Le Tissier Designs

Of Larks and Linnets and Flying Fingers

Category: Thrumming

  • Creating Beautiful Knitting Patterns: Jelly Bean Hat & More

    Creating Beautiful Knitting Patterns: Jelly Bean Hat & More

    It has been very foggy around here for the last few days. It does create a very different world when it surrounds and softens our world. Even as it lifts in the morning it leaves behind traces of singular beauty.

    The Frost this morning was amazing! It gives of the sparkle of diamonds in the sunlight and rims each petal and leaf in lace.

    Today is Wednesday, the middle of the work week and my day off. To rest, grocery shop and work on my knitting, patterns and blog! Maybe to nap as well. LOL!

    Now it is Thursday – yesterday got interrupted by some serious knitting. I am almost ready to place the thumb stitches on my glove onto some waste yarn!

    The Qing Fibre is so pretty.

    My project/sample knitting is going along swimmingly while my pattern is writing lagging behind my knitting. Which is normal because I would rather knit than write! I am much better at the knitting and struggle with the writing. I blog because it does in improve my writing abilities and it fools me into thinking my pattern will write themselves, so far, this has been proven to be a fallacy. LOL!

    As a knitter and as a designer I love texture and colour. Slip stitch knitting offers so many opportunities to combine both! Slip stitch knitting is very similar to Mosaic knitting in that you are never working with more than one colour at a time. The other colour in the round is slipped as you come to it. The Jelly Bean is a good example of slip stitch knitting.

    I have been working on the pattern for the Jelly Bean Hat. It is just about ready for release. The charts are done and the pictures. It just needs some fine tuning.

    The yarn is Juniper Moon Farm Patagonia Organic Merino in 4 colours. But it could just as easily be worked in 2 colours or every stripe of “jellybeans” could be a different colour. Knitters choice 🙂

    My remainder of the samples for the Winter/Spring classes are coming along. I really only have two samples left to knit.

    It is getting bigger. I am just a little ways away from dividing off for the underarms.
    • The Puffy Vest, which will take a while as it basically knitting two vests and then knitting them together. AND…
    • The Beaded and Twisted Cast-on which won’t take very long even though there are two variations on the same theme.

    I am going to use gloves and socks for the samples, Which will keep the sample knitting The beaded and twisted start really could be used on almost any garment or accessory. It’s just that I particularly love it’s effect on smaller items!

    The basic gloves for the class will be sampled with one of the versions of the beaded and twisted cast-on. They were started with a long-tail beaded cast-on. The yarn for the glove body is Qing Fibre Sock in the Blackhare colourway, paired with some basic black sock and size 8/0 beads.

    • Version 1 – gloves started with the beaded long tail cast-on and then twisted.
    • Version 2 – socks started with the beads randomly spaced on the knitting and then twisted.

    The other example will be my Sailors Knots Socks. In this twisted and beaded cast-on the beads are placed randomly as you knit.

    Epic Fail

    I really struggle with the technological aspects of being a small business person in our modern world of computers. Every improvement in technology requires a new learning curve. Usually it doesn’t involve the blog but…

    Yesterday I got a note that one of my posts had an error – there were two different versions, so there was a conflict. I had to pick one version. I picked wrong. SO….

    My Granny Blanket post has suffered some kind of calamity and will have to be rewritten. I will work on it this weekend. Apparently it was a “me” problem I jigged when I should have jagged! I mangaged to delete the whole thing. I somehow still have a draft version that was never finished so I will use that as a base.

    My Granny Blanket Swatch is building quite quickly though. I will be working less wedges than I thought (originally 16). I am currently thinking that 13 or 14 wedges might make the circle.

    I hope that you are having a wonderful week. With lots of knitting and no technological glitches!

    Happy Knitting

    Lynette

  • Squared Off

    Squared Off

    A square is a pretty simple shape, but it hold so many possibilities. For a knitter a square is often a nuisance, an “I told you so!” and “…really, do I have too!”

    And yes “Really you do! Or should!”

    I swatch a lot. As a designer it is really important to understand the yarn chosen, what it can and cannot do and make sure before you start that the results will be as expected. So I swatch. And I make a lot of squares to find the perfect yarn for the project in my head.

    Sometimes my swatches are not square – they are round! They are hats! Loads and loads of hats! Elizabeth Zimmermann often swatched a hat to test out a circular gauge. Someone always needs a hat! But most of my swatches are square.

    This morning I finished another swatch. This one isn’t just square. This one has dimensions, this one has “POUF!” It is a Poufy swatch for a Poufy Vest. A new Spring Class that I am developing! While knitting this swatch and thinking about the class I came up with a couple of ideas for using this particular swatch. So I have created a little pattern to go with my list of uses!

    The Gallery below might help with your process as you try one of these squares out!

    I hope that you give this a try. It has been fun and wait till you see what this is a swatch for!

    Happy Knitting

    Lynette

    These are the East Coast Mittens – don’t they look like fun. Click on the photo below for the Ravelry link.