Don't hate me because I'm not beautiful.

Is it wrong to hate a yarn? Doesn’t every yarn have something to offer?

Eyelash yarn was once cool. I knitted a few long eyelash scarves in my day. I’ve even seen it used effectively as an accent in a felted purse. And that popcorn yarn can be crocheted into an interesting necklace/scarf that makes you say, “Wha?”

But what I’m really talking about here is Red Heart Super Saver. The “beginner’s yarn.” The one that makes yarn store employees want to shriek when they see a customer walk into the store with it in their plastic grocery bag along with their aluminum needles and asking sheepishly, “Can you help me with this?” Well, if throwing the whole thing in the garbage is helping, then yes, yes I can.

What I often find is that the yarn, needles, and grocery bag aren’t the problem. This is a beginning knitter. They don’t know any better. It’s my job to educate them about dropped stitches, proper cast on, and give them a healthy dose of self-confidence. As I deftly move the stitches back and forth on the needles and magically raise the stray dropped stitch back onto the needle, I educate my new knitter about what I’m doing, find out how they got started knitting, figure out how to direct them on the right path.

I started out on acrylic yarn and aluminum needles way back when. I don’t remember there being any other kind of yarn; at least anything that I thought I could afford. Being an avid child crafter, I then as a teenager took easily to crocheted Granny Squares. When I taught myself to knit a few years later using Reader’s Digest book of Needlework, I produced beautiful sweaters, albeit with acrylic fiber. Nowadays, I crochet and knit blankets for Project Linus and we need to use acrylic yarn so the blankets will be washable. Red Heart is the go-to yarn for Project Linus because it’s inexpensive. I agree that it is the roughest feeling acrylic out there and I don’t use it unless it has been given to me for Project Linus. My personal go-to yarn for PL blankets is Caron One Pounder. Now that is a soft yarn. I find that some of the “new” soft yarns like, TLC, or Red Heart’s version, are actually too soft and limp. I truly love Vanna White’s yarn and her modern color palette. Michael’s “house brand” Impeccable yarn is very nice. There are plenty of affordable acrylic alternatives out there.

This brings me again to the issue of education. New knitters just don’t know what’s available. Someone gave them or told them about Red Heart and that’s why they’re using it. Someone gave them those aluminum needles and taught them how to knit. That may be the extent of knowledge that person has about knitting. When that grocery-bag-holding, aluminum-needle-wielding, Red Heart user walks into my knitting store, I want to give them the best feeling they’ve ever had about knitting. I will tell them that there are yarn alternatives. I will encourage them to try a long circular needle instead of cramming 250 stitches onto their 14″ needle. I will pick up their dropped stitches and even show them how to do it. They may not buy a thing that day, but hopefully, they will have the renewed motivation to go home and give it another try.

What we don’t see in that grocery bag is the love and hope that a new knitter brings. Love for the grandchild they are knitting for. Hope that they will be able to make something with their own hands and give it with all the love they put into every stitch.

My favorite place to give

I’ve heard that a lot of knitters give away what they make but I know a lot of knitters who knit only for themselves. It’s hard for me to understand this because I have so little of what I have made over the years. I have always given away what I make. I like to make gifts for people. I give to my friends and family. And several years ago, when everyone I knew had something I made and didn’t have room for one more afghan, I was thrilled to find Project Linus. A place that never says, “No, thank you” and will take your handmade blanket with a grateful smile and warm hug.

If you are one of those knitters or crocheters who have never donated an item to an altruistic cause, then please consider doing so. It’s a wonderful thing to give another person something to keep them warm.

One of my favorite books is, “Knitting for Peace” by Betty Christiansen. She talks about so many worthy causes in this book. There are stories of how the organizations were started, photos, contacts, and patterns. I cry every time I look through this book as I think of all the people who are helped and who are made to feel loved with something handmade.

One of the things I like about Project Linus is that they give to kids and they give locally. But they also give to timely causes. For instance, when Haiti had their terrible earthquake, we sent blankets. The call goes out for blankets and we send them. It’s incredible. I am so proud to get to work making blankets knowing that people will make use of them right away. And that’s another great thing about making things for people. I think about the recipient as I make the blanket. I don’t know the person but I know it will be someone who really needs a warm hug and who maybe really needs to keep warm.

The happiness I feel knowing that I am helping other people is very special. I am proud and humbled to know that something I created with my hands is going to another person and making their life a bit happier…there’s nothing like it.

I was so excited to meet Ysolda Teague at our knitting store a couple of weeks ago! She is as charming and lovely as you would expect. She gave a talk about how she got started as a knitting designer and about her current projects, including choosing colors for Scrumptious yarns by Lantern Moon used in her designs for one of her new books, Saturday Treat. I’ve been using the deep purple colorway in Scrumptious Sport Weight to knit up Cria from Ysolda’s book, Little Red in the City. With yarn this weight, it certainly isn’t knitting up quickly but it’s very enjoyable. Ysolda’s top down design with set in sleeves is ingenious and elegant. The cardigan looks so beautiful and I’m enjoying the process.

Seeing Ysolda in person was a real treat for me and I enjoyed her visit immensely. I admire how hard she works travelling around to the various knit shows – Vogue Knitting Live in New York, TNNA in Phoenix, then Stitches West in Santa Clara – and talking about her designs. She was losing her voice after being at TNNA the entire weekend! I was very inspired by Ysolda and loved seeing her designs knit up in “real life.” It makes a difference to see and touch the yarn and relate to a three dimensional object rather than just looking at photos and designs in a book. There’s no substitute for holding a yarn in your hand and really seeing the color and feeling the fiber for yourself.

So, back to knitting on my lovely sweater that will be a sample for teaching at Jessica Knits next month. Little Red in the City is a wealth of information for helping knitters make a sweater design fit correctly. After measuring yourself, you plug in numbers from a chart that Ysolda has provided for each pattern. All of her techniques are taught beautifully in the front of the book with lots of photos. It truly is a must-have for your library. If you’re not familiar with Ysolda Teague, check her out on Ravelry.com. She also has a website and blog where you can follow her travels and adventures.

Happy Knitting!

General Public's Image of Knitter

I have been knitting and crocheting since I was 14 years old. How many times have I heard as I sat working on my project, “My grandmother knits/crochets.” There I was, 21 years old, working on my filet crochet project, happy as I could be, and fielding yet another assault on the assumption that only old people knit. Why is that? Certainly, it’s because there are plenty of older people who DO knit and crochet! The argument being that now they have more time to knit or have grandkids to knit for. So many of the ladies that come into the knit store where I work say, “I want to learn to knit again. My mother (or aunt) taught me to knit and I haven’t done it in 30 years.” And guess what? They take a class and they are knitting within minutes because your hands don’t forget. It’s quite fascinating and rewarding to teach this sort of student. Suddenly, it all comes flooding back and they are on their way making new projects with beautiful new yarn because, as we know, yarn is WAY better now than it was 30 years ago! Remember Monsanto? Wintuk? Of course, acrylic is still around and better than ever (keep working on it Red Heart) but as you’ll hear much older people say, “Go get me some wool.” We have way more fibers than just wool in our store. Oh, and guess what? Someone called the store the other day and asked if we had any yarn for men’s sweaters. Why, yes. Yes, we do.

Which brings me to the reason for this topic. I went to a party last night and a male guest whom I did not know asked me what I did. I answered, “I work at a knitting store. I sell yarn and I teach knitting.” To which he responded, “Knitting is kind of a dying art, isn’t it?” Well, no it isn’t and here’s why.

How sad would it be for me to be working at a store where no one ever shopped? To whom would I be teaching knitting? To whom would I be selling yarn? He hadn’t thought through his response at all. In fact, knitting is a booming art and more people than EVER are knitting. The hard truth is, I live in a knitting bubble of sorts. I think about knitting all day long. I talk about knitting most days. I write or read about knitting many days. It is my passion. And when something is your passion, it becomes the center of your world. And I forget that everyone else does not know how AMAZING knitting is. That is a fantastic reason to go to Stitches, by the way. Everyone there is as passionate as you are about knitting and you never have to explain yourself or respond to silly questions. In fact, there are plenty of grandmas at Stitches and they wouldn’t be questioning the awesomeness of knitting; they would be reveling in it.

And this is why I love my job at the knitting store. I get to talk about yarn and knitting and patterns. I get to teach people how to knit (or remind them how to!) I teach them new skills that get them excited about new projects. It’s all a wonderful yarn party every day and I have something in common with everyone who walks through the door.

So, back to you, STEVE, thou who art unfamiliar with the thriving art of knitting. I am not pursuing a dying art, but thanks for your interest.

Springtime indigo dyeing

The indigo is very strong at first and our t-shirts prove that by how dark they ended up being. We only put them in the dye bucket for a few seconds! I’m glad we tried the t-shirts first because that gave us a chance to really see what the dye would do. We did tie dyeing on the shirts but not on the yarn. We just wanted to see what colors we could come up with. Our finished yarn was definitely a faded denim color which has been wound but not knitted up yet. We used Knit Picks bare in DK and worsted and I must admit, there is not much difference in the two weights. They took the dye beautifully though, so no problem there.

It was a rather long morning into the afternoon of dyeing, hanging (you must hang the yarn and expose the indigo to the air to get the color), then washing, then hanging again. Indigo continues to bleed after it’s washed, so I make sure to wash my t-shirts with like items, i.e. jeans. Exhausting but rewarding, I recommend this activity as a way to understand why you pay more for hand dyed and hand painted yarns. For most of us, the price is well worth it.

Our next venture will be Kool-Aid dyeing which can be done inside (a boon now that we’re in the hot months) and we’ll be working with sock yarn. Can’t wait to figure out what my socks or shawl will look like with my newly dyed yarn. I’m thinking about utilizing my egg dyeing experience and seeing what sort of stripes and over dyes I can create for some interesting effects.

Stiches West was AMAZING!

I took three classes – Celtic Cables with Melissa Leapman; Fair Isle with Sandi Rosner; and Designing Your Dream Sweater with Leslye Solomon. I learned something in each class but I would say that I enjoyed Fair Isle the most. Sandi has a very relaxed teaching style. Right away I understood what I needed to do and knit like the wind so I could see how my color choices would look in her fair isle pattern. And this technique is so much fun! This class completely took away my concern about knitting fair isle and I look forward to making a future project.

Celtic Cables

My final class was Sunday morning, my last day at Stitches. Leslye packed so much information into 3 hours – the class was just too short. I loved the giant graph paper she has designed and gave us to use during the class. Planning a sweater takes a bit of math and a bit of planning but is very doable for everyone. I would have appreciate an all day class that allowed me to design a sweater and then have the instructor’s input. Still, I learned so much from Leslye, not the least of which was to just go for it!

Although my roommate and I were in the convention center most of the time taking classes or shopping, we did need to take a short walk across the street to our hotel. The Hilton was a lovely place to stay and I recommend it. The weather was rainy, windy and cold when we arrived on Friday morning and when we walked to our hotel Friday evening – miserable! We decided to eat at the restaurant hotel and invited two attendees to dine with us. It was great fun getting to know new people! Our second night, we sat in the bar area of the Hilton and knitted while swapping stories with another just-met friend, who travels all over the country attending Stitches shows. She said that this Stitches was the biggest she had seen and was the biggest in the west, so far. The funny thing was, so many attendees live in California. A few came from Arizona and one from Nevada. Our new friend had traveled from Ohio!

If you’re thinking about attending a Stitches event, my advice would be to find out when the class sign-ups start and register right away. Classes really do fill up early. And bring an extra suitcase for all the yarn and goodies you will purchase. Ladies were there to buy yarn and buy they did! Bags and bags of yarn! There was so much beautiful yarn there – hand-dyed yarns were my favorites and they came in many different blends, as well as, colors.

While I didn’t attend the fashion shows this year, I heard they were a lot of fun. Oh, and I did see some famous yarn people besides my instructors. I was pleased to purchase yarn from WEBS, where Steve was walking around being super sweet and helpful and his dad was at the check-out. I also saw Lorna Miser of Lorna’s Laces.

The Sanguine Gryphon was where I found my had-to-have-it yarn. My friend and I walked around the corner and there it was! The most beautiful, dark purple sock weight yarn. I bought three skeins – but no! – my friend bought them for me! It was the most wonderful gift I have received in a long time. So unexpected and so sweet. I love that yarn! I am going to make a Featherweight Cardigan by Hannah Fettig and I look forward to showing it off when I am finished!

So, if you want to immerse yourself in beautiful yarn and learn new fiber techniques, meet lovely people, and bask in the amazing world that we love, I highly recommend attending a Stitches event. I will remember this trip for a long time. And who knows, I just may go again next year!

Working at the knitting store has given me the opportunity to help people every day with their knitting projects. Often the problem is dropped stitches or “something seems wrong.” My favorite problems are pattern confusion. I enjoy puzzling out what the pattern instructions are trying to tell us. I read through the pattern and imagine what shape the garment is taking. Good pattern directions should give plenty of information about what is happening during every phase of garment construction. Unfortunately, many well-known knitting yarns produce pattern books with shortened and often hard-to-follow directions. A schematic always helps, as does more than one photo of the finished garment.

Yesterday, one of my knitters was following directions to make an increase by knitting into the front and the back of the stitch. This produced a purl bump on the right side. This didn’t look right so we tried making a stitch by lifting the bar in between stitches and knitting it through the back loop. What ended up happening, though, was because the stitch that would have been knitted into wasn’t used, it was counted by the customer as she was following her pattern and at the end of the row, her stitch count was off by two. Thinking this through, the solution must be to make one stitch, then immediately knit the next stitch, THEN begin counting from that point. The stitch that would have been used in the k1f1b would have to be knitted as Part Two of the lifted increase. Another alternative would be to knit the stitch, then do the make one AFTER that stitch, then begin counting. Also, if she had counted from the end of row back towards the center and located the spot to make her second increase, I think this problem would have been avoided. This is a good example of thinking of your garment as a whole and not just working row by row, stitch by stitch, with sort of tunnel vision.

The point is, designers make choices when they increase or decrease. They decide which method to use and should have a valid reason about that decision. When we make changes to a pattern, we must understand how our changes affect the outcome, therefore, we should arm ourselves with as much knowledge as possible.

I believe that knitting into the front and back of the stitch to increase was the wrong choice by the designer, as the finished look was a glaring purl bump on the right side of the work. In the end, the customer chose to increase with a purl into the front and back, which created a stocking stitch on the right side of the work and blended right in.

All of this puzzling and testing took at least an hour for the knitter – for a simple increase on one row! I feel that my customer and I learned quite a bit about how increases affect patterns, and for that, I am grateful.

Brambles Beret by Amanda Muscha. Find it on ravelry or knitty.com.

Yesterday, I was at Michael’s because they are having a half off yarn sale and I found Charisma by Loops & Threads (Michael’s brand.) It’s a thicker yarn, acrylic, and, oh, so soft. I’m making a scarf by casting on 120 stitches with a size 10 circular needle. Striping in brown, turquoise, and golden yellow looks vibrant and cozy. This scarf will be donated to Esperanca, one of the wonderful altruistic organizations for which my knitting guild, Cactus Needles Knitting Guild, knits. We also knit for Project Linus and this would be a great yarn for a small blanket.

I knit all the time. Practically all day long, if I can. That seems excessive somehow but I love to knit. I always have several projects going at once and usually something that NEEDS to be knitted. Maybe for a class or for a gift. It seems like I always need a Project Linus blanket to be in the works. The sweaters that I am making for myself languish as new ideas and necessary projects take my attention away. I have three sweaters that require seaming. One of them is for my oldest son who has grown much too large to fit into it but the younger one has grown into it by now. I’ve got yarn “waiting” for me to use it. I know exactly the project I purchased it for and it’s there when I’m ready to make the item. But then, the next project comes along; the next “NEED to get it done first” project. And the older yarn sits and patiently waits.

I love the title quote because it truly describes my interest in knitting and creating. I am passionate about knitting and my passion manifests itself in many ways. Teaching others to knit is one of my passions. Helping others get started on a path that I know they will enjoy traveling for many years to come brings me much joy. When a student’s face lights up because they are knitting and purling. “I’m doing it!” When I answer a question that they have been wondering about for a long time. It seems that I hold the key to the mysteries of knitting. I explain about needles, yarn, gauge, abbreviations. It starts to become clear and they see the possibilities of what they can create with their own hands.

Today I purchased my master hand knitters materials and I hope to receive them soon. My goal is to become a Master Knitter as pronounced by The Knitting Guild Association. There are three levels: each level requires learning new techniques, mailing in swatches for critique, and research. I am looking forward to this challenge, as I am a lifelong learner. I love to study and write and I look forward to the research aspect as much as the technique aspect of the program. Posting my progress on this website is one of my goals. I look forward to hearing from those of you who are also taking on this challenge and from anyone who is following their passion for knitting and creative output.

Knit on with passion and perseverance for you are the creator of your destiny.