Tweaks to the blog

A few minor changes made today …
There are now a variety of options for following the blog:

• you can have new posts emailed to you (Follow by Email, in the green sidebar on the right)
• you can join with Google Friend Connect (also in the green sidebar on the right)
• or look for the RSS feed icon (an orange square with curving white lines radiating from lower left corner) to add the feed to your reader (in Google Chrome browser, this is at the far right of the address bar up top)

I’ve also removed the CAPTCHA verification on comments, so hopefully it’ll be a bit easier to leave your thoughts here – I am still keeping comment verification in place, because spam happens and none of us want to be bothered with that nonsense (in fact, I just had to delete one), but I usually put comments through within a day or so of you posting them.

And, below the posts there are now buttons to click, like on Ravelry, to indicate your reaction to the post! I’m excited to see how those work … they look cool, anyway. There's also one-click buttons to email the post to someone, to share it on Facebook or Twitter or your own blog.

So go ahead – tell me what you think!

Embrace the Frog

When knitters have to undo some of the work they’ve done, it’s called “frogging” – you ribbit ribbit rip it out.

Frogging is an inherent part of design work, unless you have an awful lot of yarn … and probably even then. How will you know if that border looks as good in yarn as it does in your imagination? You have to knit it to find out.  What happens if I do a few rows in stockinette here? Well, knit them and see. If they don’t look right, you can always take them back out. This is one of the wonderful things about knitting: you get your raw materials back. But you do have to be open to the idea that frogging might be necessary, and you have to be willing to yank the needles out and pull back all those stitches if the situation calls for it. You have to be willing to embrace the frog.

Today I found out that an asymmetrical border is a bad idea for a shawl that will have a centre back spine. Of course I knew ahead of time it might be an issue, but until I saw it, I didn’t know just how much of an issue. Turns out, it just didn’t look right. So I’ve started over again, with an integrated border rather than one worked sideways. That’s a couple of days’ worth of knitting that I just pulled out, but the yarn is none the worse for wear (being a lovely silk merino blend), and the beads were all safely captured and put back in the box, and in the process I learned that the border I had designed is really awesome, just not for this project.

So, now I’m trying something else that is completely different – I made it up entirely in my head and was pretty sure I’d end up with some kind of scalloped effect but not positive how it would look. It’s only a centimetre or so long right now, but it is indeed scalloping and I think I like it. I may decide that I like it so much the border becomes the body of the shawl and the whole thing gets worked in this pattern. I haven’t quite made up my mind.

I’ll just knit a bit more and see how it looks. I can always frog it if it doesn’t work out … but I have a good feeling about this one.

Halfway there

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported the launch of Just Keep Knitting!

As of today, less than two weeks from the date printed copies became available for purchase,
more than half of the books in the initial print run for Just Keep Knitting have been sold.

This means that the initial up-front investment is well on the way to being recouped, which is a wonderful thing: independent publishing provides the author with complete control over the project, but it also means that financing said project is up to the author as well!

The majority of these sales have been to people I know – either in person or virtually – and I want to thank every one of you for making the launch of the book such a huge success.

If books continue to sell over the next couple of months (i.e. after all the people I know have their copy :D) then I will consider a second printing: I’ll be putting some thought into how I can realistically assess the demand for the book in the next week or two.

Thank you again for welcoming my words into your world.

Paint the sky with stars

My friend Scott Henderson does some amazing photography. In particular, he has some neat tricks for photographing the night sky and his images of the stars scattered across the canvas of the sky must have settled into my brain, because I woke up one night with a new shawl design forming … a black lace ruana with crystal beads scattered across it like stars in the night sky.

What I’m knitting isn’t anywhere near as majestic and amazing as that, but I am hopeful that when it is done, one will at least be able to recognize where the idea might have come from.

At this stage of the game, all it looks like is this:

If you’ve never knit lace, it’s important to realize that lace in progress looks awful. It just kind of munches together and looks like a ratty pile of string, but when it is washed and blocked, it undergoes an amazing transformation. For the purposes of work in progress photography, I pinned this to the tablecloth, which is enough to give you a bit of an idea, but not much more than that. Can you see the crystal beads in there? There are a few of them, but they’re not very visible in the picture. This little piece is half of the bottom border of the shawl: each repeat takes me about 45 minutes, and I have 3 more to go to finish this side. When they are done, I’ll cast off the edge then turn the work sideways and pick up stitches along the straight edge of the border and work up the back of the shawl. When it reaches the neck, it’ll be split into two halves – like a big rectangle divided in half up the front, so you can put it over your shoulders and have it hang there properly. I will write this pattern up so it can be knit as a stole (basically half the ruana) or as the full shawl since not everyone has the stamina for quite that much lace, especially with beading thrown in the mix.

This is such tiny yarn (Zephyr, merino/silk and 10 metres weighs only a gram) that I can’t knit on this for very long at a stretch without my eyes going a bit buggy, but it’ll get done a little at a time, as all knitting does.

What’s your favourite lace inspiration?

Works in progress

I have (as always) a few projects on the go.

The angora hat is inn time out, as it was bugging me and I may change the way it is implemented. I frogged it part way, and I’m letting it sit while I contemplate frogging it the rest of the way and starting over with something a little different.

I woke up at 5 am again with the beginnings of a shawl design in my head, and while that percolates in my mind I am working on some simple, straightforward knitting.

Lateral Thinking is a side to side sweater, done ‘recipe style’, like most of the things I unvent (to use Elizabeth Zimmerman’s term – I can’t possibly be inventing anything … knitting’s been around too long and surely someone else has done this before). This is the prototype, and so far I’m happy with how it is turning out. The linen stitch really shows off the variegated yarn (which is just a plain old acrylic/wool blend from Patons, nothing special but it will hold up well to washing and wearing) and because of the side to side construction, the stripes go up and down the body of the sweater, rather than round and round, which is a good thing if, like me, your circumference is a bit larger than might be considered optimal.

It doesn’t look like much sitting in an unformed lump on the chair, but you can see the sleeve, at least.

I have another project underway, but it’s top secret. :) It’s in several shades of blue, and that’s all I’m gonna say about it for now.

There’s also a pair of socks, of course, for knitting when I go places and need a small project to take along, and I had started some colourwork mittens, but I see several people have had issues with the pattern I was using. My new Elizabeth Zimmerman Knitter’s Almanac (which the Reluctant Farmer got for me just because he knew I wanted it) has a pattern for some lovely colourwork mittens, so when I feel ready I’ll probably frog what I have and try her pattern instead.

I’m sure there are other things here on the needles … there’s definitely more brewing in my head, anyway. Two shawls are slowly forming, and there’s a third that keeps popping up for consideration then fading back into the distance while I contemplate how, exactly, to get the shaping I see in my mind to work with needles and yarn. It’ll come to me eventually.

In the meantime, I will just keep knitting. :)

New book about supported spindle spinning

With the most creative marketing blurbage I’ve ever seen! (There are testimonials from Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Shakespeare and Einstein.)

And because it comes with videos, it’s too big to be a conventional eBook … so it ships on a USB key! Is that not cool?

Even if you aren’t interested in spindle spinning, check it out, just for the sheer entertainment value: Fleegle Spins Supported

More spinning

Apparently I was in a spinning mood.

I found some black curly long staple wool that someone gave me ... don't remember what it was, but it was lovely. Combed and carded that, blended in some red soy silk (I think it’s soy silk, might be one of the other similar things, but it’s bright red and very shiny) and spun that up into a fairly thick single (well, ‘fairly thick’ for the CPW).

Then I spun up another bobbin of black suri alpaca/cashmere that my sister and brother in law gave me for my birthday and plyed them together.

Voila, yarn.

What does it wanna be? 200 g total, fairly loosely spun and plied.