I started dedicating my Januarys to swatching in 2016. Every January Swatchathon has influenced my various fiber media for the rest of the year, although some years some of the swatching satisfies my curiosity about the technique without inspiring a project. Sometimes the swatching is just a small introduction into a method that needs to … More January 2023 Swatchathon
I suppose it’s not really a news flash that I finished a project intended to use up yarn in my stash, because I have a lot of yarn in my stash and I try to use it, and it’s not news that I finished the project, because I usually do. But I mentioned my in-progress … More Stashbuster Update
I have a big, huge, overwhelming yarn stash. It happens. I’m not the only one. That’s why so many people write “stashbuster” patterns, and I just made two of them that actually did make a tiny dent in my stash. Many months ago I was attracted to a pattern for a crocheted and felted rug … More Sisyphus Meets My Stash
My annual Swatchathon at the beginning of every new year is usually my test bed for most of the knitting I’m going to do in the course of the year. That mostly didn’t happen in 2021, not because my 2021 Swatchathon failed to provide interesting ideas– it did– but because 2021 came around and I … More January 2022 Swatchathon
Who is this alien that has occupied my brain and hands and is compelling me to make sicky-sweet cute stuff? Six months in Frog and Toad World and now pink hearts and gray kittens. Some kind of cuteness bug bit me last spring, after I started knitting Frog, when I ran across a free pattern … More Hearts and Kittens
I had aged out of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books by the time they were published in the 1970’s, so they were a delightful new discovery when my husband and I came across them during our daughters’ early childhood at the beginning of the 1990’s. I remember we even had a VHS tape of … More Down the Rabbit Hole with Frog and Toad
Q: When you’re retired, what’s the difference between everyday life and vacation? A: Packing. I’m being facetious, but that reflects the fact of my privileged little life, in which what I do every day is what I want to do every day no matter where I am. Every summer, preferably in July to escape Baltimore’s … More Continuity of Operations
I was very productive during this year’s Swatchathon, thanks to the nervous energy I needed in order to live through the events of January 2021. The topic of this blog is fiber arts, so I don’t get into politics that much, but I am a very political person and I don’t avoid the mention of … More January 2021 Swatchathon
This project was born from three factors: First, our potholders were full of burn holes and should have been replaced years ago. Second, I found a free pattern on Ravelry for a pretty flower-shaped potholder made of two crocheted circles joined together by a contrast color that delineates the last four rows of the pattern … More Make It Work!
I stole the idea from the original source of inspiration and then I did everything differently, which according to Picasso and T.S. Eliot makes my theft a laudable thing. Someone on my Ravelry group posted a picture of a cropped, wide, crocheted jacket with zigzag stripes in white and gray and three-quarter length sleeves of … More Gumball Shrapnel
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 