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Blog EntriesA Long Absence – and a new FO!
Posted on | June 3, 2011 | 36 Comments
I can’t believe it’s been over half a year since I last posted. I didn’t mean to disappear for so long. But I have a good reason, I promise! I was swamped with several projects. In addition to starting a new full time job that required me to travel for 6 months and took me away from home 4 days a week, I was working on a book for Interweave, and making a human!
Said human is my daughter, Olivia — born in March of this year. I love her to pieces. She’s constantly challenging me to be a better person. I hope I’ll someday prove worthy of her.
Oh, yeah, the cardigan she’s wearing is her coming-home-from-the-hospital outfit. It’s almost too small for her already! The yarn is Quince and Co’s Tern. I know, I know, a merino and silk blend that can be only handwashed for a baby? Still, given its lovely hand and beautifully dyed colors, I think it’s a worthy splurge for a special baby item. I’ll be writing the pattern up soon.
Giveaway Winners!
Posted on | November 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
I finally managed to pull out my trusty GNU Octave random number generator and compiled a list of winners. I decided to round out the winner count to 7 and they are commenters #90, 163, 51, 157, 175, 18, and 26. I’ve already emailed the winners, so if Liz, Irene, PICAdrienne, Maribel, Amanda Barnhart, Ivana, or Kim O didn’t get an email from me, please check your spam folders.
Thanks again everyone for playing and supporting indie designers!
I will be hosting another giveaway very soon (a book this time!), so please check back 
Christmas is, er, here?
Posted on | November 7, 2010 | 4 Comments
On my way to a cupcake date with Melissa and Colleen on Friday, I walked past Bryant Park and saw this:
Looks like the Bryant Park Holiday Market is up and running. I love Christmas, but this is a little soon isn’t it? The rest of the city’s holiday markets (Grand Central, Columbus Circle, Union Square) are opening later this month, around Thanksgiving time. Still, I’ll be making a trip back there (hopefully today) to pick up a few early christmas presents. I love Christmas in NYC – the lights, the hot cider, hot chocolate, the department store windows, the tree.
Turnabout is fair play.
Posted on | November 1, 2010 | 4 Comments
Thanks, guys, for sharing the kinds of things you’re itching to knit these days. The contest is open for another week, so click here to leave a comment and a chance to win one of six great patterns.
Since turnabout is fair play, I thought I’d give you guys a peek at the non-book knitting I’ve been working on recently…
Here’s Carrie’s super cute Camilla Babe pattern in progress, worked in Blue Sky Alpaca Skinny Cotton:
And Carrie was kind enough to include two skeins of Lark to make another Camilla Babe in a package Quince sent me recently (their Osprey will be turned into a scarf for one of my book projects). I just adore the delicacy with which Pam and Carrie wrap their yarns. It makes opening it and discovering the lovely, yummy, yarn goodness inside doubly sweet!
Giveaway!
Posted on | October 28, 2010 | 212 Comments
I’ve been so deep in the weeds working on projects for my upcoming knitting book with Interweave that I’ve felt very much out of the loop these days. What is the cure for the book doldrums? Why, a recent-release giveaway to celebrate all the wonderful, prodigious creativity of my fellow indie designers of course!
First up is Hannah Fettig’s Effortless Cardigan in Madelinetosh DK. I love Hannah’s designs. They’re easy to wear and have interesting details. Her newly released and aptly named Effortless Cardigan is no exception. She was wearing her sample at Rhinebeck so I got to see it up close and now I want to make it even more than ever. Plus, it’s in Tosh DK!:
Next up is Cecily Glowick MacDonald’s Coveside in Quince Osprey. Cecily has been producing and releasing designs at a dizzying pace. And every one of them is a winner. Her designs are as spare and elegant as the designer herself. It was hard to choose which of Cecily’s recent designs I wanted to include, but I picked Coveside because of its subtle lace detail and pretty lines:
I’ve had baby knits on the brain lately – it seems like my entire knitting group has either just been pregnant or is currently pregnant. Baby knits should be simple and relatively quick to knit and super adorable. Carrie Bostick Hoge’s Camilla Babe certainly succeeds on both fronts. A smaller version of her equally gorgeous Camilla pullover, Camilla Babe is that perfect baby sweater that you’ll just whip right off the needles. I have two in progress:
Everyone who knows me knows my predilection for cardigans. I find them easy to wear and endlessly adaptable to a variety of environments – especially when they’re knit in a fine gauge yarn. So, when my friend Melissa Wehrle pre-released her Idylewylde, I pounced on it. She knit the sample in a variegated colorway of Madelinetosh Sock, but you can easily substitute one of her more solid colors for a monotone look. As a professional sweater designer by day, Melissa imbues her work with subtle details for that polished finish. I’m a huge Neoknits fan:
To round out the selection, the last two giveaway patterns are wraps.
Laura Nelkin’s Winterlude somehow manages to have both pretty lace details and be very cozy at the same time:
And Angela Hahn’s Ondo Scarf/Wrap, features her trademark ability to play with texture to great effect. I just want to wrap that loveliness around my neck:
The rules are simple. Leave me a comment telling me what kind of things you’re itching to knit now that fall has come upon us in earnest and I’ll choose 6 comments at random to give away a pattern to. Of those I choose, whoever gets back to me first will have their first pick of patterns. I’ll gift the patterns to the winners through Ravelry. You have until midnight next Sunday (November 6th) to leave a comment.
Is this thing on?
Posted on | September 20, 2010 | 6 Comments
Whew! I guess I dropped off the face of the earth for a while, didn’t I? I had a pretty intense long-distance commute to work and my knitting book deadline to blame. But for the forseeable future, my next work project will keep me in NYC so I hope to post more in the very near future. But for now, check out the Austin Hoodie KAL at Fibre Space (blog link below):
http://www.fibrespace.com/blog/
Danielle, of Fibre Space, has always been a lovely supporter and I’m thrilled that she’s hosting a KAL at her shop — a beautiful space in historic downtown Alexandria.
Anyway, check it out if you’re interested in knitting the Austin Hoodie. Her first couple of posts has covered some good basics needed for the pattern and I’m sure she’ll be dispensing more useful tips as the KAL chugs along.
And stay tuned!
TNNA Recap (Mostly in photos)
Posted on | June 24, 2010 | 6 Comments
I think I waited too long to post about TNNA because my memory of it is getting a little fuzzy…kind of like what happened after my wedding. The images are there, but somehow the narrative escapes me. So I’ll rely mostly on my somewhat blurry cell phone photos to tell the tale of my whirlwind weekend at my first TNNA.
The weekend before TNNA, I was in Ithaca to visit friends and to go to Ithaca Festival, the town’s celebration (or at least it seemed that way to us when we were students) of the fact that Ithaca belonged to its residents again after another school year of undergrad and grad student invasion. While in Ithaca, I visited my favorite LYS, Knitting Etc, and Hickory, its owner and my friend, suggested that I sell my patterns wholesale to yarn shops through Deep South Fibers. It’s something I’ve thought about, but the logistics of printing the patterns, keeping them in storage, contacting yarn shops, etc, just filled me with dread; working with Deep South Fibers seemed to eliminate most of those worries. And in the week before TNNA, I quickly gathered my wits about me and worked with the nice folks at Deep South Fibers to get my patterns and photos in their hands so that I could be introduced (along with Grannycore) at TNNA. So yarn shop owners, if you’re interested in carrying my print patterns in your shop, please contact Deep South Fibers or go to my page on their website for more information.
Here’s my poster in their booth. I found them quite quickly on Saturday when the show opened:
Melissa LaBarre and Kristen TenDyke; fortifying ourselves for a full show day with some breakfast at the hotel:
Kristen Rengren and Mercedes T-Clark at the Malabrigo Booth:
Tanis, manning the Be Sweet booth:
Tea time at Ysolda’s booth (with Anne Hanson and Clara Parkes!):
Another shot of Ysolda’s booth, which was manned by Ysolda and her lovely assistant Sarah, who made the space so welcoming to all who entered:
And Jess, trying on my Sabbatical sample (which lived in Ysolda’s booth along with several other samples from past Twist issues):
Finally, a little mysterious package from Quince yarns, a new company from the brilliant designing minds of Pam Allen and Carrie Bostick Hoge!
Drive By Posting (re: TNNA)
Posted on | June 16, 2010 | 18 Comments
I’ll do a proper post about the weekend soon, but for now, I wanted to share a sneak peek of a new design I have coming out in Classic Elite’s upcoming Fall pattern booklets. I caught a glimpse of this on Saturday at Classic Elite’s TNNA booth.
It’s a bulky weight hoodie coat (with knitted in toggles) made out of Ariosa, a very lofty large gauge yarn. Because of the way Ariosa is spun, there is a lot of yardage per 50 grams. So, despite the bulky gauge, this coat is amazingly light.
And my design made the cover! I think this is my first cover project
Be back soon with more!
TNNA
Posted on | June 10, 2010 | 5 Comments
Off to Columbus and TNNA tomorrow. I’ll be hanging around Ysolda’s booth and otherwise just walking around. Hope to see some of you there!
Hand Knit Design as Art
Posted on | June 1, 2010 | 5 Comments
A couple of months ago, Jared Flood brought together several hand knit designers for a very unique designing project for ESOPUS magazine, a journal put out by a local, non-profit organization featuring art that spans a variety of fields and mediums.
Photos taken by and used with permission from Jared Flood.
I was the second designer to get the project after my friend, Tanis, worked on the bottom band. Theoretically, I think we weren’t supposed to see (and thus be influenced) by the pieces that came before us, but for a sweater, that’s a very difficult criteria to achieve. So I got the unenviable (unenviable because Tanis is a hard act to follow!) task of picking up stitches from Tanis’ creative, sculptural feat of knitting for my piece. Ten points to anyone who can guess which part I knit 
without peeking at Jared’s schematic.
It was really quite freeing to be able to knit without worrying about writing down notes or whether it would size up or down correctly or even whether the gauge needed to exactly so. And I’m honored to be included in the company of those involved with the project: Melissa LaBarre, Carrie Bostick Hoge, Tanis Gray, Elli Stubenrauch, Cookie A, and of course, our fearless leader, Jared Flood
Jared wrote about the process more in depth on his blog.