If you follow me on Instagram, you probably know that I’m on a bit of a stripey hat kick. I find these hats to be just the right combination of mindless knitting and creative play: they use up all kinds of leftovers and little skeins, and I get to play around with colour without worrying whether it’ll look good in sample photos or the stripes are perfect or the colours are maybe a bit weird.
Continue reading
Update Sept. 27/19: The pattern–Porcupine Ridge–came out on Ravelry today. Click the link for full pattern details and to buy the pattern.
Three weeks ago I was in Whitehorse, up in the Yukon, visiting my sister. She took me to her local yarn shop, because she knows me. They had qiviut yarn, because it’s the North.
Continue reading
It started in May. I had a week to go before my road trip to Maryland Sheep & Wool, and the itch set in. The itch to make something for this trip. I can make something in a week, surely. It’s not like I have anything else to do. (I had a lot else to do.) I know: I’ll make some slippers! My beloved old moccasins are looking pretty beat up, and they take up a fair bit of room in the suitcase, and I bet I can whip out a pair of ballet-ish slippers that look nice and pack small and will keep my bare feet off the hotel carpet.
Now, this is not my first last-minute-travel-project rodeo, and though I was tempted to also spin the yarn for these things, I knew that that way lay madness. Besides, that’s much of the point of a stash, surely: to have exactly the right yarn when inspiration strikes, just waiting for you to pull it out and get knitting. So I did. I found some worsted weight from Imperial Yarn in a heathery bottle green, and off I went.*
I think I’ve discovered the problem with keeping new release announcements and promotions to my newsletter, and only posting personal projects and the like here on the blog: 99.999% of my projects are work-related, I don’t often get time to spin, and so there’s not much to say a lot of the time. (Also, to be frank, the current political climate has knocked some of the stuffing out of me, and I don’t want to add to the noise, and it feels like there’s a lot of noise to go around right now.) And lo, seven months have gone by, tumbleweeds are blowing through here, and still loquacity eludes me. But!
I do have a new project I’m excited about, and it’s not a pattern sample (though it may evolve into a pattern eventually), and this right here is just the place to share it.
Remember this?
“Make us a crazy-bright, Mexican-inspired blanket!” they said.
“I think I can do that,” I said. “I think that might be fun!”
It was. It really, really was.
Yarn: Quince & Co. Osprey, pattern: making it up as I go along, with a garter mosaic stitch panel from Barbara Walker’s book Mosaic Knitting.
…than I’m off again. It feels like I just got back from DC (wait, I did just get back—I’ve only been home a week), and I’m packing to head up to Toronto. This trip is for fun: my sister, who lives up in the T dot, is getting married to a lovely man, and the clan is gathering for the event. My other sister has rented a cottage, so there will be city time and lake time and family time and time with old friends from the punk rock stompin’ around town years. Many of my internet friends are gathering while we’re there (for another wedding—apparently it’s the thing to do right now), so there will also be time with old friends I’ve never met in real life. And there will be knitting. I got shockingly little knitting done during TNNA, and hooboy, am I going to make up for that in the next couple of weeks. (See above re: lake time: there’s a whole nine glorious days of it.) Of course, most of it will be work knitting, but that’s my favourite kind of work, so I don’t mind one bit. Continue reading
As a fan of woolly wool, I really like Brooklyn Tweed‘s yarns. I’ve noodled around with Shelter and Loft, and just love the light, spongy, cohesive fabric these woolen-spun yarns create, and the wide range of lovely, heathered colours are a colourwork fan’s dream. It pleases me that these beautiful yarns are made sheep to skein here in North America. (I love the house yarns by the mill they use, Harrisville Designs, for all the same reasons.) So when Brooklyn Tweed released Quarry late last year, just as I was finishing the next round of samples for photography, I had to try it. A bulky weight yarn at 200 yds/100g? I could get a hat out of that in no time at all, and have one more sample ready to go. When the skein arrived, I played around with stitch patterns to see what it could do, and it turned out that what Quarry does really well is texture. Ribs and cables turned out beautifully. I didn’t want to stop knitting with it: I wanted a big, generous scarf out of this stuff. Not the most practical thing for the South, but fie on that. Sometimes you just have to go where the inspiration takes you. I ordered more skeins, and knit. And knit. And very soon I had a scarf. And it was exactly what I’d pictured. It’s warm and cozy and the pattern reminded me of runnels of melting ice water, so I called it Meltwater.
Yesterday was a most excellent knitting day here at the Casa de Cusser. All summer, I’ve been working on design samples, one after the other, many of which I can’t even talk about here until some time in December. They’ve been fun projects, and I’ve enjoyed making them, no doubt. Too many work projects in a row can make one a bit squirrelly, though. With all the note-taking, the directions-following (even if they’re your own directions), the need for a perfect finished object: after a while, a knitter needs to break free, you know? I try to have a fun, playful/mindless/doesn’t-have-to-be-perfect project to turn to, and with the end of the tea cozy, it was time for something new. I’ve been obsessing about self-striping sock yarns again, so I dug into the stash and found just the thing: an insanely bright self-striping sock yarn bought at the dreary end of winter last year. Continue reading
For a knitter, I sure have chosen a strange place to live. Most of the time, it’s hot, and when it’s not hot, it’s just sort of cool. Light weight sweaters are handy from late October ’til April, but those lovely heavy sweaters, the cozy cabled and stranded beauties that would be so perfect up north? Yeah, not so practical here. But finally, finally, I’ve come up with a way to have a lopapeysa of my own that will see regular use. Indeed, it will get used every single day. Continue reading
E. Elliott Knits 