Month: June 2018

I’m on holiday at my cabin in Northern Ontario, or at least as much as a holiday as I can allow myself. That means that I am, of course, still working, even though I tell myself I can take a couple of weeks off. Before I go on holiday, I seem to need to settle every single thing in my life. Clear everything up and nail it down. Unfortunately I didn’t get the two sweater patterns I’m working on finished up so they are nagging at me. Until I get them finished, I cannot completely relax. In an effort to take some time off, I am only working a couple of hours a day. Today I am going to work on writing up the Diamond Grown Up and then talk my sister into modeling the sweater. Oops, that sounds like more than a couple of hours already.

Since my job and my hobby are the same, and I am technically on holiday, I will still be knitting, but I’m going to spend the afternoon knitting on a project I didn’t design. It’s relaxing. I chose The Shift  …

because I think the shape of it is really interesting. It’s worked in mosaic, which is a technique that I like.

The other fun part of this project is picking 3 variegated colours of wool and seeing how they go together. It’s hard to imagine and quite a surprise, at least to me, as I work along. I have used three colours of Mineville Sock which I am enamoured with at present. I’ve only ripped out one section that I didn’t like so far. Now that I know which colour becomes the background and which becomes the mosaic blips, I can make some adjustments to the pattern. Always fun. I have chosen to use the two darker colours as the backgrounds throughout and the light colour is only used as blips. It’s easy to switch the two colours, background vs blips, used in any section so that it will come out as you wish. I want a dark coloured cowl without a light coloured stripe. I really like the darker colours.

This is my plan: pattern writing in the morning, knit my holiday project in the afternoon as I listen to an audio book, and work a jigsaw in the evening. Read as many books as possible and fit in a bike ride when it’s not raining, as it has been for two days so far. Is that starting to sound more like a holiday?

Thanks for reading,

Deb

ANY GAUGE and GAUGE-FREE patterns by Deb

Cabin Fever Patterns on Ravelry

Deb on instagram

Designing on the needle is actually quite easy, writing a pattern out in many sizes is the hard work that designers do for you. Every pattern seems to have its little challenges, ha, ha, sometimes not so little, and this one is no exception. In this Top Down Diamond pullover the stitches in the Yoke form a V. That’s wonderful and makes the design special. But if the stitches are forming a V then how can we figure out how many stitches are needed to get a certain size across the chest?

Continue reading “Diamonds are not clear cut”

When you step away from a pattern and start tweaking, there are places where you have to stay fairly true to the original pattern and other places where you get to play.

The playground in this design is after the Great Divide.

How do you want work with the V shaping of the body? I thought it would be fun to play with the angle of the V and see if I could get a bottom edge that was less pointy.

Continue reading “Diamonds, playing with the angles”