Knit One, Purl Too: A Knitlog

Thirteen months to knit the first chart, four days to knit the rest. It was a lost weekend of the best kind. Evelyn Clark, I love you.

This was the last skein of yarn I bought before embarking on 9 months of Cold Sheeping, and it was knitting up suspiciously like kitchen cotton: not soft, not mom-worthy. So I gave it away, and broke my Cold Sheep streak after 290 days (I checked) with the Handmaiden Casbah, the yarn equivalent of dating a supermodel.

What kind of knitter am I? I love challenges, use deadlines as motivators and think knitting for other people is noble and worthy, as long as I also get to knit for myself. Still with me? I also know my eyes are bigger than my stomach, knitting-wise, since it takes me four years to finish [...]

Haven’t you always wanted to be one of those cool knitters who ends up as “and friend” in a picture next to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee at the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival? Or with book publishers plying you with free swag? Or as someone with a super-secret knitting project for a shop, or even better, a book? [...]

I did promise to give you still more eye candy after dumping my OMG!!HugeFinishedSweater photos here – so here we go. First, my next-to-last FO of the year, the Basketweave Scarf from Knitting Daily, completed with 2.5 skeins of yarn repurposed from my failed Lush turtleneck, seen so long ago. Was this a good idea, [...]

As the flowerbasket hat approached six heartbreaking weeks overdue (and by “overdue” I mean “later than I had hoped it would be”) I realized it remained undone because I had some sort of finishing anxiety. I would have to get over it tout de suite. Either the hat and mittens fit, or they don’t, but [...]

There are some people who think a handknit is appropriate for every gift-giving occasion – I, sadly, am not one of them, because if I committed to that philosophy, I would do nothing but knit gifts for others. And yet? I broke my own rule last week when I whipped out this little number for [...]

Forget all these people and their Socks that Rock – I’ll show you a sock that rocks right here (Jingle Bell Rock, that is).

Then, just the toe stands between me and a finished Festivus Stocking (or as I am calling it privately, The Project I Should Have Started in July).

I was back to enjoying the stocking once more last week, preparing to post away about the joys of knitting for the holiday, when my grandmother died.