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
My jaw dropped when I first encountered Steampunk, a Finnish-language pattern by Hanne Piirainen for leggings with elaborate stranded patterning of flower-like gears interconnecting over the entire fabric of the garment, with two strategically placed focal points: on the crotch and on the butt. I posted the project to my Ravelry group “The Interior of … More If Not Now, When?
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
There’s a sentence in the Duolingo German course that’s intended to be funny because it’s deprecating to grandmas and knitters: My grandma’s riskiest hobby is knitting. After absorbing the condescension, ageism, and sexism implied in the sentence, I concluded that it was actually true in my case, because some of my projects are wild and … More Zebra Kurt
Junko Okamoto is one of my favorite knitting designers, but I’m not usually an early adopter of her patterns based on the sample photos illustrating her patterns. Her sample sweaters are usually very minimalist, knitted in monochromatic neutrals, with understated, deemphasized details. When I saw her pictures for Hana, I didn’t have much reaction to … More A Season of Junko
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 