Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
[What follows is an open letter to the knitting community. See below for everyone who signed on. See CatBordhi.com for more about Cat’s legacy, and Val Curtis’s part in keeping it alive.] Cat Bordhi was one of the most creative people we’ve ever known, and one of the most generous. Many people know her creativity […]
Those of you that know Myra Wood know that she’s exceptional in oh so many ways: Her creativity. Her skill in creating free-form works of art in knitting, crochet, and beading. Her exquisite color sense. Her generous teaching spirit. And, most recently, her incredibly positive attitude while dealing with breast cancer. So when a group […]
I try not to get too smarmy in this blog, but this time it’s for a good cause. Today through March 13, Craftsy is celebrating National Craft Month in a novel way: anyone who signs up for a class gets entered in a contest to win $1000 towards the craft-based charity of their choice. Knitted […]
Alexa
By JC | September 21, 2015
Those of you that follow me on Facebook know that I have a thing for swatching. I even went through a phase of regularly posting swatch photos. . That phase has kind of fizzled out, but I’m still swatching. Case in point: a swatch for a wedge version of Ogee Lace from Barbara Walker’s A […]
Q&A
By JC | June 1, 2015
Ask anyone who’s been teaching knitting at the “big” events for a couple years (or anyone who’s done a fair bit of designing, I suppose), and they’ll tell you they regularly get questions via email. I thought it might be fun to share with you a few of my recent q&a sessions. . . . […]
Cogitating
By JC | April 19, 2015
One of the things I’ve always wanted Stitch-Maps.com to be able to do is highlight the spaces between stitch columns. Or, to put it another way, to break a stitch pattern into its constituent parts. Having Stitch-Maps.com create these visualizations automagically would be awesome fun, not to mention super useful. You could see where to […]
You know how I’ve said that I drew stitch maps by hand, long before developing Stitch-Maps.com? Well, I found a little proof today. And it was a little surreal. While cleaning out some dusty corners of my laptop’s hard drive (because, you know, I was stalling on more important tasks), I came across some notes […]
Check out the latest addition to my knitting bookshelves: It’s Knitting Fresh Brioche by Nancy Marchant, and it’s fabulous. The book is all about two-color brioche rib. You’d think that kind of narrow focus would be dull – after all, Nancy’s previous book, Knitting Brioche, covered all kinds of brioche fabrics – but no, Nancy […]
Let’s say you want to design a shawl composed of lace wedges. You have a lace pattern in mind, and you want each wedge to grow by two stitches on each right-side row. How do you get that lace pattern to fit into that wedge shape? In Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls, Martha Waterman suggests making […]
Yesterday, while scoping out the knitting shelves at a local bookstore, I found a gently used copy of Martha Waterman’s Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls. Since I’m in the middle of updating my Wedge Shawl Design class, I had to get it. The book has a lot going for it: history, design advice, a nice selection […]