more No Sheep yummies

Can you tell I'm having fun? Whee!

First, regarding Amazon and their strangeness, Interweave is looking into it. As soon as they have an answer, I'll share it here. We're sorry they're stressing you out!

Now. More fun!

Karin Maag-Tanchak, one of my new favorite designers, designed the Berthe scarf for No Sheep -- it's her answer [and a brilliant one, if you ask me] to the "what do I do with this one skein of something delicious if I don't want a rectangle?" The version in the book is very different than her original, which she [giggle] knitted in wool. Here's what it looked like:


Isn't that delectable? The one in the book is a little more freeform and textury, and the finished result all depends on the yarn you use and how tightly you knit it. You can get anything from ruffly to perfectly elegantly flat, like the prototype. The pattern lets you be creative. I can't wait to see what you guys do with this one. I think they're going to look like fingerprints...no two will be the same!

Another treat you'll get to see [soon, I hope!] is the sexy 100% hemp Manly Maze sweater, designed by Celeste Culpepper [yup, the Maze beanie is hers, too -- she cleverly designed the beanie as a swatch for the sweater, so she could try out different color combinations before she knit the final sweater.

A sexy man sweater? You bet. Look at this:


Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. That's Franklin, modelling the real thing. I had no idea when I taped my episode of Knitty Gritty last fall that Mr Franklin would be on set, but he was! And he couldn't wait to try this sweater on when I pulled it out of the box. I snapped this grainy picture quickly, but you can see how well it suits him. Poifect.

Okay, enough of this. Back to making y'all some spring Knitty!

I finally get to show.

That thing about BGK2 and waiting a year till you can see it? We've already waited a year for No Sheep...remember this time last year when I would hint about my Tuscany shawl but couldn't blog it? [A year to the day, actually. Freaky.]

I can blog it now!



[thanks to Interweave for these pics from the book - photography (c) Interweave Press LLC]

That's my baby. I'm quite proud of it. I've never designed anything this nice, and may never be able to do it again.

This shawl was designed to be an easy first-lace-shawl knit for those intimidated by lace knitting. The WS is about 98% purl so you get a nice mental break every 2nd row. The front is designed to be as intuitive a pattern as possible, so you can toss the chart aside after a few repeats. Jen kindly volunteered to test knit a sample. Blog yours now, Jen! [She's been holding it back for almost a year, too!]

Want to see more pics of the projects in No Sheep? Check out the Amazon page for the book. There are some nice pics in the gallery -- some from me and a few from a nice reader in Indiana.

And feel free to write a review there. There's just one lonely opinion and I'd love to hear what everyone thinks! Oh, and there's a Knitalong, too. I was silly and made some buttons with the button artwork that Franklin did. I <3 Franklin.

Where have I been?

Hint:


What was I doing there?

[that's Rikki, uber-makeup artist and killer new knitter along with our 4th model, Melissa [too pretty for words. we hate her, in the good way.]

Who was in town for the occasion?


Who couldn't be any cooler if she tried?


[we just finished the last photoshoot day for BGK2. it went very well and you'll just have to wait to see the results...about a year. seriously.]

Queensland Cotolino, a love poem

on the needles now, the Cables and Os cardigan from No Sheep For You.
Yarn: Queensland Cotolino [60% cotton, 40% linen], color 17

you do not yield easily,
yet you are not as inflexible as your pure sister, linen.
you acquiesce to the needle with a minimum of coaxing.
my twisted rib is happy.

[i will not quit my day job, promise].

---

p.s. No Sheep is in stock at Amazon. Let the plotzing commence!

this instead

Already on the needles, this sweater in exactly the same color as in the book.

I don't feel guilty in the slightest for not choosing another color. I picked the sweater to be in the book. And in this case, this one is just my taste. [Not everything in every book I work on or magazine issue I publish is my taste, or else no one would care for my work very much, I think. But this pink cably, lacy cardigan is just exactly what I hope to be wearing on cool spring nights. Clearly, I'm a delusional optimistic, but it's what I need to keep motivated.]

The yarn was sitting here after a quick delivery from Elann, so I swatched. Twice. Uncharacteristically for me, I had to go up one needle size to get gauge, but then I got it right on. I'm on row two of this big-ass project [it's back and fronts knit all at once, so it'll be slow going for a while] and I'm very fond of the yarn. It's well-behaved stuff, but not hard on the fingers. Looks really pretty in the twisted rib the designer called for.

Okay, back to BGK2 work, Knitty spring [it's coming, you know! Watch for it in March] and other stuff.

happy pig year!

[can anyone tell me exactly what this banner says? the lady at the store gave me a rough idea, but i'd love a real translation] we're back from the madhouse which is Bright Pearl on new year's day in Chinatown. p.s. yes, i'm feeling better. thanks for all the get-well wishes!

---

Thanks to May for this translation: The saying in the banner means "Everything goes as you hope". More literally meaning "ten thousand events goes pleasingly." Cool. Just perfect.

---

new year, new sweater, right? well, i'll do my best to oblige. the pictures are horrible, so apologies in advance.


with my arm stretched out, it shows the raglan shaping.


here. on my bed. flat. ooh! waist shaping!


the only clear shot of the bunch. see how nice the fabric is after washing/drying?

summary: this sweater came from a rough pattern created by sweater wizard, a lot of trial and error and a wee bit of guessing. i didn't want to think too hard, so i went by eye, and kind of forgot the vertical shrinkage issue. despite this, the body length is just fine and the sleeves are a little shorter than i'd planned, but still very wearable.

this was a knit-to-zone-out sweater and it did the trick. it's also the first sweater i've finished in a very, very long time. and the reason i was able to finish it is that i turned off all expecations of perfection and creating a sharable pattern [sorry, guys -- my notes are horrific] and just knit the damned thing. it's comfy on the body, flattering enough and will help me break out of the knitting wraps only phase. i now want to knit another sweater, but I think maybe a Bombshell might be the ticket - something skillfully written and crafted to flatter, rather than the product of a generic computer program abandoned when it stopped making sense.

[yarn: suss twisted, which i love knit up. it knit irregularly because of the thick/thin nature of the two strands, but when washed and dried in the machine, it turns into the softest, most even fabric. it does take a little attention to finger-feel to notice if you're knitting both strands or have caught only one, but nothing a little crochet hook can't fix a few rows on in simple stockinettte. i'd definitely use this yarn again.]

blog tool as entry

via this neat toy

seriously wiped. caffeine isn't even helping.

true love

valentine's day may be tomorrow, but you know it's love when your sweetheart brings you this when you tell him you're sick and you could use some tea.

i don't know why apricot tea is my drink of choice when i'm sick, but it is and has been as long as i can remember. it's soothing and i only want it when i feel like this.

one other thing i've been doing since coming back from the big big boat is to peek at where it is most every day. the cruise line shares the feed from the bridge web cam on the net, and i take full advantage. ahh, it's sunny in grand cayman today. i can almost feel it.

better together!

You know when you look at a book on Amazon.com...and they try to sell you another to go with it? How do they pick what goes with what?

For example, look what I found when I was checking the No Sheep page today [I do that obsessively now, because stock should arrive any day and I'm dying to see when it will actually ship]:



Look, Steph, we're supposedly better together. Perhaps that means that the nakedness of my cover model is well balanced by your own fully clothed self. Perhaps it's because my non-wool book is a fitting counterpoint to the wool-centric writings of Ms Harlot. Perhaps it's a crapshoot marketing technique Amazon thinks sells more books [hint: bing bing bing! we have a winner!]

[Clearly I am working very hard to find reasons to post instead of doing my work. Bad, bad me.]

you only love me for my cupcakes.

i wasn't able to make it to LK last night. you know that feeling when you're looking forward to going out and then suddenly you realize you're not going anywhere cause you don't feel quite right? that was me.

so i hear today that the only reason i was missed was the lack of cupcakes. nice.

see if i show up tomorrow night at the Dick to knit with you Drunken Knitters, then. just see. with cupcakes. and the top-down raglan that's just now got a SUCCESSFUL neckband knit into it. so there!

[i think i'm getting this taunting thing wrong.]

p.s. people who love me only for my cupcakes are missing out on all my other charming virtues, the most significant one being that i will NEVER scoff your merino or cashmere when you're not looking. can you say that of all your other knitter friends? i think not.

eta: rachel has a point. bringing cupcakes to a bar seems a bit off. don't want to piss off the delightful Dick staff that so deeply love the Drunken Knitters by bringing in external food. cupcakes will have to wait till wednesday.

top-down raglan...light > tunnel

I've tried it on several times now. After ripping back first to the armholes to narrow them, I added waist shaping. 6 inches too low.

So I pinned, while it was on my body, to indicate where the waist should have been, took it off, ripped back to 12 rows before that and added the waist shaping. Tried it on again...and success! It shows off the boobage and then gets slim where I get relatively slim and then goes out again in the right place. Eeeee!

The only worry now is how the neck will look. It's very wide and deep (the deep is on purpose, and I expect the wide will be, too - because I plan a good 1.5" wide double-mitred neckband to stablize everything. I imagine that it will do the trick. But I won't really know till I actually knit the thing. Of course, Laura could take one look at it tomorrow night at LK and answer all my questions for me. And I expect she will. She's one of those knitters that oozes knitting expertise and information from every pore.

In exchange, I'm bringing the laptop to help her make a decent-sized PDF so she can release a new pattern.

See? Cooperation makes the world go round.

And I just ate a chocolate cupcake with palest-green peppermint frosting. THREE days old and still delicious.

p.s. also just scooped my Cotolino at Elann...and I had built up a credit, so a whole sweater's worth cost me less than $40. Woo hoo!

my non-wool thingy

Ginger_nut asked in the comments to another post just what is up with my wool avoidance. For those who know already, my apologies. I'm sure you're sick of hearing about it. :-)

For those who wonder, here's the deal.

1. I am diagnosed allergic to wool [with the scratch test at a doctor's office, when I was a wee bairn].

2. I am highly sensitive to most animal fibers, including alpaca, mohair, cashmere, llama. You name it.

2a. My sister has the identical physical reaction to these fibers that I do.

2b. My mother knits and wears wool.

2c. Neither my sister nor I are adopted. Genetics are cruel.

3. My immediate reaction upon touching something with one of these fibers in it is usually a prickling sensation which quickly changes into a strong burning feeling. If I wash my hands thoroughly, the feeling subsides reasonably quickly.

4. When I was in college, I ran a self-test. I knit a hat from a 75% acrylic, 25% wool yarn. I ignored the prickles and burnies in my hands and kept on knitting. And had a full-on head cold in 3 days.

So there you go. I have no respiratory symptoms, but my skin is ridiculously sensitive. Instead of being a joy, touching cashmere is a cruel trick. It feels soft for a second or two, and then it starts to hurt. My self-test is clearly anecdotal and not really evidence of much. But what it comes down to is that it just doesn't feel nice to me to knit with wool or animal fibers, so I don't.

There you go. The full story. Weep not for me. I have silk.

Kate, i miss you!

my e-mail hasn't changed. please write!

pre-release enabling!

You might have heard me mention something about No Sheep for You, the book I wrote for Interweave Press about knitting fabulous things without wool. :-)

[It should be in the Interweave warehouse Feb 15...and they'll ship as soon as they have stock, so if you're waiting on a pre-order, you don't have much longer to wait!]

But Elann has made it impossible for me to wait so patiently...and maybe some of you? Here's why:
Tomorrow [Tuesday] at noon EST, they're releasing Queensland Cotolino - a lovely cotton/linen blend. You can get a peek at the colors here. And this specific yarn happens to be just what we spec'd for this gorgeous cabled cardigan.

I know it's a bit of a leap to order yarn without seeing the pattern in full, but I can give you some specs. The stuff is HALF OFF at Elann. I figured if you'd wanted to knit this, you'd kill me if I didn't tell you when it was available so SUPERcheap, so here you go. :-)

Specs for Cables and O's:

Finished bust measurement [inches]/Skeins required
31.5 / 9
36 / 11
40.5 / 13
45 / 15
49.5 / 16
54 / 18

The color in the pic is #17. P.S. Leave some for me, will ya?

p.s. all pictures © and courtesy Interweave Press

who needs Magnolia?

Every once in a while, usually in December, a new sign pops up in a storefront in my neighborhood saying "coming soon", and we start to get excited because we can't wait to see what they'll be selling.

It's been a while since we saw the sign for Life is Sweet, but the moment we did, I [in particular] have been like a kid, bouncing up and down for the day they'd open.

They opened last Wednesday, and this morning, hub went over this morning and brought back little iced tastes of heaven:


Yes, this is a blatant photostyling imitation of Jane Brocket's beautiful and continually inspiring blog. Jane's much better at this. But I had to try.


So for breakfast today, I had one of the choccy ones [on the right]. Deep, rich chocolate flavor, light, fluffy cake, filled with a tiny hint of whipped cream in the very center. I was bouncing off the ceiling for at least 20 minutes with the sugar rush. This little gem's cupcakes are good through and through -- not just the icing. Oh, heaven.


Hub had one of the lemon ones and loved it. I won't tell you how many he bought for just the two of us, but it's obscene.

Life is Sweet Cupcake House: 2328 Queen Street East at Kingswood.