I have certain...proclivities. Put me outside (preferably somewhere shady and not too hot please) and leave me alone for a little while and it's all but certain I'll pick up a feather, a pebble, a pinecone, a seashell, a bit of moss, or a nifty stick, depending on where you've dropped me off. It's a character flaw I'm sure, but as far as character flaws go, it's fairly manageable. And well, there is a massive oak tree in my yard. And I’ve rather bonded with this tree. I see it out my office window all day long, and I love [...]

Hey Brain, what are the chances you remember how to do brioche?⁠ Not good, Fingers, not good at all.⁠ But Brain, you LIKE brioche. You find it soothing. You find it pleasant.⁠ Well yes, Fingers, I did. But I haven't done a lick of it in at least two years. And it's been a rather eventful two years. Like, the bad kind of eventful. The trauma kind of eventful. The kind that makes you forget all sorts of shit. And brioche was a newly acquired skill, which means it will have faded fast. Neither you nor I remember how to [...]

Look, I FULLY admit it would be wildly impractical. I absolutely cannot store all of my scraps on knitted spools. My scraps fill two sizeable plastic bins, and storing them like this would substantially increase their volume (not to mention that knitting that many spools would quickly become tedious).⁠   But oh. Oh there is a small part of me that very very very much wants to see such a thing.⁠ Please send common sense and good judgement. Or, failing that, at least some sort of ability to reasonably assess my own attention span and patience.⁠ Because I seem to [...]

Whose turn is it to supervise me and make sure I don't get up to nonsense if left unattended? Because you see, I find myself thinking 'there's no particular reason *not* to knit a little thimble to go with the spools.'   Now, to be perfectly frank, I probably won't do this right now. I have too many other things to do right now to have time to do that. But there is a danger of doing it later.

I mean yes, sure, you CAN wrap the tiny spools with scraps of leftover yarn (or thread, or ribbon, or whatever). And that's what I did at first. But if you happen to maybe just *have* a bit of gorgeous silk embroidery floss just kind of lounging, casually, over on the shelf there, you might as well use it.   This is Molly Girl Yarn's Legato, and yes, yes it really is that luminous in real life. Some day I will sew with it I'm sure. But until then, I might just gaze at it. I'm sure you understand.

Am I still besotted with the little spools? I mean it would seem so. ⁠Do I have an unreasonable urge to knit enough of them to have a whole rainbow of thread colors? Alas, also yes. ⁠Will that make the urge subside for a moment? Your guess is as good as mine.⁠ Anyone wanna guess how many I'll end up with in the end?⁠ Standard bits apply! Yes it will be a pattern, no it's not out yet. The plan right now is that it will be the first pattern to come out under the Shiny New Thing and that [...]

I truly believe that just about everything you knit will benefit from blocking. And yes, yes this totally includes tiny things. The tiny things block pretty much the same way as bigger things (just faster), but there is enough confusion out there over how to block stuff in general that it's worth taking a bit of time to talk about. I'm more or less obligated to start any discussion of blocking with a disclaimer right up top that says blocking doesn't always involve stretching/pinning. Sometimes it does, most of the time, especially for small stuff, it does not. So I'll break this [...]

These only exist because the hearts were so much fun. Well, that, and I wanted to see if I could make them with absolutely no seaming, no picking up stitches, and only two ends to weave in (the answer was yes, yes I could, which is just darn nifty). Seriously though, the hearts were so much fun (and so popular with you folks) that I wanted to see what other sorts of tiny nonsense you'd let me get away with. Because really, there was every chance that the hearts were a fluke and only popular because I managed to bring [...]

A lot of my patterns are for tiny things that need to be stuffed before they're finished. I've tried a lot of different materials over the years, and I've talked a bit about how I stuff things in individual patterns. But I wanted to put everything in one place so it's easy to point folks to if they have questions. Plastic Pellets Plastic pellets are my very favorite way to fill tiny things. I got a big bag of the weighted pellets and have filled an astonishing number of projects from it. They give my knits a heft I really [...]