Happy New Years!

2012.

We made it!

This year I'm going to publish my New Years resolutions. Normally I would never do that as if I didn't live up to my goals I would be forever shamed. not really, but I would definitely feel disappointed.

I want to publish 25 patterns this year. With any luck I will be able to do this!

Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone has a chance to knit, relax and eat lots of yummy foods!

For the last week, Mr. Monkey Pants has been featured on the Gina Brown's Facebook page and the Ravelry group. Here he and Baby Monkey are hanging out, wishing everyone a great day!

The Bolete Beret

I've just released my latest hat pattern - The Bolete Beret! (Available for purchase, here or on Ravelry and Patternfish). It's made out of the lovely Done Roving Kidding Ewe - the colors shown are Appropriately Pewter and Old Sturbridge. The brim of the hat is knit as a corrugated ribbing - one of my favorites to use with yarns that are variegated/self striping because of the way that the colors just seems to pop out more. The pattern stitch for the top of the hat is using the waffle stitch. It's a great slouch hat that's not too slouchy but very trendy! Thanks to Paula at Done Roving Yarns for providing such amazingly, beautiful yarns and David for taking some great photos.

Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

I had the whole day planned out.  I wanted to sit around the house and knit and work on patterns and blog and eat my wonderful smelling pot roast (that is currently making the house smell amazing!) and watch/listen to some TV and clean the house (well I didn't really want to do that but . . .) and do laundry . . .etc. (best run on sentence ever, but also very accurate in how I felt the day should go). Scratch that. Washing machine died. Thus I found myself hauling a bunch of laundry to the laundry mat - a scenario that I hate having to participate in. Not that laundry mats are a bad thing, just that I don't want to leave my house on my only day off! While I was there I started to play on David's new iTouch that I bought him for his birthday. Felt the only way to make the day a bit better is to take a photo of the amazingly old school game right beside the seating area with my knitting as a fun, yarnie juxtaposition. I'm making two pairs of the Ohh La La Fingerless Mittens as a custom order. I'll post more about these later . . .

Complete!

There has been a lot of custom knitting this fall as two of the stores' knitters are moving and no longer knitting for us. One day we recieved a phone call from a lady asking about custom knitting and I told her to bring it all in and we would give her a quote. She came in later that day and the result was 3 baby blankets and a baby sweater. Two of them were knit with Debbie Bliss Bella & Debbie Bliss Cashmerino DK and the sweater/blanket set was done with Bernat.

I knit the baby sweater first as it was very cute and easy to knit. The pattern is Infant Set 1 - Ann Norling #36 by Heather Finch. The blanket was quite a bit more tidious. It did start to feel that I had 5 inches left every time I measured! The upside to all this knitting is that Connie (the lady interested in the custom knitting) decided to retire and start to knit again!

Flowers, Flowers and more Flowers!

This is by far the busiest time of the year for me. I am always doing something, whether it's working full time and teaching every night or working on patterns and custom orders etc. Let's just put it this way I either have a distorted view of how much it's actually possible to get done in a day or I'm a sucker for punishment :) or perhaps a bit of both!

One of the ladies I know is doing a craft fair this weekend and needed a whole bunch of flowers and corkscrews for the tops of some of the cutest little hats! So I made quite a few flowers and over 20 corkscrews. They were so fun to make but it just reminds me that I need to get organized and publish my flowered baby headband pattern for crochet. Every since I did the knitted version, I've wanted to do a crochet one. These flowers were neat and easy to make. They were crochet with Sandnesgarn Alfa and a 9mm crochet hook.

The ones I will do for the Flowered Baby Headbands in Crochet will be using double knit yarn and a 4mm crochet hook for a wee bit of a more delicate look to them. They are so cute!

Berroco is 'Crazy for Cowls!'

I recently got a Ravelry message from Amanda at Berroco asking if they could have permission to use my photos in one of their blog posts talking about independant designers who are designing with Berroco's yarns. You can check out Berroco's Blog here. They have interesting posts about all things Berroco - new yarns and patterns etc! As you can probably imagine - I was pretty excited!!

My latest cowl pattern, The Potentilla Cowl, is crochet out of Berroco Vintage. It is available for purchase here. I also made a sample in Berroco Ultra Alpaca to test my pattern - the green version in the photo above. I love Berroco's yarns. They are very affordable and have a lovely hand to work with. The colors are by far the best part - everything from solids to heather etc. Yum!