handmade by stefanie

I'm still continuing with my all-grey, all-the-time theme for WIPs this week. Actually, that sock I posted about last week looks exactly the same, as it's sat in my bag untouched in favor of my other projects for the time being. I took my Tunisian scarf to knit with some friends at the coffee shop, where it was suggested that I could turn it into a nice buttony cowl instead. I've never had much attention span for scarves, so this is a pretty good solution to the issue of boredom I'm experiencing now that I feel reasonably proficient with the techniques, but I still haven't made a final call on scarf vs. cowl. The big news is that I cast on for the Lake Michigan Tee after finishing and blocking the swatch last week! I'm not very far along, but I'm excited to see how this shapes up, especially once I start adding the other yarns for my pseudo-ombre effect. I've been wanting to start a new project using non-grey yarn, but have been hemming and h...

Welcome back to another episode of the  Take 5  blog series! This week, Alicia Morandi of Woolen Diversions and The Sweet Sheep Body Shoppe , who is an avid knitter and spinner who calls Rhode Island home. Today, she shares her top five methods of procrast-knitting while still actually doing things which relate to the craft.  Click here  to get caught up past Take 5 blog posts; I'll let Alicia take it from here:  When I first heard the term 'procrasti-knitting', I figured it referred to all of the times that we knit instead of doing something else we ought to be doing. Then I realized that, due to a combination of Type A neuroses, day job, knitting blog , and lotion business , that definition would encompass pretty much every time I sat down to knit at home. There seem to be countless tasks I ought to be doing besides playing with yarn, but listing off 5 things like laundry, dishes, and account balancing would make for a rather mundane blog post. Ins...

Now that it's been gifted, I can share this FO here on my blog! I recently knit the Newborn Vertebrae cardigan for a family member who's expecting a baby later this spring. The pattern is available for free on here Ravelry , and I have seen so many cute projects posted on Instagram, Ravelry and blogs in my reader that I couldn't resist making one of my own. I used a beautiful skein of hand-dyed yarn from Anzula , a fingering weight blend of Seacell and merino called Sebastian . The colorway, Curry, is the most gorgeous color of yellow I've ever seen - and perfect for a unisex baby project! While I think the resulting garment is cute (and the folks I gifted it to certainly loved it), I can't say I was totally in love with the pattern. For whatever reason, I seemed to be cursed from the start - I keep messing up the decreases as I knit and had to rip back a few times. I also am not totally sold on the frontless cardigan for a baby - or for anyone, for that matt...

It was impossible to resist casting on with the lovely (and grey!) skeins of yarn from my YarnCon stash enhancement experience. Thank goodness I'd gotten so many projects off the needles beforehand so that I could indulge in startitis without guilt! On Sunday night, I immediately began making a simple Tunisian crochet scarf using my newfound skills and the two skeins of Bijou Basin Ranch sport weight yarn which came home with me: it was impossible to resist this incredibly squishy 100% yak yarn. I thought it would be fun to alternate between navy and grey as I practiced the Tunisian knit stitch and the Tunisian purl stitch - the result is an interesting effect! The only thing I'm not super-thrilled with is how loosely I began the scarf, but luckily that can be easily fixed by adding fringe to either end when it's all said and done. I also started a swatch for the Lake Michigan Tee from the new Knitscene, using the mondo skein of BFL sock from Leading Men Fiber Arts w...

I spent the entire weekend at YarnCon here in Chicago - man, I sure could use a weekend to recover from my weekend! Tiredness aside, it was totally worth making the trip down to the West Loop three days in a row (I helped out on set-up day last Friday and all weekend long in the Bijou Basin Ranch booth). I met some folks I've previously only known via Instagram or Ravelry (i.e. one of the most recent Take 5 bloggers, Lucia Pane ), saw many knitting friends, and came home with some awesome goodies. This year's event was even bigger than last year - the entire marketplace was full of every imaginable yarn and fiber, not to mention the project bags and other related accessories. On Saturday, I came home with a mondo skein (as in, 600+ yards) of BFL sock yarn from Leading Men Fiber Arts : Some gorgeous spinning fiber from Yarn Hollow and CJ Koho (the concept behind this is really cool, so I'll be sure to talk about that more in a future post): And these awesome bu...

Last weekend, I finished the self-striping OMG Heel socks which I started near the end of March. They would have been done much quicker if I hadn't gotten distracted by gnomes and lots of other projects, of course, but that's just how things go around here! I love how they turned out, and as luck would have it, the self-striping pattern even matches up pretty well. The yarn is hand-dyed by me on the Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock base, which is a superwash merino/nylon sock yarn. I made it many years ago when I still worked there, as evinced by the 225-yard skeins (they've since changed the put-up to be around 440 yards per skein, I believe). I made the smallest size of the OMG heel socks, which means that some lucky kiddo in my life will be getting a new pair of socks at some point! I had plenty of yarn left over, too - I didn't even touch the second skein! If you follow me on Instagram, you might want to check your feed, because I plan on giving the left...

I finished a lot of projects over the weekend (which I'll be blogging about eventually, of course), and I find myself with only one new project on the needles: on Monday night, I cast on for the Long's Peak 3-in-1 Mitts by Marly Bird, which have been in my queue since the Rocky Mountain Collection came out in 2013. I've been saving two skeins of Bijou Bliss  yarn for the occasion - one in a lovely grass green, and then a deep blue-green which was a limited-edition color. I've made several projects with this yarn (a 50/50 blend of yak and cormo wool), and it's always a delight to work with. The hand-dyed colorways have since been discontinued, but you can still snag skeins in natural cream and natural brown if you are so inclined! I am still working on my cozy memories blanket, but I imagine folks are tired of seeing the same progress photo again and again since it's such a slow burner of a project. However, I do have one more update for this week: after...

Welcome back to another episode of the Take 5 blog series! This week, we are joined by one of my colleagues and virtual knitting friends, Rebecca Huben of NutmegKnitter.com ! Rebecca is a prolific knitter (and crocheter and spinnner) who wears many hats: in addition to working with me at Stitchcraft Marketing , Rebecca is a full-time Mom, a test knitter/sample knitter, and she blogs even more than I do!  Click here to get caught up past Take 5 blog posts ; I hope you enjoy today's post which is full of great ways to make fiber friends and engage in our wonderful community!  Hi there, I’m Becca! I blog from Connecticut, the Nutmeg state, which is how I picked my blog / Ravelry / all over social media name:  Nutmegknitter . Here are my top 5 events or classes: Your Local Yarn Festival! For me, this means the bigger  New York Sheep and Wool Festival  (aka Rhinebeck) and the smaller  CT Sheep and Wool Festival . A yarn festival has a feel similar to a...

At last, one of the "secret knitting" projects I've been working on recently can be shared with the rest of the world! I am super-excited to share my newest design: the Inverness Shrug . It's knit in one of my favorite yarn bases from Bijou Basin Ranch, Himalayan Trail (for more about why I love this yarn, click here !). I was asked to design this shrug to be part of their Outlander-inspired pattern collection , and when I think of time-traveling historical romances, apparently I think "textured cables" (confession time: I haven't read the books or watched the TV show...but I've read the cliff's notes). I just couldn't get them out of my mind as I knit swatch after swatch to find the perfect stitch pattern for this shrug. Though I have many designs in my back catalog , this is my first-ever garment. I was actually kind of nervous about it, even though a shrug is basically like dipping your toe in the garment pool, right?! Still, the ...

Since finishing my Block Island Sweater , I've been all about working on smaller instant-gratification projects: for instance, over the weekend, I finished my Gnome Rainbow for #ProjectGnomeDiplomacy: This got me excited about knitting tiny things - I purchased the new Tiny Alpaca pattern from Mochimochiland along with the Tiny Sheep pattern so that I could make some friends for my gnomes. I plan on knitting some of these fun little guys over the upcoming weekend! I was inspired to start a crochet Platypus when I randomly thought about the Easter Platypus from Invader Zim ( click here to see what I'm talking about ) - I think he's going to be so cute! I'm just using random destash yarn: I've also been working on my self-striping socks from last week - here is my HO (half-finished object): And lastly, I've been working on finishing up the newborn vertebrae I started last month: I'm not totally in love with this particular pattern, but I th...

Welcome back to another episode of the Take 5 blog series! This week, we have a special treat - a double-header by a fellow Chicagoan, Lucia Pane! She also shared her favorite knitting-related meme, which seems to be an unspoken tradition for Take 5 guest posters.  Click here to get caught up past Take 5 blog posts; I'll let Lucia introduce herself in her own words:  Aloha, my name is Lucia and I am originally from Hawaii but now I live in the Chicago area. I host the Knitted Paradise video podcast and I’m the owner/designer/creator behind Pearl of the Pacific . Here is my list of top 5 notions that I keep in my kit at all times and my list of top 5 knitting tools that turned me from a casual to a serious knitter. Top 5 Notions: Yarn needle and threader . For weaving in all the ends and my new favorite, the invisible ribbed bind-off. The needle threader I have is designed specifically for yarn (it’s one solid piece with large holes) which is more durable than the...

I'm over the moon with this week's FO: my Block Island Pullover by Allyson Dykhuizen, which I started in January of this year! The pattern is from the Fall 2014 issue of Knitscene, and when my knitting group was placing an order with Peace Fleece (hot tip: they'll give anyone wholesale pricing so long as the order is a minimum of $150), I knew this was a great opportunity to snag a sweater's worth of yarn. I chose two colors of Peace Fleece Worsted , Patience Blue (the darker color) and Indigo Smoke. The yarn has a little bit of mohair in it, but you really wouldn't know it from coming across it randomly (unless you have an allergy of course) - it's not at all like the mohair you remember from the 80's...and that's a good thing! I didn't totally enjoy knitting with this yarn for a couple of reasons: first, it was kind of tough to work with because it's so sturdy and strong. The benefit to that, however, is I'm sure this sweater will l...

I started out the week in a most unusual way: by attending a training seminar downtown on Monday & Tuesday. For those of you who are new to my blog, I work from home doing a variety of things related to the yarn and fiber arts industry, and anything that requires me to be awake and out of the house before 10am is generally anathema to me...but occasionally I will make an exception and get outside of my comfort zone! Trade shows and seminars such as the one I attended definitely mean that my brain power is sapped by the end of the day (and sometimes, from the get-go - I am truly not a morning person), so I tend to favor extremely simple projects to suit the occasion. Much progress was made to my Newborn Vertebrae in Anzula's Sebastian Yarn: I also started a pair of tiny OMG Heel Socks using some self-striping yarn I'd dyed many years ago while working at Lorna's Laces; I'm hoping that the XS size option fits one of my nephews! These are a truly quick knit - I ...