It’s kind of a long story, but what the heck — you’ve got some time to kill, right?  I’ll valiantly try to keep it short.
A decade ago, plus or minus, my brother and I were back in Iowa, helping my mom as she attempted to continue living in her apartment.  As part of the job, [...]

Here’s a quote from the latest Vogue Knitting email:
 

Introducing the VK360°
Vogue Knitting Holiday 2008 is now officially on sale…and on video!
This issue, we decided to put every project up on the big screen—due in large part to all of your positive feedback (thanks VK readers!).

It seems they have started posting videos of the projects in [...]

I know, I know, I haven’t written anything for a whole week – didja miss me? – but it’s mainly because my journal subscription to Catherine Lowe’s couture knitting workshop arrived and I’ve been more-or-less submerged in it.  This stuff is GREAT.
The title of this post refers to the fact that it’s apparently not just [...]

OK, the Internet is definitely a weird place.
After Sheryl’s comment sent me off googling "knitted fruitcake," somehow this is what I found, over at the Sydney Morning Herald:
"These are just some of the finalists in this year’s [2005] annual Shoot the Chef competition where student and professional photographers compete to produce the image that captures [...]

Ya know, it’s hard to blog when the things you are doing are (a) things that you can’t write about or (b) boring.
In the second category lately are many administrative things, like setting up fall class schedules and working on websites.  The good news is, the Polar Bear Patterns site is coming along nicely — [...]

Over at the [Knitting Daily->] blog, they’ve been discussing the design process used by Michelle Rose Orne in her book, Inspired to Knit.  I haven’t gotten the book yet, but Michelle’s description of her design process intrigues me:

As a designer for the garment industry for many years, I used … mood or “story boards” when [...]

Hey, there – just a quick plug today, for my pal Deb’s mini-sock club that she’s just unveiled!
(ed. note — it’s not a club for mini-socks, it’s a mini-club for full-size socks.)
It’s a set of three different sock yarn + original pattern combos, with the second pattern being designed by Yours Truly.  Deb is doing the [...]

Well, it’s nearly halfway through the timeframe I set for my personal UFOlympics.  (In fact, it’s only about 40% of the way through, if you don’t count that "vacation" time I spent with strep.)
And while I’ve been waiting for you guys to decide what I’m supposed to do about the bunny eyes on the slippers, I haven’t [...]

A shameless Allman Brothers reference, and another guest post by the fabulous TrishC!
(Unsurprisingly, though, I couldn’t help throwing in a couple of editorial comments along the way.  TH)

Tess and I were chatting one day about how we got started knitting, and we discovered some strange coincidences.
At first, it didn’t seem as if there could be [...]

As part of "fun weekend", DH and I went and visited a place on the other side of the river, called "SCRAP".

SCRAP — The School and Community Reuse Action Project – is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and our mission is to promote creative reuse and environmentally sustainable behavior by providing educational programs and affordable materials to the [...]

The most important piece of knitting advice I ever found was in the Holiday ‘87 issue of Vogue Knitting.  (I must have found it while I was knitting those lousy boyfriend sweaters.)
A wonderful knitter wrote a letter to the editor which made a very strong impression on me, and it greatly influenced my knitting success.  In [...]

The upsurge in the popularity of knitting in the past half-dozen years or so, coupled with the Internet, has been a mixed blessing to me.  Browsing the online knitting world, I am continually reminded that there are all kinds of knitters, many of whom I probably have little or nothing in common with.
It took me a [...]

Well, on Sunday evening (Sunday the 13th!) I finally cast on another pair of socks for DH.
The yarn is Lana Grossa "Meilenweit 6 fach" in a true solid dark green – his favorite color.  I like doing toe-up socks, so I don’t have to bother too much with a gauge swatch or any math or anything.  I [...]

Fact:  boxy, square sweaters hide anything you’ve got worth showing.
An image consultant came to one of our local knitting guild meetings a couple of years ago.  She had a handout that showed some “before” and “after” pictures of women dressed in various clothing styles, which either suited and enhanced their body shapes, or didn’t. Here are some [...]

OK, here’s the ONE Xmas present I knitted this year - but it is darned cute. It’s a double-knitted teddy bear from the book “Knitter’s Stash”. The book’s been around a while, but I don’t actually own it (the library does, though!) so this is only the second thing I’ve knit out of it.
The teddy bear is actually [...]

Q. When is a picture NOT worth a thousand words?
 
A.  When it is a BFL (Big Fat Lie).  
One of my biggest knitting peeves is photography in knitting publications that is a deliberate misrepresentation of the article in question.  (A close second is "artsy" photography, at the expense of seeing what the garment actually looks like.)
The most [...]

Of course, this means I’m in at [Ravelry->].
Actually, I got invited about a week ago, but haven’t had time to go exploring before now. What fun! Lots to do!
Unfortunately for me, someone already has the username “tessknits” – so on Ravelry I’m now known as “tessm”. Maybe we should start a group on Ravelry for [...]

This year, while DH was off at the Sasquatch festival over Memorial Day weekend, I decided to clean out my closet. I hadn’t done a thorough job of this in about 6 years, during which time:

we moved from TX to OR,
I quit my day job, and
I lost ~10 pounds (from not eating fast food for [...]

Many of my knitting friends know that I love, love, LOVE old knitting books. Old VKs are a fave, but I’ll thumb through just about anything. (And I have the overflowing bookshelf in my studio to prove it.) Often you can find a stitch pattern, a silhouette, or a detail that will spark an idea. [...]

So, you may have noticed that in the previous post, I said that my sister was knitting a sweater for her fiance.
YIKES! but what about the famous, infamous Sweater Curse? 
I didn’t know about the Sweater Curse then: I was only 6, after all. The Curse didn’t work on her though, because my sister did get [...]