my new toy...

you know how amazon.com gives you free shipping on books if you go over a certain amount? i was ordering some books for my daughter and came up just short. so naturally i needed to buy the barbara walker treasury, seen above. i pored through it, and after my recent experience with päivi's  22 leaves KAL, i wanted to just experiment a little. i found a little lace design, printed out some graph paper and got to work! well, hardly work. but some fun thinking and calculating and figuring.

i thought i'd try a square and just repeat a simple pattern out to make a lace kerchief, in effect. it's really fun, and i can't wait to finish this one so i can start another! i'm using some autumn colorway sock yarn from joann's called sensations bamboo & ewe pattern, a wool/bamboo/nylon blend. the colorway does not allow for much view of the lace, but it's inexpensive and easy to work with. i think i might use a plainer yarn for my next experiment, but it looks very fall-like, and i like it.  if i figure out how to write an elegant chart that someone besides me, myself, and i can understand, i'll write up the pattern and post it on ravelry.  it's just the repeats and exceptions that i don't know how to express on a chart.  but that will be fun to figure out, too!

finally, i have one last picture of my official french market bag in use -- it's so pretty, so handy, and i can't wait to do another. it's one of my favorite patterns ever.

as always, if you click on a picture, it will pop up much bigger.

water bomb slouchy hat

a new free pattern for you!  seamless, cotton, quick, and you get to learn a new technique -- the tubular cast-on!  or maybe you already know the tubular cast-on, in which case i'll bet you can finish this simple hat in a few hours.  i completed it quite quickly, and i am a slow knitter.

the tubular cast-on gives you a nice edge, and the perfect place to hide some elastic thread.  threading some elastic through the cast-on edge makes the cotton ribbing snap back into place and remain snug on your head.

the lace is both charted and written out, and there are links to the lace-charting website and the youtube video from which i learned the cast-on.

enjoy!  happy knitting!

ravlink

new links! ------------------------------->

i have figured out how to make my simple free patterns available to non-ravelry users. the links to the right go to scribd, a publishing hosting site. there you can download my pdf's.

happy knitting!

simple arithmetic?

+

+

+

 =

hours of scarf planning fun!

maybe no product, but so fun to think about ;-)

1.  madelinetosh prairie, color wren

2.  elsie knitted border

3.  english inset

4.  graph paper ;-)

brrrrrrr!

chilly morning for us!
it was down in the 30's overnight...  it's april!  we're supposed to be sleeping with the windows open by now ;-)

good thing we all have hand-knit warmies to keep us cozy!

ETA:  it's chillier at 9 am than it was at 8!  i'm wearing BOTH of my original hand-knits -- the yertle AND the cozy moeby.  the house is now warmed up to 62°.

a sparkly notion

i have this really pretty black sock weight yarn.  it's spun from merino wool, silk, and (imagine!) sterling silver.  i intended to use it to make myself some opera-length, black fingerless gloves with a lace panel from elbow to knuckle.  they were going to be really pretty -- a way to both bring back gloves AND show off a manicure.

however.

i got sidetracked, and decided i needed a simple wrap to wear to an up-coming event.  and that yarn was beckoning.  i've been inspired by the look of the citron wrap everyone's making, particularly the ruching divided by some structure.  i wanted something lacy, but not too; structured, but not too; easy, but not too.  i experimented with 4 different simple laces and decided upon the 2 i'm using.*  the really fun part of this wrap is that the structure comes from columns of tunisian crochet worked every 16 rows.  it was actually pure laziness that led me to this.  i did not want to perform the calculations necessary to reduce the gauge, and even if i just grabbed a smaller needle and started knitting, i did not want to knit a million little stitches and 50-11 little rows.  hence, tunisian-supplied gathers.

this is a tricky fabric to capture with a camera in daylight.  but here you can kind of see the sterling silver sparkles.  they look like dust.  (click for biggie-smallness)

i am not naturally drawn toward sparkles/glitter/sequins/look-at-me stuff.  but this is very subtle, very restrained, very take-a-second-look-if-you'd-like-but-no-pressure.  i am nervous about not liking it once it's done.  but it's been a really fun experiment, combining the techniques of knitting and tunisian.

wouldn't those fingerless gloves look great with this?

_________

*why 2 different laces?  i wanted the edges to be bigger and rufflier than the middle panels, which i wanted to have as straight lines to complement the really square nature of the tunisian stitches.  moderate method to the madness.

or maybe i got bored...