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New Pattern Release: Blue Betty!

Remember Blue Betty?

She’s all grown up and released as a pattern! I’m so thrilled about this one. It only took me a few weeks to go from concept to sweater, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I think I achieved my original goal–a bust-friendly colorwork sweater!

Blue Betty is available to purchase for $6.00. The specs and the purchase link can be found on this page of my website, or on the Ravelry pattern page here.

A few gratuitous glamour shots:

In my head, this picture is named Betty Boobs.

Arrived!

I’ve arrived at my new home in Indiana, and now I finally have time to get back to blogging!

Of course, now that I have the time, I’m working on a top-secret project I can’t show anyone. Ha. But trust me, it’ll be awesome.

For this project, I need to buy some blocking wires for the first time. I’m going to visit a few LYS (oh darn, right?) to see if anyone has them to purchase right away, but I might end up needing to purchase them online.

Knit Picks has these ones for $19.99:

But I’m a little worried about the speed of shipping. I’m trying to get the project done by the weekend, and my (non-negotiable) deadline for this piece is the week after that… so unless I paid for super-expedited shipping, I’m not sure I’d get them in time.

I saw a few mentions on Ravelry of buying welding rods from a hardware store (plenty of those around!). I found this picture online when I searched for “welding rods for blocking”:

Those look pretty good, but I also found lots of pictures of wires in spools, like this one:

And I wouldn’t know the first thing about straightening the wire to make it useable. Hrm.

Probably my best bet is to call around to the LYSes and see if anyone’s got them. I would much rather have wires designed for the purpose, even if they’re a little more expensive.

Do you have blocking wires? Where did you get them?

Knitting and Crochet Blog Week: Improving Your Skillset 3KCBWDAY6

Today’s topic: Improving Your Skillset. How far down the road to learning your craft do you believe yourself to be? Are you comfortable with what you know or are you always striving to learn new skills and add to your knowledge base?

I would consider myself an advanced intermediate knitter. I can (obviously) design patterns, but there are still many skills I don’t know, or don’t know well.

There are a few skills I’m pretty confident about. Like complex cables:

Morgandy Mittens

Shedir

And colorwork:

an ill-fated Autumn Rose sweater

Socks (including stockings and slippers, which I prefer because they’re so much quicker!):

Cable footies from One Skein book (love!)

Stocking with short-row heel

Basic lace:

an in-progress Jordan

Kari Baby Blanket (my own pattern)

And obviously, I’m pretty good with basic sweater construction, both raglan (see my Chandail and Hipster Stripe patterns) and set-in sleeve (my Bevin pattern).

Which wraps up the list of skills I’m confident in… and brings me to the skills I’m not!

Here are a few that could be better:

1. Short rows. I’m okay at these, but they never turn out quite as I’d like them to–always a little messy or misplaced. I’ve been bookmarking alternative short-row methods for a while (shadow wraps, German short rows, Japanese short rows), and sometime when I’ve got a lot of knitting dead time (ha!) I’m going to do some mega-swatches and try them out.

2. Intarsia. I’ve done it, but it was fiddly and awful and I hated it. Here, for posterity, are the only two intarsia projects I’ve ever done:

Purple Totoro, a gift for my sister and brother-in-law

Doggie argyle

And here’s a list of things I haven’t tried at all (but want to!):

1. Steeking. Scares the crap out of me. I don’t have a sewing machine (or access to one), so I know I’ll have to figure out how to REALLY reinforce those center stitches before I dive in.

2. Complex lace. I’ve never done nupps or bobbles, never knit with beads, and never done lace patterning on both right and wrong side rows. This is more a case of not finding a pattern I’d like to knit than anything else, honestly…. I don’t wear or knit shawls (although I’m working on a design for one right now, oddly enough!), and I’m not a big fan of how most of the froofy lace stuff looks. But I’d still like to try it!

3. Crochet. I know how to single-crochet around the edges of things, but that’s about it. I would love to actually make a whole crochet project someday.

That was a fun list to create. Makes me want to go work on my shawl design, actually :-)

Knitting & Crochet Blog Week 2012

Starting Monday, I’m participating in the 3rd Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, hosted by the lovely Mimi of Eskimimi Makes.

I’m excited about the challenge of blogging seven days in a row. The prompts are great–very thought-provoking. I highly recommend checking them out if you haven’t already.

Hope to see you on Monday!

Organized

(Warning: photo-heavy post)

I have been disgruntled with my yarn storage for a while now. When we moved into our current apartment, we found these cubes at Target and hung them on the wall:

There are several things to note in this photo. First, although the idea of having the yarn as decoration on the wall is a good one, everything ends up piled haphazardly in there. Second, the unattractive pieces of plastic stuck in the sides… which we found out pretty quickly were necessary to keep curious cats from jumping on the dresser and futzing with bits of yarn. And third… the top of the cubes pretty much serve as a ~~clutter repository~~ catch-all for random things.

And the rest of my yarny storage wasn’t much better. Here’s what my books/magazines/WIPs/needles/notions area looked like:

No, we don't live in a dorm room, but I don't blame you for thinking it.

My workspace, where I do the majority of my designing:

If you’re getting depressed by all this clutter, don’t worry! This post will have a happy ending, I promise.

A table covered with WIP patterns, swatches, etc:

So obviously I needed a new storage solution. Enter… (cue dramatic music)… IKEA!

The husband assembled it for me, assisted by the cats:

What? This is my hammer.

And here’s what my yarn storage looks like now!

All my yarn fits in the cabinet with room to spare (okay, not much room–but some). WIPs (including swatches and designs-in-progress) are in the middle bin, partial balls leftover from projects in the second bin, and yarn I’m hoping to trade or sell in the bottom bin. The cubes hold all my needles, notions, and books. Magazines have been moved to the bookcase in the living room, where they stand up better anyway.

The cabinet is a Billy bookcase from IKEA, with a Billy Olsbo half-glass door. All together (including the bins), it was just under $100. A steal, if you ask me.

Although… after sorting my yarn, I’m starting to think I need more sweater-quantities. So it may not end up being quite so cheap, heh.

FO Friday: Kari’s Blanket

A little late for FO Friday, but here’s the finished baby blanket in all its glory:

I’m really, really happy with the way this turned out! Also, I’m delighted afresh with my new camera. These pictures were taken on the bed in my apartment, with limited light, but I don’t think you could ever tell.

I’m happy with the way the back looks post-blocking, too. It’s kind of a neat design in its own right:

The specs:

Pattern: My own. I’ll work on releasing this one (self-publish via Ravelry) as soon as the two Knit Picks sweaters are done. Hopefully within the next few weeks.

Yarn: Knit Picks Simply Cotton. The mama-to-be this is intended for wants organic clothes for baby, so this was perfect. Love the depth of the color, and it got even softer and smooshier with blocking.

Notes: I’m holding onto this FO until next month, when I’m throwing my bestie a baby shower. I can’t wait to give it to her…

This may be a contender for best picture I've ever taken.

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….

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…

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want…

(And yes, I’m perfectly aware that title dates me.)

I’ve decided I really want a digital SLR camera. I’ve been doing all my pattern and project photography with a fairly nice Sony point-and-shoot. It has very limited manual settings, though, so I have to be super-careful about lighting.

Bright, sunny days are nice and all, but when you have them 99% of the time, photography can be a nightmare. I’ve taken a bunch of my pattern pictures at the beach (as you might notice), because it’s one of the only places in the greater LA area that usually has cloud cover.

Why am I so happy in this picture? Because it's the first time I had seen clouds in three months.

Another issue is that contrary to popular opinion, there are places in LA that are far from the beach. I happen to live in one of them. It takes about forty-five minutes to get there when there’s no traffic (which is never). If I have three or four samples to photograph, the trip is worth it, but otherwise it’s a giant pain in the behind.

Over Christmas, I ~~stupidly~~ intelligently decided to try out my mother-in-law’s Canon Rebel T3.

I am deeply, madly in love with this camera. Using just the kit lens, I wandered around their house and yard taking pictures of everything, and THEY ALL CAME OUT GREAT.

Proof I’m not lying:

Are these not the tastiest-looking jellybeans you’ve ever seen?

This next picture is, I think, the best one I’ve ever taken. And it’s of CILANTRO.

Can you imagine what this camera could do with, say, a Madelinetosh sweater?

So the bottom line is, I want a DSLR. Desperately. But it’s not in the budget right now, so I’ll have to be content with my ~~POS~~ P&S until I make enough money by selling my designs to purchase one.

And if anyone has recommendations for entry-level DSLRs or places to buy them, I’d love to hear about it!