Knitting Mondays

Sunshine. Sock knitting. And a very strong americano. The yarn is Paton’s Kroy, a criminally underappreciated sock yarn. It’s unbelievably hardwearing (my fave 75% wool/25% nylon blend), machine washes and dries beautifully, and great to knit with. And it’s easily found at mainstream craft and yarn stores, and the price point is terrific.  There are also excellent colors. I’m making a pair of manly socks, so the colorway is manly, but there are some great brights available, too. My only grumble about the yarn is that the ball band recommends a larger needle than sensible – I use my usual ...

Two Toronto area knitters are participating in a really rather wonderful project: making socks to send into space! I recently spoke with Emily Mooney and Catherine Goykhman about this project. Emily, tell me about this Astro Socks project.  Over the past five years or so, NASA has been doing a whole lot of public outreach through social media. They’ve invited thousands of people to what were originally called NASA Tweetups but are now known as NASA Socials. These are chances to visit NASA locations, such as the Kennedy Space Center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and NASA HQ in Washington, and get a chance to ...

I wrote about this briefly in a recent WWW post. Tech editor and author extraordinaire JC Briar has recently launched a revolutionary new charting tool – Stitch Maps. JC has been thinking about charts for a long time. She is the author of Charts Made Simple, an excellent little book explaining all about knitting charts, how to work from them, and how they work. Her experience writing this book, and teaching and editing, had led her to see that there is an inherent weakness in knitting charts: although they represent the stitches, they don’t necessarily represent the fabric. Let’s take Feather and ...

Knit designer Julie Crawford, in addition to publishing many beautiful designs, writes a blog. All her posts are worth reading, but in particular we get most excited on Monday mornings – Modification Mondays. Just about every Monday, Julie blogs about a pattern modification or conversion. She finds fantastic projects inspired by existing patterns, and writes about them. A recent post featured a conversion of the popular Knitty summer top pattern, Gemini, into a summer dress! And remember the classic Urchin tam? How about a lacy rainbow version! And I adore the BFF hat, inspired by the cowl. She features many ...

Kate knitted in the audience at a comedy show. Amy’s LYS, The Purple Purl, yarnbombed a 400ft fence in a nearby park on Queen Street. More photos on their Facebook page. Lettuce Knit knitted and spun in public on their patio – yes, a yarn shop with a patio! On Sunday, WWKIPTO hosted a huge event in Toronto’s high park.  Excellent picture here, courtesy KniterlyErin. Knitters were spotted at the Relay for Life 24-hour road race fundraising event. More events are scheduled for this coming weekend – check your local shops and guilds! Kate will be in Waterloo at the Shall We Knit Studiopalooza. ...

Until this past Saturday, our official line on printing copies of Knitty patterns was pretty strict for LYSs. Only the customer could print their copy, and only on their own computer. Well, times have changed. I know of many, many LYSs that have a dedicated internet workstation for their customers, and some have that workstation attached to a printer. So I decided it was time to update our rules. We hope this will please many of you…we think it will! As of June 1, 2013, we are officially encouraging yarn shops to let customers print their own patterns on shop premises! We have heard that some customers are not ...

World Wide Knit in Public Day has become a phenomenon since it was launched in 2005, by Danielle Landes. So much so, in fact, that the event now runs over a full week! WWKIP began as a way to bring knitters together, out of the closet and into fresh air. Although knitters have been gathering together for many years – in each other’s homes and  in stores, on “stitch nights”, and at events and retreats – but it’s usually knitters among knitters. The purpose of the day is to bring knitters out into public, amongst the “muggles”. WWKIP events often include knit-ins at parks ...

I recently had the distinct pleasure of attending a knitting retreat. This one, “Knit U”, held at the Springbrooke retreat center in Langley, B.C., was organized by the KnitSocial Team – the wonderful Amanda and Fiona. The setting was perfect – especially for us sun-starved east-coasters. Early spring in the Pacific Northwest is a beautiful thing. We gathered on Friday afternoon, and started the proceedings with a casual lecture session (is there such a thing as a casual lecture? there is here, when you’re gathered in the living room, in front of the fire, with snacks and a glass of wine ...

As I reported last week, I’m going through my annual “tired of my winter gear” phase, and like every year, I’ve made myself a new hat to cheer me as we see out the last weeks of winter. A friend alerted to me to the Stray hat on Ravelry, and so in a fit of late-night-startitis, I dove in the stash and came out with the required three coordinating colours…. Not exactly authentically leopard, but I do think they work rather well together. Note that I did make two adjustments – the original hat is a fab beret style, but I prefer a more fitted hat, so I took out one pattern repeat; and ...

Come mid-February, the winter doldrums start to set in. I’m officially tired of my winter coat, tired of my boots, tired of the early dark, tired of the grey skies and grey slush. Come mid-February, every year, the same things happen. I could set my watch by them: First, I knit myself a new hat. By this time, I’ve been wearing the same hat since December, and I’m deeply bored of it. I also start to crave color: bright, outrageous, silly color. Which results in something like this: (This is the Stray leopard print hat, but worked in colors that only I would think were a good idea.) Turns out ...