handmade by stefanie

I used to think of duplicate stitch simply as a way to avoid intarsia, but it's also a great technique for weaving in your ends invisibly, especially in colorwork projects. Earlier in the year, I knit the Very Important Villager hat in two naturally-dyed colors of Rambouillet yarn from Shepherd's Lamb . This breed-specific wool yarn has great stitch definition and lends itself well to colorwork: Fun fact: if you consistently hold one color below the other as you work, the colorwork motif will look crisper (this is known as color dominance ). Plus, the wrong side will look just as lovely as the right! If you're new to duplicate stitch, here is a great tutorial video from Very Pink Knits . I think of it as a 3-step process: you start by bringing your yarn up in the middle of the stitch BELOW the one you want to duplicate, then behind both bars of the stitch ABOVE the stitch you are duplicating. You return the yarn through to the wrong side the same way you starte...

What if there were some easy hacks to make knitting from charts easier, faster and more enjoyable? It's not too good to be true - there are plenty of simple tricks you can use when working from charts. I use each of these tips myself (sometimes all at the time!) and I'm sure that one, some or all will work for you, too. Hack #1: Blow It Up! For years, I would struggle through a tiny chart with tiny symbols that made my eyes crossed. Then one day, I realized that I could just MAKE IT BIGGER. Whoa. Mind blown. Back in the day, this meant a trip to the local copy shop, but now that I have a printer/scanner at home, it is really easy to enlarge charts as needed. Plus, it is a lot easier to adjust the way a PDF will print out, so you can also enlarge the page containing the chart in question, subject to the capabilities of your printer and level of techno-savvy, of course. A color-coded cabled chart and highlighter tape! Hack #2: Color Inside the Lines....and Out Of Them...

Here we go again....startitis has set in once again! I am trying to concentrate on gift-making this month since there are many birthdays in my family this fall with the holiday season not far behind. Of course, when a beautiful new set of needles arrives on your doorstep, are you really going to NOT take them for a test drive? Karbonz Starter Set - there are actually 5 sizes, but I am already knitting with two of them! Sure, I could just find a gift project that uses any one of the five sizes in the set, but it sure is a lot more fun to cast on for a few selfish knitting projects. I started with the Mountain Moss Shawl from the Summer issue of Pom Pom Quarterly using the Wool Dispensary yarn I bought during last week's yarn crawl : Then the fall issue of Knitscene arrived, and I did a little stash diving to start the Emmanuelle sweater by Mercedes Tarasovitch-Clark: As you can see, I started with the sleeves two-at-a-time; I'm using Stitch Nation Bamboo Ew...

The Rule of Threes paid me a visit recently.  The mildest case involved a monster do-over caused by a simple miscalculation of yardage while using leftover skeins from my stash.  Not the end of the world, admittedly, but I did find myself frogging an entire monster body on Tuesday night - not how I'd hoped to spend the evening! I also recently knit the Brier Toque (from Weekend Knits ) with a gorgeous skein of Neighborhood Fiber Company Watershed Sock yarn that I bought at Article Pract several years ago on our west coast 'tour.'  The colorway is Glover Park, and I've been saving it for a special occasion.  The hat started out well enough, but after a while my bamboo needles (and fingers!) started to turn a deep forest green.  Uh oh.  Yet I pressed onward! Once the hat was done, I tossed it in a nice bath of a bit of Eucalan and some cool water.  And the water turned green.  So I put it in another bath.  And another!  By the tim...

Robin 'helps' finish the dino. Dino is done!  Tuesday night was the second night of The Sweatshop of Love 's dinosaur-making class - I spent most of the time sewing the top of the body together because I got super anal-retentive about the placement of the scales.  I'm usually don't worry myself if something is imperfect - after all, it adds character to a project, and in this case, it's just a toy! - but for some reason having wonky scales was really bothering me!  Sometimes the masochism of doing something only to rip it out and do it again is fun, apparently.  Securing the leg. At any rate, I spent the lion's share of this morning with Robin purring in my lap as I finished sewing together my dino.  I mentioned in the last blog post that I picked up some good finishing tips - my favorite being something I wish I'd thought to do eons ago:  when attaching legs or other bits and bobs, tie a firm knot with the yarn you're using for sewing.  Espe...

Ever since Book 3 came out, I've been wanting to make an inverse version of my Kitchy Pleated Bag - and at last I've crossed that off my knitting to-do list.  The actual knitting part of the project only took a day and a half - so if you're looking for a fast project for a certain upcoming event next month, perhaps you might want to give this one a try!  (Which reminds me - be on the lookout for a Junkies-only discount on all the patterns in my Ravelry shop in honor of Malabrigo March) Pattern:  Kitchy Pleated Bag by yours truly - available only in Malabrigo Book 3 Yarn:  Malabrigo Chunky in Charrua (MC) and Frank Ochre (CC) Buttons:  Found Buttons - part of my Etsy shop   Bamboo Handles:  The Milliner's Daughter - Etsy shop Other notes:  If you choose to use a darker color (such as Charrua) as the MC on this bag, don't forget that darker-colored yarns felt more (and faster!) than lighter-colored yarns.  I actually did forget ...

the squirrel on wheels turned out even better than i was hoping for!  not only is he a zippy little critter himself, but a pretty fast knit as well - the whole things was finished in three days.  yarn:  [MC] 1 skein knit picks city tweed heavy worsted in tahitian pearl [CC] small amount of lorna's laces shepherd worsted in 24ns navy my other big news is that last week i finally finished my peak's island hood - it took me almost two months to knit!  a lot of that time was spent ignoring the project entirely, and it probably still wouldn't be done if i hadn't had help with the miles and miles of moss stitch.  though i love the pattern and colors i chose to make it in, i think i ultimately wasn't excited about it because the yarn felt scratchy and a little gross, and i just couldn't imagine wrapping it around my head.  in the back of my mind, i suspected that this yarn would never have the softness and drape of the yarn actually called for in the pat...