Tuesday pattern roundup

I’m migrating the pattern roundup to Tuesdays, and keeping it on the small side – hopefully that means I’ll have time to write it every weekend!

Since the last roundup, new issues of Twist Collective and Knitty are out. Both have great patterns and you’ve probably been through them already. My favorites are Jennie Pakula’s Celandine, the Twist cover design, and Miriam Felton’s Anthemion wrap.

For this post, an assortment of mostly smallish projects – cozy sweaters that fill my lap aren’t what I feel like knitting in spring. First, an unusual new shawl pattern, the Leaflette shawl by Stormy Autumn Designs:


It’s a delicate tracery of twisted stitchwork on a purled background, plus a leaf lace border. I love lace combined with texture – what a beautiful design! Available as a Ravelry download for $4.00; uses 450-500 yards of fingering weight yarn.

Next, a brilliant little pattern for those one-off skeins of handspun, the Wabi-Sabi Handspun Mitts from Kristen TenDyke. These fingerless mitts with a turned-back cuff are designed to be knitted at the same time from two ends of a center-pull ball so you can use every bit of your yarn. Knitted flat and seamed up one side. Free download; uses about 100 yards at a gauge of 16 stitches to 4”.



Here’s a pretty cardigan for girls aged 2 – 12 years, Melissa LaBarre's Tiny Tea Leaves. It’s a sized-down version of the adult Tea Leaves Cardigan from Madelinetosh. Written for worsted-weight yarn, but I think it would make a beautiful baby sweater in a finer yarn. $4.00 download.


How about a summer hat? I love Roxanne Seabright’s Flower Frog Hat in Artfibers Bistro, a cotton/nylon ribbon yarn with chenille edges (although I might dispense with the embellishments). Uses 150 yards; knit it for $15 (the pattern is free). Worked in the round from brim to crown, stiffened by sewing the brim edge over a hoop of millinery wire.



Linden Heflin’s pretty Fresh Mint is just the thing for summer – a stockinette tank with a bit of lace, in DK cotton. It’s worked top-down, beginning the the lace yoke sections – once they’re knitted, you join and knit the body down to the lower edge in the round. $5.00 download.



Until next time – enjoy!

Retreat, and the lure of spinning

My knit group retreat last weekend was short, but idyllic. There was a foot of snow on the ground in the Sierras, but the weather was sunny and gorgeous. Most of our Saturday was spent on the deck:


Knitting was the excuse for the expedition, but there was also just lots of good company, great conversation – and delicious food and wine. What a blast!

I didn’t do much knitting (although I did finish binding off my Brandywine shawl), but my trusty wheel rode with me and I did do lots of spinning. First some plying to clear my bobbins:

Softly-spun merino-wool in lavender, silver-gray, and sheep’s black. I spun all of each color before going on to the next, then made a two-ply. Where the colors don’t match exactly, there are marled black-gray and gray-lavender transitions. I think it’ll make a nice color-banded hat or mittens.

Then I spun this Corriedale in three coordinating colors the same way (these flash photos are quite accurate):


The fiber is from Royale Hare - a mixture of dyed and natural gray carded together, for a lovely, complex heathered effect. It has yet to be plied, but should make a nice slightly fuzzy worsted-weight 2-ply.

It’s time for me to tell you my spinning story. When I started knitting, I thought I should give spinning a try, and eventually I had a drop-spindle lesson from a friend a couple of years ago. It was a group lesson, and several folks were instant spinners. Not me – hopeless. With some relief, I decided I didn’t need to spin after all. One less enthusiasm to complicate life.

However. I’ve got a great virtual knitting group – we’re friends who’ve been talking knitting, and other things, for years online.  Many of the group are longtime spinning enthusiasts, and enablers par excellence. After that spindling lesson, I told them I’d been there, done that, no thank you very much. But they knew better. Last summer, a great deal on a preowned Matchless cropped up in the discussion. I seem to have expressed some interest, because before I knew it, the wheel was delivered to my door. As a surprise, the whole group got together to make it happen – and over the cliff I went.

Here’s Ms. Matchless on the day she arrived:



I still haven’t figured out what I did to deserve this incredibly generous gift, but it has proven to be the beginning of a love affair.

My day job is serious left-brain work. Indexing is reading, writing, and analyzing; often I’m thinking about abstruse, complicated topics like identity politics in the Caribbean or the emergence of modernity in the Middle East. Knitting is a great complement to the work I do, because it’s about handling real materials and making real objects. But knitting is just a little bit technical. The lure of spinning for me is that it’s so elemental and so different from my paying work.

A long time ago, I baked for a living for a few years. Knitting is like pastry making; spinning is like sourdough bread baking. Oh, I know, I could be a technical spinner – but I prefer to spin intuitively. It’s simple in some ways, but mysterious and complex in others – so there’s always something to learn. And when spinning, I feel connected to a tradition that goes back thousands of years. It’s satisfying in the same way it is to grow food, or make wine. In short, it makes me feel human.  So thank you, dear friends, for making this adventure possible.

Resurfacing

Long time no see! I’ve been mired in book indexing work, and sick, and well…there hasn’t been time to blog.

There hasn’t been much knitting either. The two current shawl projects are both stalled. I started to bind off Brandywine, eager to block and wear it – and discovered an errant yarnover that I can’t live with:



It’s been sitting in time out ever since, but I’ve decided that designer Rosemary Hill is right – don’t ladder back and fix it, just bind off and sew it closed. Actually there’s another mistake you can see in the photo – but that one I’ll just live with.
Then there’s this one:



Miralda’s Triangular shawl, in my own handspun (Targhee from A Verb for Keeping Warm). Love the pattern, but there are some nupps that need repairing, and I don’t have the patience for it right now. Not loving the quality of my yarn – I think it’s overplied – but will stick with it anyway.

There has been a little bit of spinning. I reward myself for finishing work quotas and taxes and the like with spinning time. I recently finished this skein of Lisa Souza BFL (in Aww-tum):


and I’m working on this one:





This is some nameless wool/merino/nylon I was given in small quantities. The colors are related – a bit of the lavender runs through both the gray and the black, so I divided each color in half, and am spinning all of each color in turn. Hoping that they will come close to matching when plied, with some interesting marling at the transitions, and make a nice color-banded hat or something. I’m trying to teach myself to spin (and ply) a bit more softly.

I’ll be belting my wheel into the back seat of the car tomorrow – I’m off for a mini-retreat in the Sierras with a dozen friends from knit group. We’ve never done this before, but it’s going to be a great time!  Here’s what the cabin surroundings looked like a couple of days ago:



Looks like perfect knitting-and-spinning-by-the-fire weather to me - I’ll report next week! [ETA: no cell phone or Internet either. A true vacation!]  I hope to be bringing back the Pattern Roundup soon, and to have some Knitfinder news for you before long too.

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.

Friday pattern roundup

Some of this week’s most original and creative patterns are in a new book from STC Craft, Comfort Knitting and Crochet: Afghans. This book has 27 knitted afghan patterns (and 24 crocheted ones)  by Norah Gaughan, Margery Winter, and the rest of the Berroco design team. There’s an amazing variety of color, texture, and techniques to choose from. You can see photos of all the designs here on the Berroco website. Here are two of my favorites:

Danish Modern

Floret

All the patterns are written for Berroco’s acrylic/nylon blend Comfort® yarn in various weights. If you prefer to knit with natural-fiber yarns, it shouldn’t be difficult to substitute – or to shrink patterns to baby-blanket size. **Edited to add: Berroco is giving away 50 copies of the book, plus yarn - click here to enter the drawing.

Patternfish added its 5,000th pattern this week. This site is a fantastic source for patterns past and present – 40+ new ones added every week. More info about them here. Number 5000 was the Kathy Zimmerman coat in Classic Elite Waterlily on the left, knitted sideways in strong knit-purl texture. There’s also a new stole by Catherine Devine with handsome stylized flowers on a mesh ground, and a ladylike cropped cabled vest by Michelle Porter for Lana Gatto (check out the cable detail around the armholes).

Waterlily Sideways Cardigan

Andrea Dogwood Blossom Wrap

Cable V-Neck Vest

Prices for these patterns range from $4.95 - $6.00 – all available instantly. By the way, did you know you can order Classic Elite yarns directly from their website? Waterlily info/colors here.

Here’s a brand new design from Fiddlesticks Knitting – Flair, a  coat-length  vest in feather-and-fan lace with neat, wide seed-stitch bands. Simple, elegant vertical lines, meant to be closed with a pin. A short version would be very nice too.  The yarn is DK-weight raw silk; there’s a special kit price until April 11. Or, buy the (printed) pattern only for $12.00

More lace – an unusual shawl design from Tiziana Sammuri called In Spring Shawlette.  It’s knitted from the bottom up, shaped as four steep triangles with wide embossed-leaf panels on a lace ground. Available as a Ravelry download for € 4.00 EUR. Requires 600-650 yards of fingering-weight yarn. Tiziana has several other beautiful lace designs in her Ravelry shop.

A small free project: the Honey Cowl from Madelinetosh. Reversible slip-stitch texture pattern shows off the semisolid yarn beautifully. 225-450 yards of DK merino wool, may be made short or long, wide or narrow. This would be lovely in silk or a silk blend, too.

Finally, a couple of months old but new to me, Rachel Russ’s incredibly cute Pixie Poncho, designed for Spud & Chloe Yarns  - it’s published in their leaflet no. 9508. A short hooded, fringed poncho with exuberant colorwork in a cotton-wool blend.

I’m working on a color knitting page for the Knitfinder resource section, which is still in its infancy. I’ll post some of the great links I’ve found for you in a few days. Meanwhile, enjoy this week’s patterns!

Friday pattern roundup

We begin with a pretty new sweater called Manu from Kate Davies. It’s a yoke cardigan in stockinette stitch with a softly gathered neckline and matching gathered patch pockets. Longer length, three-button closure; written for sport or DK weight alpaca or wool/angora/cashmere. You can buy it from Kate’s blog or on Ravelry for £3.50 GBP.

Next, something for men - Janet Szabo’s Cedar Trail Vest from the new issue of Twists and Turns. It’s a handsome button-front vest in worsted-weight cotton/merino blend, with intricate small-scale cable patterning and garter-stitch bands. Would be fine for women too. You can download the issue for $5.00, and there’s a nice women’s pullover in it as well, among other patterns.

More texture: the Hands of Blue fingerless gloves are a free pattern from Lucy Hague – download the PDF file here. Bands of undulating twisted ribbing, a longer length, and pattern options for fingerless mitts, half-fingered or full-fingered gloves. Written for 150 yards of DK-weight yarn; the designer used a bamboo/merino blend.

Now for some color – two patterns from Dutch designers. First, Alyssum from Dutch Knitting Design, a simple triangular shawl designed to show off the color changes of Noro Silk Garden Sock yarn. $7.00, available as a Ravelry download (I don’t see it on the Dutch Knitting Design website yet).
 
These Hiroshige mittens in three colors by Hanneke Sieben are inspired by a Japanese print. A complex chart and some rounds that use all three colors make this project a bit advanced. Lovely – somehow they look wintry and springlike at the same time. Available as a Ravelry download for $3.00. Knitted in Dale Heilo and Cascade 220.

To wrap things up, a spring/summer design, the very pretty Soft Linen Single Gore Skirt by Gudrun Johnston, published in Classic Elite’s Farmer’s Market brochure. Soft Linen is a DK weight wool/linen/alpaca blend. Graceful flared shape, inverted pleat with lacy embossed flowers, and a touch of texture at the yoke and hem. There are several other nice patterns in the brochure.

Enjoy! Until next week.

Vintage Bohus

I spent last Sunday in Susanna Hansson’s Bohus Stickning class at Stitches West. What a great day! Susanna tells the Bohus story, with plenty of slides, shows off her collection of vintage Bohus garments, and gets you started on a pair of Blue Shimmer cuffs. For me, the highlight was the opportunity to see and handle the vintage garments from Susanna’s collection. Here are some photos – click to see closeups. From the 1940s, two designs by Anna-Lisa Mannheimer Lunn:

Blue Eskimo hat

Red Edge cardigan

See the unexpected touch of pink in the Blue Eskimo hat? That photo also shows the tiny gauge – look at the garter-stitch brim. These 40s designs have less of a modern following than the later ones, but I love the retro look of them. Rumor has it that a kit and pattern for The Red Edge is coming soon from Solveig Gustafsson. I’d wear that sweater often.

From the 1950s, three designs by Annika Malmström-Bladini (all from 1957):

 Tobak

Winter Haze (Vinterdis) tam

Lemon cardigan

Tobak (Tobacco) was a cowl-neck pullover with a plain body and color patterning on the neck and cuffs only.  And Lemon – that eye-popping chartreuse body color is quite true, on my monitor at least.

From the 1960s, designs of Kerstin Olsson:

The Green Wood (1960)

Myrten Grön tam (1964)

The New Azalea (Red Egg) (1963)

Mosaik jacket (1967)

And one last 1960s design, Karin Ivarsson’s Large Lace Collar tam from 1960:


The Bohus story is told in detail in Wendy Keele’s excellent book Poems of Color. (The book was recently out of print for a short period; it’s likely to go out of print again soon, possibly for good.) Briefly, it goes like this: in 1937, a group of women, wives of unemployed stone cutters in the Bohus province of Sweden, approached the provincial governor’s wife for help devising a home-based industry that would allow them to help support their families. The governor’s wife was Emma Jacobsson, a highly educated Austrian Jew who had grown up in Vienna and immigrated to Sweden when she married. She took on the project, and after a few false starts, settled on the production of handknit garments – sweaters, hats, mittens and gloves.

Bohus Stickning was born in 1939 and lasted until its closure in 1969. Emma Jacobsson herself was the first designer; just five others were hired over the entire 30 years. Hundreds of knitters worked for Bohus Stickning over the years. They were highly trained and well paid, receiving about 30% of the retail price; they were expected to produce perfectly-knitted garments, but were allowed up to 3 months to finish a sweater.

These were couture garments with a conscious fashion aesthetic. They were marketed as luxury goods; the sweaters sold for around $300 US in the 1950s in stores like Neiman Marcus. Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly were among the celebrities who owned Bohus sweaters. Emma Jacobsson fiercely defended the integrity of the brand through strict quality control (of  the wool, the spinning, the dyeing, and the knitting) and marketing techniques (high pricing, careful choice of sales outlets).

For more on Bohus Stickning, read Poems of Color. If you ever get a chance, take Susanna’s class – there’s nothing like seeing the garments in person, and being able to examine the construction methods. Here’s a link to an online article based on one of Susanna’s lectures – it appeared in Knitch magazine. Unfortunately Radiant Knits: An Enchanting Obsession,  the catalog for the 2009 Bohus exhibit at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, seems to be no longer available. [Edited to add: You can get it from Saga Hill Designs, the website of Wendy J. Johnson, who photographed the Bohus garments for the catalog. Thanks to Ellen for the tip.] That exhibit featured Susanna Hansson’s collection. There’s also a documentary film by Kjell Andersson, made for Swedish Television in 1999. The film is available from Schoolhouse Press – in fact you can order it together with Poems of Color at a 20% discount. There’s also a Flickr pool, with photos of some vintage sweaters I’ve seen nowhere else like this one and this one. Of course, there is a Ravelry group too, moderated by my friend ermabom aka knitsarina.

*Edited to add one more great online article: B is for Bohus, Revisited, an entry in unionpurl's Knitting Abecedarium.

As many of you know, some of the garments are now being reproduced in kit form by master Swedish dyer Solveig Gustafsson. Her yarns and colors are truly beautiful, and the prices are very reasonable. Just go to her website and feast your eyes on the designs she’s made available. Susanna has very generously translated the patterns into English, in return for which she encourages knitters to donate to Doctors Without Borders, in the spirit of Bohus Stickning’s original social support purpose.

I don’t have much to show for my morning of class knitting:
I’m pretty slow with two and three colors at a time on 000 needles. That’s the size I needed to get a gauge of 8.5 stitches to the inch.  The yarn is 50/50 merino and angora. I have to rip this and start over to get a nice cuff, but I plan not only to do that, but to go on and knit gloves. I think they’ll be beautiful.

**3/4/2010: Just uploaded the vintage Bohus photos to Flickr so you can see them even bigger. Click here

Friday pattern roundup

Today I’m inaugurating what I hope will be a weekly feature here on the blog – a roundup of the best new patterns I see each week. Just a few, because I don’t want to overwhelm you!


Let’s start with a free pattern, Mary Rourke’s Lusekofte-sque Mitts. These would be great as a first stranded colorwork project. Sportweight alpaca in two colors, nicely flared cuffs, traditional Norwegian colorwork. Separate charts for the two mitts, so the patterning is symmetrical. Available on Ravelry (free download). This pair was knitted by Liz.

How about a baby sweater? Nikki Van de Car’s free Maile cardigan is simple and incredibly cute. It’s a button-front raglan worked in one piece from the bottom up. Very springy in bright green, with eyelet flowers around the hem and leafy lace along the raglan lines. Tidy garter-stitch edges are just right.  Needs just one 100-gram skein of sock weight yarn. Written in one size, 3 months, but wouldn’t be difficult to size up.

We have to have at least one lace shawl. I love Luiza, new from Jane Araujo. Top-down triangular shawl with unusual, very pretty border at bottom. Requires 450-500 yards of fingering or laceweight yarn; $5.00, available as a Ravelry download.
Now, two patterns from new books. First, whimsical stranded colorwork mittens – with kangaroos on them!  Wonderful. The roos are full of energy - not one chart repeated three times, but three different poses. Appropriately enough, these were designed by Barbara Giguere for a new book by Gail Callahan aka the Kangaroo Dyer: Hand Dyeing Yarn and Fleece. Go to the Ravelry pattern page for a peek at the palms. And from Nancy Marchant’s new book on brioche stitch, Knitting Brioche, the Haarlem jacket, an elegant striped cardigan in neutral colors that would look good on almost anyone – or on the runway, for that matter. The subtle color play and asymmetrical collar are very chic.
And to finish up, there’s a great new collection from Churchmouse Yarns & Teas in Washington called Churchmouse Classics. Eleven patterns in the group; my favorites are the simple stockinette infinity scarf in Rowan’s Kidsilk Haze, knitted on the bias (Mohair Bias Loop) and a cashmere beret, but all these patterns by Kit Hutchin are winners – there’s a beaded beret in one skein of Koigu, a Koigu linen stitch scarf, and more.  Available either as printed patterns or PDF downloads. You can order directly from Churchmouse.


So there’s some inspiration for the coming week. If you come across something new that you think I should mention, drop me a line – I’ll be glad to hear from you.

I’ll be spending quality time with Bohus sweaters at Stitches West on Sunday – I’m taking Susanna Hansson’s all-day class on them. I’ll report next week – expect beautiful Bohus photos!