I’m nearly done with two of May’s patterns, but the shawl and sweater(s) I had planned for late March and early April are on (temporary) hold. The biggest miniature wool vessel is currently serving as a cozy for the leaning plant of basil, and I’ll probably put all the rest through another harsh felting/fulling cycle to see if I can make them even denser.
(This is my second attempt to promote the latest shawl, which is not something I realized until I went back into my drafts folder to pull this post up. It’s even the same photo.)
I think I am going to try this all week.* I am going to work really hard at it. (Most of it might be invisible. I am trying to finish polishing a couple of March designs. But I am also going to try to be louder online, because that’s one thing I definitely do not do, and apparently the last time I was Dedicated to Hyping Myself Up was more than a month ago.)
NEW SHAWL:
It’s called Easy Guy Shawl. This is because as a project, it’s an easy guy—not because it is for guys who are easy or because it’s a heavily gendered guy shawl. There may have been some initial confusion about that. (Which is understandable. I think I use “guy” as an affectionate diminutive for pets, rather than associating it with people or specifically with dudes.)
This .PDF and the rest of my portfolio on Ravelry are on sale through March 26th, end of day, Mountain time! Buy any three regularly-priced patterns, and get a fourth one (equal or lesser value) free; all you have to do is add all four to your cart. It’s a great way to create your own mini-collection.
Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be promoting my knitting patterns!
This is BeesBeesBees Cowl. It’s knit in little pieces and then seamed. (I don’t think that’s too much detail. I think it’s fairly obvious from the finished piece. The .PDF pattern for the design goes into possibly too much detail on how to connect the hexagons to get that little line effect between them, which I like a lot. It also includes a .PDF tutorial for the unique cast-on method used, which is another technique I like a lot.)
I find this strangely satisfying, even though the basic idea had me stuck for a while—I wanted to use shapes that don’t tesselate as well (and I still might for a future design! Stay tuned!) and I wanted to avoid finishing seams, but ultimately my (attempted and discarded) solutions for that felt a lot more fiddly and potentially frustrating than the technique I ended up with. The handspun yarn really lends itself well to this. I’d like to be able to use superwash commercial yarn here, but I think it might not hold up as well; it’s best to use soft wool with a little bit of natural texture.
Something new is up over on Ravelry:
Mina Shawl! Obvious reference, slightly questionable taste (I only knew Dracula from pop culture and memes before this year; I did not expect Mina to be so affecting as a character)!
The colors on this one were inspired directly from some speckled and solid Malabrigo Arroyo I was working with for a sweater pattern. There wasn’t really enough left from the skeins I had to get the effect I wanted, but I really liked how the speckled combined with the more traditional hand-dyed yarn. Lazy gradient, kind of.
Anyway this is the best shawl I’ve come up with in a long time. It might be the full-on best, but I’ve also been looking back through my photos, and now I think some of my other ideas were stronger than they felt at the time. (I took a screenshot for a joke about a video game—it’s very important that I find this and actually post the joke somewhere—but this was around the time of Conduit Cowl and Iteration, and those are a lot nicer than I remember.)
I have a lot to do this month: either I update the Sample Shop page here for the upcoming winter holidays, or I don’t; I have a lot of upcoming design projects I’m excited about; I want to knit little animals for the kids. (It’s a whole weird thing. I’m still excited when I can afford to buy a cool present; I want to buy Lego; and yet kids have started to specifically request knitted things. It’s perplexing but not all bad, and also not all good, since it is very hard to knit a 4-foot-long caterpillar and have it turn out well. I should’ve just learned to crochet and done a space millipede from Projectarian. Mine’s okay, but it’s not a space millipede, so it feels like a missed opportunity.)
Oh no! I forgot to publish my exciting New Hats post, and now it feels really dated.
There have been two new hat designs! This one is the most interesting as a hat:
It’s called Provisions Hat and goes different directions!
The other is very simple, but has more intermediate finishing techniques, plus it’s knit in the round, plus optional finishing makes it convertible, so that it can be worn as a hat or a collar. (Plus) I have a couple more ideas to work out that are similar, but I need to brush up on cable terms and possibly learn to chart a design effectively for the one.
It’s a sack hat, but I’m not sure how obvious that is from most of the photos, since part of what I like best about it is the neat-looking edge when it’s in hat form. It’s so simple! So easy to knit! But you get this sleek double fabric at the end!
Oho, the one social media I neglected this month is the official website-y one.
We have a new shawl pattern out! It’s here!
There are a few Son of Dog Days and Summer Kitchen projects left to wrap up, but we’re heading directly into September in a couple of hours, so I’m not sure whether I’ll have those out late, but still this year (it’s technically still summer for the next ~21 days where I am!), or if I’ll save them for next summer. The farmer’s market bag is probably the most exciting one to me, but I haven’t been to the farmer’s market yet this year.
So! That’s the August update! I will catch you next month (probably?).
The title is misleading clickbait. There are no dinosaur bones in this post. I am not really even sure why past-me thought that was a useful heading. Was it going to be about dinosaur bones? I cannot remember.
I haven’t actually posted about any of the recent design projects! I haven’t posted for July!
The main Summer Kitchen (well, loosely: Summer Kitchen has become home decor/organization/housewares in general, and wool boxes are maybe not kitchen-related specifically) project is Little Boxes. (The one above is shown pre-felting. It gets its shape from the yarn it’s holding, but after felting, this particular sample didn’t get as small as the others I’ve done in the same yarn—one even from the same skein. I probably need to up the agitation.) There are some others in the works, but it’s probably going to feel too early to talk about them up until the last minute.
Isurus is the latest shawl. I haven’t been this excited about a shawl in a while, but this was pretty rewarding to design & knit, and finally got me using the fancy Hedgehog Fibres yarn I’ve been holding on to for two years. Two years!
That’s probably going to be it for July, since it’s the 30th now and all. Cheers!
By the end of the month, if all goes to plan, I’ll have published 10 indie patterns this year, so far—
but 6 of the 9 so far are hats;
two are shawls,
and two of the planned ten are cowls.
(One’s a connected triangle cowl. It could use some new photography. But that aside, it looks like I still classed it as a cowl, rather than as a bandanna or a headband. One is a balaclava, but you can wear a balaclava as a hat, so I counted it in the hat category.)
This seems unbalanced, with a considerable lean towards hats, and that bothers me a little—but it looks like I am/may still be in a hat phase for a little while. I’ve been playing with some structural ideas, which seem fairly compelling to me, and I guess on the up side, small projects like hats and socks are decent for spring and summer knitting—but I still feel a sort of low-level anxious desire to Get Ahead with those in a way that would free up some time to experiment with some spring and summer tops and light sweaters.
In other news, Igneous/Igneoramous is available now (link here or above), SALT cowl is coming soon (sneak preview in first photo—it’s really simple but still extremely satisfying), and everything that comes after that is too far out or too early in planning for me to talk about it without jinxing it.
The Mouse Army Knitting Co. 