There will be Hugs and Stardust

By now everyone in the world has heard about what happened in Orlando, Florida this past weekend.  It was devastating, not just to the people involved, but to people all over the country and even the world.

There are those, who probably nodded to themselves, and said something along the lines of "Isn't that just like Americans," or "That's what we expect from a country that has shootings in schools" or "He was a terrorist, or a bigot or..."  well you get the picture.

All I can say, is that there is more than enough hate to go around in the world and responding to such horrendous acts with candle-light vigils is all very well and good, and it makes the people who participate feel a marginal bit better.....but something has to change.  And before you tell me, or yourself, that you are just one small person and the change needed is too big for you to make an impact on; that throwing sand grains in the sea won't raise the water level at all, let me tell you a little secret that knitters know.

Many small, good, actions add up.

When I start a project, no matter what it is, somewhere there is the first stitch.  One loop of yarn around a needle, that through time and many small actions grows up to be a shawl, a scarf, socks, a sweater, a blanket or anywhere else my fancy takes me.  One small flick of the fingers, or scoop of the needle and that one stitch can become two.  Five minutes later how many small movements turned into the entire cast on for a sweater or the first few rows of a shawl?  I don't count them, those movements are too small, but they add up.

On Ravelry alone there are 6 million knitters!  Think of all the small movements they make each day!  And Ravelry is by no means all the crafters out there, every day I encounter people who have never heard of it. If everyone on Ravelry just knit for five minutes today, how many small actions would that be?

Since Sunday I have seen a lot of rainbows popping up on the web, but here is one I want you to go look at, and if the fancy strikes you, maybe purchase a skein.  Natasha of Unplanned Peacock asked me if I would like to design something to use that very special colorway and help support the fundraiser, and of course I jumped at the chance.

Here is what Natasha has to say about the fundraiser and what UPP has been able to contribute to Urbanpeak.org in the past...


"For those of you who were around last year, we had a "Rainbow Unicorn of Love" fundraiser to benefit Urbanpeak.org, a youth shelter out of Denver. We raised enough money to buy 1800 pairs of socks for teens that are currently homeless.  I decided to reprise this fundraiser as a small antidote to the hatred and negativity brought about by the shooting in Orlando.  How does this relate? 40% of teens that are homeless are LGBT.  Most homeless teens have been abused by family members or others. No one chooses homelessness over a happy home life.  If you want to learn more about the statistics, click here.
Socks are one of the most needed items in shelters. We can show these teens that someone out there is caring about them, when the world seems to be against them.

Last year we put socks on 1800 kids' feet. Let's double that amount this year."*

I am working on the pattern right now...actually I think it is mostly written, just swatching and waiting for my skein of that very special yarn to arrive.  (I am going with the warm tones and a little sparkle in the fingering weight......and while I knit I will be thinking about warm hugs and stardust.)  When the pattern is released I will be donating a portion of the pattern price to Urbanpeak as well.

Doing my part to make those small motions add up into something bigger.

Another one of my favorite designers is donating all sales from one of her patterns (rainbow mitts, they are fun!) to Lambda Legal.
So if you want a "ready to go right this minute" pattern to show your support, here it is. 

~M

*And if you want to do something in your own community, that's great too!  The shelters I have worked with in Columbus, Ohio also say there is a huge need for hygiene products, along with clothing, especially clothing that can be worn to job interviews.

Today's The Day!

I mentioned yesterday that today was a special day, and it is.

Not jut because it is my birthday, which it is.

Not just because the kids have decided that my birthday counts as a ten percent day.* Which it does. So there will be cake and pie on the menu for dinner tonight!

But, because today is the day that the Early Fall issue of Knotions goes live!

See anything you like in that pretty group of patterns?  I know I did!

But, this is my blog, so rather than just drooling over other people's patterns I will tell you a little bit about mine.  :)

A Walk in the Woods Sock.

Ever had one of those days where you just couldn't decide what you wanted to knit?  I know that it happens to a lot of knitters, their current project is boring them and they want to be working on that elusive "something else".  Maybe that something else is some lace to break up the monotony of a plain sweater or some cables to break up the dullness of a garter stitch blanket.  Maybe that something else is some texture rather than open lacework with beads.

Sometimes, I know exactly what I want to knit.  And other times, well I just want it all, and these socks have it!  Lace leaf motifs and texture on the front, cables and ribbing on the back.


I find, that in my own knitting, patterns that have a lot of different things happening in them tend to go faster than those that are long stretches of plain knitting, so these socks just about flew off my needles.


The socks pictured were knit in Cascade Heritage Sock Yarn in the Dusty Turquoise colorway on size 1 (US) needles. The original prototype was knit with some discontinued Land O Lace Steffi.



Working with Knotions to bring you this pattern, was again a pure pleasure!  I didn't need quite as much hand holding, this time around, having been through the process once before with my Step Into Spring Socks, although getting the pattern back with the edits is always a little harrowing!  (This time I could have sworn I followed the style sheet and checked my grammar and spelling!)  I told the editor that my goal to was one day write a pattern that the tech editor could not find anything that needed to be corrected or changed and she pretty much laughed at me and said that even the very best patterns have something to change.  If she couldn't see anything initially she was liable to spend a lot more time going through the pattern a second and third time looking for what she missed.


I don't know what you have planned for the weekend, but for me it is off to a wild knitting party!

~M




*Only eating healthy things all the time is limiting, so we claim that we eat healthy foods 90% of the time and 10% of the time, if we want ice cream and cake for dinner, well so be it.  Actually the way things work it is much less than 10% of the time that we throw caution to the wind and eat "junk" as the more time goes on, the less of the "junk food" we find we like!

It Will be an Exciting Saturday.....

Saturday will be an exciting day at Chez Yarn Diet, but until then.....

After working those final 17 rows, that felt like they would never end, which wasn't helped by my having a massive case of Knitters ADHD, I cast off the second version of my ColourMart Lover's Group Spring Contest Shawl. 

Once she was done and blocked there was the usual juggle to try and get the shawl, the model and the weather all playing nicely together at the same time!

One of the things that was distracting me from actually knitting those final rows was getting the charts and instructions in order.  I think that they are very nearly ready, which means the call for test knitters will be going out again.

I really should just create a standard "personal ad" that I use and just change the details depending on the project....In Search of Adventurous knitter to take long walks on the beach and knit a shawl.

The only parts that are missing, right now, from the pattern are the completed gauge and yarn usage.  As I went with smaller needles this one came in just under the yardage of the first version and is just ever so slightly smaller, but as you can tell this is still a big, wrap yourself up in fine merino, shawl.


As, with one of my other entries, this shawl does not follow the "normal" spine treatment of incorporating stitches from the main body of the shawl into the successive increases and giving an all over pattern, and as with that other entry, I am trying to "tell a story", and as  the other entry had only one person "got it" when I posted pictures...tell me....what do you think that the story in this one is?

Ack, I'm Bored....now what?

Do you remember when I got to the point where I had 17 more rows to do on my shawl and I decided that it would look much better if I changed it?  I asked for votes both here and on Ravelry for if I should rip back 71 rows or just finish that one up and knit it again.

The vote was for keep going and re-knit.

Well today, I have 17 rows left to go on my shawl.......

I had a peaceful day of knitting planned. 

So what did I do?

I surfed the internet.

I bought a new dishwasher...(Thank you for all your support buying my patterns, I decided I wanted a dishwasher more than I needed new yarn right now so although the hobby is supposed to be self supporting it is actually supporting my hating washing dishes by hand...first world problems!)

I played 144.

That game is harder than it looks, but I won a few times.

I cast on for another small project.

4 loads of laundry, grocery shopped, menu planned, cleaned bathrooms.

In short, everything under the sun other than knit those last 17 rows.

So tell me, what do you do when your knitting has hit that horrible place where you would rather clean bathrooms than look at those 500 plus stitch rows anymore?

Leave me a comment telling me what you do!

~M

P.S.  I really do need to finish it up....I have test knitters waiting in the wings for this one.

Almost, almost on a Friday

According to the math I have been doing I am almost, almost! 80% through the re-knit of my shawl.  With the redesign of the ending, even though there are over 500 stitches on my needles about 300 of them have been just plain knits for a little bit now.

All that changes on the next right side row I will be knitting as I have finally hit the edging! I will go from groupings of 25 plain knit stitches to  more "action" stitches , even my landmark stitches that I had left as plain knits from the beginning of the shawl start getting into the decrease/increase game that is lace.

No pictures of that today, it really looks very similar, if a bit larger, to what you saw the other day.  Even on my longest needles it is all scrunched up, but the parts I can see I am pleased with.

Even with all this counting down to being done, I know myself well enough to know what is coming next.  It always happens with the bigger projects.  I invest so much time and energy into just doing them and then getting close to finishing them that when the end happens I get this sense of let down.  Post Project Depression. *

Luckily, my mail man has already placed the cure in my hands. 

I haven't properly unpacked them yet, but here are my winnings from the ColourMart Lovers Spring Contest.  I worked that voucher for yarn really hard! 14,000 yards of extra fine merino and cashmere/merino blends just waiting for a project.



















And.....

I saved the best for last.

Go check out the preview for the Early Fall 2016 issue of Knotions.  My knitting queue just got a whole lot bigger looking at the awesome designs that Jody has rounded up.  I wonder if I have enough of any one sock yarn to knit thigh highs?

~M

*I am not in any way downplaying postpartum depression, that is a real disease and not at all what I suffer from with my post project depression.  Maybe I should call it post project letdown?

Not what I should be knitting at all

This has almost nothing to do with current knitting at all....originally I was going to do a post on provisional cast on's but....well I didn't get it done. (Not to mention I have this hope that a friend can take some pictures for me for the provisional cast on post, the kids failed me massively!)

While I get that together I have a question for you....


What do you think this grew up to be?

Correct answers will get a coupon code to get the pattern for free!

I hit the 60% point on my current knitting, but somehow I don't think it will be finished when I had hoped.  If I had not spent so much time on the Ravelry forums maybe it would be ready to be blocked on Saturday.  Which was my original time line for it.

~M

WIP- Wednesday ~ Fifty Percent

The fickle knitter strikes again!

I should be much further along on the re-knit of my shawl.  The pattern is pretty intuitive, even if the rows are getting pretty long, but it seems like every other second that I am working on it, I am finding something else to do with my time!

I really wanted to have this off the needles by this weekend, photo's done and that hard part (the actual writing) well underway by next week.

Could it still happen?  hmmmm  Maybe.

Will it? hmmmmmm Probably not.

But, I did finally pass the fifty percent of the knitting done and each row from here sees a higher and higher percentage done.

And, I asked some of the best knitting friends in the world to take a look at several different ways of presenting the charts to get input, before I got to the "here test knitters see if you can read this chart" phase.  Having friends to bounce ideas off is more valuable than they will ever know!  Which got me to thinking.  I know, that is a dangerous activity!

Actually several, completely unrelated things got me to thinking.

Thinking about following dreams.

Thinking about how to make them a reality.

And how, moving my kids to North Carolina in the boys senior year of high school just isn't fair so, no, even though that job sounded like the "perfect thing for me right now" it could be the "perfect thing" just not now!

Do you have a creative dream you would like to make a reality?

Maybe we should talk about what it will take to get there!

Leave a comment if you are interested in hearing more about those thoughts and what your creative dream is.  Maybe, just maybe, we can work through them together.
~M