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, [...]

The "Z" here refers to NEW ZEALAND!!  Yes, here I am on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Queenstown, New Zealand.
Ah, the magic of modern air travel.  Here is how bad it was getting back home in PDX just before we left.
And after only 4 separate flights and 34 hours of misery traveling, here is what I was [...]

Here is what it looks like from my office window and my backyard these days:
 

And here is the yoke to my top-down raglan sweater so far.

With all this snow, and everything being cancelled, you might think I’d have gotten a bit more knitting done, wouldn’t you?
However, there have been extenuating circumstances.  A couple of colds [...]

Last Friday was our first top-down sweater knitalong class, and I’m so tickled with my Friday knitters, I just have to tell you.
I’ve got seven — count ‘em, SEVEN — knitters who are going to knit a top-down sweater along with me!!  It will be a project extending over a few months, so watch this [...]

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 — [...]

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:  [...]

Hoo boy, it’s been a while since I posted a good, solid, technical article.
(Just in case you are wondering — yes, this does mean that my personal UFOlympics are sort of at a standstill.  I’ve spent a lot of time working on #5, the Rowan vest:  trying to figure out how to trim out the [...]

If you think waaaaay back, you might remember a few issues I had while trying to make some felted slippers for myself.
Of course, these were not just your garden variety felted slippers.  No, I had to make it harder than that.  My goal was to replicate my dearly beloved, but quite elderly, pink furry bunny slippers:  Hip and Hop.
I had a couple [...]

Over the weekend, I had a touch of  "the depression" *.
Specifically, I had the knitting depression.
I didn’t have a single decent current project, the UFOs were one big pile o’ crap, I hated everything in my hotlist **.

I HAD NOTHING TO KNIT.

If this sounds to you a bit like closet angst (I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR), you [...]

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 [...]

Wow, what a difference a couple of weeks makes!  Here’s what’s happened since we last saw our friend, the Nutcracker sweater…
Bodice knitting:  finished.
FI panel:  about a million ends woven in.
Hems & facing:  sewn down.  Stitching down the hem took a while, because it had to be redone a couple of times to get it to properly [...]

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 [...]

Or to put it another way, the Turn of the Screw.  Emphasis squarely on the word "screw".
Because get ready, kids — here’s where it all falls apart.  Or at least it gets a whole lot more complicated.  Turns out I picked a real doozy to start off the Playing Lessons with…!  But let’s not get ahead [...]

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 [...]

So, after a second trip to the LYS, here’s what the yarn collection looks like. The Rowan “kid classic” is in the middle, flanked by all the Berroco “Ultra Alpaca” and some Nashua “Kid Mohair” on the bottom and the left. (The printed color swatches of the Cascade 220 used in the original design are [...]

OK, I found my next exciting project. #29 from the recent VK Hol 2007. This sweater is so freakin’ sassy, I can’t believe it. Faux fur & satin pockets!
Actually, I like almost every sweater in this layout, which is a refreshing change – in the past couple of years I’ve spent more time going [...]

Last Friday, I made another attempt at a pair of felted slippers for myself. (For those of you keeping score, DH has a pair already that he wears & loves – made in 2004.) 
The original concept behind this project is that I have a fabulous but very elderly pair of slippers that I’d like to [...]

This past summer, I learned a term from my woodworking brother that I think deserves wider attention in the knitting world.
He was reading an article on “pine", I think — and just what kind of a nut would read an article about “pine", I ask you – give me an article about “MOHAIR” any day [...]

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. [...]

You may have noticed – I like green.
Just about any shade of green really, even the ugly ones – with the possible exception of really light minty green. See, I’m a natural redhead, and it’s something I just can’t help. One of my personal slogans is,
“I never met a green yarn I didn’t like.”
Thus it [...]