Earthbound Misfit

I love collaborating with other independent business people in this wonderful industry and I am always amazed how much more I can achieve when I work with other brilliant creatives. This new shawl is a prime example of my point. I decided to call it Earthbound Misfit (after my favorite Pink Floyd song Learning to Fly) and it features beautiful custom gradient sets from The Unique Sheep and perfectly matched beads from earthfaire.com.

The first step is that I drew up an idea I had and took my sketch to SAFF because I knew that Kelly (from The Unique Sheep) was going to be there. My drawing skills aren’t the greatest, but I thought y’all might like to see where things started:

We start with images and art that have caught our eyes for their color combinations. Once we have narrowed down the candidates Kelly from The Unique Sheep works her magic developing custom colors. Occasionally the colors need to be tweaked until we are all happy – but they are always stunning from the get go. Then the yarn travels to Ellen at earthfaire to be matched up with the perfect beads.

For this shawl I asked her to put together a “bead soup” of multiple different colors that matched the colors that the yarn gradients pass through. By placing these colorful beads on the contrasting color stripe the beads have a big impact with a relatively small number of beads (compared to the size of the shawl). I also wanted to challenge myself to place the beads randomly. I’m not much of a “random” person – but sometimes you just need to loosen up!

Speaking of size, the pattern is designed to have some wiggle room in the amount of yardage you need. We worked with three different fingering weight bases and they each have slightly different yardage. I planned the color changes to occur in the large textured bands and you can fudge the transitions by a couple of rows here and there to match your yarn. The end result is a shawl that takes between 900 and 1000 yards. The resulting shawl measures 24″ X 55″ (61 X 140 cm) but due to the curving shape it wraps around as if it were much larger.

If you are in love with one of these specific color combinations you can get them in kits exclusively from earthfaire.com. You can also pick out your own gradient set from The Unique Sheep in their Luxe, Verve, and Tinsel Toes bases. Just let them know you are making an Earthbound Misfit and I am sure that they can make sure you have the right amount of yarn and a great contrast color. I cannot wait to see all of the different versions of this that might come about. Seeing the three that we created amazed me in how changed the pattern appeared in the different color combinations!

Come learn to fly.

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Scarab Shawl Revisited Again

It is an unfortunate fact of life that yarns get discontinued. I don’t blame the yarnies, they have to do what their customers want. But it can create some issues. When I re-knit the Scarab Shawl for independent publication (it was originally published in Knit Now) I was lucky enough to receive yarn from one of my favorite dyers Miss Babs.  The alpaca/silk blend that we decided to pair with the pattern brought a whole new look to the shawl and I adore it. I sometimes take it out and pet it. But alas, all good things must pass

But let us not look upon it as a loss, but as an opportunity! An opportunity to see Scarab knit in an entirely different yarn! This time the crack team at Anzula just happened to be introducing a brand new Sport weight MCN called Ava. And you know, the difference between DK & Sport weight is in the “close enough” category considering the non-fitted nature of this shawl. It was a bit of a gamble, but one that paid off.

I still love this delicate lace.

Look how beautifully the yarn paired with the pattern. This color is called Misfit and I am totally in love with it. I kinda don’t want to mail the sample back to California but it needs to be reunited with its owner. It was such a pleasure to do a photo shoot with this shawl and my model Fatimah is just the picture of beauty isn’t she?

We do have about as much fun as it looks.

Really, I don’t need to say much, the pictures speak for themselves.

But of course, before it departs on its journey I decided to make a pattern tour video.

In the video you will see the two shawls side by side. There are subtle differences in how the yarn behaved but both are beautiful. I think that you should knit two!

Til There Was You

The design of this shawl was driven almost entirely by the yarn. I had come up with a shaping idea, but other than that I had little to no ideas of what the details would be. It was me and the yarn and a bunch of swatching for quite some time. What precisely did this yarn like? What did it do well? And I found that it really loved cables. The chunky weight gave the cables great presence even with a 2/2 cross and the softness and bloom filled the cables in to create a wonderful field of texture in the basket weave pattern. You may recognize the Stitch Sprouts Crater Lake from a previous pattern release. This one has actually been in the works since before that one, but patterns will do what they will. Some cooperate, some take more nurturing.

Ever since In Uffish Thought I have been enamored of the idea of using a cabled selvedge to prevent rolling because it just looks so cool. For this the challenge was making the cable run seamlessly along the top edge when the construction was top down. The solution to that is Judy’s Magic Cast on, only worked flat. I didn’t want the texture of the cables to overwhelm the shawl so I kept the body simple. This also had the bonus of highlighting the lines of lace that make up the functional increases of this shawl. This wedge increasing eventually transitions into a pi-shawl increase to provide a blank slate (without increases) for the basket-weave trim.

A 10.5 needle produces beautiful drape,

You can easily size the shawl up and down by increasing or decreasing the number of repeats you work of the stockinette body. The rule of thumb to remember is that the trim will take about 50% of your yarn. As written the body takes about 150 grams of yarn and then the trim takes 150 grams. If you want to knit the body for 200 grams then you will need at least 200 grams for the trim. Does that make sense? And of course – since you are changing things on the fly, you might want to have an extra skein, just in case. 😉

I love the weight of the trim.

If you would like to check out the video tour of this pattern here it is!

Each to Each – a beaded lace shawl in gradient

Have you heard of a sock blank? It is this really cool concept where the yarn supplier takes an entire skein of sock yarn and pre-knits a long strip of stockinette yarn. This provides a palette where the dyer can then work their magic. From the knitter’s point of view you buy this beautiful strip of art which slowly unravel as you knit directly from the blank. Or you can go ahead and ball the whole thing up and knit from that.

The amazing thing is that, when knit, the colors completely rearrange themselves and you get this beautiful variegated yarn that doesn’t really pool. For this new shawl I worked with the sock blank Sea Garden from Gale’s Art to create a top down crescent shaped shawl. Gale requested lace and beads and I think I fulfilled those requests. I might have gone a bit bonkers with the beads.

But I don’t regret a single bead. It is so sparkly. I may not be a big fan of myself when I am putting them on (who thought this was a good idea is something I mumble to myself), but the end result is so worth it. It isn’t a spectacularly large shawl, I designed it to make the most out of a single skein – more of a shawlette really.

It works as a kerchief!

But it is easily adjustable. There is the main lace motif and then the edging. You can adjust either to suit your desires. Because the color was named Sea Garden I decided to try and evoke a watery feel. The central lace pattern is wavy, which also does double duty in moving the gradient around a bit, and the bottom is meant to look like a fisherman’s net awash with the sparkling drops of the sea. This desire also led to the naming of the shawl. I took a line from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T S Elliott:

Each to Each

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

Peephole -a long

It is time for a Spring knit-a-long and it seems that The Peephole Stole is ripe for -a longing! I would love it if y’all could join me in my Ravelry group and knit this pattern along with others (click the link for the Ravelry thread)!

While it was designed to work perfectly with a 6 skein gradient set from Miss Babs, it is also supremely easy to customize. There are people in the -a long who have dove into their stash and have found many wonderful color and yarn combinations to make the pattern unique to them.

One of the wonderful things about knitting a long is that if you want to modify the pattern we are all there to help you figure it out. This piece is easy to make wider and in the -a long thread we discuss how to do that. And there is always the motivating factor of seeing what others are doing and showing off what we have done.

If that doesn’t do it for you, there are also prizes!

During the course of the knit-a-long  there are progress mile markers where, if you have posted a picture of your progress, we use a random number generator to choose someone to receive a free pattern of their choice. So there are 6 opportunities for that. At the end of the -a long (which will be mid-June) we will also have a Grand Prize and hopefully a few other prizes. I am working on getting some together, but I already have the Grand Prize and I am super excited about it.

Miss Babs has been generous enough to donate one of the six skein gradient sets in the color of the winners choice! How amazing is that?

Miss Babs Grand Bazaar

If it tickles your fancy you could win the above piece of gorgeousness! All you have to do is finish the shawl and post a finished photo by Mid-June to be entered. I will post about other prizes as I figure them out, so check back. And please, if you are so inclined come and join us.

Pattern Video Tour – In Uffish Thought

There has been brainstorming going on at Casa Benson with regards to what I can do with the video format. Tutorials are great, and I will continue to do them, but what else can I do? The video format offers me the ability to convey information differently than in either written words or still photographs so I really want to take advantage of its strengths.

I have a list of ideas that I keep adding to as they come to me. Some of them will take the acquisition of more technology and/or skills, but some of them can be accomplished with what I have on hand. Yesterday I filmed my first attempt at what I am calling a Pattern Tour. Which might make you do the head tilt, huh?

For every pattern I do a photo shoot and upload still photos to the Ravelry page (and here) and I try my very best to communicate all of the things that a knitter needs to know about a pattern. But things slip through the cracks. There are subtle elements that don’t quite come through. So I figured that I could shoot a video with me showing off the finished piece and babbling a bit about what you might have missed in the photos.

For my first swing at this format I decided to use In Uffish Thought. It is a fun, easy pattern with some subtle details that I think are not adequately conveyed by the photographs. Hopefully the video will show you more about the piece and maybe it will be a good fit for a yarn that you have been wanting to knit up. I tried to keep it short. Based on what YouTube tells me is the average viewing length of the previous videos – I need to keep them at 2:30 or less. Which makes sense, everyone is busy in this world!

My plan is to make this style video for all of my new releases (to add to the laundry list of other things I have to prep for a new pattern – why do I do these things to myself?), but I also want to go through my back catalog. If you have any of my already published patterns that you would like to receive this treatment, please do not hesitate to nominate them in the comments. It would be awesome to be able to prioritize my efforts.

Any feedback on this concept is also welcome. Was there something I did that didn’t work for you? Is there something you wish I did that would be great to add in the future? This is an evolving concept so I can try new stuff in subsequent videos.

Luidia and the Sandpiper Stitch

My first new pattern of the year is a two color slouchy hat that ended up being named Luidia. Luidia is the genus of starfish in which you find the species Luidia ciliaris, the only starfish with seven arms. I thought that the top of this hat evoked thoughts of starfish or urchins, well you can judge for yourself:

Isn’t it cool? This hat was a collaboration between myself and the awesome Lindsay who is the owner/dyer of The Fiber Seed, a small yarn company based out of Tampa, FL. A really cool thing about them, other than the fact that they dye beautiful yarn, is that their yarns are all American. American wool spun in American mills dyed with American dyes with low environmental impact. How cool is that?

But truly, all of that is just icing on the cake because the colors are so fabulous and the yarn is all sproingy … I love sproingy yarn.

See, slouchy

I wanted to keep this piece on the simple side and ended up developing a fun new stitch. I started playing with the classic lifted stitch pattern called the Gull stitch, but of course I had to figure out a way to mash it up with slipped stitches. Poof, a new stitch. I decided to call it the Sandpiper stitch (LOL, Sandpiper = seabird = Gull, I crack myself up) because the slipped stitch looked like a little leg. I always love watching the little sandpipers standing on one leg on the beach. In total the hat used about half of each skein of yarn, so I have leftovers. I am considering designing a short pair of finger-less mitts to complement the hat. Anybody think that is a good idea?

The view from a different angle

The stitch is not hard, but it involves a maneuver that is non-standard (imagine that?) so I was able to use my new found video skillz to make a little tutorial on how to work the two slightly tricky elements of the stitch. I also learned from my last two videos and think we are well on on way to getting it under control. I improved the lighting set up with fancy new bulbs and changed the background from gray to white. Keep watching for a wee bit after the stitch demo is over, there is a little surprise with a swatch of a different color.

The next step in video land will be really nailing down the sound and then I think we will have it. I would love to hear any feedback you have on the videos. What might you like to see? Is there anything I am doing well or not so good? I have many ideas bubbling up and I think it is a really complementary form to help me communicate better about knitting. It really is such a visual thing and since I cannot come to each of y’alls house to show you stuff, I guess this is the next best thing.

Ves, a shawl inspired

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most knitters (who would be reading this blog) are familiar with the concept of a “yarn club”. You know, when a great indie dyer gives knitters the opportunity to “subscribe” to a series of exclusive yarn colors that are delivered over the course of many months? That kind of club. Frequently the yarn arrives with a pattern designed specifically with & for that special yarn.

Going on the assumption that there is already some familiarity with this concept, I now ask you if you have ever heard of the Miss Babs Knitting Tour version of this concept? The lucky knitters that join this club are “armchair travelers” and they receive 4 shipments in the year. During the planning stage the wonderful people at Miss Babs (including the namesake) select four destinations and provide them to the featured designers so that they can draw from them for inspiration.

This time last year I was tickled beyond words to receive an invitation from Miss Babs to participate in the 2015 tour. My shipment ended up being the first (March). It took great restraint, but I didn’t blog about it because, along with the exclusivity of the yarn, the pattern was unavailable to the general public for 6 months after the “travelers” received their packages.

Guess what? Six months is up!

Get your own copy of Ves!

The inspiration destination for my leg of the tour was Sri Lanka! Like any dedicated artist, once I learned that I immediately booked a flight to Sri Lanka to do research!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I wish. I totally Googled it.

And if you are looking to see piles and piles of beautiful art, landscape, and architecture I recommend you do the same. There were many things that caught my attention, but in the end I drew my ideas from traditional Sri Lankan dance. Specifically, the costumes of Kandyan dancers which are referred to as Ves. If you want to see some of the pictures that grabbed my attention here is a link to a Google image search. The intricately embossed metal pieces led me to creating an intricate and deeply textured lace pattern that evoked the shape of the points of the headdresses.

The technique used in this shawl is Mosaic Lace like Golden Lion Throne and Love Child, with a complexity falling somewhere between the two. Close to 50 Armchair Travelers finished the shawl within the allotted -a long period so if you want to see finished shawls you can check out the Ves project page. The two sets of colors that Miss Babs made for the shawl are gorgeous, but I cannot wait to see what colors other knitters match up!

So, if exotic travel isn’t in your budget … at least you can do some exotic knitting from the comfort of your own home. And you get a great souvenir! 😉

Cowls and Scarves

Recently I have found myself on a bit of a scarf tangent. I have found that I love both designing & knitting them. I decided to write this post to find out if I have any compatriots out there. How do you, gentle reader, feel about scarves?

Do you like them long or short? Skinny or wide? Warming or decorative? YES PLEASE to all is how I feel, but I know that there might be dissent and I would love to hear it.

So far I have not published many “traditional” scarves (I define traditional as long rectangles). No. Mr Bond I Expect You to Die, Ziggurat, and Gyre and Gimble fall into that category.

Captive is traditionally shaped as well

For non-traditional scarves I think I would branch out to include Curiosity as well as …and Curiouser. Hmmmm, maybe I have created more scarves than I initially surmised? Possibly this is not a new infatuation but simply a dawning realization? This could take some pondering …

Oh well, onward & upward. 😉 Considering that cowls are frequently referred to as “infinity scarves” and that they serve the same purpose I tend to lump them into the same category and I have many of the same questions.

Do you prefer long or short cowls? Tall  or short? Decorative or functional? Inquiring minds want to know. I have designed both close-to-the-neck pieces and long dangly things. Most recently the shorter ones have been occupying my imagination (see Oh Bother and McClanahan) but perhaps I should revisit the long/super long version? For some reason I have only designed two in this style, Code Breaker and Rollercoaster. Both of which I still love.

I mean look at this:

She’s all like BAM!

It makes me smile whenever I see it. The photo is so much fun and so is the cowl … but what is the perfect length for a “long” cowl like this? For that matter, what is the perfect length for a short one? These are the kind of questions that keep me up at night. Silly, I know.

I would love to hear thoughts from y’all on these weighty subjects. Please feel free to let me know what’s what in the comments!

Oh Bother

I had to search my own blog. I remember talking about it but couldn’t for the life of me recall when. And then I was like, did I just write that blog post in my head? But I did indeed write it. Speckle dyed yarn, a bit of an obsession for me really. It is an awesome looking dye technique that has been showing up recently from the yarn artists (dyers) I follow. Swatching to deal with the yarns idiosyncrasies took place a while ago and a pattern has been in development. Today is the day that I have unleashed it upon the world (BWAHAHAHAHA – man, I should probably lay off of the Phineas & Ferb – channeling a wee bit of Dr. Doofenschmirtz).

Yarn in skein, yarn in pattern – do they match?

Honeycomb style stitch —> Honey —> Winnie the Pooh —> Oh Bother. Because that is the way my brain works, I have no real excuse. But this isn’t your average honeycomb stitch, can I ever leave well enough alone? Don’t answer that. By tinkering around a bit and adding some slipped stitches I was able to cause the honeycomb effect to kinda scrunch down into an almost brioche like effect. The resulting fabric is deeply smooshy with a three dimensional element. It actually has a thickness to it without a whole bunch of needle gymnastics.

While I was knitting the cowl I kept trying it on to make sure that it was as I liked. Specifically I was going for a “close to the neck” style. Which meant that I had to slide it over my big ole head. Sometimes I would start pulling and then get distracted and end up with the cowl on my head. It felt good there. I looked at it in a mirror and it looked good there – so obviously I had to do a hat too. Luckily Gale from Gale’s Art has several colors that I lust over. The cowl that started it all is in Meadow, which makes me inordinately happy. It just makes me feel Spring in my heart. But the hat? The hat is Goth Girl which has everything I love all blended together and yet somehow still working.

And the hat!

And the stitch is so easy that I was able to provide instructions for sizing up the hat; Adult, Youth, Toddler, and Newborn are all included. The hats are worn with almost 3 inches of negative ease, so they will definitely grow with a child’s head. I don’t have any pictures of a kid wearing one – but hopefully y’all knitters will fill in that gap!