Fiber Fool

I knit these cozy mittens about 9 months ago or so. They were a free pattern in the My Sister Knits newsletter back in February. There they had to fit in very limited space so both mittens were to be knit with the cables identical on each mitten and the stitch pattern was given only in line-by-line format. I am a die hard chart knitter so that wasn’t going to do for the final product. I am also a sucker for little details so knit my pair with the stitch pattern mirrored across the mittens.

I’ve had the pattern pasted up and ready to go except for photos since February as well. I’m not 100% certain what held up photography, likely weather to a certain extent until they were forgotten about and late winter turned into spring and releasing bulky mittens seemed silly. I’ve been getting a few unfriendly e-mails lately about it being “unfair” that a pattern that is not available be listed on Ravelry. Rude as they were, it was a good kick in the pants to dust the pattern off and get it out there now that fall is supposedly on it’s way (though it is hard to believe with our upper 80’s and low 90’s highs this past week).

One of the many very warm things Amanda modeled for me on Sunday in the record breaking heat were these mittens. As you can see, we had a good time. (Though I probably should have bought her an ice cream or at least an iced latte afterwards seeing as how she modeled alpaca, cashmere and yak in 90 degrees - I owe you big time, Amanda!)

It seems we have stumbled upon a magic place for photography in town. The energy there and the light just all comes together. There is also a wide variety of backdrops to choose from making it great for when we need to photograph multiple projects but want them to each look distinct.

Since I haven’t looked at the pasted-up pattern in so long I want to make another technical edit pass over it before releasing it for sale. It will go up on Ravelry today sometime, barring any horrific errors found. To celebrate I’ll be having a little sale over the weekend, so stay tuned to my Twitter, Facebook groupor Ravelry group to get all the details once the pattern is up!

The Laridae Mittens pattern features thumbs with an asymmetric gusset that help keep the cables centered nicely and undistorted on the back of the hand while the palms are knit in plain stockinette stitch. The cable pattern is mirrored across the mittens. Knit at 16 stitches and 24 rounds per 4″ / 10 cm in stockinette stitch in the round the resulting mittens will be approximately 7.5″ circumference unstretched and 10.5 inches long from beginning of cuff to tip. Additional sizes can be obtained by adjusting gauge appropriately. The pattern is 4 pages long, with both written line-by-line and charted instructions for the cable pattern and top of mitten shaping and will be $6. It will be sold in my Ravelry store, though you need not be a member of Ravelry or have a PayPal account to purchase the pattern.

If you have questions about purchasing my patterns, please send them to patterns (AT) designedlykristi (DOT) com.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! I’ll be taking in one final harvest festival this weekend where I shall buy this year’s pie pumpkins. What will you be doing?

I’m having a strong case of startitis. I have more than enough on my plate right now and I think because of that I’m lusting after other people’s knitting patterns. Thankfully I do have some new-ish yarns in the queue to be knitting with. Above is the lovely Chickadee from Quince & Co, a Maine-based company that launched this summer with some great names and experience behind them - Pam Allen, Carrie Bostick Hoge and Bob Rice. This yarn has a wonderful feel to it and I can’t wait to get it on the needles and start swatching. I’m super excited about the design it is for too. I think that siren song is strong enough to keep me from casting on a non-design project (I’m all for knitting other designer’s work and I plan to do a good bit of it as soon as my current project is wrapped, but I have to avoid temptation just now).

This may be the next design on the needles as soon as I wrap the three (or at least one of the three) that are currently on needles. Three designs at a time is enough. Especially when you consider there is still writing, editing, photographing and test knitting to be done on other projects. With three projects on the needles there is a good chance I’m at a KIP-friendly point on any one of the three at a given time should I shake my recent hermit tendencies and start socializing again.

This yarn is quite new to the line up at Frog Tree (a fair trade company). It is their new sock yarn, Pediboo, an 80/20 blend of superwash merino and bamboo. I discovered it at the My Sister Knit’s 6th Anniversary sale and scooped it up. I also know the general plan for this yarn and am excited for it. Though this one still has a lot of the details to work out yet so it will be a bit before I’m ready to cast it on. Though swatching will be in order before the details are decided on. I love the hand of it and I’m thinking the manner in which it is spun and plied will really compliment the general design.

Now this yarn is one of the three currently on the needles. This is Nordique Sport from St. Denis, a Veronik Avery yarn and is not quite as new as the above yarns. It is very squishy, sproingy and a nice solid yarn. It needs to come off the needles though. I’m having a bit of gauge trouble at the moment and I overshot my target size by a lot. It is not, however, the fault of the yarn. It is the stitch pattern’s fault. It is one of those kind of stretchy patterns, not quite as troublesome as a rib, but nearly so. I suspected the problem for a while, but kept denying it. On Monday I came to the conclusion that it had to be frogged. It is Friday and I haven’t yet done so. I thought I would at SnB on Monday night. I packed my nostpinne, but ended up casting on another design project instead (the third project on the needles) that I had packed in case I had successfully frogged the St. Denis project before our evening was up. Ah, sometimes you just have to go with what it feels good to work on.

I think the plan for today is to frog the St. Denis, but with the ball winder rather than the nostpinne. And perhaps put my disc of The Medium from NetFlix in the player (this is disc 2 of season 1 and the jury is still out whether I’ll stick with it) and finally wrap up the third project that is on the needles. That may be a tad tall of an order, but if I could get half way to finishing it today it will have been a productive day!

I have some fun with Alpacamundo (who had her first cria birth recently) lined up for the weekend that should provide some good blog fodder and hopefully some great photo ops. That is if I don’t get shy about snapping shots in a crowd… It’ll be good for me though to get out of the house (and not distract DH from his grad school homework) and to be amongst people. Monday nights have been about all the socializing I’ve been doing most of the summer.

I hope you all have a great weekend and get to enjoy these last summer-kissed days!

It was a fun kind of working so I’m not complaining. Most of the weekend was dedicated to photography. There was a very early morning photoshoot on Saturday with Amanda (many thanks go out to Bob and Sue for taking care of the kiddos). I should probably qualify my “very early” - my typical bedtime the past 6 weeks or so has probably averaged about 2-2:30am, so with a bedtime like that a 7am photoshoot is very early. Then there were quick edits that evening followed by more refined edits on Sunday once the top picks were chosen. Above is a sneak peek of the results.

Due to working, however, I don’t have my linkity pulled together. In fact, the whole week last week was pretty busy so my Google Reader is indicating more than 300 unread posts :-/ I’m hoping to catch up on that a bit today. Since 10 on Tuesday is not happening this week I’ll have linkity for you tomorrow. An even exchange of one list for another, right?

I did get in a quick trip to the farmer’s market and got some of the most amazing heirloom tomatoes I’ve ever had and was excited to see the roasted chilies are now in season as well as pears and more varieties of peaches! The usual eggs and mushrooms came home with me as well. So it wasn’t *all* work, but very busy nonetheless. What did you do this weekend?

Yesterday morning I bound off the last stitch on a design that has been about 6 weeks in the making. It has been a fantastic journey and one I hope to repeat in the future. It involved many swatches, two of which I blocked like the finished object (in two different weights of yarn). Now it is time to block the final object and I don’t know how to do it.

I do only have one pointed edge shawl I’ve knit, Seraphim by Miriam Felton (shown above) and I did so in a sport weight yarn (Brown Sheep’s NatureSpun Sport). It was not nearly as pointy a design as this or knit sideways to the body either so I had just pinned out each tip individually.

I’m not quite happy with the blocking job on either of the swatches for this project. Now it is time to block the final project and I’m uncertain about how to proceed. Let me show you extreme close-ups that don’t give away too many details, as I probably shouldn’t be talking about this project…

For the first swatch I used wires to block the main portion, then I used T-pins to individually block each point of this sawtooth edge. The swatch was only about a quarter of the size of the final project and I ran out of T-pins about three-quarters of the way through those. In addition to my needing to purchase at a minimum two more boxes of T-pins, it takes a long time to block each of those out. If I could have shown you a wider angle you would also see more clearly that the points were not equally blocked and I’m pretty sure I could have fussed with pin placement on the swatch for the entirety of a day and still found ones that required slight adjustment.

So, when it came time to block the fingering weight swatch I decided to try a different tactic - run my blocking wires through each point on a side and pin the center 1-3 repeats individually as needed. That way they are all pulled the same distance from the body and blocked probably as equally as is humanly possible. Absolutely a fantastic idea in principal. In practice, not so great a fit with a knitted on edging whose stitches run perpendicular to those on the body. I found I had to run the wires through two stitches for each point. If I only caught a single stitch it just drastically distorted that stitch and did not effectively block the edging. I continued on merrily thinking it was going to be great. It looked good while it was lying on the bed drying. Wrong! Notice how each point is actually two rather distinct loops? Not quite the effect I’m going for here.

Up to this point I’ve used welding rods for blocking wires. They are great for straight lines because they don’t bend and bow as easily so if you aren’t doing extreme blocking they only need pinned down at the ends. When I stopped in at MSK today I picked up their last in stock blocking wire kit. These blocking wires are probably nearly half the diameter of my welding rods. What is your experience? Will I lessen (or hope of hopes eliminate) the two-loop points with a smaller circumference blocking wire?

How would you go about blocking something with an almost saw-tooth edge like this? Keeping in mind that there are well over 100 points to be blocked in the full-size finished object?

Why don’t I turn this into a contest! Give me a suggestion and your name will go in a drawing for a free electronic copy of the pattern once it can be released to the general public. I’ll draw one more name from that pool for every 25 suggestions I get on this post. Because I’m under a deadline and need to get this blocked and photographed soon, comments will close on Friday, August 6th at 11:59pm MDT.

Would you like more chances to win?

• Share the contest on your blog and trackback or leave a comment with a link to the post in a comment (trackbacks and comments for extra entries do not count towards the 25 suggestions increments).
• Follow me on Twitter and post a tweet about the contest. Be sure to include @fiberfool in your contest tweet so it gets counted and please tweet only once per day!
• Like Designedly, Kristi on Facebook and share the contest on there. Leave a comment here with a link to your Facebook post.

I can’t wait to hear your suggestions!

I hate making decisions. Frequently! I think DH thinks I play a game when he asks me what I want for dinner and I tell him “I don’t know.” In reality, by the time we get to dinner I’ve probably already made at the very least a dozen design or marketing decisions and I just cannot make any more. If I’m given a few choices from which to choose rather than given a wide open question I am then usually able to pick. I find the same tactic can be really helpful when designing or even in my photography.

Have you ever been given a large, but vague task and found yourself almost paralyzed by the infinite possibilities that lie in front of you? This can be the case when designing knitting patterns. Especially if something hasn’t directly sparked an idea or you aren’t working towards a specified theme. Just think of the number of questions there are:

• What weight yarn do I want to work with?
• What fiber types do I want? Wool? A Blend?
• Do I want singles yarn? Plied? Tightly spun and plied for a smooshy feel? Worsted spun or woolen?
• What kind of stitch pattern do I want? Cables? Lace? Twisted? Slipped? Brocade?
• What sort of fit do I want? Highly fitted? Loosely fitted? No shaping?
• How much ease do I want? Negative? Zero? Positive? Oversized?
• Do I want to knit it top-down or bottom-up?
• What kind of neckline or cuff do I want?
• Do I want seamless or seamed?
• How many sizes do I want to offer? Over what range of sizes?
• Do I want to appeal to men or women or both?
• Do I want it to be an easy knit? Or a challenge? Or in the middle?
• and the list goes on and on and on…

In reality, once you answer a few of those questions some of the others have answers fall right into place. But I do enjoy designing to a requirement of some sort, be it a theme such as for a sock club, a magazine’s call for submission mood boards, needing to use a specific yarn and/or color and so on. It just helps direct my thought processes. Some of my favorite designs were designed for specific needs.

Siren Socks (shown at top) were requested to be similar to Spearfish. I was given a wool and seacell blend yarn to work with and the club colorway (not what I knit my version with) was sea related. So, I adopted an oceanic theme and ran with it.

Mashup Madness came about because the constraint for the first Sock Madness pattern call was that the name had to include “madness” in the title. I had recently been drawn to the cable pattern that has a hint of lace in it and thought “Who put the lace in my cables?” I then couldn’t help but think of those old Reeses commercials that said “Who put the peanut butter in my chocolate? Who put the chocolate in my peanut butter?” I decided I needed the opposite, “Who put the cables in my lace?” represented in the sock as well to complete the design.

My first Woolgirl sock club pattern was a real challenge because the yarn was super high contrast colors that pooled or flashed at every sock-appropriate gauge I tried. That is hard to design with since pooling and high key colors each tend to drown out any stitch patterns and forget it when they are both present. So, with those constraints I opted to go with an unusual construction technique that showed off the gorgeous yarn rather than try to fight it and Dog Days of Summer was born. This was my first really unique sock pattern and it is still one of my favorites. I haven’t released it outside the club yet because I have been wanting to knit it up in a different, perhaps slightly lower key colorway and include examples of both in the pattern.

The success of that design sparked my proposal for Spread Spectrum (second photo from top) that was published in Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarns. There are probably at least another half dozen sock pattern ideas in my design notebook that were inspired by these two designs. In fact, once upon a time I entertained the idea of writing a full book working only with high contrast handpainted yarns. Not just for socks either! Perhaps some day.

The constraints that can help me push through the paralysis of too many options isn’t always so obviously a part of the design. I’m finding that designing for the My Sister Knits newsletters to be an enjoyable challenge because I have to use a yarn they carry (obviously) and it has to be a pattern that can be presented on a single page. That forces me to keep things simple which is a valuable exercise for me since I always like to learn something new with everything I knit. That approach tends to make for challenging patterns that not everyone is up for. Often times I try to make the MSK projects with one skein and minimize the left overs whenever possible or offer a way to make use of them afterward. Some of my favorites from the MSK patterns include Collegiate Flare (above), Laridae Mittens (third photo from top) and of course Stellar Facecloths.

If I’m not currently working under any design constraints and finding myself stuck sometimes I’ll revisit a prior theme I’ve worked with before and either re-work it or work with something related. Other times I’ll seek input from family and friends. Or occasionally I’ll employ Oblique Strategies.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I use constraints with photography too. If I’m feeling stuck or uninspired I’ll find a theme to work in. I think that was why the first round of Project Spectrum did so much to further my photography skills several years ago. I had a goal and a purpose to take pictures beyond just sharing my knitting on my blog. I think that was kind of the turning point for me and photography. If your friends and family don’t inspire a theme for your photography, Digital Photography School has a challenge each week that you will likely find educational.

Do you like working with some set limits or specific goals like me or do you prefer to have wide open possibilities?