It’s springtime and everything is new. After more than 3 years at blogspot, I have launched a new web-site here at Knit & Knag Designs. Blogspot has been wonderful in many ways, but at this point I need to reorganize the site in a way that blogspot doesn’t support at the moment. The new page should be much easier to navigate. Hope you’ll like it. At the moment, it’s a work in progress, and it will take a little while until it’s perfect. But it’s getting better every day. 
Since this past weekend was a long weekend here in Canada, I had a chance to get a lot of knitting done. As an added bonus, the weekend was unseasonably warm and sunny, so I could sit outside on the deck and enjoy the 25C+ temperatures while I was knitting.
An amazing shipment of Skinny Bugga! arrived here in Ottawa on Wednesday. As always, the Sanguine Gryphon yarn is rich in colours and this yarn has multiple shades of purple.
They say “Diamonds are Forever” – so I chose diamonds as a theme for this stole to symbolize everlasting love. To me, the glistening diamonds also mean beauty in the way they reflect the light.
Mystic Diamonds is a rectangular lace stole. The pattern is adjustable for both width and length.
1,100 yds of laceweight yarn will give you a shawl approx. 75 cm x 204 cm (30” x 80”).
The pattern allows for both wider and narrower shawls. It is also possible to use fingering weight yarn and make a thinner scarf.
The pattern is available as a downloadable pdf for $8.00 CDN
Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight,
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.
The StarLight shawl is a double-knit triangular shawl. The pattern allows you to adjust the size of the shawl.
2 x 135 g of fingering weight yarn in contrasting colours will give you a shawl which is 184 cm (72″) long and 33 cm (13″) wide at the midpoint.
The pattern is available in English, German and French here.
Today the third clue of the Mystic Diamonds pattern was published. So far, the stole looks like this. The two edges are symmetrical and the shawl will be grafted together in the middle once the knitting is completed.
I’ve been fascinated by double knitting for a while, so I decided to try it out.
Double knitting is knitting with two colours in such a way that the knitted fabric is reversible, and the colours of the pattern are inverted.
The two sides look like stockinette knitting, and the fabric is double-thick for extra warmth.
There are two different ways of accomplishing this. Either you knit holding both strands at the same times, and then you knit the front and purl the back.
Alternatively, you can knit using only one colour at a time, and slip each stitch that is to be knit with the other colour. You will need to use circular needles, because at the end of the row, you slide the stitches into position and work the row again using the other colour. Whichever way you choose, the result is the same; a beautifully knit, reversible fabric.
For this project, I’m using contrasting colours of Wollmeise 100% sockenwolle (again!). The needles are size 2.75, and my colours are Granatapfel (pomegranate) and Maus Alt (old mouse – that would be a speckled gray). The pattern is my own.
The Vancouver Sweater was designed and knit during the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. The sweater was inspired by the relaxed look of the crowds.
It’s a form-fitting, ribbed raglan knit in the round. The sweater is completely seamless, and is meant to be worn with some negative ease.
The pattern comes in several different sizes – 34″ – 36″ – 38″ – 40″ – 42″ bust.
The yarn pictured is Wollmeise 100% sockenwolle (525 m per 150g skein). But any fingering weight merino yarn of about 350 m per 100g would work.
It uses 2 skeins of the main colour and 1 skein of the contrast colour for sizes 34-38″. For the larger sizes you will need 3 skeins of the main colour and 2 skeins of the contrast colour.
The pattern is available in downloadable .pdf format for $5.00CDN.
I’ve always been enamoured with the Raven Clan colours from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. It’s all black yarn with shades of colour.
Black is one of my absolute favourite colours, and for many years I wore nothing but. I’ve definitely branched out and as you can see from my knitting I like all sorts of other colours too. But black is special.
I had a chance to examine many of the Raven Clan colours at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival last year. Some of them had much more colour than I had imagined, and others were wonderfully black with just a hint of other colours. My favourite was Thraven, which is black/dark gray with hints of bluish greens.
I’ve been eying Laci in Thraven for a long time, and now that I finally have a skein, I’m ready to get going on another lace design. Casting on today for a top-down triangular lace shawl.
The sweater is finished!!!!!
I cast on during the opening ceremonies, and bound off as the Canadian Hockey team was receiving their gold medal – Canada’s 14th gold of the games.
It’s a ribbed raglan sweater, knit in fingering weight yarn on 2.25 mm needles. I’m amazed that I managed to knit the entire sweater in only 17 days.
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