I started dedicating my Januarys to swatching in 2016. Every January Swatchathon has influenced my various fiber media for the rest of the year, although some years some of the swatching satisfies my curiosity about the technique without inspiring a project. Sometimes the swatching is just a small introduction into a method that needs to … More January 2023 Swatchathon
Things don’t always go as planned, in needle-work and art as well as in life. I can’t absolutely assert that resilience and resourcefulness in fixing fiber art problems translates to resilience and resourcefulness in fixing life problems, but I can confidently state that fixing fiber art problems makes you better and more creative at fixing … More A One-Eyed Solution
My older daughter was an only child for a blissful two years and 49 weeks. That ended when she got the worst possible birthday present three weeks to the day from her third birthday: her younger sister. It took her a couple of years before she understood the cyclical nature of time, while she tried … More Birthday Knitting Season
One of my favorite sources of design inspiration is… pigheadedness. Also technical failure. Or both, as was the case for this pullover for my older daughter that combined both of these elements. The pigheadedness expressed itself by prompting me to take up the challenge of using a Wollmeise colorway that one of my Ravelry friends … More Lipstick Samples
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???
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
