General

WWW: Yarn bombing, Yarn batteries, Yarn allergies, Yarn bridges and Embellishing a Yarn

This delightful story about 104-year old Grace Brett landed in my inbox last week, describing her role in helping a group of “yarnstormers” decorate the burgh of Selkirk in Scotland and claiming she “just might be the oldest street artist in the world”. The town of Listowel in Ontario, Canada – home to Canada’s largest mainstream yarn manufacturer Spinrite – is also building a yarnbombing tradition including a town-wide scavenger hunt and selfie contest. Both of these stories had me recall a thoughtful essay by crochet activist Hinda Mandell. Mandell makes a case for dropping ...

WWW: Knitting as exercise, Brontës, socks in history, more poppies, real body templates

New South Wales extreme knitter Jacqueline Fink is renowned for creating brilliant knit textiles at an impressive scale. She says “giant knitting requires whole body movement and a lot of weight bearing.” That sounds like an attractive way to skip the gym. Jacqueline works and teaches at her studio Little Dandelion – check out her gallery for some really gorgeous pieces. We love any intersection of literature and knits – Welsh knitter Denise Salway has knitted the four famous Brontë siblings, based on a recent television production. New Zealand newspaper Otago Daily Times runs a “100 ...

WWW: Knitting Conversations, poppies for peace, community visible from space

It’s been a stressful few days in the news, which makes us look to those who seek to draw people together – particularly people from different races, cultures and languages. Textile artist Movana Chen recently held an exhibition at Los Angeles’ 14th Factory called “Knitting Conversations”. Chen asks friends and audiences to bring books they have read and found meaningful. She reads them, shreds them, and turns the resulting “magazine clothes” into fabric. She often teaches these participants to knit a few stitches and contribute to the whole. The garments and projects made ...

WWW: interview with Maggie Menzel; how flax becomes linen, with bonus Irish accent; knitting, animated; cool sheepy design prototypes

We recently published a beautiful-bright cabled sock called Vinculum. On the Apocalypse Knitting blog, read an interview with Vinculum’s designer, Maggie Menzel. Those who know me know I am allergic to wool, and as a result, exceptionally fond of anything not-wool that’s worth knitting. Linen is at the top of my list. Thanks to the Mason-Dixon’s weekend newsletter, Snippets, I learned about the wonderfulness that is Colm Clarke of County Donegal (note his correct pronunciation: don-E-gal), who takes us, start to finish, through the process of growing flax and turning it into linen. Now you know why ...

WWW: The TCM Knitting club does Gable; missing Roger and his sweaters; an ode to our Kate

O the things I learn, writing the WWW blog post! Seems there’s an unofficial TCM knitting club which celebrates knitting + classic movies, and this month, their chosen patterns are inspired by “Gable’s casual yet snappy style.” They’ve picked out”a few patterns to suit a sharp-dressed man with outdoorsy tendencies.” Sounds yummy. Read lots more here — I’m signing up for this newsletter. It’s full of good juicy stuff! We lost Sir Roger Moore this week (he was my first Bond). Did you know he was also a sweater model back in the day?  —> I got to speak ...

Obsession Thursday: current obsessions roundup

Oh, SO MANY THINGS are happening in my world. Here are two: Something you didn’t know about me: I learned to code HTML in the late ’90s. In the early ’00s, I switched to Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver can make you a lazy coder. It made me a lazy coder. It is easy to look at the pretty WYSIWYG page result and think you’re done. At the same time, my ex taught himself to be a heavy-duty coder in Javascript, PHP and other such stuff. He bumped up Knitty’s back end, creating a database of all the Knitty content, an advertising system, printer-friendly pages. Lots more. Meanwhile, I started noticing ...

Obsession Thursday: Continuing to breathe normally

This post is for my fellow hoseheads (CPAP users, or beloved of those who use CPAPs). It’ll bore the crap out of the rest of you. I was diagnosed with Hypopnea (a form of sleep apnea) in April 2014, and have used a CPAP machine ever since. Still on my first machine, a ResMed S9 Elite ->. It’s what the sleep consultant recommended so I bought it. It cost something like $1600, of which my provincial health insurance covered a big chunk ($600, I believe) and my private health insurance covered most of the rest. Still, that’s a hell of a lot of money for this thing. Especially when you do a google ...

Who Should I Spin In 2017?

I want some fresh color in my life, so I am on the hunt for new or new to me dyers to spin in 2017.  I certainly won’t be abandoning my go-to dyers, Into the Whirled, Cjkoho Designs, Sheepspot, Spunky Eclectic or Hello Yarn, they are always coming up with new tempting colors and fibers. There is a world of color out there and some days I feel like I’m just scratching the surface. There are also dyers that I haven’t spun for years, that somehow have fallen off my radar, Like A Verb for Keeping Warm and Three Waters Farm (I might have just bought a braid of fiber from Three Waters Farm this morning, ...

Obsession Thursday: All Tully, all the time…

Not really. But at home, it kind of is. He’s such a different bunny from any I’ve ever cared for before. Last few nights, he’s decided he enjoys jumping on me when I’m on the couch and demanding to be petted. This, as you can imagine, is not a hardship for me. Except when I stop. And he decides I need to be back at it. So he tells me with a not-gentle nip. He’s still a baby, and only 3 weeks since his neuter, so testosterone is still in him. He gets the high-pitched bunny squeal of pain in return, which is a language he understands. Eventually, the nipping will stop. Or get gentler, ...

Obsession Thursday: Rhinebeck 2016 recap!

As I haven’t been to Rhinebeck in years, this was an exciting trip for me. It’s hard to sum it up in paragraphs of prose, so I’d rather go with photos, and I think you would, too. Enjoy!     And then I went into the A and B buildings. The lighting for photography was best in these buildings, and I was able to get in before the crowds came. I loved so much in this year’s show, but couldn’t possibly feature everyone’s work, as much as I wish I could! These are just some delicious highlights. I can’t possibly compute realistic numbers, but what you’ve seen here ...
Load More