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
When my swatch of Natalia Moreva’s Coral Reef pattern first began telling me it wanted to become a summer top in Hawaiian shirt colors, I had to decide how I was going to shape the garment. Coral Reef is a stacked-stitch pattern whose stitch count triples on the increase rows and returns to its … More A Wedge Issue
I belong to a group on Ravelry whose online members, mostly located in the UK, became my real-life friends after my husband and I made a couple of trips from the US for long weekend meet-ups at holiday houses in the English countryside. The son of one of these friends unexpectedly and unaccountably died about … More With a Little Help From My Friends
My first job out of college was a position as a library assistant in a chichi Harvard Square architecture company that was responsible for some of the ugliest buildings to blight the Middle East. This job taught me several valuable lessons, listed in ascending order of importance: I didn’t want to be an architect. Aside from the … More Deconstructing the Shell Game
I resisted crochet for a long time. I was Team Knitting all the way, and crochet looked clumsy and frumpy to me. A friend taught me the basics during my first knitting era, but knitting was a lot more interesting and appealing, so my friend’s efforts to teach me went in one ear and out … More Crochet to Abby: Resistance Is Futile
My first knitting era lasted for about 15 years, and then the ideas dried up in the late 90’s. My color work had started looking hectic and undisciplined to me, and the square shapes I knitted because they didn’t require calculations had come to look clumsy and dowdy. I had no more questions that could … More Manifesto: Math Phobia
The Interior of My Brain: A Knitting and Fiber Arts Blog 