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
When the Pussyhat Project first showed up on Ravelry, I wasn’t instantly in love with those cat-eared pink hats knitted in huge numbers for the Women’s March protesting the new U.S. administration. I was uncomfortable with its vulgar reference, and the knitting looked tedious to do by hand, and doing it on the knitting machine required … More Pussyhat, Pussyhat, Where Have You Been? I’ve Been to DC to Protest the King
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…
Six months ago I bought a knitting machine. I never thought I would want to mechanize my chosen handcraft with a machine that has too many moving parts for my comfort, but I did it for two reasons: I love stockinette but hate knitting it, and I have a yarn stash that is so huge it could … More Scary New Toy
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
I have a collection of Wollmeise lace yarn that is several times beyond SABLE, a useful acronym in knitting jargon that breaks out to “Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy.” I use this yarn exclusively by choice and necessity, since I have so much that I can’t consider buying other kinds of yarn. I love Wollmeise because of the … More Don’t Just Live– Dye!
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 