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Introducing Shuffle

  a fun new pattern
♣   each row is decided by the draw of the cards
   every project is unique

Shuffle

The idea came from knitting the “Nuvem” shawl by Martina Behm. I wrote a blog post about it. I had two lovely skeins of yarn, one with twice as much yardage as the other. I racked my brain for a way to distribute the colors evenly without doing regularly spaced boring stripes, but I also didn’t want to run out of the pretty multi-colored yarn before I got to the ruffle edge. Pacing around my home (yes, I truly paced while thinking about this), I spotted two decks of cards on my shelves and, voila, perfect: an easy to carry, easy to randomize, easy to count way of controlling which colorway to knit the next row with.

I have a list of design ideas I am getting out into the world. My first labor of love was the police box shawl, but Hoo*bert is NOT necessarily an easy knit. So I really wanted to get a fun accessible pattern out there next. I used the two to one idea that I knit my Nuvem with, but I wanted to add different stitch patterns depending on the face value of the card. The test knitters all said they had fun knitting it wondering which card would come up next and how it would look next to the previous row. Shuffle can be done with solid colors, or you could knit it with a solid and variagated, similar shades or bright contrasts, it all works. My first shuffle was done with solid worsted weight from Harrisville Designs (they liked it).  My second Shuffle was knit from the two ends of my slowly changing color Loop handspun, and I kinda love it.

What will your Shuffle look like? 😊
Keeping knitting fun,

Heather

P.S. Join my email list to get a $2 discount code. Link is above.

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Badminton Baktus

A KAL for the BSGFPB in May, the lovely and simple Baktus. I had some cotton sockotta yarn I bought ages ago that I never felt compelled to use for socks. After seeing all the work people do with sock yarns for scarves on ravelry.com I decided to join in on the knit-a-long with this stash buster. The pattern is available for free at flickr, where you can see many other versions with all kinds of yarns, and also look at ravelry.

I love it, it’s a nice, light scarf for the spring, summer, and fall. It’s low maintenance since I can throw it in the wash, the tassels won’t even fray. They are the “gossamer tassel” from the Vogue book, Knitting on the Edge.

my baktus scarf

EDIT: I lost this in the wind at Logan Airport. … such is life.

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Mini Mochi Akimbo

This may be my favorite project ever, I loved the yarn, I loved the simplicity of the pattern, and I couldn’t stop taking photos of it.

Here’s how it went down.

Taking a weekend away to drive up to New Hampshire, we stopped in Newburyport for a late breakfast. I pulled out my ‘yarn store finder’ app from the ravelry.com people and discovered I was 43 feet away from a yarn store, A Loom with a View.  Gotta buy something, it’s vacation, right? 43 feet? Hell ya.

So I came out with 2 skeins of Mini-mochi and one of a Madeline Tosh Sock yarn. I took these photos with my iPhone using the white bag they came in as a lightbox, I uploaded them to flickr right away.

In New Hampshire I surfed ravelry and found a lovely triangular shawl someone did with Mini-mochi and figured I’d skip socks this time and try my first shawl. Once I got back home I made my shawl decision, Stephen West’s Akimbo shawl.  I worked with it as the Mini-mochi colors came, and decided I didn’t like it enough. Meh…

So I pulled it all out, down to a nub, and then considered speaking to a therapist.  I cut out all the blue after seeing that there was more orange and pink than blue after looking at the color cards.

Then I went to town on this, keeping the blue aside until I got to the contrasting colors. Eventually I realized I needed to order a 3rd Mini-mochi skein from the store in Newburyport to finish this project… but here’s how it came out. Love, love, love it.

I used this for my March project in the BSGFPB game we have going at ravelry. And it ended up winning me a hand dyed skein from Kesten. (!!) So awesome.

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Design – Leaf Shawl with Vogue Knitting on the Edge

A shawl to go with my new Anokhi dress. I used Trendsetter Yarns “Dune” and Berrocco Glace. The Dune is mohair with a bit of metallic going through it, and the Glace let me do the leaves on the edge while giving the mohair some body and extra softness. The leaf pattern came from Vogue Knitting on the Edge, and the rest of the shawl was done with alternate rows: P2, yarn under, p2tog / knit across.