The knitting magazine, Cincinatti Knitting, has started an online resource for knitting in the news.
They take articles from newspapers and blogs online sources and wire services and collect them into one page with abstracts and links.
All links are fresh–less than five days old. It’s a great way to keep up on what folks are writing about knitting and crochet.
Here are two of my knitting students from Now and Then in Takoma park. They’re posing with one of our class projects–a hat I designed using Southwest Trading Company’s Karaoke.
It’s a skullcap style hat with a little eyelet row that you can leave as-is or run a ribbon through as an extra decorative detail. The hat is designed to teach increasing, decreasing and ribbing. My students also learned mattress stitch and a cable cast on. They did a great job.
JD–a crocheter from St. Louis who is active in e-mail lists and always very helpful suggested a mini tape recorder might come in handy while designing a garment. I think this is a fantastic idea. Your hands are busy, and it’s easy to forget to write important details down as you design them (and hard to reverse-engineer for pattern writing after your finished). So, if you just make a quick audio note about what you’re doing (i.e. row x, decrease every 5 stitches) or something like that… when you are writing your pattern it could be a lot easier. Thanks JD–I’m definitely going to try this one out.
p.s. The picture is a cool knit sighting I found on flickr…
I’ve talked about this show a bit in the past–Vicki Howel’s knitting show on the DIY network is a 30-minute knitting show that crams in lots of patterns and techniques with a young, fresh additude.
What I particularly like about the show (other than seeing on TV designers I admire in print) is that I often learn quick and easy tips that can literally change the way I knit. (For instance, it was on the Knitty Gritty that I first learned to cable without a cable needle!)
Last night, I was watching an episode about mixing yarns–the patterns for this episode didn’t make me run to the yarn store, and I have done tons of blending different fibers together myself, especially when I was designing and sellling scarves for Neighborhood Knits, the fiber arts coop I was involved in in Seattle. But I always use some guesswork and a lot of swatching when it comes to choosing the hook or needle size for a project where I’m carrying 2 (or 3 or 4!) yarns at a time…
So, along comes Lion Brand’s Stephanie Close, the episode’s guest designer, with this little tip: when combining yarns, add the milimeters for the needle recommendation on each yarn label together (i.e. if one yarn calls for a 5mm needle and the other calls for a 7mm needle, you’d want a 12mm needle) If that size needle doesn’t exist, use the closest one you can find, which in this case would be a US size 17, I think… It’s obviously not a hard and fast rule, but it’s a great starting point for when you decide to mix yarns.
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Not blogging, obviously… I’ve been pretty busy lately with teaching, and I’ve been having a great time!
I have a weekly gig teaching a class of 15 6-8th graders in Bethesda–they’re amazing, they’re knitting and crocheting, they’re creative and full of energy.
I’ve also been teaching beginning knitting and crochet. So, to keep up, I’ve been creating patterns and samples (I’ll post pictures here as soon as I can) and writing lesson plans. I get such a buzz from teaching. Annie Modesitt says teaching “recharges her design batteries” and I agree! (I attended a workshop with her last weekend, it was amazing and I learned a ton!)
Oh, by the way, the purse in the picture is one I created to highlight the Silk Juggle Balls sold at Now and Then in Takoma Park, one of the stores where I teach.
