UFO #2, 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 #1, 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. [...]