Close Knitters

Regular customers to the shop watched Jen’s belly grow last spring, and have been wondering what the baby looks like. He visited today, and is very cute.

He had a full tour of the shop, and appeared to be impressed by all the colors. He really likes the Noro. Jen said that he’s doing great at five weeks, and sleeps pretty well. And if you’re wondering if Jen is getting any knitting done-

There’s another temporary visitor at the shop

Flo is a Knitty pattern, and will be heading off as a baby gift soon. Phyllis knit her out of Cascade 220, in the colors shown in the Knitty sample. She’s a pretty easy knit, but there are some tricks to assembling her.

Should we have a class to make and assemble Flo?

There are lots of options and ideas in the store for wintry scarves. Here are some of our favorites

Here are: Reversible Cable Scarf, Cable and Seed Stitch Scarf, Zig Zag Scarf, Single Reverse Cable Scarf, Reversible Chunky Scarf, Willow Lace, and Noro Wave. All nice winter scarves which will look great in a lot of yarns.

Then there are the fast and fun scarves

Marshmallow is the white one. It consists of a row of puffs, separated by a thin strand of yarn. You knit just the thin strand, and the puffs line up. Very soft and cozy.

Ruffles is made out a self ruffling yarn. The yarn itself is a knit tape. To work it you poke through the edge of the tape rather than wrap it around the needle. It makes ruffles! The ruffly yarns come in solids with silver sparkles, and in stripes. The one pictured above is two balls of a stripe, with a different edge, and color being worked for each ball. These fun scarves work up quickly, which may be useful in December!

There’s a lot of scarf knitting going on these days. And several customers have mentioned that they plan on knitting several scarves as holiday gifts.

Here’s Kim’s latest

Two skeins of Noro Kureyon. Look at how beautifully the colors line up, nice even stripes. An excellent choice for a gift, there are so many colors in a skein of Noro that the scarf will certainly match a winter coat!

Phyllis has a new one, too.

This is willow lace, knit out of Blackstone Tweed.

And Jin came up with this

It uses two skeins of Sunday, a wooly blend in lots of nice colors. Nice chunky yarn which works up quickly.

All of these are very versatile patterns- wider they would make lovely shawls or stoles. Wider still (or maybe longer for the Wave pattern) they would even be nice afghans. And the lacy ones are pretty straightforward knitting, with short repeats in their patterns.

All three patterns are available in the store, free with purchase of the yarn.

Socks are great little knits, they get worked on in bits and pieces, and suddenly there are socks. And part of the joy of knitting socks is the wonderful self striping sock yarns. You never quite know what you’re getting, so watching the color pattern evolve is fun.

Sometimes the striping pattern works into the heel shaping quite nicely, but sometimes a traditional heel flap will affect the pattern. That was the case with this blue yarn.

I knit it from the top down. As I was knitting the leg portion I realized that the stripes are so even, I didn’t want them to change as I knit the heel. So I worked the heel using Elizabeth Zimmernan’s Thumb Trick- she used it for mittens, too. See the white line between the blue stripes? That’s where the heel will go.

No heel yet! How did I get into this situation?

When I reached the point on the leg where I would have started the heel, I used white yarn to knit across half of the sock. Then I slipped the white stitches back onto the left hand needle, and knit them with the blue yarn. And kept on knitting until I’d finished the toe. Then I went back to the white yarn, and removed it. This created the heelless sock above- there are live stitches around the edge of the heel space. I put them onto needles:

The final step is to knit the heel- it’s shaped just like the toe!

Nice even stripes!

More babies!

Lots of customers have been commenting on the baby boom in their lives- new grandkids, nieces, nephews, great grandkids and great nieces and nephews. Some knit afghans to greet the new ones, some knitters prefer to knit sweaters.

The two top sweaters are Sublime patterns,the bottom one is from Cabin Fever. They’re all written for sport weight yarn, so work up well in a number of baby friendly (that means machine washable) yarns.

These are from a few different pattern sources- Sublime, Minnowknits, and Ella Rea. More yarns to keep new parents happy- soft cottons and machine washable acrylics. Vests are nice- you can dress up the baby but he or she will stay cooler. The bottom vest is knit in Sweetness, our Yarn of the Month.

Not sure what size to knit? Make it a six month size, and the baby will wear it at some time in it’s first year.