Over the past nine months I have been experimenting with the basics of plant dyeing using scavenged materials. The thrill of uncovering beautiful colors hidden inside ordinary plants that I never noticed before, or food waste that I would have thrown away without a thought, could almost have distracted me from the fact that I … More What Happens After You Dye?
When ponchos had their moment in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, I was immune to their charms. I’d been a few years too young to participate in the hippie movement, and by the time I was old enough to leave my parents’ house and live independently, the proto-punk cynicism of the hippies’ younger siblings caused me … More More Than It Seams
I knitted a sweater using a pattern recently, which in the general run of knitting blogs is not a news flash, but for me it is, as an exception to my general preference to figure out and knit my own ideas. The pattern was Stephen West’s Reis, a very simple yoked pullover with proportions straight … More A Matter of Scale
My sister Nancy is a jewelry artist. She has mad OCD technical skills and a brilliant eye for color and design, and luckily for me, she’s very generous to her sisters. She sent me a necklace that she made after she saw photos of my January Swatchathon pieces, the ones made from my plant-dyed yarn, … More Swatchathon Postscript
When I’m on Ravelry, where I see the world’s best knitting and crochet, I fave project after project that were created using skills that are unfamiliar to me, and think “someday”. These last couple of years, I have designated January as that someday. January 2016 was my first swatchathon, and I learned how to crochet and to follow … More January Swatchathon
Last summer, my sister and her husband kindly invited my husband and me to their cottage rental in Cape May for a few days. There were so many things to love about sharing the space with my extended family and about the space itself, and I encapsulated the experience in a long series of photographs … More The Painted Ladies of Cape May
After finishing my pullover based on the Diamondback sock pattern, I began to feel the need for a pair of socks colors that coordinated with the pullover. A Ravelry friend needed test knitters for a beautiful sock pattern she was preparing to publish, a stranded design that made very effective use of two or three different … More Testing… Testing…
About 7 years ago, Andie Luijk, the color genius and owner of Renaissance Dyeing, asked me to write patterns for yarn kits using her beautiful natural-dyed yarns. It was a wonderful opportunity. I was deeply flattered at being asked to do it, I tried really hard to design things that other people would want to knit and … More Presto Change-o, A Sock Turns Into A Pullover
Hundreds of knitters in Ravelry’s annual Tour de Sock speed knitting competition know who Kirsten Hall is: she’s the sock designer they’ll encounter after they survive the first couple of stages, who will challenge them with mental and needle gymnastics that will reward them with beautiful, ingenious socks. Her patterns are long, long, long, but are … More A Conversation with Designer Kirsten Hall
When I was about 6 years old, my 13-year-old sister told me that white goes with everything. Of course I believed her. She was a teenager and she knew everything. White is known to be pure, basic, modern, minimalistic. White is a blank slate, an empty page. But my work with color has brought me … More White: Color’s Secret Frenemy
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 