Nevada sagebrush

I’ve written before about my friend Janine, the Feral Knitter and colorwork genius. I took my knitting down to her open house yesterday evening for a visit. Besides a happy hour or two of knitting and conversation, I enjoyed myself by pawing through the yarn playpen, trying to put together colors for a Nevada sagebrush-inspired sweater (or throw? or ???)  Here’s the playpen, filled with every color of Jamieson’s Spindrift:

photo from Feral Knitter

And here’s my inspiration, from two road-trip vacations in the last year to Montana and Idaho, via Nevada (mostly). We made the first trip last September, and just got back this week from a second:

photo by slgwv

Most people will tell you that northern Nevada’s high desert scrub makes for the most boring driving on earth. We don’t agree. In September especially, the sagebrush scrub was full of glorious color. There was the soft dry gray of the sagebrush itself; darker green of juniper, and charcoal-brown of juniper bark; bleached straw of dry grass; russet and pale pink seedheads; acid yellow and rhubarb-pink blooms; and shots of brilliant chartreuse here and there.  The large photo above gives a glimpse. These were my feeble attempts to capture it on camera:
Pictures taken at 85 mph don’t work so well. The photo above captures some of the colors well, and here’s a gallery of better ones I gathered on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/couleeca/galleries/72157624390876393/

Janine brought out one of her inspiration notebooks – and there was a big magazine photo of the same Nevada landscape pasted in! Here’s what I came up with for a start:

Poor photo, but colors are semi-close on my monitor. Top row: earth, sphagnum, thyme, lichen, and rye. The reds and pinks: rust, chestnut, spice, cinnamon, and coral (I think). Yellows, in the middle: daffodil and lemon, with the darker bronzey-gold bracken at right. Greens: moss, leprechaun, and pistachio. It’s only a start – we couldn’t find just the right acid yellow, sagebrush green, dead-grass-straw, or seedhead-rust. More detective work is in order – perhaps some Elemental Affects colors would fill the bill. (Here’s a full Spindrift color chart at Camilla Valley Farm; you can order the real thing from Janine – info here.)

Janine’s online store, Feralknitter.com, is under construction and should be up and running soon. She sells every single Spindrift color (you don’t have to wait for the finished website) and she’s offering mini 20-yard skeins for sampling – perfect for playing around and developing your own colorwork designs, as she teaches in her classes. She’s aiming to make Feral Knitter a home-on-the-web for knitters who love Fair Isle-style stranded colorwork, and she’s got some great, unusual ideas for the site. Stay tuned at her blog. Me, I’m going to order some miniskeins soon and start swatching.

Tips for knitting from PDF patterns

I started a new project a few days ago – Stephen West’s Daybreak shawl. As usual, I made an electronic copy of my PDF pattern and added some notes to it. This is very handy, especially if you have a tendency to work on lots of patterns at the same time and/or stop working on something and go back to it later when you don’t remember the details. I thought I’d share how I do this.

Daybreak in progress

 

Most people, including me,  have Adobe Reader on their computers for opening and reading PDF files. But I’ve got another free PDF viewer as well, because it has some nifty tools for adding notes and comments to PDFs: Foxit Reader (click on the link to go get the download). Unfortunately, there’s no Mac version.

When you open a PDF document in Foxit Reader, you’ll see a bunch of icons across the top of your window under the drop-down menu categories. We’re interested in the last few icons – a pencil, a T highlighted yellow, and a balloon with text in it. These tools allow you to add a text note, highlight text, or add a hidden popup note or comment. Just click on the tool icon you want to use, then click in the PDF at the point where you want to insert your note, or click and drag to select text for highlighting.

Here’s my routine. First, I open the pattern PDF and save the file with a new name – otherwise you can’t save the changes you make to it. I made a copy of my Daybreak pattern and named the file “Daybreak-notes.pdf.” This way, you always have a pristine original copy of the pattern, plus a marked-up working copy.

I clicked the highlight tool, then highlighted the size I’m making and the needle size specified. Next, I clicked the pencil icon for the comment tool, then clicked in the pattern and added the two blue comments you see, a note about the yarns I’m using and confirmation that I’m using the recommended needle size:


 On the next pattern page, I’ve highlighted the stitch counts for the size I’m making, added notes about which color is which and how I’m changing colors, and also added a hidden popup note (the yellow thing next to the word “Stripes”):


 When I click on the sticky note icon, I get a popup window that shows me the whole note, which looks like this:


 These popups have a scroll bar, so the notes can be as long as you want – handy when you don’t have room to enter all the text right on the pattern as a comment. I haven’t been able to figure out how to make them print, though.

Other free PDF viewers may have similar comment features – experiment with yours. The next one I’m going to try is PDF-XChange Viewer. I believe Adobe Reader’s sticky note feature has some restrictions that make it difficult to use, but if you use it I’d be curious to know how it works for you.

I’m heading off to the TNNA (The National NeedleArts Association) summer trade show in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday. It’s my first time – looking forward to meeting lots of yarn & knitting industry folks and seeing what’s new for fall. I won’t have time to blog, but I will post updates on the Facebook page and Twitter. There are still a couple of Cool Yarns for Hot Days posts coming as well, but they may take awhile.

Color knitting links & inspiration

The Knitfinder resource section is coming along slowly – I’m trying to build it into the be-all and end-all of knitting bookmark collections, so you can start there to find ANY kind of knitting info you happen to be looking for. I’m working on a color knitting resource page now and thought I’d share a few tidbits.

Nanette Blanchard’s blog Knitting in Color has been around since 2003, and it’s full of great information and inspiration for stranded color knitting. You’ll find tutorials, patterns, and lovely photos – Nanette lives in photogenic New Mexico. She’s self-published several how-to booklets including Stranded Color Knitting, Glove Knitting, and Mittens in Color. At left, one of her mitten designs – the lovely Tijeras mittens. Find all her booklets and patterns in her Ravelry shop.

Here’s a great resource from Nanette’s blog: a list of the best yarns for stranded color knitting, organized by weight and linked to their Ravelry pages. Yarns were chosen for their quality and wide color range. The list is a year and a half old; there are some new yarns that would be good additions, like St-Denis Nordique and Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light.

If you’re embarking on your first stranded color project, there are plenty of how-tos out there. There’s a list of the best here.  TECHknitting has a great tutorial series on stranded knitting:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 as well as one on slip-stitch color knitting. If you’ve never been over to TECHknitting, you’ll be amazed at the wealth of information. If you learn better from video, the KnitPicks tutorial section is a good place to start. There’s a collection of colorwork tutorials, including stripes, intarsia, Fair Isle, and color theory. Here’s one showing different methods of handling yarns for stranded knitting.

My friend Janine Bajus aka Feral Knitter is a brilliant colorwork designer and teacher. Her 3-day “Design Your Own Fair Isle” class is scheduled for March 26-28 in Berkeley, California – I don’t know if there’s still space available. There’s also a one-day class in May at Web-sters in Ashland, Oregon.


Here’s a swatch I knit in her class; she teaches a simple swatching technique for evaluating color combinations. This swatch revealed one I hated (the green and yellow in the middle), and several I loved (red and lavender, red and mint green, olive and coral). And you’ll find great tips, patterns, and color inspiration on her blog. Janine’s Celtic Pillows (free PDF from Two Swans Yarns, a great source for Fair Isle yarns and patterns) are meant as a canvas for playing with your own color choices.

There’s going to be an “Around the World” section in the Knitfinder resources, and color knitting leads us right into that. Scotland, Norway, Estonia, Sweden, Turkey, Peru…all have their own color knitting traditions. You’ll find the whole world of color knitting at unionpearl’s Knitting Letters A to Z. Many photos, great writing on knitting traditions, lots of links.

Some more photo inspiration:

Swedish Bohus Stickning on Flickr (read more about Bohus here)
Annemarie Sundbo’s collection of Norwegian mittens, stockings and sweaters
Latvian mitten galleries – from a project associated with the NATO summit in Riga, 2006
Let’s not forget modern colorwork designers: Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably, Alice and Jade Starmore.

More to come when the color knitting page goes live. I’m behind on other work this week, so there will be no pattern roundup tomorrow – look for it again next week. I may move it to Mondays or Tuesdays so I have time to write the posts over the weekend.

Knitting techniques online - where to start?

Need to learn a new cast-on method, find tips on inserting a zipper in your cardigan, or cut your first steek? Trying to alter a sweater pattern or fix a cable mistake? Or maybe you're just learning to knit, and need videos of the basics.

It's never been easier to get knitting help from the Internet. From the earliest days of blogging, knit bloggers posted great tips and photo tutorials. Now that Internet video is accessible to most people, there's a how-to video for any knitting technique you can think of.

It can be a little bewildering to sort through these resources. They are scattered all over the Web; sites with lots of tutorials tend to be poorly organized (if they are organized at all), and some of the videos in particular are not very good. On the Knitfinder how-to page I've collected the very best of these links and organized them for you by topic, all on one page. It's easy to find exactly what you're looking for--just click on a keyword in the alphabetical list on the left, or use Ctrl F to search the page.

Here are a few more good collections of general knitting help for all levels, from beginner to geek-expert. These not only offer good content, but are reasonably organized so you can find what you need.

KnittingHelp.com
Launched in 2004, Amy and Sheldon Finlay's site is a collection of short, clear technique videos, all free. A great place to start if you're learning to knit. Advanced techniques such as magic loop, Kitchener stitch, stranded knitting and double knitting are here too. Videos are also collected on a CD available for purchase, and there's a glossary of knitting abbreviations and an online discussion forum.

Knit Picks tutorial collection 

Good basic collection covering most techniques beginning to intermediate knitters will need. Includes videos and a glossary of abbreviations. Fairly well arranged; there's an A-Z index of techniques, so it's pretty easy to find what you need. Knit Picks also has a YouTube channel with more than 100 videos.

TECHKnitting
Since 2006, this site has published dozens of in-depth, clear, illustrated explanations of knitting techniques and problems. Everything from basic cast-ons to very detailed analysis of short-row uses and techniques. Invaluable and a bit geeky. Lots of unusual problems and issues are covered. Index of posts by topic is here.

Knitty articles

Knitty has published lots of good technique articles over the years. Archived articles are listed here by topic. Theresa Stenersen's column "Techniques with Theresa" has covered most of the basics; here is a list of subjects. For other Knitty articles on specific techniques, see the Knitfinder how-to page.

Drops Design YouTube channel

90+ technique videos without audio, supplemented with written instructions. If you want to see a technique demonstrated without being distracted by talking, these are for you.

and...great knitting teachers on YouTube

Many knitting luminaries are on YouTube, often in Knitting Daily TV segments. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to find them. Try searching for a favorite teacher's name. Two with channels of their own:

Lucy Neatby has eight great videos on provisional cast-ons, double knitting, bobbles, and "navajo" knitting, among other things. 

Cat Bordhi has 24 videos on sock knitting, moebius knitting, and other techniques. Some real gems among her tips.

Check out the Knitfinder how-tos, and drop me a line if there's a technique you can't find, or you've got a favorite tutorial or video you'd like to see added to the list. I tuck in new links whenever I come across a good one. New today - the "bar none" increase popularized by Meg Swansen, and new color knitting videos from Berroco.

Coming soon: new content for the Knitfinder resource section--look for pages on color knitting and online pattern sources in the next couple of weeks. Also, stay tuned for a new weekly blog feature - the best new patterns available online, from all over the world.

Happy knitting!