Where did the swag bags come from, then? Well!

I’m working from the list of donors on the KAL blog, and doing some educated guess work, so I may not be totally accurate here… if you know better, please tell me, and I’ll fix it! (ETA: fixed the things mentioned in the first comment!)

Let’s start with:

Two balls of my very favouritest yarn, Bernat Satin, from Spinrite!

(My crochet guild is working on arranging a bus trip up to Listowel to see the fine people at Spinrite. I can’t wait! Also, while I’m on the subject, keep your eyes on the top bar of this blog; I’m planning a “yarn” tab)

Next is some superwash merino from Diamond Yarn:

Then there are a couple of sets of knitting needles. The wooden ones are 19mm (!) and are from the Purple Purl, and the 4.5mm needles are from Romni Wools:

A handful of books from Simon and Schuster:

There were also coupons in the bags, from the Purple Purl, Mary Maxim, and Knit-o-Matic

Here is the t-shirt I won:

And the bags it all came in:

(The black one was this year’s bag, the white one was from last year, and it had the t-shirt in it)

Thanks again to the TTC KAL folks, and all of the donors (a full list of which you can see on the TTC KAL blog)

I can not wait until next year! I’ll try to remember to post about it in time for people to sign up and come along (you know, instead of the night before… heh)

Charles: I could really go for a grilled cheese sandwich
Becky: There’s a place two doors down from Lettuce Knit that apparently has great grilled cheese sandwiches
Charles: You know, we really should go to Lettuce Knit!
Becky: Ok, but that’s where I got that skein of $39 yarn…
Charles: I seem to have suddenly developed a cheese allergy…

I was on team Central Purple. We started the day at the Yarn Boutique, near the corner of Bloor and Keele, where I bought this:

As well as some DPN’s. The plan is to make myself a pair of socks… because I’m some kind of crazy person (a crazy person with size 11 feet)! I’m going to try the simplest pattern I can find for my first pair.

Next stop: The Knit Cafe, which sells both yarn AND tasty treats. I had a lovely vegetarian quiche, and bought some lovely malabrigo:

I’m planning to make a hat out of it, but after winding the purple skein into a centre-pull ball, I’ve discovered that I am allergic to it after all. :( The hat will have to be for someone else, I guess. It’s a shame, because it’s just so very soft!

Then we headed to Romni Wools, which, if you look at a map of Toronto, it seems like it’d be easy to travel between the two shops, but due to streetcar re-routing, possibly due to protests, we ended up taking a scenic route down the street!

I found Romni quite overwhelming! It’s huge, and has every natural-fibre yarn you can think of (I assume… I don’t know of very many!). For someone like me, I’d have been better off deciding what I wanted to make and what yarn I’d need for it before heading in.

Still, I bought this:

I’m planning on playing with it to see if it’ll make a nice shawl. If it does, I’m going to go back and get more!

We then took another scenic streetcar ride up to Lettuce Knit where I simply could not resist buying this:

It’s soft, and even more beautiful than this picture would suggest. It is destined to become a scarf, which should be stunning with my black winter coat!

At the end of the shopping spree, most of us headed over to the Rivoli to meet up with the other four teams for merriment and prizes!

I won the “WTF WIP” prize my mitten, which I started when I got on the subway at Kipling Station. This is how much I got done over the course of the day:

Action shot:

The most frequently asked question I got about it all day was: how are you going to do the thumb? I love yarnies!

More in the next post about the amazing free stuff we got! (Look for that post either later today or tomorrow… my blog is being quite flakey today!)

I’ve been silent because of a combination of “working on presents for people who read the blog” and “working on getting a pattern published”.

I’ve been over-thinking about this for about a month now, and I’ve finally made a decision! I’m off work because of the G20 Summit being hosted in Toronto this weekend, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to post the pattern for the Oddly Linked Blanket.

If you’re on Ravelry, you’ll find the pattern here: Oddly Linked Blanket.

If you’re not on Ravelry, you should still be able to buy it by clicking on the button below to be taken directly to the PayPal page:

You would be paying $2.00 USD for the pattern for the blanket. I’d say it’s an easy-intermediate level blanket, with one tricky part that is clearly (I hope!) explained using both text and lots of pictures.

Once you get the hang of the special stitch, the blanket works up quickly! Use any smooth, solid coloured yarn with an appropriate hook for best results. I think a variegated yarn would work well, but one with long runs of colours would work best.

One last note: I know that this pattern looks like it might have a lot of ends to weave in, but it has exactly as many as you’d expect with that many colour changes; so 2 ends per stripe of colour.

This morning I started trying some of the patterns. Now, this is a book made up of crochet border patterns (obviously), and while each pattern also has a “in rows” version, they are primarily meant to be worked in the round. Specifically, around *something*.

I wanted to get started right away, though, and I didn’t want to have to fuss with the math of getting the right number of sc stitches around a motif, or for that matter, wasting time making the motif to begin with (before you say it: most of the motifs I have worked up already are not square, and would have lead to even more math. Time’s a tickin’!)

I tried the first border I had bookmarked (#26), using the “in rows” version and felt that I didn’t really get a good feel for the border as half of the stitches were backwards. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal to me, but this was a stitch of particular interest because I’d never heard of it before.

So… there’s a border I want to try, I want to do it in the round, and flat, and don’t feel like making a motif of some sort first. What did I do?

Thank you chainless foundation sc!

Someone on Twitter asked me once (and I appologize for not answering your question there, I didn’t see it until just recently!), how I come up with design ideas. Apparently the answer is: laziness and happy accidents. ^_^

See the last post for a close-up of the stitches. This pattern is being tested right now (and that’s terribly exciting!). More information to come!

My question to you: is this new to you, or have I reinvented the wheel?

First, with a hook appropriate to the yarn you’re using, make a chain about as long as your bullion stitch will be tall (I did 5)

Then grab a smaller hook (I used a 3.25mm) and put it along side your working hook, butt-to-hook.

Make sure the smaller hook goes through the loop on your working hook – this will make a later step MUCH easier!

Yarn over a whole bunch of times (I did 10 yo)

Insert your working hook into whatever stitch you’re working into (I inserted in the furthest ch from my hook). You may need to play with the yarn overs a bit to do this. Just be careful!

Yarn over

Pull through one loop

Yarn over

Pull through all loops on hook. I found it useful to very carefully pull through the first loop, then, making sure the smaller hook is butted right up against the tip of the working hook, hold onto the herd of yarn overs with your thumb and finger of your left hand, and pull the hooks through.

Take the smaller hook out

Yarn over (this will make a sort of vertical bar that ends up getting hidden behind the bullion stitch)

Pull through. Bullion stitch made!

Now do it again! And again! I did 7 more and then joined with a slip stitch to the top of the starting chain.

And here is the back; see the vertical bars?

Work around those vertical bars if you want to add more rounds that tuck behind the bullions, or work right into the tops of the bullion stitches.

Good luck!

Ladies and gentlemen, I have mastered the bullion stitch!

Tutorial to come just as soon as I get more batteries!

I first learned of this pattern from a Crochet-Along on Craftster. It’s such a pretty pattern, and it suits this yarn really well (I bought the yarn at Mary Maxim during their Boxing Week sale with only a vague idea of what I’d do with it… a blanket… that’s all I had planned).

Anyhow, it’s a good thing it’s pretty, because the number of ends to weave in is astounding.

Here’s a wider shot (no, you can’t see the ends… I’ve been diligently weaving them in as I go) :

I’m actually further along on this than the in that picture. I’ve just about used up the first ball of each colour now.

As for the ends… the pattern goes: 2 rows brown, 1 row green, 1 row pink, repeat. The open-spaced nature of the pattern means that there isn’t really a neat way to crochet over the ends as you go, and so… there are 6 ends to weave in. For every pattern repeat.

I’m taking a bit of a break from this one for a little while; I don’t think you’ll blame me!

And I haven’t released an album made up of Crochet-related songs (but I think we can all agree that that would be awesome!).

There was one thing that was missing from my prank, though, and that was musical “proof”. I’m not sure how many of my readers know this, but I actually am a musician, though I’m no longer a professional. I used to teach private music lessons on piano, trumpet, flute, and recorder. I also used to be the back-up musician for a United Church (I played the piano for the services when the regular organist was away).

I was (still am, I guess) a certified Technics Music Academy teacher. If you’re thinking about learning to play the piano, I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, Technics isn’t making pianos anymore, so I’m not sure what has happened to the learning program that went with them.

The reason there weren’t any clips to accompany my April Fool’s Day joke is that my Technics digital piano (a truly awesome instrument) broke a little while ago. You turn it on, and the little red power light lights up, but nothing else. No screen, no sound.

It’s the end of an era not because the piano died (and it may be fixable… we’re looking into it), but because of my reaction to its death. It didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. For someone who has been a musician her whole life, and always loved the piano the most, it’s shocking… but not too upsetting.

On the other hand, as good a musician as I always believed I was, I’m not sure I could come up with a believeable “heavy metal / gospel fusion”.

Anyhow, here’s a picture of what I’m working on now:

I’ll blog more about it in the next post.

Happy April 2nd everyone!