I am bubbling over with glee! Can you tell?! =D
Over the weekend I finished my first pair of socks in 2013!
My super stripey Zauberball Crazy socks kept me so happy and completely enraptured that I couldn't put them down. I finished a pair of socks in a week. Which is unheard of for me considering my track record with finishing socks. lol So we have a new personal knitting record and I am amazed at just how gratifying a finished pair of socks can be. =D
Aside from the newly finished socks ( that I have been wearing around the house non-stop since I finished them on Saturday ) I got something extra fun in the mail last week! And no I am not talking a letter from my Nana...though I adore every single letter she sends me and rip it open with the excitedness of a school girl getting a love letter from a beau circa 1950s.
No, I had an amazing mail day wherein I got my next skein of Zauberball Crazy among other yarns and a knitting journal! The yarn ( left to right ) Three Irish Girls Glenhaven Cashmerino Fingering in A Very Merry Unbirthday, Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rocks Lightweight in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Crabby McHappypants and Zauberball Crazy in #1507 Pinstripes. The ladies at BMFA sent me the amazing sock bumper sticker and two handmade stitch markers in lieu of the awesome BMFA buttons. I cannot wait to slap it on my car. =D
While I am very happy with my new skeins of yarn and goodies..the yarn journal was what I was really excited about.
One of my other goals for 2013 is to find a better way of organizing my knitwear designs. I have a few notebooks I cart around with me that I doodle in and sketch out ideas. But when it comes time to actually sit down and knit the sketches I forget to write down important things, like my gauge ( because while I always knit a swatch-- which a little part of my rebellious side cringes at the thought of knitting a gauge swatch -- I don't usually keep the yarn in the swatch, I unravel it and use it for my knitting to use every bit of yardage just in case.. ) or my prototype wasn't quite what I wanted and I forget to write down my changes. So then I have to go back, reknit the pattern going row by row to make sure I have the correct notes. Very annoying and unproductive. Consistency is key when designing knitwear, and while I found ways over the past year to sketch that worked for me, my notes were a little um...haphazard. lol Chaos would be a good word. And to be honest my mind is very chaotic at times, it definitely translates into my notebooks.
The two notebooks at the top of the photo are filled with sketches set up like that...with small amounts of productive notes. (and yes, we had a terrible sippy cup accident with the one on the top right, my daughter put the cup in upside down in my purse. It took a week to dry out. Good thing I used waterproof pen ink for the most part! ) The bottom notebook is the knitting journal "Knit Notes: Explore*Create*Design" by Nadine Curtis. Which is what I was so excited to get in the mail via Amazon. Normally I don't go for the structured and preset layouts of most journals. But since it is a new year and I was looking for a new approach to design work I figured I'd give it a go. So far I'd have to say it is a major success. The hat design in progress is just waiting to be re-knit and figure out the style of decreases. I adore the graph paper, though I used it more for sketching the overall look of the hat and my initial thought for the decreases. In the back of the book is an excellent section of colorwork/cable graph paper for charting. But since this particular colorwork chart is so small I decided to just keep it all in the same spot. This journal has all of the standard measurements for hats, socks, sweaters located at the back along with spots for additional notes that you can use for elaboration from the original design pages. There is enough room for 30 design/project entries, which is excellent since I am hoping to self-publish about 10-15 new designs this year. So this journal should last me about 2 years or so. If you are also looking for a way to better organize your knitting mods or design work I would highly recommend this journal. It is reasonably priced and full of extremely helpful measurements.
A side note, the hat pattern you see will be available for free, so don't worry about me sharing the chart or other information. =D The socks are design ideas in progress. I haven't quite got it down. And those two will be released as free patterns as well. I fully believe in having a mixture of pay-for patterns and free ones for all around accessibility. As someone that appreciates a well written free pattern I am trying to "pay it forward" in my own design work.
Lastly, today I am taking a trip down to my local yarn store Woolwinders in Rockville, MD. I won a gift card for submitting a name that they picked for their store sheep. "Hank" is the new name of their sheep that the store employees selected from all of the submissions. Which I chose to submit at the last second, because it is our nickname for our son Henry. Go figure that they'd pick it! I am not very lucky so I was very surprised that my name submission won. I didn't even think of the fact that the name is also a knitting term. ( A hank of yarn.. ) So basically the giftcard is burning a hole in my pocket and I wanna go touch all the pretties. Henry can flirt with the ladies and I can bring some new design yarns home. =D
Hope you are all doing well and keeping up with your New Year's Resolutions Goals!
Happy Knitting,
Kate
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