Back to Knitting

What have I been knitting on? Think you can guess from a photo? Those of you on Ravelry can easily figure it out by looking at my projects page, but that's cheating.



Here are a few hints/details:

• It is knit in garter stitch
• It is knit with miters (the corners you can see above are made by increasing)
• It is knit in sock yarn, in this case, Knit Picks Memories that I overdyed with yellow
• It has a unique construction
• It is a garment for a baby or small child
• You could make a larger version simply by using larger needles and thicker yarn
• I only cast on 3 stitches to start!

Give up? You didn't try very hard! Ok, it is this pattern. How many of you guessed the Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmermann? Close but no cigar. I've had this pattern in my Rav queue for quite a while and finally decided to try it out. I've been struggling with what to use this particular yarn for (aside from socks) and I think this is perfect. The constant increases change the stitch count every row, which really helps avoid much pooling. I'm almost to the point of starting the sleeves, so things will start to get really interesting. I have a couple more patterns by this designer in my queue, I'm excited to try out other unique constructions.

P.S. Check out another photo of the same project. Amazing what different lighting will do to a photo. The photo at the top of this post was taken mid-morning, this photo was taken late-evening.

Detroit Lives

I don't often go too far off topic here, but this is an issue that's near and dear to my heart. If you have 30 minutes to spare, won't you check out this documentary on the city of Detroit?

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Once the fourth-largest metropolis in America—some have called it the Death of the American Dream. Today, the young people of the Motor City are making it their own DIY paradise where rules are second to passion and creativity. They are creating the new Detroit on their own terms, against real adversity. We put our boots on and went exploring.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

Chart Coloring

It's been a while, and I've been knitting some things that I can't show you yet, so I thought I would show you how I've marked up my chart for the scarf I have going.



Each row on this lace chart is different, so I absolutely have to pay attention. There's no memorizing going on here. A lot of times, every other row in a lace chart will just be all purl stitches. As you can see above, this is not the case with this pattern. So, in order to keep from having to count the number of purls in a row each time, I highlighted large groupings of purl stitches and then labeled a nice key for myself. Now I can quickly look at the chart and see than an orange section is 10 purl stitches without having to count all the little dash marks. It makes the knitting go much faster. One last thing I want to mention, I only highlighted down to 7 purl stitch sequences (there are no 6 purl st runs) because 5 stitches in a row is pretty easy to pick out on its own. Telling the difference between 8 and 10 at a glance, not so much. Plus I only had 5 different color highlighters.