You searched for: cast on over two needles
Hatched
These were never intended to see the light of day. They were meant to be for my own private amusement, inflicted on no one else.
For you see, I am a board game person (not one of you is shocked). And not just a board game person, but one of those people whose enjoyment of a board game is substantially increased if the various bits and pieces of the game are...cute (again, not a single one of you is shocked). So it was only natural that I knit myself a little nest to hold the egg-shaped tokens in one of my favorite games (someone is about to ask, it’s called Wingspan and it’s great).
And then, well then the nest made an appearance in a couple of random instagram pictures, because that sort of thing happens. And it turns out rather a lot of you share my peculiar predilections and wanted to do something similar. And I couldn’t in good conscience do just the nest by itself. So naturally I decided to add in some eggs (because somehow that makes it better?).
So here we are. A little nest, complete with drawstring ready to turn it into a pouch for game pieces or candy or whatever else you find amusing, and some eggs to go with it. Because sometimes these things happen. It’s better not to fight it.
Penchant
Exploring variations on a theme is my happy place. The more I look back on my earlier work, the more I see that this has always been the case. I love to find something fun, then tweak it and tweak it and tweak it, just to see what happens.
For these hats, that meant starting with a pretty little ribbing then setting to work with increases and decreases to make that ribbing wander off in a rather fetching fashion. But you see, there’s more than one way to do that. And it was too hard to pick just one, so I ended up doing two. Because once you realize you can get two different versions of a hat, each delightful and each with a different vibe, just by changing how you stack up your increases and decreases? Well it’s hard not to go ahead and do exactly that.
Restraint was never my strong suit!
And speaking of my scandalous lack of restraint, these hats are especially well suited to further adornment. When I was done knitting, I used duplicate stitch to doodle all over mine (you’ll see that in two of the pictures here).
More than one right way
I'm currently loving folded hems on hats. Folks tend to either think folded hems are Hard & Scary & Fancy, or they shrug and say sure I can do that. [...]
Explicate
I have a somewhat fraught relationship with what some folks call mindless knitting. I often reach for my knitting when I need a distraction from the world. If a project is too mindless, it won’t provide the necessary level of diversion. Worse yet, if it’s too mindless, I’ll get bored and never actually finish. And then the project will go to the pile of abandoned dreams in the corner and make me feel no end of guilt.
But not this time! This time I absolutely raced through what is, by any reasonable measure, fairly simple knitting. Because this time, when I was done, I knew that I was going to do something absolutely enchanting. I was going to embroider all over my knitting!
Should this have been enough motivation to push me through yet one more round of plain stockinette? Probably not. Was it? Oh very much so. Will it work for you? Every knitter is different, so I can’t make any promises, but I suspect it very well might!
Dispatch
There’s something magical about letters. I don’t know why. I’m not in charge of these things. There just is. The idea taking a tiny handful of the thoughts swirling around in your head, turning them on to words, putting those words on paper, and sending them off on an adventure to land on someone else’s doorstep and brighten their day is just kind of special.
My hope is to capture a tiny sliver of that magic with this knitted envelope!
Discretion dictates you not actually try and send it through the mail (though goodness knows I understand the temptation). But you can absolutely tuck a note (or a gift card, or some candy, or some other tiny treasure) inside and slip it under your sweetheart’s pillow or into a friend’s coat pocket or into your kid’s lunch box. Or perhaps you want to help the tooth fairy on her appointed rounds or make a post office play set (how cute would it be to make a little snap on stamp?) or knit a whole bunch and have the coolest advent calendar ever. I suspect that, as with most magical things, something delightful will occur to you if you just think about it for a little while!
Unspooled
Patrons at any level get this pattern for free as part of their membership, and they get a bunch of other patterns too! Here’s a preview of the free patterns you get a the Sheer Nonsense level ($3), the Utter Nonsense level ($6), and Rampant Nonsense level ($12).
So sometimes? Sometimes I knit something just to see if I can, with absolutely no thought to whether I should. Luckily, I design knitting patterns (not, say, rockets or bridges or viruses), so the consequences of this rather haphazard approach are fairly low. But that's totally what happened here.
You see, I was having a little dalliance with sewing. And I was at that awkward stage of learning a new thing where you're sort of surrounded by tools and supplies and practice projects and everything feels more than a bit overwhelming. I needed to take a little break from being terrible at sewing and do something I actually knew how to do. But sewing was apparently still very much on my mind, and these where what happened when I switched to knitting needles instead of sewing needles!
Oddly enough, thanks to the inclusion of a few strategically placed magnets, the big ones actually make a really useful pin tray and pattern weight. So I did find a way to use them to do something more than just soothe my ego (those first few sewing projects are a humbling experience). And I have a feeling I'll use the tiny ones to show off my treasured collection of gorgeous silk embroidery thread.
But really, I suspect most of you are going to knit these just because you can!
Scandalous
So, I am absolutely scandalously reusing my own work here folks. As part of the prep for the new website (which will be up in mere weeks!), I'm writing The [...]
Charts
I love charts. They’re a great way to present a lot of information in a small space. But as much as I love them, I realize that they can [...]
Shiversome
Look, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with winter in general and with snow in particular.
There’s a fairly outspoken seven year old inside me who thinks it’s great. Snow days, snow angels, sledding…what’s not to like? But there’s also a very tired 40something in there who is really quite sick of shoveling the driveway and driving on slippery roads and worrying about the roof.
I’m trying to find the happy medium. Tucking up under woolly blankets with a new book, hot chocolate ready to hand, watching the snow while I am safely inside is actually rather lovely. And since winter is happening regardless of how I feel about it, I might as well try to enjoy what it has to offer.
But I’m definitely still working on coming to terms with the cold. And these little buddies help. Yes, they are snowmen. But they’re the warmest, coziest, toastiest snowmen you’ll ever meet. No cold toes or freezing fingers or wind reddened cheeks required.
Chimney
Once upon a time, a friend with kids came over for a visit and saw the tray of blocks that lived on my coffee table. She started talking about how nice it was when folks without kids had toys around for kids to play with when they stopped by.
I did not have the heart to explain that those were my blocks.
They were mine. They were for me. And I will totally share them with you if you visit! But they are very much mine. And I’m going to play with them, regardless of my age or how ridiculous it might seem.
That’s pretty much how I feel about these little houses. I want to play with them. I want to make a whole village. I want houses and a tea shop and a bookstore and a school and everything else I can dream up. I want to use just the right colors and arrange them just so and dream up little stories for the folks who live there. Regardless of my age. Even if it’s ridiculous.
But I will share them with you if you’d like.
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