"figure it out"  This has always been my mantra. If you mess up on a project, figure it out.  If you forget your keys in the car and you have locked yourself out, figure it out.  If you ran out of Tikka Masala and you need it for your Butter chicken, figure it out.  If you get a flat tire and you have errands to run, figure...errrr call AAA (triple A).  Figure it out has always been a natural response for me whenever I'm stumped (and this is why my partner and I make sense...his brain doesn't work like this for non work related things).  As a Knitter, figuring it out has always been in my vocabulary. And if you have read my previous posts, you know that books and the google machine have always been my buddies. Searching for new (to me) techniques has always been fun for me, but sometimes I do what all science minded people know they should not do...I go with the first source.  This unfortunate habit still plagues me to this day, however I am learning....

  Let us begin by pouring one out for the pieces that made it past the blocking stage but didn’t survive the accidental wash that your partner..nay the traitor initiated.  If you were lucky enough to take a picture for the gram (or ravelry) of your FO before it got wrecked, let us observe a moment of silence.  If you were not lucky...then you know better next time.  I’m sure there are many of you who have a story or two about the time that you learned that wool was (and still is) meant to be treated with love and kindness. Wool, though sturdy can become even sturdier if it’s aggravated enough by harsh washes, harsh soaps, hot water, and the melodic agitation of a washing machine. We call this sturdier product felt. And if you had a beautiful lace shawl, congratulations now you have a tiny face towel.  So let’s do a quick overview of what I have learned/like to use:  The not so harsh wool soap I don’t cast shame on those who ask, “can’t I just use a little b...

  I know you’ve seen them...the beautiful Instagram picture with the perfectly positioned yarn butler, or the nice ceramic yarn bowl from JamPdX (that we all want to purchase but are waiting because we are too lazy to click “submit”. Or perhaps “we haven’t gotten paid yet” *coughs* lies *coughs*    But behind this perfectly curated picture lies something gastly. Something so awful, yet beautiful. Expensive, yet desecrated. Messy, yet artistic. It’s the project bags, the storage baskets, and perhaps the bed side piles that contain the remnants of WIPs. It is literally anything that houses our projects that we work on while we are home.  It’s the project bag that contains the sweater that is lonely on sleeve island. A sweater that is longing for a touch. Or perhaps it’s the Jessie Mae tank that is forced to live its days in pieces, half unraveled but somehow still keeping it together (me during this past presidency).  Now somewhere, trapped in endless loops of yar...

 The gauge.  Sounds so scary and elusive.  It's something that some may ignore. Others may deal with it, though annoying. And some may enjoy it, we call them liars (I kid..but really).  Knitting to gauge is something that we are not often privy to until we try to knit a hat that ends up large enough to fit the circumference of a watermelon. And if you are still unsure of what I am referring to here's a hint, it's the small paragraph at the beginning of a pattern that tells you the size of the needle and the yarn that was used. This information is also found on most yarn labels from your big box stores, but it is often absent in the labels from Indie dyers. And if this information is missing we rely on the type of yarn, i.e. sock, sport, worsted, etc.  Now you may ask yourself, why should I care about knitting to gauge? Can't I just wing it?  Well you could...but just know that you aren't just half-assing it, you are full-assing it. This risky behavior is a ...

One of the greatest downfalls of being extra is that you are easily convinced into buying the stitch markers in every shop update. Once you discover the greatness and the effectiveness of such a tiny knit notion, you can never go back.  You may ask yourself, why would you need more than one marker for the BOR?  Well allow me to tell you the tale of my pink velvet sweater. When I knit this bad gal up I too thought the same way. And after a decade of knitting, I didn't think about the benefit of using stitch markers to show the beginning and the end of each chart repetition.  Now this gorgeous sweater was knit at the beginning of the pandemic. During this time I was about to end my 2nd year of pharmacy school and I had the added pressure of wanting to help my coworkers at our hospital. I was so stressed about family and life in general that I joined the pink velvet KAL in hopes that knitting would help burn some of that energy.  Now I don't know what happened, but mark...

Times have certainly changed in the world of knitting.  If you have a question about a pattern or if you are confused about an abbreviation we simply hop online and ask. For some of us, this means going onto reddit or asking their local knitting group, for others it may be to hop onto Ravelry, and then there are those who rely on the help of an ancient item...a book.  My journey as a knitter began by picking up a book. If I remember correctly the titles was, "Teach me to Knit". In fact here is the picture below.  I didn't identify with the girls on the cover, however I knew that I wanted to learn...so I suppose we had more things in common than just our gender.  This was THE coolest book. Since I had no access to dial up internet...yes dial up. And since smart phones didn't exist back then, I relied on the pages of this bad boy that I picked up from a King's General Store in the middle of podunk.  The only issue with this book was that it didn't explore the ba...