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
Being BFF’s with the owner of a thriving yarn store has tangible perks for a dedicated knitter. Many knitters, and I’m one of them, accumulate more yarn than they can ever knit during their time on earth. We call it SABLE, an acronym for “stash acquisition beyond life expectancy”, and it sounds like a joke, … More Melissa’s Largesse
When I previously wrote about using the machine knitting method Diana Sullivan calls “sew as you go”, which joins a new piece of knitting to the edge stitch of a previously knitted piece, I had made three variations on a sweater formula I’d developed and a pair of socks with a wavy shape built into … More More Panels
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
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 