November 2009 Archives

Little things make me thankful

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After weeks of mostly rain, we have a gorgeous sunshiney day, two antsy dogs and a tank full of gas. We're off to the ocean (can't say "beach" or the dogs will go crazy pants.) Before I go, I wanted to give you a sneak peek of my most recent finished object. I'll have better pictures in the near future, over in ravelry.

SimpleThingswithPups

This project is Mary-Heather Cogar's Simple Things Shawlette. It was exactly what I needed to work on while I wait for yarn to arrive for my next deadline project. I followed the pattern, almost to the letter, except that I omitted one repeat of the garter ridge. I used this bind off to get a good loose edge and it worked a charm.

As a side note, for no real reason whatsoever, except that I have a slightly geeky side, I created a little spreadsheet that can be used to plan out yardage for any triangular shawl that increases 4 sts every other row. You would have to expand the number of rows for longer shawls (like my La Cumparsita) or delete rows for shorter shawls.

Why would you use this? Well, let's say the pattern called for 400 yards of yarn and you have 350. You could use this to determine approximately how many rows you could actually work, without running out of yarn mid-row. Alternately, you might simply like to know when you are actually at the halfway point, or how far through the project you've gotten. Anyway, if you want to play around with it, you can download the file here.

Note: this does not have any information about the shawlette or any other pattern in it, it's simply a tool for calculating stitch counts and yardage in triangular shawl pattern. I am offering this for free for your own use, personal or commercial, but I cannot offer you technical support for this file. It is yours to play with but you will need to understand excel or open office to edit it and I cannot train you to use those programs. If you wish to modify it to be more functional, I would love it if you'd share it with others, and pass along your expertise.

Successful Lace Knitting

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Almost three years ago, if I have the time line correct, Donna Druchunas asked me if I'd be interested in submitting a design for a book she was working on. She had a variety of lace stitches we could choose from and our pieces had to feature at least one of those stitch patterns.

Donna just released a couple of the pictures from the book, Successful Lace Knitting: Bringing Dorothy Reade's Patterns and Techniques to Today's Knitters, and, lookie, mine is one of the ones she's previewing.


Photos by Brent Kane, copyright Martingale & Company

You can see the other pieces she's previewing here.

I'm knee-deep in deadline knitting. I like to think that means I'm embracing my alter ego:

The Knitter
The Knitter

The upside is, I think I make a decent super villain. The downside is, I won't have much to blog until the end of the holiday season.

I'll try to slip you a few pup posts in the interim, you know. like this, where I send my dog out into hail.

The Manzanita Collection

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The Manzanita Collection

Did you know that Ravelry now supports ebooks? As a designer, I think this is fantastic. In celebration of this nifty new tool and because, much to my chagrin, it's creeping up on that holiday season thingy, I've decided to offer my first official ebook.* You can now purchase Jamison Square, Astoria and La Cumparsita together for almost $7 off the price of buying them individually.

To purchase the collection, you can go here.

And, for sure, I don't want to punish those of you who have already purchased one or all of these patterns. If you are interested in the collection discount and have purchased any or all of the patterns, write me with the subject line: "Manzanita Collection" and include your receipt(s). I will invoice you for the cost difference or refund you the $6.99, if you've purchased all three before Friday November 6th.

As always, thanks to every one of you who supports me and/or other independent designers. I think that's downright awesome.

*Technically, Alsace has been functioning as a sort of ebook, but there's no need to split hairs.

A few things that are making me happy

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Leo and I managed to throw together passable Halloween costumes without any planning, thanks to some inventive closet diving.

IMG_0005
A demon and Maryann from Gilligan's Island, or possibly Dorothy pre-ruby slipper

Ravelry is featuring Jamison Square on their pattern page


I squeed when I saw this.

While we didn't win a cover spot, you can see see Thea at about 1:12 in this video.

And the whole darn video is full of smiley goodness.

And lastly, artichokes.

Artichokes with Pesto Dip
I love artichokes. Click image for recipe

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