This spring we undertook a massive decluttering and refurnishing project to return our two spare bedrooms to functionality after having used one of the rooms to store 25 years of junk. The other room was our daughters’ childhood bedroom, still full of their stuff a decade and a half after the younger one flew the … More Siobhan Has Seen Things. She Doesn’t Want To Talk About It
I have a second knitting machine that lives at my daughter’s house in Wisconsin, a plastic mid-gauge LK150 with different capabilities than my electronic standard gauge KH965i that lives upstairs in my daughters’ childhood bedroom. I was thrilled to discover that the yarn feeder on the regular, standard knitting carriage of the LK150 was equipped … More Y2K Called, It Wants Its Duster Back
Last summer I figured out the mechanics of machine-knit intarsia, and discovered that it was the perfect vehicle for some self-striping mercerized cotton DK yarn that I had had lying around for several years. My first intarsia summer top, made of Uneek Cotton yarn, was supposed to have been a stash-buster, but it came out … More The Heart in Summer
Last year’s January Swatchathon, my annual month dedicated to making swatches and trying new techniques, was a particularly productive one for numbers of swatches and new techniques attempted. But in terms of completed garments based on the swatches, it was a bit of a bust. I was overly ambitious. When I first started dedicating my … More January 2024 Swatchathon
It seemed in September 2022 like something I could knit on the machine with plenty of time to spare before my younger daughter’s birthday in late November. It was a blanket design by Nicky Epstein that I saw once in my friends’ activity on Ravelry, made up of garter stitch squares in different colors, sewn … More A Year and a Quarter Later
You know that thrill of meeting someone for the first time and hitting it off? When they seem completely perfect and everything seems so effortlessly natural? Then you spend more time together and you discover each other’s limitations, and starry-eyed illusions collide with reality? That happened to me very recently, not with a replacement for … More A Deeper Relationship
I have been using modular machine knitting techniques for some time as a way to create design elements while extending the width limitations imposed by a 200-needle knitting machine bed. Until now I have avoided concocting designs that had half of the neckline knitted vertically and the other half knitted horizontally because that requires one … More Goldilocks and the Three Shirts
Over the course of the last eight or nine months, I have mentioned in my posts that the needle selection mechanism of my Brother KH965i electronic knitting machine was malfunctioning. I couldn’t imagine how I was going to fix it, so I figured out some clever workarounds to my panic over the fact that it … More Four Screws, Silicone Spray, and Adult Supervision
When I got married decades ago, I was very tempted to get married the way my parents did when they were 22 and had no money, in a rabbi’s office with next to no guests, no catering, no band, nothing but the legal essentials. But I thought that I might be sorry later on if … More Not-So-Scary New Toy
Monogamy has a specific meaning in knitter jargon: it means working on one project at a time until the project is finished. Before I retired, I was a monogamous knitter, and it was satisfying to me to focus all my thought and knitting time on the project and seeing it steadily grow. Then I retired … More Polygamy
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 