New Shawl Design: Randomly Productive

I grew up with a bit of an overdose of Protestant work ethic: you must be productive. The Devil makes work for idle hands. Being lazy is a terrible thing. Do something useful.
As I have been learning to live with PTSD, I’ve had plenty of trouble with these beliefs. I want to do things, I want to be productive … but I also need to rest. I really need to pace myself, or there are unpleasant consequences for everyone. But when I rest, when I listen to my body and do only the things I feel up to on any given day, I feel like I haven’t done anything useful, like I haven’t been productive. And I feel awful about that.
But the truth is, I’ve actually done plenty. I never just sit. I putter about doing a bit of this and a bit of that: knitting, or weaving, or spinning, or baking, or gardening, or sweeping the floors, or doing a load of wash. I do stuff. Just not the stuff that was on my to-do list for the day.
I’m randomly productive.
This shawl was designed for my beautiful therapist, who helped me to realize this fact. The design celebrates randomness in colour, texture, and shape … yet despite relinquishing control over the details, despite purposely not planning everything out in detail, it makes a completely wearable and absolutely one-of-a-kind shawl.
Good things can happen when you just follow your heart.


You can get it here.

New Shawl

When my brain goes walkabout it tends to come back with new knitting designs. 

Use the code comeonspring and get it for fifty cents. :)

It's called Anthemon... Flower. 

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/anthemon

Simply Comfortable: new shawl design

At Fibre Week two years ago, my friend pulled this gorgeous naturally dyed yarn out of her basket and I exclaimed “Oh! I need that!” … so she gave it to me.

It wanted to be a shawl. Definitely. But the yarn got put away and forgotten until we were clearing out the fibre room this week.

It still wanted to be a shawl.

I obliged.

You can make one just like it, if ya want … the pattern is free, and as long as you can knit, purl, yarnover, knit two together and knit two together through the back loop (which is easy, but you could substitute a plain knit two together, nobody’ll notice), you can do this. Minimal counting. No stitch markers needed. 675-725 metres of worsted weight yarn, a 9 mm circular needle, and you’re off to the races.

Help yourself. It’s called Simply Comfortable, and it’s available as a free download from Ravelry.

The Cold Never Bothered Me Anyway

If you haven’t yet seen Frozen, I highly recommend it. Even if you haven’t got kids. It’s got a lot of thought-provoking things to say: many of which seemed particularly relevant to me, like the idea that trying to control everything you feel is likely to lead to an unexpected eruption of power that hurts the people you are trying to protect, for instance. Like the idea that love, not fear, not control, is the answer to the pain and confusion.

I loved it. It’s also visually just stunning.

And when I saw that icy crystal gown, I knew there was a shawl design in there.

Some time with a spreadsheet and a bunch of beads and yarn resulted in this:

It has a lot of beads (close to 300), but it didn’t take all that long to knit, really.

The pattern’s up on Ravelry, if you need one of your own. The first fifty people to use the code LetItGo can have it for free. :D

New shawl design: A Dash of the Waves

Like it’s predecessor, A Dash of Colour, this shawl is a one-skein adventure, meant to work well with colourful sock yarn. It requires almost no counting, minimal concentration, and the lace repeat section is actually random, so you don’t even have to worry about things lining up properly or being all perfect. It’s not supposed to be.

A really easy, really quick knit, this is loads of fun and looks really cool when it is finished … in fact, it looks like it must’ve been a lot harder to knit than it actually is.

Wanna make one yourself?

The pattern is available right here:

What does your Brave Girl look like?

My counsellor asked me that this week.

“What does your Brave Girl look like?”

I thought for a minute.

She has a sword in her hand, held up high. And a leather shield … embossed with the horse of Rohan.

Then I knew.

She looks like Eowyn.

Eowyn, who faced the Nazgul king and said NO.

Eowyn, who was wounded, and spent a long time in the Houses of Healing.

Eowyn, who became well at last when she opened her heart to the love that was offered.

Yes, that is what my Brave Girl looks like.

There’s a shawl design in the making now, for her: it will be called Shieldmaiden’s Courage.

It’ll be awhile … it’s big.

When the brain is on overdrive

Lately, my brain is on overdrive: scattered, frazzled, hard to focus on anything, trouble remembering things, the usual. After effects from the relapse, I am sure.

My family have been wonderful about helping out – The Boy has done chores for me so I can stay inside and rest, and everyone’s tried hard to help me feel better. I appreciate all their efforts, very much.

I’ve been doing my fibre arts work as a coping strategy: I can’t focus well, though, so I have a bunch of projects on the go and I keep switching from one to another, it’s like being in kindergarten and going from one station to the next! I have a sock in progress out of some stunning yarn from Mayhem and Chaos, the Elizabeth Zimmerman sweater, which is now getting a lace border added to the hem, some mittens, and a hat that I am inventing as I go. Oh, and some merino/silk on a spindle, because, hey, merino and silk makes any day better, much the same way a cup of tea improves even the worst day at least a little bit.

I was at a knitting party last night, working on the hat, and I explained that I had been feeling very scatterbrained and so although I’d looked at a bunch of patterns and even started one or two of them, following a pattern just wasn’t gonna happen so I had to make something up myself.

It was pointed out to me that for most people, feeling scatterbrained means they need to follow a pattern, not that they immediately go off and design something brand new right out of their heads.

Yep, I have a weird brain. :)

But it’s a cool pattern, I think it’s gonna work well. Yes, I’ll publish it when I’m done … if it really does work out as planned. I’ve decided to call it Ekaterin, for Ekaterin Vorsoisson Vorkosigan, from the fantastic universe created by Lois McMaster Bujold. It seems like the kind of hat she’d wear.

Linen stitch. Integrated i-cord. Variegated hand dyed yarn. I think it’ll work.

 

ETA It’s posted on Ravelry now!

Sunny Dee: a new shawl pattern available

A little while ago, there was talk in one of my favourite Ravelry groups of the ongoing projects some of us had on the needles that were destined to be gifted to other people. One of the knitters had a whole bunch of things on the go, and said “I wish someone would knit for me!”

Well, I was in the I-need-to-rest kind of place that day, plus I had the sense that there was a new design burbling somewhere in my head that needed to come out. I decided I would be the one to knit for her: I would design and knit a new shawl, and send it off to my knitterly friend.

And, that’s just what I did.

I looked through some pattern books, found a bit of inspiration, and sat down with paper and pencil and needles and yarn and started knitting. I had to restart a few times, as is inevitable when designing, but in the end I came up with a shawl that would knit up quickly in bulky yarn (I finished the prototype that very day), but would also work in finer yarns. As it is a tip-to-tip design, as long as you can divide your pile of yarn in half and the pile is about 200 grams to start with, you’ll end up with something workable.

The shawl is based on garter stitch and the ‘lace’ is just a matter of paired yarn over/knit two together stitches, so it is not complicated at all. The top of the shawl forms a slowly increasing (then decreasing) triangle – you can make it a shallow triangle by working increases/decreases every other right side row, or a more traditionally shaped triangle shawl by working the increases on every right side row. The border is really wide, but a very easy to memorize pattern repeat that forms small points at the bottom edge.

(Yes, those are sheep in the background.)

It’s been made in fine mohair, which creates a beautifully haloed fabric (worn by the knitter’s granddaughter as “her princess cape”), in bulky, super bulky, and worsted weight. All of them look great – hopefully the knitters will add their projects to Ravelry so that you can see them.

The pattern is available now – you can see it on Ravelry or just …

Happy knitting!

Frazzlehead’s Handspun Sock Recipe

I spun up three 100 gram Frazzlebatts.
I plyed them together and made two big balls of 3 ply yarn. Sparkly, purple and red and blue yarn. Thick yarn that wanted to be boot socks.
I experimented with needle sizes. I experimented with toe shapes. I experimented with patterns and leg shaping and in the end, I made knee high socks.

Then I thought, I should write that pattern down so that next time I want to make socks out of handspun, I don’t have to do so much experimenting. And I should share it, in case other people want to make socks out of their handspun yarn too – a recipe for figuring out how to make socks with a bit of trial and not too much error.
Quote from the start of the pattern:

So you got a lovely batt and spun it up. Maybe you got two or three. You have this pile of lovely yarn and it really wants to be something awesome, but … what does it want to be?
Perhaps what it wants to be is a pair of socks.
Well, sure, you say, but did I make “sock yarn”? What if my yarn is thicker than the usual stuff you get for socks? What if I’m not sure I have enough for socks? Will I run out partway through the second sock? How do I know how many stitches to cast on when I’m using non-standard yarn?
Fear not, brave knitter, Frazzlehead’s Handspun Sock Recipe addresses all these problems.

It’s free. It’s here. Help yourself! :)

Diablo’s Ribbons

Almost a year ago, I was asked if I would take a prize-winning alpaca fleece, clean it, prepare it for spinning, spin it into yarn, and knit a shawl in time for a competition this fall.

It started out like this:

Well, actually that’s after washing and drying and sorting, and it’s a lot of fleece. That bucket is squished full, as is the tall bag beside it. Gorgeous stuff.

The fibre for the shawl was combed on big hand combs, then spun on spindles. That was my Tour de Fleece adventure:

I took the plied yarn with me on our recent holiday, thinking it was probably time to get a good start on the shawl. While we were away, I got an email letting me know the deadline for entries was about three weeks sooner than I’d anticipated!

I cast on. :)

It’s been a hard go getting this done – not because the pattern I chose was extremely difficult or anything (I had designed a custom pattern for this last winter, swatched and charted and everything, so I was ready to go) … but my brain seemed to refuse to grasp what we were doing and I had to really, really concentrate to get it right.

Yesterday, at long last, I was able to bind off.

I was not at all happy with the look of the finished shawl … it was just a gray blob. Very sad looking. However, I was pretty confident that the miracle of blocking would save the day and …

It worked.

The lace at the bottom edge is meant to look like the rosettes that the winning animals are given in the show:

The shawl is a semicircle, half a pi shawl:

The very beautiful animal who contributed his fleece is named Diablo, and he has won lots of ribbons (his fleece from this year took first at Olds, I saw it on the table and said “hey, I know him!”), and his People are very proud of him.

Diablo is from Tail Spin Alpacas, just west of St Albert … I met him when I was looking for a welder to repair one of our post pounders, and when I got out of the truck to deliver the broken metal to the nice man waiting for me in the driveway, I saw all these adorable alpaca and nearly forgot why I was there. I was invited to come spin at their alpaca show, and the rest is history.

So, Diablo, this one’s for you. Hope you like it.

Travel knitting

The Reluctant Farmer and I are heading out on a bit of a road trip tomorrow morning: we are going to visit his parents (yes, I actually like m in-laws a lot) and on our way back we plan to take a couple of extra nights to see some parts of the province we’ve not visited before.

Of course, this means I need to pack travel knitting.

I have the alpaca yarn I’ve spun, which needs to be transmogrified into a shawl by November, as well as the pattern I designed loaded onto my eReader for ready reference.

I have stitch markers, and my tapestry needles. I have scissors, interchangeable needles, and my DPNs.

I also have sock yarn (enough for 3 pair of socks – this might be ambitious, but I really don’t know for sure). I even took the big balls of sock yarn and wound them into two smaller balls, evenly divided, so I’d know I have this much yarn for each sock. I’m also taking this book along:

My friend gave this to me at Fibre Week a couple of years back and I’ve been meaning to try some “real patterned socks” ever since. Now seems like a good time!

I’m starting with Spey Valley, as almost all the sock yarn I have is self patterning in some fashion or other and I figured a fairly simple sock design was best. This sock has a really neat horizontal chain of stitches in a couple of spots up by the cuff, done in a rather ingenious fashion that is sort of like binding off without binding off. I love learning new tricks.

Progress so far (it was important to be sure it was a workable project before embarking on the journey):

Seems to be working with the patterning yarn so far. We’ll see how it is once we get a little further along!

Prism Polygon Shawl Pattern: now available

The pattern for the shawl I entered in the Mary Maxim contest is now available for purchase on Ravelry (or with buy now' target=_blank>this link, if you aren’t a Ravelry member).

The shawl was made out of Prism, from Mary Maxim, which is an acrylic yarn that actually isn’t yukky. It is a lightly twisted, much like Noro, with long colour repeats and bright shades that make it a great choice for your wool-or-natural-fibre-challenged friends and family.

Worked tip to tip, the stripes become vertical instead of horizontal, emphasizing height rather than width, and with the geometry involved they also go from wide bands of colour at the tips to narrow stripes at the centre back.

The border is easy to memorize and instructions are both charted and written. You can make any size from shawlette up to full body wrapping triangle, the pattern is modular, so grab a couple of skeins of yarn, pick up your needles and go for it!

Design Contest Update

I entered two pieces in the Mary Maxim design contest … a pink shawl and an autumn leaves afghan.

My mom called today to tell me that I got a letter (at her house): “Dear Contest Participant...” There were lots of great entries, but mine wasn’t in the top three in either of the categories I entered, so, no big prize money for me. Oh well!

The good news is that my parents both get lovely gifts – Dad gets the afghan to keep his chilly feet warm and Mom will look great in the shawl. Maybe this is regifting – they did give me the yarn! Ah well, they are happy and that makes me happy.

Dad says he’ll take some photos for me so that I can use them on the patterns when I publish them on Ravelry shortly. Stay tuned for details on how you can knit your own! :)

If it isn’t working, try something else

The online course that I created awhile back to teach people how to knit lace seemed like a great idea.

Until a student tried to register, and the whole thing went to pieces. It took multiple emails and several days to get things ironed out, and what I discovered is that the software I’d chosen to use wasn’t even ready for beta, not really.

So, if one strategy isn’t working, try something else.

I still had all the material, so today I’ve published Demystifying Lace Knitting: the basics as an eBook.

It’s essentially a step by step guided workbook that will take you through the very basics of lace knitting: making holes in your knitting on purpose, using decreases to balance your work, and a quick look at chart reading. You’ll knit a swatch and practice all the necessary stitches, then have a guided knit-along of the Dash of Colour shawl.

The pattern is included in the price of the course, so if you’ve always wanted to try lace knitting but been scared to try, maybe now’s the time to give it a go!

Ready to go in the mail

Here it is, the Autumn Afghan:

The contest entry labels are on the afghan and the shawl, the projects are neatly folded in a box with the appropriate postage, thanks to Canada Post’s Ship-in-a-Click service. It’ll go in the mail tomorrow when I head into town.

Wish me luck!

Success!

The afghan is done! I will be blocking it today and hopefully have pictures for you soon.

Speaking of pictures … I inadvertently deleted several of the photogallery albums that host the pictures I use here on the blog. I’ve repaired the images for most of the recent blog posts, but if you go back in time you may find empty picture frames.

I’m attempting a restore, but no guarantees.

New pictures will be backed up better!

Almost done

The leaves are done. The plain border is done. All that remains is the very outer garter stitch edging.

One stitch at a time

One stitch at a time, a ball of string becomes fabric.
One stitch at a time, a piece of fabric turns into a recognizable shape.
One stitch at a time, a project is completed.

Still, an afghan requires a lot of stitches.

Ta da!

Design Competition: progress

The afghan for the Mary Maxim design competition has been hibernating for a while – I set it aside to finish up my brother-in-law’s lap blanket, and then when I went back to competition knitting, the shawl was calling to me, so I’ve been working on that recently.
After more false starts than I can count, I finally settled on something that works: an integral i-cord edge at the top, and a very simple lace border (much like the one used on Hearts Ease) at the bottom. I’m just about at the halfway point, and I am definitely looking forward to the decreases .. it seems to go so much faster when the triangle is getting smaller.
As always, it’ll look much better after blocking, but here’s a sneak preview:

The Prism yarn is working out really well – I see that it’s listed on the Mary Maxim site now … in fact, it’s on sale!