Seattle Recap Part 1

I am back home from my wonderful trip to the Pacific Northwest. My flight to Chicago was a couple hours delayed, resulting in more knitting time and a finished new design. In some blog posts and tweets, I may refer to new projects and designs flying off the needles, but you all will have to wait until this fall/winter to see what I'm talking about. With all this secret knitting, I'll try to still have some projects and photos to share and perhaps some sneak peaks in the meantime so keep a look out.

Anway, back to the trip. My first stop was at Village Yarn and Tea in Lake Forest Park, WA.


Victoria's shop was cozy and inviting with all those tables for knitting and drinking some of the best tea I've ever had. I was kindly greeted by a display of my designs accompanied by some beautiful photography books. One of the books was a collection of photos by Karl Blossfeldt, whose work I love! If you're not familiar with him, I recommend looking at many of his photos. I'm sure you will be intrigued.


I always enjoy seeing other knitters' versions of my designs and sharing my own samples in person. I managed to bring along all my shawls, hats, and neckwarmers, which surprisingly fit in a large backpack.


I want to thank Victoria and Elsa again for hosting and entertaining me for my first few days in Seattle. Victoria showed me around Seattle where we visited Pike's Place Market, ran around Green Lake, enjoyed salted carmel ice cream at Molly Moon's, and encountered a giant troll under a bridge.


That's me helping him knit my new Daybreak shawl. Yes, another Daybreak. I keep giving them away, but this new one is Cashmere so fortunately it should be awfully hard to part with. I'll get some photos of it to share soon.

I love meeting new people, especially knitters, and this trip was no exception. Now, I have time to settle back into my home again, but another little trip is coming up soon. I'll be in Minneapolis April 16-18 for the Minnesota Knitter's Guild's 24th annual Yarnover Event Saturday, April 17. I'll be hanging out at Yarn Garage with my trunk show and patterns on Friday and Sunday. I'll also be at the Yarn Garage booth for Saturday's Yarnover event.

I have a lot more to share about Seattle, but I'll save it for later posts.

One last photo though. This one is Elsa, a regular at Village Yarn & Tea, with me wearing her Herbivore. She was lucky I didn't take the scarf home with me, it matching perfectly with my jacket and all.

sundara windschief

I haven't been sharing much of my knitting recently, but I can share the latest Windschief hat I made for a friend's birthday.


I used Sundara Merino Worsted, which I love to work with. Sundara's colorways are some of the best because they have so much depth and layering within the colors. I particularly love this glowing yellow-green colorway.


My red Sundara Windschief is the hat I wear most, especially after it relaxed from so much wear. So, today I started a matching red Windschief cowl in Sundara's Trumpeter's Lullaby colorway.


I don't know if it's the twisted ribbing or something else, but Windschief and Herbivore are probably my two most worn knit items these days. I'm sure that will change soon with all the new projects I have on the needles. How about you all? Do you have favorite knits that you tend to wear all the time?

march happenings

March is quite the busy month this year. I've been spending a lot of time away from home, but I can't complain because I'm getting to travel to some exciting new places!

The first week of March was spent in Amsterdam, dancing, seeing some performances, and meeting several wonderful people and new friends.


I can even relate the trip to knitting! I found a cute yarn shop called de Afstap filled with Rowan yarn. They had a couple other brands, but primarily Rowan. So, I got some fuzzy alpaca/wool and their new recycled Rowan PureLife Revive to try out some new designs.


I also started another Herbivore to serve as my travel project. I finished surprisingly fast, resulting in my yarn purchases at de Afstap. The yarn is uncharacteristically bright compared to my usual color palette and it's 100% BFL fingering weight from an indie dyer on etsy. I'll share more photos on ravelry when it's blocked.


I also managed to find a local knitting group that meets at a gorgeous cafe by one of Amsterdam's canals. It was a wonderfully diverse and interesting group of knitters and I hope I get to knit with them again soon!


After my week in Europe, I had to come back for rehearsals gearing up towards a dance performance in Chicago this weekend. The performances were held at Links Hall, which is a great space for independent artists to present work. I'm headed home to Urbana tomorrow, but only for a few days before my Seattle trip!

I'll be in the Seattle area for about 10 days. My first stop will be at Village Yarn and Tea Shop in Lake Forest Park, WA this Saturday, March 20. I"ll be at the shop all day with a trunk show of my designs. I'll also be teaching a little workshop all about shawls!

The next week I will be taking a week of workshops with Cat Bordhi on San Juan Island, focusing on book design and publishing because I'm working on a pattern booklet to be released later this year! I will share more bits of information and perhaps some sneak peaks as this project progresses. In the meantime, I'll be sure to share photos of my knitting adventures in the Pacific Northwest.

Wrapping up my trip will be another event at Wild Fibers in Mt. Vernon, WA Sunday, March 28. I'll have a trunk show of my designs as well as another shawl workshop Sunday afternoon. If you're in the Seattle area, I would love to meet you soon at one of these events!

purge

Since coming back to Urbana from a month in Chicago and South America I have to say that I've been a bit overwhelmed with all of the wooly things in my apartment. Yarn, unfinished objects, and even finished pieces have been taking over a lot of my space. I have made quite a few hats, scarves, and shawls in my relatively short time as a knitter and many of them I keep for myself. However, I don't wear all of them because I have favorites that get more use than others. I have a couple favorite hats and quite a few favorite scarves and shawls, but I had a whole bag of beautiful and functional accessories hidden under my bed. So, I decided to have a few of my good friends over for dinner and I put out a big pile of knitwear for them to pick from. They were very excited and it felt so good to let go of all those pieces, especially to really appreciative friends, and now the things I made are actually being used everyday. Since then, I have made a couple new projects for friends. One of them was the Purl Ridge Scarf in my last post, a cowl that I'm currently working on, and this quick and fun bulky neckwarmer for my friend Nibia.


I used Malabrigo Aquarella for most of it with a thick stripe using Malabrigo Gruesa on US 13 needles.

Anyway, it felt good to purge all those knitted items I wasn't using and also make some new ones for friends. If you have some knits lying around that you don't use anymore, I would encourage you to let go of them too because handmade knits should be used and worn.

Now that I don't have all those unused hats and scarves lying around I feel better about making something new for myself. After making the Purl Ridge Scarf for a friend I decided I would like to have one to wear and also bring with me as a sample when I visit and teach at yarn shops. I have been pretty good about knitting from my stash recently and not acquiring too much new yarn. So, I went through my stash and found some Rowan Lima in a beautiful shade of green that I got in Chicago last year. I had a wonderful evening of knitting and baking instead of watching the superbowl. Plus, I had some good company...

Purl Ridge Scarf

I just finished a dance performance this weekend in Urbana so I had some time these past few weeks to knit while waiting in the theater and during long evenings of tech/dress rehearsals. One of the projects I worked on was an infinity scarf requested by a friend and I have to say he picked the best yarn for this project from my stash (Hedgehog Fibres silk/merino singles). It was a pleasure coming up with a simple design because the yarn was amazing to work with and I hardly had to think about what I was doing. Long rows of easy knit or purl stitches are a favorite of mine.


I'll have to make one of these for myself soon because it's so easy to wear several different ways.





Best of all, this new pattern is free so here's the download link!
download now

I'm back!

Here we go again. I've been putting off updating for quite a long time. I really want to have an updated blog, but I just have so much to share that I've been letting things pile up gradually. SO, instead of filling you all in on everything between the last post and this post (which is A LOT of news) I'll just pick up with what's going on right now with my knitting.

I've been enjoying answering some questions for interviews and one of those can be found at A Yarn Tale blog. Perhaps this interview can make up for my lack of updates on this blog. I have been twittering quite regularly. I'm westknits over on Twitter so I usually post current news there.

I recently got back from visiting a friend in Ecuador earlier this month and dancing in Chile with my friends who have a dance company in Chicago. It was beautiful and summery down there and I still got some knitting done.

The Santiago landscape was beautiful...

The food (especially the seafood) and wine was the best...

And I could not have been with better friends.


While I was in South America for three weeks I was able to get in contact with Deep South Fibers in time for TNNA in Long Beach. They are now representing my westknits pattern line and doing all of the distributing to yarn shops. If you'd like to see my patterns in your LYS, they can contact Deep South Fibers for wholesale information. This company also represents a handful of some really talented knitting designers like Ysolda Teague and Julie Weisenberger (cocoknits) and many many more.

I have a new pattern called Bentgrass that I just put up on Ravelry last week. My most recent finished object is another Bentgrass Neckwarmer.

It's an insanely quick knit with super bulky yarn and US 13 needles.

I used Blue Sky Alpacas Bulky Natural for this one and added some Black Walnut buttons from thehickorytree.etsy.com.

Hopefully, I'll start working on a website soon that will serve as an online location to gather everything westknits like my travel/event schedule, news, patterns, etc... For now, I'll try to share news, events, and happenings more often on this blog. Coming soon, I will be at Loopy Yarns in Chicago teaching a project class on my Daybreak shawl. The 2 part class will take place on February 20 and March 6. You can find more information on their website here.

More exciting news! I'm currently planning a trip to the Seattle area next month! The dates are March 18-29 and I will be having events at a few knitting shops in the area so I'll let you know more details soon. I am looking forward to this trip because I have never been to the Pacific Northwest before. I have the feeling I'm going to fall in love.

Sorry this post is a bit blunt and choppy, but I had to put something on here to get this blog going again. I barely even talked about the projects I'm working on right now! I suppose I will save the rest for other posts. It would be great to hear from anyone who reads this. Knowing that other people read these posts is encouraging and will hopefully boost me into sharing more.

Herbivore

I just released a new shawl pattern today called Herbivore!



$5.00

There are some other beautiful versions already knit up and ready to see on Ravelry

Herbivore is a shawl named after the plant-like structures within the fabric. Increases at each edge and at three other locations create the unique shape, while twisted stitches branch out from those increases.
This pattern uses about 430 yds of a fingering weight yarn and would look great in solid as well as variegated and semi-solid yarns.



The three sets of increases in the fabric allow the piece to be worn several different ways.



I have a couple other patterns to share in the next few days as well!