The Blue Brick

Baby Gi

September 10, 2012
My first baby sweater ever came off the needles this weekend! The expecting couple are both karate students, so it only made sense to try making a little karate gi:

I used the B aby Garter Stitch Kimono pattern. The yarn is something I picked up in Boston from deep within the stash, but I remember that it was a super soft super wash merino. I used only about 2/3s of the ball for the infant sized pattern.

I read reviews from a few folks who found it to be a dull knit – but I loved it. I knitted most of it while waiting in line for rides at Canada’s wonderland, and this mindless portable little project was perfect.

The trim is from precious leftover Viola sock yarn. It occurred to me as I was knitting the sleeves that I was
1. Knitting in the round on dpns
2. Knitting using 3mm needles and sock yarn
3. Successfully picking up stitches.
So of course I thought, ‘perhaps it’s time to brave a sock?’. Just think, how much more of a super deadly kninja I could be if I mastered dpns…

Because it’s meant to look like a baby karate uniform I opted for ties instead of buttons, but otherwise made no alternations to the pattern. A little teddy in place of the crest finished off the look. I gave it to them yesterday, they loved it :)

Ravelry project page here.
FO – Cream and Sugar Cowl

September 7, 2012

Done at last! This was a great airplane knit. I can’t wait until it’s cold enough to enjoy.

The pattern is the Cream and Sugar Cowl by Alana Dakos. The yarn… oh the yarn. It’s Sweet Georgia’s Cashluxe Fine – a Cashmere/Merino blend that is unbelievable to touch. The yarn was a gift from Yvette, who, without buying me turquoise, knew just what colour to get! This gorgeous, soft and wearable colour way is called ‘Ginger’. Ravelry project page here.
New FO and How To Fix Curly Shawls

September 6, 2012
So I finished this lace shawl, and it’s so gorgeous I can’t believe I knit it.

It’s the first thing I’ve done entirely from charts, and I have to say I’m pretty pleased with m’bad self. The pattern is Mystic Fire by Anna Dalvi, and the yarn is Northbound knitting Superwash Merino in the gorgeous colour way ‘Artemisia’.

The pattern is great – some of the charts look intimidating at first but one row at a time I managed just fine. I have an iPad, and an app called ‘Good Reader‘ that opens and lets me mark up pdf files. I can’t recommend it enough – it let me outline the row I was on for easy reading, insert other lines to break up the chart into digestible chunks and leave notes for myself on the side, such as which repeat I was on, and directions another knitter used to make it bigger if I felt so inclined.

Still, when it was all done, there was a problem. I may have needed a few extra rows of garter stitch in there, but the thing curls up faster then my cat in the sunny spot on the couch. I didn’t discover this until after it was bound off and blocked.

I needed a solution, because the curl really bothered me, and damned if I wasn’t going to get to enjoy the best bit of lace knitting I’d ever done. I bat around different ideas like sewing on edging, blocking it even more aggressively, threatening it, and finally hit on a solution that I’m sure many knitters before me have discovered but was brand new and shiny to me and had a good amount of it’s-so-simple-it-just-might-work going for it. I was going to crochet on a simple trim.

Here’s how I did it:
- I used the leftover yarn from the project, luckily there was some. You only need a small amount.
- I used a smaller hook size then the needles I’d used. 1.25mm smaller to be exact.
- I tied the working yarn to the bottom corner of the shawl and single-crocheted my way across, using the small holes left by the stretchy k2tog bind off (highlighted in yellow). At the corner I did 3 SC in the same stitch to turn.
Even after only 1 row of SC you can see it’s looking better:

I did 2 rows of SC before tying off the yarn and blocking it again.

It worked like a charm. I know some folks might not be fond of having a thick border below their lace, but in this case I feel it works. It’s certainly way better than the curled edge I was getting before, even after removing the pins and wearing it the edge stays flat, allowing me to take this creepy instagram pic:

Best of all, it cost me nothing extra and I was able to work directly into a cast off piece. The beauty of crochet was that if it didn’t work I could have just pulled it out without damage to the shawl. I’m pretty happy with the results :)

Ravelry Project Page here.
Bollywood Beautiful

September 5, 2012

Remember these guys? They’re halfway married!

They are doing 2 ceremonies – the ‘red wedding’ and the ‘white wedding’. The Hindu (red) ceremony was a few weeks ago and I was the wedding photographer :)

We’re only 2 months away from the white wedding where I’ll be too busy trying not to trip up my bridesmaid dress to take pictures (a reprieve that I’m looking forward to). The incredibly talented Tami MacInnis will be shooting that one, so I know the photos will be amazing.

The ceremony is complex and beautiful, taking about 2 hours to complete. I enjoyed seeing my lovely friend in her Bollywood best. My mom is Hindu as well, so the ceremony was familiar to me and I enjoyed trying to capture all the little details – enjoy!
The Drop Zone Caterpillar

August 30, 2012

Tito and I have had a romantic tradition of going to the CNE every year, on a work night, and just walking around, shooting the rides, eating bad food and losing spectacularly at games.

This year I tried something a little different, just for fun:

Here’s how you get the effect – take multiple shots of each ride, like so:

Then you bring them all in to Photoshop. You want all the pictures to be different layers in the same file. You change the blend mode of each later to ‘darken’, and voila! I like how the drop ride now looks like a crazy caterpillar.

The results are very cool, I can’t wait to try it with more complex movements, like the erratic flight path of a bee, or one of those games where everyone is tossing rings at a row of bottles. I plan to have a lot of fun with this one! Of course, that’s not to say that I didn’t also do my favourite – long exposure shots.

I love the CNE, can’t wait for the airshow!
New Pattern – Dionne’s Slouch Hat

August 29, 2012

I’m in the mood for fall knitting these days – and this new pattern was inspired by a friend of mine who had a slouch hat that she loved so much she wore it almost every day, indoors and out, last winter. It set me thinking about how much lovelier it would be if it was a handmade hat (hers was from a major clothing boutique) and how important that perfect slouch hat can be. From cold weather to bad hair; it’s a wardrobe staple alright.

Enter the Dionne Slouch Hat!

The perfect slouch hat for fall, this quick and easy knit works up fast on 4.5mm needles and worsted weight yarn. It’s a great pattern for beginners; all you really need is knit, purl, cast on and cast off. The pattern makes it easy to ‘read’ your knitting as you go, making it a good TV project for seasoned knitters as well. Solid and variegated yarns both work well in the simple, geometric pattern. A cute moss stitch band with faux buttons adds a nice touch to the brim.

Ravelry Project Page here.
Or, you can purchase the pattern on Etsy here:
Free Pattern – The Mushin Cowl

August 29, 2012
Cool weather is coming; just last night in Toronto it was downright chilly. Time to stock up on some fall accessories! Mushin is a Japanese term frequently used in Martial Arts training that means ‘Without Mind’. It’s totally appropriate because this is completely the easiest, most mindless project for instant gratification.

I worked this up over a day (no kidding) just carrying it around wherever I went. No TV show or conversation, however complex, will make you err on this simple, sweet crochet project. The simple pattern is great for both solid yarns or that special skein of variegated that you love, but don’t know what to do with ;)

Materials:
- 4 mm crochet hook
- 335 yards of sport weight yarn
- Sample is using one skein of Malabrigo’s ‘Arroyo’
- in Colourway ‘Jupiter’
- Tapestry needle for weaving in your ends
Finished dimensions:

When lying flat: 12.25 inches wide and 13.25 inches tall.

Download the pattern here!

Ravelry Project Page here!
The Pianoman

August 28, 2012

As part of Toronto ramping up for the 2015 Pan Am Games they’ve participated in an international project call ‘Play Me, I’m Yours.’ The project involves putting pianos in public spaces, and has already been through 26 cities around the world. Each piano is painted by a local artist, and they’re all beautiful.

This piano is outside of Toronto’s Union Station, partly hidden by the hoarding around the building announcing renovations. The person sitting there was playing beautifully, the sun was setting, the light was gorgeous and I was entranced. Alas, all I had was my iPhone, but the Instagram shot was everything I could have hoped for. I might just turn it into a painting.
White on White; photographing fluff

August 28, 2012

Leslie Ordal came over last night for some last minute photography of her spinning work for a piece she’s writing in Interweave Magazine. We didn’t have a lot of time to plan the shoot, and the material was all white. White fluff, spun into white yarn. With the challenge of coming up with something artistic and creative late on a work night we opened some beers and got to work. Nailed it?

For the photographers out there: this was shot in a white lightbox with a medium grey backdrop and 2 small spot lights. I used the 7D with the 100mm prime lens at f10, to get every detail in the fibre for some shots, and f2.8 for the shallow DOF shots. I processed them in lightroom to select the finals and do a batch edit for colour correction, tone, cropping and adding the vignette effect. Finally, small clean ups (cat hair, non fluff bits from the mill) were taken care of in Photoshop with the patch tool. The entire shoot start to finish was 1.5 hours including processing time.
Update to the Jax pattern, and tough learning experiences.

August 22, 2012

I’ve updated the pattern for Jax to include instructions for a full-length leg warmer pattern as well as the boot topper version – I was enlightened to the need for this by someone who listed it as a project on Ravelry, and let’s just say she wasn’t kind.

It was an interesting experience for me – I had spent a lot of time replying to emails from this person to help her through the pattern – explaining the cables, the row and pattern counts etc. I felt I’d done a lot, particularly considering my day job doesn’t leave a lot of time for drafting emails about knitting patterns.

I care about standing by my patterns though, and making sure people have a good experience with them. It’s important to me that folks are happy with my work. So you can imagine my shock when she listed her completed project and wrote that she basically hated them. There was even swearing involved. It seems that the problem was her being under the impression that they were leg warmers instead of boot toppers. As though I had somehow written a miraculous pattern that would allow me to wrest 2 full sized leg warmers out of a measly 350 yards of sport weight yarn.

Well, lesson learned for me. I even wrote a short email back to her, after I updated the pattern to include yardage and instructions for full length warmers. I confess, I was so hurt that it took me literally months before I felt ready to draft a short letter expressing dismay at her choice of words and advice on maybe being kinder in the future.

It’s a good lesson. I love designing knitwear, and I love that feeling of satisfaction when people send me photos of things they’ve made. I want to make sure I’m improving the way I work, and the way I communicate with my fellow knitters. To this end I thanked her as well, for bringing the discrepancy to my attention.

The internet is a big place. When you put your work out there you can expect a few pieces of feedback that run the gamut from unflattering to downright mean. I’ve been lucky; in the wide worlds of Ravelry, WordPress, Facebook and Pinterest my negative experiences can be counted on one hand, with room to spare.

It was a tough learning experience, but one I’m glad I had!