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I have so many things to talk about in this newsletter, but I’m most excited to talk about a new feature at Stitch-Maps.com: curated collections!
With this new feature, you can gather together groups of stitch patterns – those you’ve contributed to the site, and those contributed by others – according to whatever criteria strikes your fancy. You can then tag each of your collections, give them descriptions, and set their visibility. This is great for:
- Sharing with others. The Victorian stitch patterns collection is a good example. I combed through Stitch-Maps.com to find all the stitch patterns that came from Victorian-era books, regardless of who contributed them to Stitch-Maps.com and regardless of how they were (or weren’t!) tagged. It’s an impressive set!
- Organizing for your own use. Normally, a Things to swatch collection is something I’d keep private. But I’ve made this collection hidden so you can get a peek at how you could make a similar collection for yourself.
- Gathering together hidden patterns. Picture this: You’ve purchased pattern PDFs from designers who’ve included links to hidden stitch patterns. If you gather all the stitch patterns in a collection, you’ll be able to search through them easily without having to go back to the original PDFs.
- Sharing a set of hidden patterns. Designers! This tip is for you: If your pattern PDF contains multiple stitch maps, you can include a single link to a hidden collection listing them all, instead of having to include individual links for each stitch pattern.
Now, granted, this feature is new. So when you browse, you won’t find a lot of collections on the site just yet. But hopefully soon!
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Having read the book’s introduction, I knew to interpret “make 1” as “yarn over,” and “knit 3 together” as “sl1-k2tog-psso.” That made this stitch map possible:
Ah, but I have a thing for symmetry. So some of those right-leaning k2tog had to become left-leaning ssk. And while we’re at it, why not use bunny ears decreases rather than slightly off-center k2tog?
Ah, yes, that swatched up nicely.
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Have you seen Lucy Neatby’s Snowfire blanket?? It’s the latest in Lucy’s series of double-knit blanket patterns, and it’s a stunner.
The pattern, believe it or not, makes use of stitch maps. I’ve always envisioned stitch maps as being ideal for lace, but the truth is they’re ideal for depicting any stitch pattern that relies on increases and decreases – like Lucy’s blankets. In particular, she’s taken the idea of using a stitch map as a “coloring page,” and run with it like no other designer.
Want in on the fun? Snowfire is now available as a “pattern-in-progress” from Lucy’s website. And you can get a dyed-to-order yarn pack from Knit Circus.
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Oops!
If you follow me on Instagram, you know I had a bit of an adventure last week. Several rows down, in two-color patterned brioche, I discovered an “oops!” in the form of a split stitch. Just a few fibers held the fabric together – one unfortunate tug, and it could all start unraveling.
I tell the students in my Disaster Recovery class that weak spots such as this can be repaired via duplicate stitch: a few minutes with a tapestry needle and a spare bit of yarn, and you needn’t worry anymore about the fabric coming apart. And I actually considered taking my own advice... but in the end, hubris won out and I decided to try dropping a few stitches off the needles and reknitting them, sans any split stitches.
It was a slightly nutty thing to do. Because of the patterning, I knew I had to drop three stitches off the needles, and they would soon grow to seven stitches that would need to be wrangled. But it worked! You can see in this photo that a pair of dpns let me carefully reknit row by row.
And I’ve made appreciable progress since then. Two or three more inches, and it’ll be a hat.
(Note the red lifeline. I can learn from my mistakes.)
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I’ve known for a while that itty-bitty Halsey had a shop, but I never took the time to visit. Now that I know a little bit more about the shop and mini-mill, I kind of regret that. It seems to be a really special place! Watch their video to see what I mean. |
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February, April, and October are always busy months for me. (My best guess? Event organizers want to avoid major holidays, summer vacation season, spring break, and the start and end of the school year... and that doesn’t leave many other options.) This year is no exception!
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