Autumn Moss Fingerless Gloves

Guest post by Dory

Dory is an avid crafter, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.  She is also the brains behind all of the graphic design work at Yarnia.

When I visited Yarnia this past weekend, it was my first chance to see the big binder of consignment and Twist Collective patterns for sale. 

I usually come to Yarnia with a project in mind seeking yarn and encouragement, but this time I was looking for some unexpected inspiration. I flipped through the binder and was immediately charmed by the Autumn Moss Fingerless Gloves, by Hannah Maier. 

As the weather starts to get chillier (even back in New York now, it’s grey and rainy) fingerless mitts can come in really handy; if your office or workspace is cold, you can still type; if you insist (like me) on sitting outside at your favourite café even if you have to wear a hat and scarf and big puffy vest to keep warm, you can still turn the pages of your book. 

So, I grabbed a sock-weight premade cone that caught my attention, a wool-bamboo-nylon blend of greys and browns called Gaspe, cast on the 56 stitches on some size 2 DPNs, and got to work. 

The pattern calls the knit-purl checkerboard pattern moss stitch, but I’ve always known this to be basket stitch. Either way, it’s easy but interesting knitting, and quite forgiving -- if you accidentally make some of your squares a bit larger than the previous row of them, it’s barely noticeable. 

You can try on the tube as you go, adjusting the length to suit you and admiring your work along the way. The thumb is a simple held-stitches-on-waste-yarn thumb, no gusset increases to confuse the patterning. 

In short, this is a perfect pattern for a first knit-in-the-round project, or if you have three complicated lacework WIPs that need full attention and you’re looking to knit something where you can chat and drink coffee while your needles click away.

I spent my Portland weekend knitting these in the shop, in the car, at the bus stop, waiting for the food to come at Ken’s Artisan Pizza and Tin Shed, and during the previews before the movie at the Kennedy School Theater. 

I cast off the top of the fingers while waiting to board my flight to JFK, and finished the thumb before take off. Then I immediately cast on the next 56 stitches for mitten number 2.

I haven't blocked the mitten yet, when I do, the purled squares will bet a lot less bumpy.

This pattern for these delightful mittens is available at Yarnia, just ask! When I finish the pair, they’ll go via USPS to the shop so you can try them on for yourself.

New Patterns From Stitch Cooperative

Are you itching to start a new project, but don't know where to begin? Stitch Cooperative features fantastic new patterns, all from independent designers.

And the best part is, it operates on a business model that helps bring these awesome knitwear designers a wider audience, while benefiting small local shops like ours at the same time.

How does it work?

Every time you arrive at Stitch Cooperative through our website or newsletters and purchase a pattern, a portion of the sales will go to Yarnia, and the rest will go straight to the author. It's a fantastic way to support a community of creative designers, and your LYS at the same time!

What Kinds of Patterns Does Stitch Cooperative Offer?
From scarves to bags to cardigans to home decor, you'll find a wide range of patterns, from some of the best current designers out there, such as:

• Annie Modesitt
• Stefanie Japel
• Sivia Harding
• Miriam Felton
• Amy O'Neill Houck
• Shannon Okey
• ...and more!

Check it out and get your fall pattern shopping done today!

Featured Yarn :: Reedsport

Reedsport

Shades of purple and pink, ranging from eggplant to lavender to carnation, alternate in this lightweight variegated yarn.  This one would make an adorable baby blanket!

• Care: hand wash or cold delicate cycle / lay flat to dry
• Cone Weight: 8 oz.
• Fiber Content: 64 cotton / 27 cotton-rayon blend / 9 rayon
• Yardage: approx. 388 yards
• Yarn Weight: worsted weight

Also available in our online shop!

 

Nell -- Finished!

Guest post by Melanie

Hello again Yarnians,

I’m back to show you how wonderfully (sort of) my Nell top (now a dress) ended up. I know I mentioned to you last time that I was having gauge issues with the project. My gauge was much smaller than recommended. I was getting 20 single crochets to 4 inches and the recommended gauge was 16. 

Because I was getting a smaller gauge I decided to make the 40 inch chest size. I’m not sure what evil crochet mojo attached itself to this project, but even with a consistently smaller gauge, my top circumference ended up being 44 inches. Not good.

As the project calls for sewing on a sewing machine anyway, I decided rather than rip all the way back to the beginning and start over, I would serge the seams smaller. For those of you not familiar with sergers, they cut fabric and sew a thread binding around the cut edge as they go. That’s right, I cut my crochet. But look how much better the top fit afterward.

Then came time to piece the fabric bottom together. The pattern instructions say to take two large piece of fabric, sew them together into a tube, gather up the top of the tube, and sew that to the bodice.

This creates the babydoll look that you can see in the pattern pictures and in many people’s projects on Ravelry. I think I mentioned before that, while this is a great look for some women, it is not the most flattering look on me. What I may not have mentioned is that I LOVE sundresses. They are probably my single favorite piece of clothing and one of the saddest things about living in the Pacific Northwest is that the weather often precludes wearing them until well into June. I decided to add to my sundress collection.

I’m sorry I didn’t stop to take lots of pictures during the construction of the dress. It was one of those situations where I just started working and didn’t look up until I had a dress. Here is what I did:

Since the bodice fits around the widest part of the chest (which on me is the widest part until my hips) I measured the circumference of the bodice and cut two strips of fabric half that circumference plus 1 inch (the half inch is for the seam allowance) and as long as the dress I wanted (for me this was knee-length).

Next. I tried on the bodice and measured how far from where the bodice ended to where my hips are. This is because I needed to add extra fabric at the hip, both because my hips are my biggest part and because I wanted the skirt of my dress to flair.

After a rough measurement to my hips I seamed the two strips of fabric to that measured length. This means that the dress is just a straight tube from where it attaches to the body down to roughly my hips.

To add fabric to the hip of the dress and make it flair I inserted two wedge shaped pieces of fabric into either side of the tube. To do this I measured the length of the unseamed bottom part of my tube – for my dress this was roughly the distance from my hips to my knees. This became the side length of my triangle inserts. The bottom of the triangle was the total extra width I wanted the bottom of the skirt to have divided by 2 (because there is one insert on each side).

Once my two triangles were cut out, I sewed each long side of the triangle into the opening left on the sides of my tube. (if you have ever had occasion to turn a pair of jeans into bellbottoms this process is exactly the same.)



I hemmed the whole thing around the bottom and I was finished… I thought. Then my boyfriend came over and I proudly showed him my finished dress. He praised my craftyness and took pictures for me, but he said he felt like the dress was “missing something.” 

When I asked him what it could possibly be missing he said, “I don’t know, maybe some white lace around the bottom?” This was an exceptionally strange suggestion coming from a man who usually appreciates my craftiness from a safe distance refusing to participate in “which color/texture/hemline/sleeve-length/etc. looks better” conversations. 

I was skeptical at first… white lace on a dress with such deep colors… I was unsure. But, figuring I had nothing to lose and I could always take it off again, I went back to the fabric store for some lace trim. 

After sewing the lace to the dress I instantly was amazed at the result. It looked like it was meant to be there. It completely pulled the dress together and made it look “finished.” I am so glad I decided to try the unusual suggestion.

Lastly, because I wanted to accentuate my waist without having to go through the bother of adding waist shaping to the dress, I made a quick tie to cinch in the waist of the dress. I crocheted 3 really long chains—long enough to wrap loosely around my waist twice—then braided the chains together. It is just the right length to tie into a bow at my waist bringing the dress in and also carrying the crochet into the body of the garment.

All in all I would say that this pattern has major issues in the gauge department (you do the math, this time it really wasn’t me!), and I would have preferred not to have serged seams running through my crochet, but I love the end result and I love that this pattern inspired me to mix my two favorite hobbies -- yarnplay and sewing.

This is hanging up in the shop, so feel free to stop in and have a look and ask me any questions you may have about the project.

Ravelry: Yarn First, Pattern Second

Many of you are probably already experts (if not outright addicts) at using Ravelry, the ever-popular resource hub for knitters and crocheters, also at times dubbed "Facebook for knitters."  But if you're not there yet, I wanted to take a moment to share with you one of my favorite parts of this site.

So if you're like me, your next project is dictated by the yarn you're tempted into buying, not the other way around.  This can be a difficult way to live, stuck in a perpetual loop of "I have this yarn...now what to make with it?", finding a pattern and starting the project, only to run out of the yarn and need to buy more.  

It's for this reason that I'm such a huge fan of Ravelry's totally massive and admirably organized pattern database.  Trying to find a pattern that calls for exactly the yardage you have can be like shooting in the dark -- and then what are the chances that you happened to buy the same weight that it calls for?

Here's my favorite trick: click on the "patterns" tab up at the top.  Let's say I have a vague idea of what I want to knit, like a shrug.

Now this simple search turns up 3 whole pages of patterns.  Which I could certainly browse through, ruling out the ones that I'm not into, or that won't work with my yarn -- which, let's just say for this example, is 700 yards of a sportweight bamboo-cotton blend.  

Or, I could use some of the filters there in the lefthand sidebar to be more specific about what I'm starting with.  Moving down the list, I'm going to check off "knitting," so that I only get knitting patterns, "free," because that's how I roll, and then I'm going to check off "sport" for my yarn weight and "600-750" as my desired yardage.

Look at that!  It just narrowed my options down to a mere  FIVE to look through and choose from, out of the original 2,600 results for "shrug."

This, I can handle.  Now what if none of those 5 patterns are doing it for me?  Well, maybe then I'll uncheck the "free" box and see if anything pops up that I'd be willing to shell out a few bucks for.  Or maybe I'll check off some lower-yardage ranges, knowing that I'll have some yarn left over at the end.

After all, if I only use 500 of the 700 yards, then I can plug those 200 yards back in after I'm finished and see what kinds of cute fingerless gloves appear!

Lanesplitter :: Making Progress

Wow, Portland.  Way to rock out a bleak day, after a mere, what, three weeks of summertime?  It makes me appreciate all that much more that I spent last night down the street at Pok Pok, sitting outside in the wonderful heat, eating the most delicious fish sauce chicken wings on the planet.  (No seriously, have you tried these?)

With this fall breeze in the air, I feel completely justified in working on a somewhat wooly project, that I imagine will eventually be worn over leggings on an even brisker October day while I bike to work.

Did you guess right?  Perhaps you're also working on Lanesplitter as part of our Knit-Along.  If not, I highly recommend it, because eventually it will look like this:

And there's still time to sign up!  It's super easy, and free.

The construction of this skirt is fun: you start off with only a few stitches on the needle, and quickly increase every other row, forming a triangle.

Then, once you've reached the desired skirt length, you make one small adjustment: instead of increasing at each end on the right side rows, you decrease at the beginning of that row, and increase at the end of the row.  

This, in effect, keeps your stitch count consistent since you're making a matching increase for every decrease that happens.  Geometrically, it shifts the shape of the skirt so that triangle now starts to look more like a parallelogram.

So that's where I'm at...what about all of you?  If you've already signed up for the Knit-Along, show us some of what you've got.  This skirt has so much potential for cool colorwork and combinations; I can't wait to see what you all come up with!

Featured Yarn :: Catuai

Catuai

This luscious yarn is comprised of bamboo, cashmere, and merino wool -- you can't get much better than that!  The bamboo's variegation is what allows this yarn to segueway from green to blue to lavender-grey, in a sport weight perfect for delicate and lacey projects such as the Moonshadow Stole.

• Care: hand wash / lay flat to dry
• Cone Weight: 8 oz.
• Fiber Content: 48 bamboo / 30 cashmere / 12 rayon / 10 merino
• Yardage: approx. 500 yards
• Yarn Weight: sport weight

Also available in our online shop!

 

Simple Shag Pillow

Dudes, it's been hot.  Crazy hot.  I've-been-waiting-all-summer-for-this kinds of hot.  As anyone who lived with me during my Montreal years will recall, I love extreme weather.

So while my fingers are already clamoring for fun little fall projects like hats and fingerless gloves, I just can't get behind it, not this week.  

While the brim of this hat I've been eyeing from the latest issue of Interweave Knits would have been the perfect little pub project to keep in my purse, while I spend the evenings with good friends in the lingering summer heat, enjoying Northwest IPAs at Apex (our neighbors down Division!), the project calling to me when I got home was this.

This is one of the easiest projects you can make.  The fact that it's super-functional is just an added bonus.  After casting on any number of stitches, you just knit even until you've got a square.  (I did stockinette stitch here because the texture of the shaggy yarn was all I needed to give it a fun look.  You could do garter stitch if you're using a plain-textured yarn, to give it those cute nubby little ridges.)

All you need to keep track of is how many stitches you cast on, so that after you've finished that first square, you can make an identical one to match.

Once you've got your two matching squares, use some extra yarn to seam three of the sides together, leaving just an opening at the top.  Because this yarn was so fluffy, I used just a simple whip stitch, and then turned the pillow inside-out so the bulkiness of the seams was on the inside, and the pillow looked like an empty bag, ready to be stuffed.

I stuffed the pillow about halfway to capacity before starting to seam up the final side.  This is a little trickier because you can't turn the pillow inside-out once it's stuffed, but again, the shaggy yarn saved me and even seaming the final side on the outside rendered it invisible.  

If I was using a less forgiving yarn, I would have seamed up all four sides to begin with, leaving just a small little hole at one corner for the stuffing, then turned the fabric inside out and stuffed the whole thing through that little hole, leaving much less visible seaming at the end.

Stuffing anything with Polyfil makes it pretty smooshy and great.  Now we've got another cozy homemade pillow in our little living room area to snuggle up next to while you swatch up your blends.  

Simple Shag Pillow

Mayaguez yarn :: 260 yards

Cost of materials: $23.10

If you want to try this out with the same yarn I used, we've still got some in our online shop!  (Note: you'll need about 1.5 cones to complete this project.)

Creating Solid Colored Yarns

So, we all know that sometimes the crazy colorful yarns are exactly what you need for a fun project.

But sometimes you just want a nice, hearty solid color.  Maybe you want to show off some ropy, braided cables, or a seed stitch brim on a cute hat.  Or sometimes you want to just be able to marvel at thousands of the same cute, pudgy stitches, all lined up in neat rows, in a giant project like a sweater.  These are all things that are easily obscured by a busy yarn, no matter how pretty it is.

Not to worry.  You won't see any of these solid yarns on the premade cone shelves, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.  Our premade cones are all sorts of blends -- some fiber blends, some color blends, some both -- to show you all the possibilities that are out there, once you start combining different yarns.

In fact, we intentionally stay away from winding up three cones of a solid green wool in a worsted weight, because who knows?  You may come in wanting it in DK, and then we'd be right back where we started.  

Instead, you can use the single strands that you see on the shelves as color guides, and if you want a thicker version of that solid yarn, we'll just keep adding strands until we get there.  

For example:

Here's some nice, soft heathered green wool, originally a light sportweight.  Perhaps too thin for the gauge you want to achieve, but let's put three strands together...

and voila!  A nice worsted weight wool, perfectly pudgy on Size 8 needles.

Speaking of this wool, we just got a whole bunch of new fun colors in for fall, so pick a project and let's wind some up -- whatever weight you need!

Featured Yarn :: Gold Beach

Gold Beach

A thick, luscious blend of five different colors of bamboo, and one strand of tweedy rayon -- an earthy combination with wonderful luster and sheen!

• Care: hand wash or cold delicate cycle / lay flat to dry
• Cone Weight: 8 oz.
• Fiber Content: 86 bamboo / 14 rayon
• Yardage: approx. 180 yards
• Yarn Weight: worsted weight

Also available in our online shop!

 

The only downside to the BSJ

Any of you who have embarked on the Baby Surprise Jacket before will agree that it is totally and utterly addictive.  And once you finish the first, it's hard to resist immediately casting on for the second.

Even before I had finished my first BSJ, I was already crafting the color scheme for the next.

Really, the only downside to this innovative little project is that if you choose to stripe often -- and you should, because it makes this little jacket look sooo cute -- there are about a thousand ends to weave in at the end, since every single adorable little stripe begins and ends with a new yarn attached and loosely tied on.

In fact, to finally bind off only to have this staring you down is a pretty daunting way to end a project.

Here's my method for conquering the beast: have another project handy -- one that you're jumping out of your skin to work on, and entails relatively simple, back-and-forth knitting.

Weave in five ends on the Baby Surprise Jacket, then reward yourself with a row or two on your dessert project.  Then another five ends on the BSJ...you get the picture.

Happy weaving!  Trust me, it's worth it.

Conquering Lace

Guest post by Hollis

Hollis is an avid knitter and longtime fan of Yarnia.  She is here with us this week during her annual visit from Brooklyn, NY.

I have a confession to make.  I have been knitting for 10 years and I have never knit lace.  I'm not just  talking about intricate Estonian lace shawls.  I have never even knit a single eyelet.  Oh sure, I've made holes by accident countless times, but I have never intentionally embraced the wide world of knitted negative space.  Until now.

For years, I have been stymied by the tangle of headphones, scarves, and bag straps that plague me during New York City winters.  I decided the thing to do was make a cowl.  No wrapping, no tangled scarf.   

Really, I wanted a gray qiviut smoke ring just like Sarah Palin, but then I decided even qiviut was not worth thinking about Sarah Palin every time I put it on.  Next stop: Alpacaland.  All I needed now was a pattern.  

A quick search of Ravelry lead me to an easy pattern for an Old Shale Smoke Ring by Cossette Cornelius-Bates.  Now, as you may know, Old Shale, or feather and fan as it's more commonly known, is in fact lace.  So now I faced a challenge.  Challenge accepted. 

Every summer I come to visit Lindsey and by extension, Yarnia.  I always have a list of mostly rectangular and mostly mindless projects.  This year was different.  I came with a mission.  I came to knit lace.  And knit lace I have.  

I started with a practice cone just to get my feet wet (also I forgot my beautiful birch size 7 16 inch circulars at home and didn't want to start my pattern on loaners).  And of course I chose a beautiful pre-made blend called Richmond that just happened to have a strand of cashmere to make practicing a scandalously indulgent experience.  I highly suggest the cashmere test drive.   And now, may I present:

Lace!

It took me four tries to get going, as evidenced by my excessively crossed out and restarted chart.

And here's the thing:  For years I have been too intimidated to try knitting lace.  I knew how to knit two stitches together and I knew how to yarn over, and I knew how to read a pattern but the idea of knitting lace seemed beyond my capabilities.  No more.   

I jumped in needles first and as it turns out I can knit lace!  Now that I have survived my first attempt at lace, I can't wait to try some more complex lace patterns. 

Are you thinking about trying out a new knitting skill?  Perhaps tackling fair isle, learning how to knit continental, take on double knitting, or conquering cables?  If you are, go for it!  You might be surprised how manageable it will be, if you take it one stitch at a time.   

And don't forget, Yarnia offers affordable classes on all these topics, if you want to learn a knew skill with a little guidance and company.