Things don’t always go as planned, in needle-work and art as well as in life. I can’t absolutely assert that resilience and resourcefulness in fixing fiber art problems translates to resilience and resourcefulness in fixing life problems, but I can confidently state that fixing fiber art problems makes you better and more creative at fixing … More A One-Eyed Solution
I closed my last post, Birthday Knitting Season, with unfinished business, some of which I have finished. I completed my older daughter’s birthday sweater and got it into the mail 12 days before her birthday, which hopefully will be enough to get to her in time. I’m pleased with it aesthetically and technically, and I’m … More The Monsters’ Birthday Party
My older daughter was an only child for a blissful two years and 49 weeks. That ended when she got the worst possible birthday present three weeks to the day from her third birthday: her younger sister. It took her a couple of years before she understood the cyclical nature of time, while she tried … More Birthday Knitting Season
I’ve been flirting for some time with the idea of Hønsestrikk, a style of knitting developed by the Danish knitter Kirsten Hofstätter in the 1970’s as a protest against the yarn companies’ linking of garment patterns with yarn purchases. Hofstätter promoted and popularized personalizing basic sweater shapes with stranded motifs that were meaningful to the … More When Will This Sweater Be a Crime?
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
After spending most of 2018 hand-knitting stylized faces for two pieces of wall art, DNA and Faces Come Out of the Rain, I thought I was done with knitted faces, until my Ravelry friend Rebecca Yaker created a machine knit version of the pattern and generously shared her recipe with me. I made a swatch … More Are You Really Going to Wear That? In Public???
For the last three months, my handknitting life has been dominated by one pattern, knitted twice in very different colorways from yarn in my stash. The yarn that prompted my interest in this one versatile pattern wasn’t originally from my stash– I inherited it from a woman I never met, who destashed it to my … More Two-dle Doodles, a Color Study
As I keep saying, I find plain stockinette tedious to hand knit, which is why I have a knitting machine. All the while I was handknitting my Kurt, a pattern by Japanese designer Junko Okamoto for an oversized pullover of modular patchwork squares, I laboriously handknitted one stockinette square after an other and daydreamed about … More Machine Translation
I wasn’t the kind of mother who knitted “Mommy and Me” matching sweaters when my daughters were little, but I seem to be making up for lost time now that my younger daughter is an adult. The way that generally happens is that I try out a new idea for myself that would work well … More My Baby and Me
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
