Knitting blogs

I follow a ton of knitting blogs.  Here's my list:

Inspiration

Where do you get inspiration for your designs?  Mine comes from all sorts of sources.  Ideas often bounce around in my head for ages before they turn into a knitted object.

I usually visit my public library at least once a week.  Each time I stop by the new book section and see if there are any new knitting books on the shelf.  Usually, like today, the popular new knitting books are checked all out and there's nothing of interest on the shelf.  Well, actually, today there weren't any knitting books in the new section - all checked out!  Knitting's popular in Corvallis :^)

A couple weeks ago I checked out the knitting shelf and stumbled on an amazing book, although it's not about knitting.  British Textiles is 500 pages of amazing photos of textiles from the Victoria and Albert museum.  It's $50, but I might still need my own copy. These are all woven fabrics, not knits, but there is so much inspiration in there.

A lace panel, maybe?

Lace, or cables?

I can see a square lace shawl based on these motifs

Colorwork?  Cables?  Both?

Some combination of colorwork and texture.

Lace? or colorwork?  or a combo of the two?

Definitely cables

Definitely colorwork

I can see this in textured colorwork

These might get interpreted as mosaic patterns

Colorwork  - stranded or mosaic?

Cables in two or more colors?

This book could give me endless ideas.  I've only shown you a small sample.  Never mind the inspiration, it's fun to just turn the pages and admire all the beautiful fabrics.

Latch Hook Santa

I made this guy when I was in high school from a latch hook kit.  I haven't hung him in a few years, but decided he needed to come out this year.  He's about 2.5 feet in diameter.  Here you can see him above my couch to get some scale.

Though I think his bright green kind of clashes with my sofa's seagreen.  Oh well.

I used to be really into latch hook.  I also have a Christmas stocking, about 1.5 feet tall.

Unfortunately, I don't have a mantle to hang it on where I live now, but I think I'll hang it on my wall.

In the same picture box as Santa was this lighthouse latch hook wall hanging that I'd forgotten I had.

It's 3 feet high by 2 feet wide.  I may need to look for a spot in my apartment to hang it.

Felting

I did some felting today since I had room with a load of towels.

That thumb is still too big.  I''m not sure how I'm going to fix it.

Some snowflake coasters

Some petroglyph coasters

A vase with a mosaic pattern at the top

While it could be used as a wine cozy, the wine bottle is really there to shape the bottom of the vase.  I often find that vases and bowls come out of the washer with really rounded bottoms.  I search through my kitchen for the appropriate sized jar/bottle/tupperware/etc.  to mold the bottom to a nice flat shape.

And lastly, my favorite of the day, another vase

I think this one is going to be really cool after it gets a shave.  It has a tupperware molding it's bottom and a mesh laundry bag full of bean bag pellets pressed inside it to force the sides to round out nice and evenly.

Knitting Lace

One of my favorite knitting books is Knitting Lace by Susanna E. Lewis. 

I first got this book from my library years ago when it was out of print. It was love at first sight, but you couldn't buy the book. I lost the bidding war on Ebay several times. I'd have the highest bid and be continuously hitting refresh. Then someone would outbid me a nanosecond before the auction closed. I finally found a copy on half.com and paid $55 or so for it. Of course, now you can buy it new for $29.95 at Amazon. And if you don't already own it, I recommend you do just that. It's one of the best knitting books I've ever seen.

Susanna Lewis reverse-engineered the lace patterns from a sampler in the Brooklyn Museum. Each of the  92 lace patterns has both a chart and written instructions and a clear notation of the stitch and row counts  for repeats. The book also includes sections on creating your own lace charts, using lace in designs, and the techniques needed for lace knitting.

I taught myself to knit lace from this book by knitting samplers of a lot of the patterns, though not in one 15 foot long piece like the sampler in the book. I did four samplers around 5 or 6 feet long.

I didn't knit every one of the 92 patterns, but I did a lot of them. At the time I was designing a set of lace placemats as a wedding present for a friend, so my choice was somewhat driven by patterns I thought might work well in placemats.  Other patterns got knit just because I liked them.

Blogging Every Day Is Hard

I don't have any knitting content today.  I was gonna do a book review, but I had a busy day, and it's 11pm, so I don't have the energy or time to do justice to a review.

What was I up to all day?  I volunteer at my local food bank, the South Corvallis Food Bank.  We get our big deliveries on alternate Thursdays.  We've been serving a lot more clients lately - for several years we'd averaged 200 to 220 households a month (roughly 800 people).  But the last few months we've been running more like 250 to 270 households a month (over 1000 people).  So we've been going thru a lot more food and our orders have been bigger.  

I think a lot of food banks around the country are experiencing this uptick in demand, so I encourage you to donate to your local food bank.  Google food banks in your area and see if they have a list of items they particularly need, or better yet send them a check.  Most food banks can get considerably more for the money than you can at the grocery store.  Just one example I picked off today's invoice, we got cases of 24 15oz cans of mixed fruit for $7.97 - that's only $0.33 per can.

When we order too much, like today, they can't bring it to us in one trip.  So today 6441 pounds of dry goods came at 11am and another 2006 pounds of freezer and refrigerator goods came at 2pm.  So I spent a lot of the day at the food bank meeting the delivery truck and supervising the volunteers unloading the pallets.  The freezer goods were a real challenge.  We stuffed all the freezers full to the brim (3 upright freezers the size of normal kitchen refrigerators and a triple freezer the size of 3 regular refrigerators for backstock).  It was a real jigsaw puzzle getting all those boxes in the freezers.  But we did it and now the food bank is well stocked.

I should still have had plenty of time to do a knitting book review this evening, you say.  Nope.  I got my arm twisted into volunteering at my local Democratic Party's holiday gathering this evening.  There was a catered dinner, a silent auction, door prizes and music.  It was fun visiting with some people I hadn't seen in a while, and I bought my Christmas tree there.  The tree farm I've gotten my tree from the last couple years, Donovan's, had donated a tree to the silent auction and I got it for just $16.  I think this weekend I'll head out there with my certificate and pick the perfect tree.

So that was my day, not a lot of time for knitting, tho I did make some progress on my Xmas tree skirt.  It's coming along nicely and should be done either tomorrow or Saturday.

Knitting Podcasts

I mentioned yesterday that I was catching up on my knitting podcasts.  Here are some of my favorites.  All are available through iTunes - Check them out!

Audio
Cast On An American currently living in Wales.  Nice stories about Wales and a lot of knitting content.
Electric Sheep A London knitter.  Fun snippets of life in London and good knitting content.
Fiber Beat WonderMike talks about all things fiber.  He does great interviews with various folks in the fiber industry, interspersed with frequently slightly cheesy music clips.
iMake  All things handmade from the Isle of Guernsey.  A nice peak into a very different place.
Knit Knit Cafe A mother/son podcast with mainly knitting content.
Savvy Girls Two sisters, one who lives in Bogota, Columbia, the other in Alberta, Canada.  They have a lot of fun and are a bit silly at times.  As much about their travels and adventures as their knitting.
Yarn On Tap  Lots of knitting content from the Knitter's Brewing Co.
2 Knit Lit Chicks A mother and daughter talk about knitting and books.

Video
The Charminglochie Podcast  A fairly new podcast from Scotland.  I love her accent and the Gaelic introductions to her sections (a change from all the "On the needles" segues).
Knitrundig Another fairly new podcast from Britain, knitting and archaeology - what a great combo!
Stockinette Zombies Another fairly new podcast, two friends from Minnesota talk about their knitting.
90% Knitting Lisa from Fibernymph Dye Works in Pittsburgh talks about her knitting and shows off the gorgeous colorways she dyes for her shop.
TheKnitGirllls  Leslie and Laura are a lot of fun to watch.  They talk about their knitting, spinning, and fiber events they attend.  They also usually have good knitting book/magazine reviews.