Knitting & Purling

Knitting colorful throw pillows is another wonderful way to use leftover, stashed yarn. This pillow uses more than a dozen worsted-weight yarns saved from more than ten years of knitting. It has been in the works off and on since last winter, and I finished it last weekend. The design is my own. The neutral browns in the foreground help the bright palette of mostly autumn colors pop, with beige vertical lines to add geometric structure along with the diamond pattern. As a finishing touch: tassels! Just for fun, it's reversible. Sorting the stash into yarn weights and colors. Knitting gets underway. It gets messy before it gets beautiful. The finished pillow--except for the... Tassels!

First time experiences are so often memorable -- and not  just the big moments, but small-scale triumphs as well, like roasting a turkey, fixing the sink, rolling out a a pie crust, or repairing a bicycle tire.  Rowan Softknit Cotton As a child you leave these matters to the grown-ups and as a teen you start building some basic skills. But if you sew you still might leave those difficult buttonholes to your Mom. Or you might delegate the use of the power drill to your brother, defer to your Dad on the fallen bookshelf, or ask your sister to wire your sound system.  "Killarney" by Martin Storey And that only covers the household. Let's take sports and recreation. Whether child or adult, you may learn to ride a bike, swim the backstroke, ace an overhead tennis serve, ski parallel, paddle a kayak or master a back walkover--all of which I've loved.  Rowan Big Wool cowl But who can say what is the tipping point that leads you to step up to the ...

Knitting letters is similar to stitching alphabets in  traditional samplers and cross-stitch embroidery. The catch is that the "pixels" are rectangular, not square.  Helvetica, a typographic classic, renders well in knits because it is bold and sans-serifs.  If, in the 70s, I could be a champion at rendering fonts in pencil,  I figured i could transfer that skill to knitting.  Here's my latest creation, a warm solution for the hair-free, requested by my clever neighbor, Marc.  As Marc says, this cap stops people from wondering why he is wearing his  hat indoors. Plus, the fiber is super soft Berrocco Ultra   Light Alpaca .  When I chart my pattern, my process is utterly low-tech, as shown below. Sometimes I have also been known to hold up graph paper and trace from my Mac or iPod computer screen after I have enlarged or reduced text. The completed hat Here's a hat for...