Bella Knitting

Stash Exposed! Yikes.

Laura

OK, time to pay the piper. My house did it's job and coughed up lots of yarn . . .  too much yarn. My sins are now exposed to all (read 'husband in shock'). It is not really my fault. Before I left my job at IBM I worked part time in my LYS. It was an opportunity to learn more about my craft, fondle new yarns and meet other knitters. I had a blast. However, since I had that other job I took my yarn store salary in the form of yarn credit. So combine a regular Friday schedule, an employee discount a few extra hours on special projects and ta da massive yarn stash all carefully hidden stored in various bins and bags around the house.

The trick to moving without losing your mind is to get organized and decluttered before you move so you're not packing, moving and unpacking unnecessary items. While I would never ever categorize stash as an unnecessary item it was time for me to admit I would probably never knit with most of it. The next best thing to keeping yarn in stash for yourself is finding someone else to love it. And so my eight bins went into the Garage/Moving Sale inventory. Thanks to Craig's List I was able to advertise the yarn content and got to meet many nice local knitters I had not met before. A woman from Russia, a grandma knitting preemie caps and a 7-year-old anxious to learn. We chatted about yarn content, gauge, designs and stash.  We also sold a few chairs, some clothes, outgrown kid's toys and several flower vases (do they procreate inside my pantry?)

All in all a delightful afternoon. Don't worry I saved some of the best items (like my Brooks Farm, Tess) for a blog destash. As soon as I get my head above water I will list a few of those items. What would happen if you collected all your stash in to one place? Would you be surprised by what you find? What would your family's reaction be? For my family I think this just confirmed Mommy is off her rocker! :)

Hidden Yarn Stash

Laura

Dear House,

You may have heard we are moving. Don’t worry we’ve found a nice family to take our place, one without two large dogs to pound your lovely wood floors and shake your rafters with their barking. A family with two small children who will crawl on your floors, grind dropped Cheerios under their toes and consider your steep stairs their play ground.

The thing is when I leave I’d like to take my yarn with me and I could use a bit of help finding it all. It’s hidden it in nooks and crannies in almost every room. The Realtors made me put it all away; categorizing it as 'personal clutter' as if buyers could not appreciate its obvious beauty. Crazy huh?  And, if I’m really honest, some of it might be hiding from my husband for whom the concept of ‘stash’ means under a dozen skeins of yarn. Clearly he does not appreciate the creative process.

So I’m missing a few items like that Scarf Style lace leave scarf I started in bright olive green but did not finish. It’s in a red silk knitting bag somewhere. Then there's that pretty Moroccan blue cardigan I designed that’s still missing sleeves, the size 8 sweater I knit for my now 12-year-old son but never put together, and the wound skein of Handmaiden Camelspin just waiting to be turned into a lovely lace shawl.

Oh, and while we at it it seems that I’m also missing a few knitting needles. Surely they can’t all be with UFOs. That would mean I have at least a dozen projects on needles – surely that can not be the case. Surely I have some self control when it comes to buying new yarn and finishing projects. Surely I am lying to myself.

Thanks for coughing up this long hidden treasure. Eight skeins of cotton-silk that were my very first purchase from a 'real' yarn store about fifteen years ago. A swanky knitting store in mid-town Manhattan that did not yet understand the idea of a LYS and whose doors closed over a decade ago. Never one to shy away from projects over my head it was meant to be an intricate Irish Fisherman's sweater. After weeks of knitting our new puppy pulled it apart and I never could get back to it. I knit this intartia swatch several years later but it too never went anywhere.

Thank you House, your help is greatly appreciated. I'll let our new place know how helpful you were.

Playing with Colors

Laura

After my foray in to the many gardens in the San Francisco area I had colors on my mind. The amazing potential in the variety of colors that can be combined by Mother Nature and by designers - be they working with yarn, fabric, paints or computers. One of my favorite little tools on my Mac is a Widget by Color Schemers.

The site has a Color Scheme Gallery with hundreds and hundreds of color schemes with amazing names like:

- Cold Shoulder,
- Grab that Dog,
- Mermaid on the Rocks
- Sunny Spot in Dark Forest,
- Mean Girls,
- Pepperoni Pizza and
- Sad but True.

I enjoy looking at the names as much as I do the color combinations! These designers are very imaginative, makes me want to rename some of our projects!

Under their products tab you'll find two free downloads. One for Mac Users and one for Windows.  The Widget shown above is for the Mac Dashboard. It has thousands of inspirational color ideas - many of which I would never have thought of but really like.  I would love to design a sweater using all the colors in some of my favorite palettes. The hex color values are included above.

Windows users aren't left out either. ColorPix is little app that let's you grab the color values and screen coordinates at any pixel on your screen. Then it  translates any screen color into RGB, HEX, HSB and CMYK color values.

I have not tried this one but it certainly looks fun.

And there is one more free tool to tell you about.  Their online color selector allows you to enter the RGB or Hex number for any color you want. The selector will lay out a series of coordinating colors then you can lighten or darken the entire palette. Great for selecting yarns, web colors or even paints like it did for my new living and dining rooms that are adjacent to each other.

Book Review: lace & eyelets

Laura

Never in the 320 blog entries Sarah and I have written have we ever written a negative post. I’m afraid I have to break that streak in the interest of preventing anyone else from buying this book and wasting your money like I did.  I should have trusted the other knitter’s reviews on Amazon, but no, I a lover of all knitting books and collector of all Stitchionaries thought I just couldn’t go wrong with a book based on the Harmony Guides and with such a pretty cover. So  wrong. Let’s see, where to start….

Most complaints had to do with the lack of charts, a draw back but not a crime. The authors seemed confused, who was the target audience for this lace book. They must have decided that first time, “I’ve never held a knitting needle in my hand” knitters-to-be were a target market since they included instructions on how cast on and ‘the knit stitch’ in the beginning. Really? They also included inane knitting “tips” like “stitch markers are your friends”.  I guess they needed to fill up the tons of white space on the page. All of these, while annoying, are still not that criminal. But I’m not done yet.

Let us now move on to the total lack of consistency. Want to yarn over? You will have to read through instructions that say yf, yb, yfon, yfrn, yo, yon, yrn with a glossary hidden in the back after the graph paper (huh?).  They must have used multiple photographers as well. Some photos are so close you can not tell what the pattern will look like and there are shadows under the eyelets that make some of the patterns extremely difficult to see.

But wait there’s more! There are instructions to wrap the yarn (why with seven different yarn over instructions do I now need to wrap yarn too?! Then there's knit and purl "twisted" as opposed to "KB1" which means knit into back of next stitch, as opposed to tbl. And don't forget to "draw sl st over".  Confusing but I do understand this is an update of a classic, and so there is more.

Imagine my surprise when I started to look at the pattern for Lacy Diagonals on page 145 and the pattern is for the WRONG stitch altogether.  That's right the photo and the directions do NOT match. I decided to look online to see if it was listed in their errata. This was the final shocker (and the thing that made me decide to post) there are two compact pages of errors! egad!! They list almost 200 pages of incorrect use of yarn over vs. yarn forward (quell surprise) and 16 patterns will multiple errors  - not including the one I found where the entire pattern is mismatched.

I could go on (OK, I will I just have to vent!)

•    the difficulty seeing some of the dark colors and the washed out look of the lighter flesh colors
•    the total lack of organization so that similar stitches are spread through out the book,
•    missing instructions (Vertical Slit Cables; rows 6 to 13 have no stitch instructions at all and certainly could use a how to with such an unusual method to work. Is this the same book that thought we needed instructions on how to cast on?)
•    Similar stitch patterns (Mesh and Staggered Eyelets, and a few of the zig zags) that just fill space

While I like Erika Knight she let this one get by her and so did Interweave. I really think they owe us an apology.

OK, I feel better now. Thanks. I think I'll go look at some Barbara Walker then I will be at peace with the knitting universe. But I must leave you with this last bit of wisdom from page 166:

"As a beginner, avoid working with novelty and fuzzy yarns as they can make stitches difficult to see." What, do experienced knitters some how suddenly decide to use fuzzy yarn when knitting lace?  I may need a glass of wine after that one.

Follow up below ...

Store Bought Sweaters

Laura

This is my friend Susan (sans head as promised). We met when we both lived in the Chicagoland area. I moved west to the San Francisco Bay area while she headed south to Austin. All in all three fabulous places to live. We met for a brief time last week at the San Francisco airport. A bit odd, yes, but she had a three-hour layover on the way to Hawaii. So while I didn't get to go on the vacation I  ran up to have a bit of lunch in the plush surrounding of SFO.

Look at the cute sweater she has on! My knitter's eye immediately started dissecting it. The varying lace patterns, the solid band, cute hood. It would be fabulous in a nice light bamboo yarn. She told me it's a sweater by Cabi. They sell clothes via home parties, they're nice I have bought some Cabi things myself.  The thing is if I were to buy this sweater, I would forever be asked if I knit it. I stopped to think and realized that the sweaters I do buy are the ones that won't be confused with the ones I knit. I was especially careful of this when I worked in a LYS - no sense confusing customers. Am I the only one that thinks this way? Do you buy hand-knit looking sweaters or like me are you busy making sketches of what you see in the store to add to your project list?

Shhh, here's Susan. She's just too cute to have her head chopped off! Thank you iPhone camera.

Pre-finishing

Laura

I've been playing with a new yarn, Karabella Lace Merino Silk. I am really enjoying it (in spite of my little mishap with the pattern the other day).

I seem to be attracted to merino/silk blends first the Cascade Venezia and now this wonderfully soft yarn which is delightful to knit with and has the slight shine silk brings to yarn. I think it will make a lovely all season shawl.

I've only knit about a foot of my new shawl so far but I already steamed it to see how the pattern will look when done. I like to do a little finish work along the way sometimes; steaming part of the work and sewing in ends before I'm done. It gives me a sneak peek into the finished project and keeps me motivated.  Fewer UFOs that way.

Lemonade

Laura

I've been having a bit of trouble with my eyesight lately. It was interfering with a few of my favorite things like knitting, reading and blogging - no big surprises there. I looked upon this issue as an excuse opportunity to  start a brand new collection. Some women collect shoes, some purses (and there's nothing wrong with doing both). Me, I'm going to try reading glasses. It's a pretty harmless thing to collect, cheaper than a good shoe or purse and more limited in quantity than my yarn stash!

It's not as easy as it sounds. There are many many boring reading glasses available in your local drug store - those are not for me! But you never know where you will find the perfect pair. I'd love to tell you I'm browsing chi-chi boutiques but this snazzy red pair is from my local car wash. The vigilant shopper is rewarded with great finds. :)

I like that I can be much more daring in my glasses collection than I ever would in my wardrobe. I think a pair to match every knitting project is an admirable goal don't you?!

Thanks to CIndi for recommending ICU Eyewear (get it?). They actually make the red glasses above and sell lots of sets with matching glasses and case. Not sure why I find that appealing but I definitely do.

She is, however, feeding my addiction. I already ordered a pair - brightly striped sun-reading glasses. Who knew there were such things. Now I can knit outside in the sun. Summer here I come!

 

Saving for a Rainy Day

Laura

I was immediately a fan of the Knit Picks Options. The weight of the metal, the smooth join and the flexibility of the cable. Let's not forget the really nice price point. When the Harmony needles were announced I ordered some right away to try them out. Just a few, then a few more, some extra cords and then the amazingly slight and still beautiful Size 1 sock needles.

I think I might have a problem knowing when I have enough of a good thing!
Shown above are some of my new 16" Harmony Circulars in size 8, 4 and 1.
So pretty with just a bit of yarn grab vs. the metal.
Help! Should I stop buying or just get a second binder?

Ancient Knitting Proverbs

Laura

She who experiments with a perfectly good lace pattern in the middle of a project is foolish.

She who makes more mistakes trying to repair foolish choice is careless.

She who tries it all again gets what she deserves.

.

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Lovely tulips in my kitchen bringing me inner peace as I start all over again.

Craftsmanship

Laura

When given the opportunity to do a bit of shopping at Stitches West this year I wandered by the booth for Flames & Fiber. I was immediately attracted to the fabulous colors, superb craftsmanship of their beaded pieces. I looked around for a bit, studiously ignoring the one piece that was calling shouting my name. After trying on this incredibly intricate blue necklace I hemmed and hawed, kidding myself and my budget that I was not doomed to buy it from the moment it caught my eye. I was love at first sight and the purchase made me smile the rest of the day knowing it was tucked in my bag waiting for me at the end of a long day.

I would have shared it with your earlier but only found the card for Shirley and Nanette after a bit of reorganizing this weekend. It also gives me the opportunity to show off my new camera which, like Sarah, I am in love with. No one is immune from my attempt to master it. We have added a number of new photos in the Bella Flickr site so you can see some there as well as in the past few posts with my niece on the trampoline and the yarn shots.

It will come as no surprise when I  confess to being a techno-junkie. I love a good gadget but am willing to wait and save for the ones I really want (like this camera). I've had to reshuffle my most favorites list a bit. Here are my top 4: Tivo, iPhone, MacBook and Cannon Rebel XT.

Do you love technology gadgets too or does your yarn obsession leave room for no others? What's on your list?