Tutorial Tuesday: Stained Glass Ornaments

In case you’re not keeping track, only six weeks remain between now and Christmas. Whatever retail stores that had the dignity to wait until after Halloween to unveil their garish holiday displays have completed the terrible act. Now everyone’s flaunting faux evergreen, holly, poinsettia, nutcrackers, stars, snowmen, and dozens of other motifs that signify the season of spending is here.

And boy do I want to spend. This year, more than any other, I want to blow lots of money on extravagant gifts, buy decorations ample enough to turn our home into a holiday wonderland, and invest heavily in scented candles that make the entire house smell like orange and cinnamon and pine 24/7.

Last year, all the energy I might have poured into decorating our home, baking seasonal treats, and searching for the perfect gift instead went toward mastering breastfeeding, changing diapers every hour on the hour, and sleeping in stretches no more than two or three hours in length. This year I’m ready to jump in and binge while I can on holiday everything, and introduce Adelaide to the spectacle that is the Christmas season. I know she won’t remember much, if anything from this year, but I have a difficult time remaining rational.

In an effort to appease my appetite for all things Christmas without breaking my budget, I’ve thrown myself into Holiday DIY projects. You’ve probably noticed. It started with a garland of crochet Christmas trees and then a trio of evergreens made from felted wool sweaters.

My latest crafty endeavor? Stained glass ornaments made with wax paper and crayon shavings. Call this one practice for when Addie is old enough to join me in the holiday making. But even without a little one to help you sprinkle the crayon shavings just so, this is pure comfort food crafting. A little glue, kraft paper, crayons, and some paint – classic craft ingredients if there ever were any.

If you want to make stained glass ornaments my way, check out the tutorial!

Knitwear for Jam Jars

Since my early knitting days I have focused my stitching efforts on churning out garments of all varieties. Hats, scarves, the off pair of mittens, and my favorite: sweaters. Rarely did I cast on with the intention of knitting something that I or a knit-worthy recipient could not throw on before greeting a cool morning.

Knitted pillows? Lovely, but I couldn’t be bothered. Wooly throws? I adore the idea of having a few to toss over the back of our living room couch, but I can’t commit to knitting something that large. My inability to knit for the home has even put me off making that heirloom lace tablecloth I so badly want to conquer. Seriously – I planned to start that monster no fewer than three years ago, and I have yet to even attempt the cast-on.

So my most recent knitting project is somewhat of a breakthrough, because unlike my usual knitting fare, it cannot be worn. Well, it technically can be worn if you are a glass jar or aluminum can or some other round, container-shaped object. Yes, I made a knitted jar cover. But it is a knitted jar cover capable of turning a container destined for the recycling bin into a lovely vessel for flowers, pencils, and even, perhaps, knitting needles.

October 20, 2012

 It’s a project small enough to keep me from throwing it to the ground halfway in and returning to my beloved sweater knits, and it’s a fantastic canvas on which to practice stitch patterns that might one day become part of a sweater, hat, or other wearable. It also features a method of working from the center out using an i-cord umbilical cord (thank you techknitting), and for those of you who are like me – with lots of leftover yarn in amounts too tiny to make much – it’s great for stash busting.

Want to know how I did it? The full tutorial is here!

In Real Life I Do Occasionally Knit

I’ve alluded to my knitting and even flashed a few long-finished pieces in my previous posts. That does nothing to prove I am still actively knitting and my blog is not a sham built solely upon past triumphs. If I had decided to start blogging about seven months ago, you would have been reading a knitting blog authored by someone who had touched neither yarn nor needle for nearly twelve weeks and was in no hurry to cast on for anything. It wasn’t that I suddenly lost my passion for fiber arts and really good sweaters. My longest stint without working so much as a couple rows of stockinette since I first picked up knitting happens to correspond with the end of my first pregnancy.


(I really do knit! Here's a picture to prove it!)

I never intended to abandon my knitting for as long as I did. In fact, leading up to Addie’s arrival, I spent a lot of time thinking about all the knitting I would accomplish during my twelve weeks of leave. About eight weeks into said leave, I realized how wishful that thinking was. (I am ever the optimist when it comes to fitting in knitting while also taking care of a wee one.) I had exchanged working a few rows of this sweater and that blanket for napping. Or planting myself on the couch as yet another wave of exhaustion hit me. Those, I discovered, happen a lot when there’s a newborn in the house and you’re getting acclimated to running on fewer hours of sleep a night than you thought possible.

When my girl was about ten weeks old, I began to feel that familiar itch to make something, anything. But when I returned to work just a week later, learning to balance a full time job with being a mom and managing my fair share in the household duties killed that desire . Fortunately, I did get my knitting mojo back, but the going is slower than it was before baby. A lot slower. Sometimes an entire week passes before I realize I haven’t so much as fondled a hank of yarn. I hate those weeks, because the lack of knitting usually corresponds with an especially hard run of an already difficult-to-maintain schedule. When I do get to pick up my needles and work a few rows of garter stitch or a single repeat of a colorwork pattern, I think of my daughter and express my love for her in every stitch. Every time I steal a few stitches I am filled with love and my busy mind goes quiet. I like to think that when Addie wears the knits I’ve completed in the past few months she is enclosed in a love note written in wool, signed by Mommy.

That is what keeps me returning to the design notebook, and then to the knitting needles. It guarantees that WIPs like this one, her newest dress, will not remain a WIP for too long.



Yes, that is a fold-over hem, latvian braid, and even some snazzy houndstooth colorwork. I'm excited about this little dress, and I hope to finish it in the next couple of weeks.

Design Diary: Respect the Swatch

Like most practiced knitters, if I’m making a garment where fit matters, I knit a gauge swatch. You know, that little 5X5 square (admittedly, mine usually end up being rectangular on account of overzealous cast-ons) that lets you figure out how many stitches, and less crucially, rows, fit across an inch? When I follow a pattern, that little swatch is my Rosetta stone – it lets me know if the sweater with a 42-inch bust measurement really will accommodate a 42-inch bust or it lets me know if I need to make modifications to ensure a good fit.

Naturally, I started my first design project with a gauge swatch. 5(and a half)x5 inches of Mirasol Yarns Lachiwa on 3.5mm needles later, I had a lovely little almost-square to wash, block, and measure. This modest bit of handiwork would serve as the foundation for what I knew would be a masterpiece of clever design and impressive craftsmanship.

And then I cast on. Well, first I worked out the math – determined how many stitches I would need to achieve the correct chest measurement, decided where I wanted the neck opening to fall, and figured the appropriate number of stitches to start with. Then I cast on. When I finished lopping the yarn onto my needle, I faltered. Even though I had not knit so much as a single row, I could tell that my garment – a baby dress with a knit bodice and fabric skirt – was going to turn out much smaller than the 12 month size I had planned. So I cast on a few more stitches for good measure and began to knit.

Once I strayed from the path I had carefully devised via simple arithmetic, I did not return. I intuited my way through the sleeve shaping (raglan increases) and arbitrarily decided the armscye depth. Pretty early on, I could see the bodice was going to be too big. But I persevered. The dress was, after all, intended for a growing baby. If she couldn’t wear it now, then surely she could in a few months time. Only after I knit to within a couple of inches from the hem did I realize how long it would take for Addie to grow into her dress. My panicked addition of several stitches had resulted in a bodice generous enough to fit a two-year-old.

She looks thrilled, doesn't she? In fairness, tolerating a photo shoot while wearing an ill-fitting dress isn't my idea of fun, either.

I resolved to finish, rather than frog the too-large top. I guess I wanted some artifact of my first attempt at designing so that years – maybe even months, depending on how quickly I improve, from now, I can laugh at my novice decisions. In the couple of months since I bound off and sewed on the fabric skirt Addie has grown; her dress is no longer clownishly humongous, but it still hangs off her.

Before the end of the year, I’ll knit a second version of this dress and this time I will respect the swatch and listen to what it tells me. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Inspiration

This summer was brutal. We racked up eight 100-degree plus days through late June and early July and nearly 50 90-degree plus days throughout the summer. It's not over yet, but lately cooler morning temperatures hint at the crisp Autumn days to come.

Naturally, this has me dreaming of cozy fall knits. Sweaters are my default late summer projects, but if I wanted a fall sweater this year, I should have started last spring. Since spring came and left without me so much as casting on for a cardigan, I'm focusing on hats. For inspiration, I've gathered some of my current favorite hats from Ravelry and around the web.


1. I love the slip stitch colorwork pattern on Triona Murphy's Check Slouch. The finished hat looks like a difficult knit, but the pattern itself is easy.
2. The simple and striking colorwork motif on Full of Fluff's Augustine adds just enough splash to an otherwise simple hat.
3. Alex Tinsley knits a lot of hats, but a most bespeckled hat is one of my favorites. Her choice of color and the slouchy shape makes for a whimsical and ever-so-wearable piece.
4. Po Lena's Tears of Bronze features a simple but arresting cable motif that sings when paired with a semisolid yarn like the madelinetosh lysaknits chose for this version. And the pattern is free!
5. Another example of non-traditional cabled motifs, Ysolda's Oxidize features lots of single-stitch cables snaking over a stockinette background. I especially love it in a semisolid yarn like the one Saz chose for the version above.
6. If Terhi Montonen's garter stripe beanie isn't the definition of knitting comfort food: simple stockinette stitch worked up in gorgeous yarn and a stripey garter stitch edging, then I don't know what is. Even more comforting -- this is another free pattern.

Now to decide which of these darlings to add to my knitting queue. And get to work on designing a hat that embraces the spirit of simple, but well-chosen details.

Design Diary

I hadn’t been a knitter for long when I decided I might like to design my own knitwear. Developing ideas, hoarding them in a notebook – I’ve never found that difficult. But during those early years, and even in recent years, I always stopped short of executing my designs. A lot of it had to do with fear. What if everyone hated it? What if the fit was all wrong? What if I, lacking the skills or experience to puzzle through a design issue, got stuck mid-sweater? What if I hated it, and after all those hours, not to mention expensive yarn, committed to a failure of a project? Clearly I based my speculation on failure, not success.

Then, a couple of years ago, I knit myself a sweater sans pattern. Before you congratulate me for overcoming my fears and starting down the path to successful knitwear design, I should admit that while I did not follow a pattern to the letter, I did base my work on Elizabeth Zimmerman’s EPS system. (An aside: if you are a knitter and you do not know of Elizabeth Zimmerman, get thee to Amazon or your local bookstore and buy Knitting Workshop or Knitting Without Tears. They will change your life, or at least, they will change the way you knit.) Even using the EPS to figure the math, it took me three tries to knit a wearable garment, and the finished sweater was not perfect. After a few wears, I grudgingly recognized that additional shaping might have prevented the sag of extra fabric at the middle back. A few weeks after that, I regretted my decision to nix the planned colorwork yoke after a couple of unsuccessful attempts to squeeze in too-large motifs. And now, as I look at the photo, it's obvious that a round yoke construction absent of bust darts isn't the most flattering choice for my, ahem, ample chest.

Despite the flaws and coulda, woulda, shouldas, I’m still pretty proud of that sweater. So it makes no sense that instead of building upon this baby step toward designing my own knitwear, I retreated. Once again I grabbed a pattern as I reached for the yarn and happily followed along, knowing the whole time exactly how my finished garment would look.

It was the birth of my daughter, Adelaide, that finally inspired me to keep going even after I had fully realized a design on notebook paper. I have knit her many sweaters from patterns, but the ones I’ve designed myself are special. They are truly one-of-a-kind, and I poured my love into them even before I knit the first stitch. Now that I have actually completed a few designs from concept to finished object, my knitting choices have changed. I can’t commit myself to knitting from someone else’s pattern, but I approach each of my new design projects with excitement and high expectations. I’m now wondering why I waited so long to begin designing, and I am glad I’m not waiting any longer.