It was a beautiful sweater, knitted from an extraordinary chart made up of fairly simple components consisting of two different cable sequences, two different faggoting sequences, and two increase-decrease leaf shapes, reshuffling their order all over the length of the garment so that the lines of the designs went every which way. I showed the … More Flourish 1, Flourish 2, and Flourish 2 and a Half
January is my annual swatching season. I dedicate the entire month, and sometimes some of the previous and following months, to swatching projects I plan to knit and to learning new techniques in hand knitting, machine knitting, crochet, and other fiber media. This year I focused almost exclusively on hand-manipulated fabrics knitted on the LK150 … More January 2025 Swatchathon
When my daughters’ birthdays came around at the end of November and December, it was an awkward time for me to embark on the elaborate, full-grown sweaters that I usually make them for their birthdays. My abstemious younger daughter said that she didn’t really need a sweater anyway, since I have already made her so … More Calculate, Knit, Recalculate, Frog, Repeat
There was grief throughout Knittingdom when Pom Pom Quarterly shut down as a print periodical last winter. Their patterns were flawed but the designs were beautiful, modeled on diverse people of all sizes, genders, and ethnicities, with great photography printed on the highest quality paper. It was all too expensive to sustain. But they went … More Fortuna’s Pockets
My younger daughter got married at the end of June to a fellow who has many pursuits, among them a detailed interest in meteorology. The two of them have jobs whose work doesn’t end when they leave the office, and they stay up late and wake up early to complete it. They are sleepy people … More Madison Wisconsin USA January-December 2023
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
If you have read this blog in the past, you probably know that I have a love for color. But I’m also very attracted to cables and texture knitted in undyed, natural yarn. I have also talked a lot about my late-life goal of knitting my stash before I die, so I try to knit … More X’s and Lots of O’s
The origin for this work dates back to fall 2022, when I ran into a sweater during my daily perusal of my Ravelry friends activity that featured a sweater with a round yoke festooned with tufts of irregularly spun art yarn poking out of the surface of the knitting. It was a kind of roosimine, … More Old Weird Barbie
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
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 