Here’s some eye candy for ya:  a few FO’s!
Sari Silk bag:  this was knit from some recycled-sari silk yarn, although at this point I’m not sure exactly which manufacturer.  This major FO accomplishment started life as "Unbiased", a bag pattern from Knitty, Fall 2004.
Unfortunately, mine was biased.  When I sewed the pieces together, they did [...]

Well, life has been happening with a vengeance around our house the past few days.  So you’ll have to forgive me for just throwing out a couple of updates here.
First of all, there are a few spots left in the Knitting 911 class this Thursday night at Knitting Bee.  This class is always a lot [...]

Oh, happy day!  DH has another pair of handknit socks, and I have one less UFO.  (Believe it or not, I’m down to just SIX UFO’s.  My advice is to keep an eye out for plagues of locusts.)

I started these socks on the trip to New Zealand, with yarn I bought there:  Naturally Haven, a 100% [...]

Be on the lookout for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!

(If you don’t know how long this UFO has been around, read this.)

This week, I finished off four — count ‘em, four — UFO’s in the stack.  Not only that, I have a good shot at finishing off a fifth.
I’m as shocked as you are.  Probably more so.
Admittedly, none of them was a great deal of work.  (That part is somewhat more shocking, actually.  This project has [...]

OK, I admit it’s been a couple of weeks, and I still have not fixed the collar on my top-down V-neck raglan from the Friday group class knit-along.  Part of that is due to a whole lot of teaching going on, and part of that is due to another sock pattern I am designing for [...]

The top-down rust raglan that I knit for the Friday Group Class knit-along was finished last Friday (or so I thought).
I picked up around the neckline and knit simple K2, P2 for a polo style collar.  (Turns out that isn’t going to work so well — but more about that in a minute.)
The moment of [...]

I’m sure at least one of you is wondering — "Well, fine, lots of sheep, some yarn stores, but did she actually get any knitting done on the trip?"
Well, yes and no.  OK, well, actually, there can only be one accurate answer there, which is YES, I did knit a couple of things on the [...]

OK, this one was totally under the radar.
A few people in my group classes have seen it in progress, but mostly I did this one on the sly.
It’s a bottom-up raglan sleeve tee shirt style sweater, in the most funky yarn imaginable — Gedifra "Velato", which I picked up a few years ago on a [...]

Ahem, ahem.  OK, yes, you are right — the last post in this series was in July.  Just barely not in June.  July 1, to be exact.
Of course, I did include this bad boy in the UFOlympics, so technically, the last post on this project was more like, oh, late August.
But enough about my blogging [...]

I took a look over at Knitting Daily today and found the holidays staring me in the face.  But in a kinda good way!
The Question o’ the Day over there is, "What are you knitting for holiday gifts?" and it seems that for many of us, the answer is, "Nothing."  I’m firmly aligned with Sandi [...]

Wow!  Here we are at the end of the UFOlympics, and the decathlon results are in…
… and I made it!

0.  Brioche st hat:  shop sample for class.
1.  Bear mittens:  one left to finish; then it’s time to take ‘em to the zoo.
2.  Bunny slippers:  make ears, felt, attach, and add eyes and tails.
3.  Glam rock vest:  [...]

Yes, you may well have been questioning why there is a total of 12 UFO’s on my UFOlympic "decathlon" list.  (Actually, there are 13, because I had to add one UFO #0 that I forgot about when making the original list.)  But it’s a good thing.
Truthfully, I could probably do at least two decathlons with [...]

Hey, are you getting as sick of the UFOlympics as I am?
It was fun to begin with — it was great to get a couple of projects out of the way and all that — but I’m getting a definite feeling of stuck-in-a-rut now.  Maybe this is why the real Olympics only last a couple of weeks, [...]

UFO #1, the fifth bear mitten:  FINISHED 07/09/08.
Final time:  2 days!
Yarn:  donated acrylic stuff.
Pattern:  from Twisted.
announcer’s voiceover:  She’s certainly maintaining a very competitive pace thus far, but can she possibly keep it up throughout the whole event?  We’ll have to wait and see.
I threw a 6-inch ruler into this picture for scale, so you can see that a single bear mitten [...]

Ummm… I have good news, and bad news.
First, the good news:  UFO #0, Brioche st hat:  FINISHED 07/07/08.
Final time (offical Swiss, of course):  2 days.
The crowd goes wild!
Yarn:  Manos del Uruguay silk & wool.
Pattern:  my own Polar Bear Pattern.
Shameless plug:  this is a sample for a class I’ll teach at the Knitting Bee in Sept. 
 

OK, the bad news:
#1:  I [...]

A little while ago, y’all learned not to ask me a certain question:
 

What should I knit?

And since I didn’t explain in that post what the second-question-I-won’t-answer was, now nobody will talk to me.  So, I guess I’d better clear this up today.
The second question I get asked by knitters, which I will not answer, is
[knitter [...]

The other day I realized I am into my 5th year of what I still think of as my "new career":  teaching knitting, writing patterns, and perhaps most importantly, not being a corporate slave.
During that time, I’ve met and taught a whole bunch of knitters.  I can’t honestly say that I remember all of ‘em — [...]

In no particular order, here’s some great pix I’ve received of bear mittens, in response to the free Polar Bear Pattern offer!!
 

In case you still haven’t heard, here’s the short scoop: 
There are bears in China that need mittens.  (For a full explanation, please see the previous posts in this series.)
The [Oregon Zoo ->] and the yarn shop [Twisted [...]

OK, here we are, finally.  It’s done!  And, I’m pretty darned happy with it.  Although admittedly, I picked a real lulu for the first set of Playing Lessons!
(I didn’t do it on purpose, I swear.  Really, I’m usually more lazy than this.)
"Lulu" is the perfect term to describe this project, it turns out, because it has several [...]

Hey, you can’t say I don’t have persistence.
This little gem has literally taken me something like 5 years to finish.
To be fair, there was more than the usual amount of knitting involved.  I did knit the entire thing once, and then reknit the top half; but then I got to cheating and for the third [...]

Admittedly, I haven’t written much in the past week (heck, I haven’t written anything).  But, I have an excellent excuse reason.  Actually, several reasons…

#1 reason is, I have a bad Continental knitting habit of using my right index finger to help out on each and every stitch.  I don’t actually need to use it — I can [...]

Aaaaaand here they are, in all their glory:

These socks comprise many of my favorite sock-knitting techniques to date.  I prefer techniques that work well and are easy to memorize, so for those of you who want to know the nuts & bolts, here’s a brief recap:

 Tess’ Best Toe-up Socks recipe
Judy’s excellent-(but-not-magical) CO:  20 sts.

(M1, YO) inc to [...]

Well, I said I was working on my pile of UFO’s.  Two more are completed, hooray!    I swear to you I got them done by Dec 31, even if I haven’t managed to blog about them until Jan 3.  Blogging does NOT COUNT as part of finishing.
That makes a total of 21 FO’s for the past [...]

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 [...]

Last night, Don said he had a “dangerous” question for me.
“Did you knit me another pair of black socks?” he asked.
I knew right away what had happened.  After all, there are only two pairs of hand-knit black socks in the house.  Yes, it was quickly confirmed that the black heavyweight socks I had made for me (Mission [...]

Every so often, of course, the subject comes up. Why (the expletive) would anyone HAND-KNIT a pair of socks?
One year, at my family reunion, I presented one of my brothers with a pair of obviously hand-knit socks, in his all-time favorite color – dark purple.

(Where, you ask, did I get dark purple sock yarn? Funny [...]

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. [...]