I am knitting (and designing!) with some absolutely incredible cashmere yarn right now and I just had to share the yummyness. In order to truly appreciate cashmere one must touch/rub/fondle it, but the colours of the hand-dyed yarn are so beautiful that they deserve a photo. I happened to see these two skeins of this Hand Maiden hand dyed 4-ply 100% cashmere for 50% off at the Loop recently and I couldn’t walk out of there without them. I’ve said it before, I’m a sucker for bright, highly variegated yarns, even though they can be a bit of a challenge to work with.
I swatched a lot before realizing that only the simplest of stitch patterns was going to work with this yarn, so I’m working with seed stitch. The project will be a scarf/infinity scarf/cowl, because they’re so hot right now, but it’s hard to come up with something that hasn’t already been done. I’m hoping that this design, while simple, will be elegant enough to capture potential buyers. Here is a sneak peak…
PS. I will likely be MIA for the next little bit, holidays and moving are taking over my life.
I just want to say a big thank-you to everyone for all the support I’ve been getting. I started this blog, and the designing thing, on a bit of a whim. Now, just a short time later, it has really started to take off. My patterns are becoming quite popular on Ravelry, and sales have been nice and steady. My KAL has more than one participant (a whopping 5 so far!), and the blog is starting to get attention from Pinterest and Tumblr. I have now started a Facebook page, so you can now check me out there… although I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to that stuff.
The big woohoo for today, though, is that my Jennifer Boot Cuffs pattern was featured on the Berroco blog. I must say, it felt pretty cool to see my work there. I’m starting to feel like I’m spamming the internet, which is weird, but I like it. I guess it’s payback for all those years that the internet has been spamming me.
I really just needed an excuse to post this beautiful picture.
I’m hosting my first KAL! To those who are not deeply involved in the online knitting community, this stands for Knit-ALong (I know, it should just be KA, KAL bugs me every time I see it.) This means I am hosting a forum thread on Ravelry in which people who are knitting the Pippa Toque can talk about it and show pictures of their projects. Three winners will be randomly drawn from those who have posted pictures of their finished projects. The winners will be gifted a free pattern of their choice from my pattern store. If you’re interested you can join in here,the more the merrier! (You’ll need a Ravelry account, which is free and oh so useful.)
I just released my first free pattern, the Pippa Toque. It’s a cute little hat to keep heads and ears toasty and warm on cold winter days. The close stitches and stranded colour work make this a nice thick fabric for great insulation. Thank you to Eleanor Dixon for technical editing and to Ryan Barr for the wonderful photography again.
Okay, this happened a few weeks ago but I’ve been unable to talk about it until now. The sweater in question has been sitting in a basket in a corner since I threw it there and stormed off. I think I have cooled down enough and my head is fully level again so it is time to revisit the disaster that was my first foray into steeking.
Steeking is a technique used when knitting stranded colour-work in the round. Since it can be difficult to purl while knitting with two colours, many knitters prefer to work in the round when doing stranded colour work. But, working in the round means you are making a tube when sometimes you’d rather have a flat piece. In the case of my sweater, I wanted to make a cardigan so I needed it to be flat. In order to turn this tube into a flat piece you do something very scary… you cut your knitting right down the middle! Oh the horrors!
Before you cut your work you reinforce the column of stitches on either side of where you are about to cut. This is where the people are a little divided, and where I guess I didn’t do enough research. In theory, if you use a true Shetland wool (which is traditional for this style of knitting) then the catchy wool can grab onto itself and not unravel when cut, even if you don’t reinforce it. Other kinds of grabby wool will be fine with a crocheted reinforcement, the crochet chain running down either side of the steek “hugs” the yarn and holds everything in place after it is cut. Other wools that are more slippery, like merinos and superwash, really need to be reinforced by a couple of lines of sewing machine stitching running down either side of the steek.
I went wrong was in thinking that my project would be okay with a crochet reinforcement. It was not okay. I also should have taken the time to test it out on my swatch before taking the scissors to my sweater, but I did not. This disaster was avoidable, which makes it all that much more horrific. I’m going to chalk these mistakes up to lessons learned and move on.
Since this was for a pattern I was designing, and I had planned on adding a little picture tutorial on steeking (yes, I appreciate the ridiculousness of that), I have thorough photo documentation of the disaster as it unfolded. Warning: the following pictures portray unwanted unraveling, viewer discretion is advised.
First you crochet a chain through the column of stitches to one side of the steek.Then do the same to the column on the other side of the steek.Then you cut down the steek column between the two reinforced columns. Remember, you spent countless hours knitting the piece up to this point.And then, if you’re yarn is too slippery, it will pull out of its crochet “hug” and unravel when you try to pick up stitches for the button band.
So the moral of the story is, always machine reinforce your steeks or you could end up with unwanted unraveling. I think I have a solution to the problem so stay tuned for updates on the steeking saga.
Cowtown Knits 