevin Pullover.

First I split the pieces of the sweater up into geometric shapes:

That says "sleeve", not "Steve". Trust me. I'm a professional.

Then I wrote out algebraic formulas for the area of each shape, in order to figure out the square inches of knitting in each size:

I'm especially proud of myself for remembering the formula for the area of a trapezoid without having to look it up.

It might look a little complicated, but it’s actually very basic. I just took my numbers for each size, plugged them into the formula, and it spit out the total square inches for each size. Then I figured out how much yarn per square inch my swatch used, divided by that number, and voila – fairly accurate yardage amounts!

If only those kids could see me now….

FO Friday: Daisy Cloche and Mittens

I have two FOs to show off today–and they’re both new designs!

Here are my Daisy Cloche and matching Daisy Mittens:

The specs:

Pattern: my own–in testing now, planning for a release in about a week

Yarn: Cascade Ecological wool held double, left over from the Neverending Christmas Stockings of 2011

Needles: Size US #11 circular and DPNs (which I had to go out and buy… I’d never used any DPNs bigger than US #10 before!

Notes: These quick projects were EXACTLY what I needed after the three-week exclusivity of my Bevin Pullover. My hands loved the switch from DK weight cotton/linen to super-bulky, squishy wool! And the hat and mittens came together with astonishing speed… I think I spent about 8 hrs on both, and that includes writing up the patterns afterward!

Now to go mess with Photoshop Actions and get the pictures exactly as I want them, hehe…

TILT: Photoshop Actions!

Thing I Love Today: Downloadable Photoshop Actions!

How did I not even know this tool existed? You can download (free, mostly!) sequences of layers and filters that automatically apply themselves to photos… and they come out AWESOME. I can do basic stuff in Photoshop (lighten, darken, blur backgrounds, change saturation, that kind of thing), but these tricks are way beyond me. Being able to drastically alter the mood of a photo by clicking one button is huge.

I’ve been messing with the photos of my new sweater (see last post for details on the sweater). Here are some examples, using my favorite set of actions so far, the Timecapsule Set by Nelly Nero (I found the download here):

Original photo

with Warm Up action

with Summer of '69 action

with City Chic action – I have never looked cooler in my life

Of course, I immediately want to go through my entire photo collection and futz with every one, haha. Such is the danger of learning new Photoshop tricks. But I think the challenge will be to keep the effects subtle. The timing on figuring this out is really good, though… I will be releasing a new hat and mitten set in about a week that has a very vintage-y feel, so some of the actions are going to work really well for those photos!

Stay tuned…

FO Friday: Bevin Pullover

A few days ago, I finished the sweater I’ve been working on. Today, hubby and I got some pictures, just in time for FO Friday!

I named it Bevin, which happens to be my middle name. Hey, I never claimed to be really creative with pattern names. It seemed appropriate for this design, somehow.

I’m really, really happy with the way this one turned out. The twisted-stitch detail goes up both sides of the front and back and stops right before the bust shaping (no need for any stretched-out motifs emphasizing the size of my bust, thankyouverymuch).

This sweater provided me with some challenges. I was reminded (more than once) why I tend to knit sweaters in the round rather than in pieces–I couldn’t try it on as I went, had to make sure the pieces were EXACTLY the same size, had to deal with all the seaming at the end, etc. But I wanted the yarn to be appropriate for summer, and the cotton/linen blend really needed the extra structure of seams to prevent any sagging or bagging.

Here are the specs:

Pattern: my own! Soon to be published through Knit Picks’ wonderful Independent Designer Program. Stay tuned!

Yarn: Knit Picks CotLin. I’m not terribly fond of working with cotton or linen (give me a nice squishy wool any day), but I can honestly say this sweater will be more comfortable to wear here in SoCal than most of my wool sweaters. It’s one of those process vs. product questions… and I think it was worth some discomfort if the finished item is so nice.

Notes: Now it’s time to write up the pattern in different sizes (I want to do XS – 3X, at least), then get it to some test knitters and a tech editor. I’ll be running the test through the Free Pattern Testers group on Ravelry, if anyone’s interested–hopefully I’ll have a call for testers up by Monday.

Love this picture, even if it isn't the best one of the sweater!

Page 25 of 27« First...10 20 «23 242526 27 »