Category Archives: my knitting patterns

knitterly

It’s been unseasonably cool this last week. I wore my new cowl, made a giant pot of chicken soup with lots of greens and garlic leaves from the garden and made angel baby a new bonnet.  I was cranky about the lack of muffin-like things in our current diet, until I found this recipe for Morning Glory Muffins and was somewhat appeased.

I’m working on the cowl pattern now.  I don’t like it when I design things that I then have to model.  It’s awkward.  Perhaps I should stick to writing children’s patterns?

I haven’t been doing much reading, just listlessly paging through random books from time to time, preferably the kind with pictures.

Oh, and I don’t think I ever posted a full length picture of Mairi Rose’s birthday dress, so there is one above.

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baby things, Food, Kids, Life, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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8 things I’m kind of obsessed with

Deep winter is finally upon us and that fire cider has been coming in handy.

One my mind and in my kitchen….

Grapefruit.  We’ve been peeling them like oranges and eating the meat out from between the segments.  It’s messier than slicing them in half and daintily eating with a fork, but far more satisfying.

The perfect teapot.  Having given up hope that I’ll ever come across a giant pottery one like they use to serve tea in the servants hall on Downton Abbey, I think this, in white, may be my more realistic dream teapot.  The one that I use now, which has been without a lid for the past 4 years, is by this same company.  I love, love, love the infuser basket.  And this one is shaped like an acorn. Cute!

 Simplifying.  I know I talk about it all the time, but I’m stepping things up a notch.  I just sent five bags of books packing and I’ve only just begun.

The Concept of a Capsule Wardrobe.  And more specifically, a mostly home-made capsule wardrobe.  This of course ties in with the topic above.  On a ten piece wardrobe.

These Books.  Give me a fantasy adventure geared at teenagers and apparently I’m good to go.  Oh, but I’m almost done!  Suggestions for future reading?

Color.  That’s right, the Queen of Neutrals is all about the color at the moment.

Knitting.  Shocking, right?  But perhaps even more so than usual (I don’t really know how that’s possible either).  After a long hiatus, I’m back to designing and will hopefully have a couple new patterns for you in the very near future!

Tiramisu.  As in trying to figure out a way to make it with safe-to-me ingredients for my birthday next week, quite the challenge!

What’s interesting you these days?

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Food, Life, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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magpies, homebodies and nomads

Full title- Magpies, Homebodies and Nomads: A Modern Knitter’s Guide to Discovering and Exploring Style.  I just finished a gardening book, so it seemed like time for a knitting book and this one sounded just right.  I like knitting books that include advice, stories and design ideas.  That sweater on the cover is now on my must knit list.  I’m seriously coveting it.  Now if only the yarn for it would just magically appear in my work basket.  I want to make the Loro Vest as well.  Though I have trouble with vests and skirts.  I like them both, but I never know what to pair them with, so rarely wear them.  I think if I just did it in a nice gray, like the sample, I could pretty much wear it over anything.

I’m currently finishing up some knits for Elijah’s upcoming birthday.  I’m very nearly done them.  When he is around I’m back at my current obsession which is to knit every single adorable baby-toddler pattern before she outgrows them.  With my specific current project being a tiny lace sunsuit.

I’ve been meaning to update my Ravelry pages for a while now.  There are a lot of holes there.  It seems unlikely that I’m manged to post about all of my past projects that I’ve missed when I can’t even keep up with posting about my current ones.  But when I spotted Elijah in the scarf I designed for him almost two birthdays ago (!) now, I asked if he minded if I took a few pictures.  I should really write up this pattern.  It’s a fun one.  I didn’t have any interesting buttons that fit, so I took the burning tool to a couple of plain wood ones and just did some free form scoring.

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Books, crafts, Kids, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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color block cuddlesome

“The book begins collecting your memories.  And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it.  It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it….yes, books are like flypaper- memories cling to the printed page better then anything else.” ~ Cornelia Funke, Inkheart 

I’m reading Inkspell, the squeal to Inkheart just now, and why not?  It’s somewhat embarrassing just how often I read children’s books for pleasure.  If the quote above is true then this series will forevermore smell of snickerdoodles and woodsmoke and evergreen boughs.  It will conjure images of candlelight and Christmas light, of long, long sleepless nights under the deep dark sky, sharp, spicy ginger tea, snow on snow on snow, with The Nutcracker and harp music for a soundtrack.

It’s the Seraphina show!  All Seraphina, all the time.  Sorry about that!  This is the very first thing I started knitting for her, before I could even prove that she existed.  Knitting for a baby that you don’t know for sure is coming is probably foolish enough, buying yarn for that purpose seemed even sillier still, besides, I wanted to start right away.  So, odds and ends, leftovers from here and there were put to use.  I started it way back when, but put it aside in favor of things that were more size and season appropriate.  I recently did the last bit of finish work.  I wanted to see how less buttons would go, so I only sewed every other one.  Not a good solution as it turns out.  Her foot keeps poking out between them.

I’ve been doing far more sewing then knitting this week.  My mind has been drifting and I find myself fantasizing about post holiday knitting.

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baby things, Books, Kids, Life, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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bundled

I’m currently reading The Bodies of Mothers: A Beautiful Body Project.  It is stunning, transformative, powerful and true…sags, bags, stretch marks, leaking milk and all.  There are essays and snippets of poetry, but most of the appeal lies in the stunning photographs.

As that is a big coffee table style book, not suitable for, say, laying and nursing, I am also reading Soul Gardening, which is a journal for Catholic mothers.  I am not Catholic, but I am a mother, a mother who is open to inspiration and encouragement from all sources.  This issue in particular contained so much goodness that I’m actually reading it through for a second time.

I don’t believe I ever officially posted about the blanket I made Seraphina while I was pregnant, though pictures of it showed up all the time when she was tiny.  I still love and use it.  As the weather gets colder she is wrapped in it more and more often, but I designed it to be the perfect sort of blanket for wrapping a newborn and this darling girl of mine is not getting any smaller.  And so I find myself knitting another blanket, in creamy snow white, this one a toddler sized blanket that she can grow into.  I don’t yet know if it’s to be a Christmas present or a birthday present.  It makes more sense to give a blanket at the beginning of winter rather then the beginning of spring!  But I don’t want to rush it just to finish in time.  I’m currently working on the simple garter center panel, making it just right for times when I want to be knitting, without paying the slightest bit of attention to my knitting.

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baby things, Books, Kids, my knitting patterns, WIP, Yarn Crafts
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wee autumn wardrobe, part 4

I picked up Sherlock Holmes again, and am back to knitting Iain’s sweater along with other bits and pieces throughout the day.

The final dress!  This one is clearly a picnic dress.  It even has sleeves like a gingham tablecloth and cherries for tea.  I did a plain hem for the sleeves on it and I’m glad I did because all of the long-sleeved dresses are already getting too small and unlike the other ones there is no elastic to get tight higher up on her arm.

The sweater is MOMO in a green tea colored cotton yarn from Knitpicks. Both hats are older projects.  Details for the Apple Green Pilot Cap can be found here and the Newborn Blackberry Beret here.  The beret fit her as a newborn, but looked completely ridiculous on her wee little head!  Thankfully it still fits.  Now that it’s more proportionate, I think it’s quite charming.
Frontier Dreams KCCO

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baby things, Kids, my knitting patterns, sewing, WIP, Yarn Crafts
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cornmeal cuddlesome

Pattern: Cuddlesome

Yarn: Swish DK, color- ‘Cornmeal’

She is around a week old in the first set of pictures and 7 weeks in the second.  What a difference just a bit of time makes!  This is the knitting project I was working on when I went into labor.  I had nothing but one wee mitt left and delusions of it being her first outfit.  The yarn is superwash after all (a very odd choice for me!), so if I finished by a certain point, there would still be time to wash it and have it ready to clothe a new babe.  At some point I made the choice to stop working on it.  I knew I was being ridiculous.  I often am.  I’m sensible enough to recognize when I’m being ridiculous, but not quite sensible enough to stop myself from being so in the first place.  I could have continued to knit.  I was still capable of it, but I chose to let go.  Other things were more important at the time.  Nothingness mostly, allowing myself to be totally lost in time and space.

When I did pick it back up again, a couple of days later, I found a tiny hole in that wee mitt.  I suspect I had been in the middle of a stitch when a contraction came on and after holding it in my lap as I breathed my way through, I must have picked it back up and knit the same stitch again without realizing I had failed to slip the last stitch off the needle.  I recognize that particular flaw from the children’s knitting when they were first learning.  They would get distracted halfway through and suddenly a perfect little hole, accompanied by an extra stitch would appear in their work.  I couldn’t figure out how they were doing it at first, until finally I caught one of them in the act and suddenly it all made sense.  I needed only to back track 30 stitches or so to fix it.  It really was no bother at all, but somehow, in my soupy, sappy, postpartum state, I couldn’t bring myself to do that; to take away that little hint of a memory, evidence of such a monumental place and time.  Even though it had absolutely no significance to anyone else, and I’d be sure to remember it just the same.  So the hole remained.  I sewed it up from the inside, you can feel a little bump where the flaw exists.  In those early days I often rubbed it while holding her hand, in something that can only be described as awe.

She is sleeping in this as I type and I know she’ll only get another wear or two out of it, she so very tall already and growing by the day.  I’ll be sad to pack this one away.  It’s somehow like boxing up her newness.

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baby things, Kids, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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Cuddlesome

An old project that I never got around to sharing.  I started working on this design for a baby sleep sack quite a while ago.  But it ended up kind of falling by the wayside.  This one was a new baby gift for a friend.  I tried to match the yarn to the color scheme she was drawn to.

 My friend was kind enough to send me some pictures of her sweet girl in it.  It’s obviously still a bit big in these photos.  This little munchkin is quite a big girl now, running around and all that good stuff, but I’m told that she wore it for quite a long while.  And that he big brother even requested one of his own.  Lately I’ve been inspired to pick this pattern back up again, for obvious reasons.

About the name- I was stumped regarding what to call the pattern.  I announced a family wide competition to come up with the best name.  Iain inadvertently won, not with the names he offered up, but by repeatedly referring to a little one we were visiting as cuddlesome.

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baby things, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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My Everest

dancing in the street

Never in my life have I been so glad to get a project off my needles and out of my hair.  Never have I had a project feel like it was just dragging on and on like this one.

This was supposed to be Iain’s birthday sweater for last year, when I came up with this sweet, sentimental idea that for their 13th birthdays my children should be allowed to design their own sweaters.  We had a couple of design meetings where it was determined that he wanted a solid bright green, zip front vest with pockets that buttoned closed, made from a worsted weight yarn.  I dog-eared my stitch dictionary marking off patterns that appealed to him.  At some point in the process he decided that he would like for it to be at least partially a surprise (it’s also entirely possible that he just wanted me to stop asking him so many darn questions and that he was just too polite to say so!) and so he left the details up to me.    Wanting to please him, I may have gone a little bit overboard, trying to use as many different stitch patterns as I could.  This boy is all about the texture.  He likes cables and bobbles and things of that sort.  I think I ended up using 10 different stitch patterns in all, switching patterns as often as seven times a row.

As I said at the start this was supposed to be his birthday sweater for last year.  But that was the winter I got really sick and stopped knitting at all.  When I finally picked up my needles again, I couldn’t face anything but the simplest, most mindless type of knitting.  I just didn’t have anything more in me at the time.  And so this sat…and sat.  Other priorities came and went, but as his birthday approached this year, I knew it was time to do something.  I seriously considered ripping back and starting over, possibly with a simple, quick and easy, already written vest pattern.  But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Of course the sizing and the amount of yarn were really a year off.  I was able to add length, but not width, which made it a little awkward.  I did in fact, run out of yarn and had to finish the edging with a different color.  And then in my fervor to really show off the stitch definition I over blocked it, especially at the neckline.  Looking back, there are several things I would have done differently.  But it was completed in time for his birthday this year.  That first picture was taken as it lay blocking in the middle of the night before.  Maybe not as nice as it could be, but at least I kept my promise, made when no sweater appeared on his birthday table last year, and he seems content.

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Kids, Life, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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Weekend in Maine pattern release

The Weekend in Maine caplet pattern is now available in both my Craftsy pattern store and my Ravelry shop.  This post was also supposed to announce the grand opening of my new Etsy shop as well, but there is some sort of technical snafu on their side of things, so it will just have to wait until that gets worked out.

Also coming soon: a French translation, so exciting!  I’ll keep you posted on that as well.

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Kids, my knitting patterns, Yarn Crafts
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