27 January 2014

monday's musing

"Be excellent to each other." - Bill

And the first person who leaves a blog comment telling me which Bill I mean above? You get a gift certificate to my pattern shop for $10. :)

Dude!

eta: We have a winner! Congratulations Pearl! :)

Labels:

19 January 2014

monday's musing - early edition

"Whatever your life's work is, do it well." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love it!

I hope you'll join me this Monday morning, January 20, 11 a.m. CST (9 a.m. PST for me!) on Blog Talk Radio for the Fiber Hooligan's show! There will be prizes!

Labels:

14 January 2014

monday's musing - late edition

“We're so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us that we don't take time to enjoy where we are.” - Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

I will take a moment to breathe this week.

Labels:

06 January 2014

monday's musing and a new pattern!

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." - Lou Holtz
---------------------------------------------
And...introducing 

Copperwood!

This over-sized scarf/stole is a mashup of my Pins & Lace Club 2013 patterns. It's knit in Wagtail yarns 100% mohair fingering weight yarn (2 ply), and uses size 6/0 seed beads on the bind off edges.

It's big enough for a stole, but I love wearing it as an over-sized scarf.

Mohair is light, fluffy and warm, and it squeezes down perfectly into a bag for those chilly moments of the day or evening.

It can be dressed down with jeans and a corduroy shirt,

or up as a shoulder wrap.

Like all of my patterns, Copperwood includes both full written and charted instructions. A diagram shows the construction from the provisional cast-on through the first end, and then from the cast-on point to the second end.

The sample shown is worked in Wagtail's 2 ply yarn, and uses approximately 750 yards of a skein. The mohair is grown in Australia by the producers and features a very long staple length with more strength than is usually seen in mohair yarns. Because of the nature of the yarn (no bounce-back/memory), the pattern uses a smaller sized needle (US 5) than might normally be used to achieve gauge; the yarn behaves similarly to a baby alpaca or a silk. If a different yarn with more memory were to be substituted, a larger needle would almost certainly be needed to achieve the gauge given. It is particularly important to swatch with the Wagtail yarn before beginning your project, and wash and block the swatch. It will serve as a reminder of how beautiful the finished product will be, as the project will look particularly rough and uneven in this yarn before blocking. When knitting this project, I found it helpful to weight the provisional cast-on edge so that the yarn would not bunch up at the beginning, and I could easily avoid knitting into the row below.

Copperwood uses motifs from Winter's MoonSong of SpringFuchsia Nouveauand StarDanceall of which are now available as single patterns as well as in the eBook collection!

Labels: , , , , ,