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Tuesday Mash: Classes, Reading, and Halloween Ideas

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First, a reminder I’m teaching a variety of classes this weekend in and around DC.  If you’ve been missing my smiling face, this is a good opportunity to get your Tinking Turtle Fix!  A quick rundown, excerpted from my newsletter:

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Darn Those Knits is happening at Fibre Space on Saturday the 6th.
While this class is wonderful for teaching you the practical skills of learning how to repair your handknits, it also has a great side benefit: you’ll have a greater understanding of know knit and purl stitches interact. You’ll go home with a better understanding of the Duplicate Stitch, and even learn a great way to “hack” doing the Kitchener stitch. This class isn’t only about repairing things, it’s also about understanding your knitting.
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Crazy Simple Lace: Hairpin Crochet is one of my favorite classes to teach for a couple of reasons. I don’t get to teach crochet classes as often as I do knitting. I love how fast this scarf works up, which makes it a great gift for the holidays (which are fast approaching!). And if you’ve never worked hairpin lace before, you’ll be shocked at how versatile it is.
This class is also happening at Fibre Space on the 6th, and would be a great way to spend your Saturday afternoon!
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Colorwork Backwards, Forwards and Sideways is my inaugural class I’ll be teaching at the Knitting Boutique. I’m so excited to teach this killer class! This class features a fun pattern (exclusive to the class) to demonstrate how to do jogless stripes, work with stranded knitting, and how to use slipped stitches in stunning results!
I decided to work my sample in traditional fall colors, since cool weather is right around the corner. And this quick cowl simply flies by!

I’ve been gobbling up Seanan McGuire’s The Winter Long, which is the 8th book in her Toby Daye Series.  I’ve talked about how much I enjoy Seanan’s writing; so much so that the scarf I’m using to teach this weekend, One Salt Sea, is a nod to one of her books.  A mix of urban fantasy, folklore and mystery, I’ve been waiting the last year to read this book.  While the genre might not be everyone’s cup of tea, I love the book for the strong plotted elements.  Like the Harry Potter series, or even the Outlander series, there are strong threads seeded in the first book that come to fruit in this book.  It’s amazing to behold.

Now that I’ve read the book, I’m thinking I might just have to get the books on tape and marathon the entire series, just so I can take my time and appreciate what McGuire has been building for the last few years.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of other things on audio.  I’ve talked before about my love of RadioLab, but I’ve also been marathoning Welcome to Night Vale.  Night Vale is a fake radio show highlighting a rather strange town out in the middle of a desert.  Both strange and hopeful, frightening and contemplative, it’s not the sort of thing I’d normally enjoy, and yet I do.

I’m actually thinking that I want to decorate my house as a tribute to Night Vale for Halloween.  As if I don’t have enough to keep me busy.

What’ve you been up to?

Inspirations and Influences: Time Traveler

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Photocredit: Sockupied

I’ve got a new pattern that released this last week, and you might have caught a glimpse of it as I hinted at it’s existence.  Time Traveler is a pattern based off of my love of historical knitting and crochet patterns, and I couldn’t be happier to have it released into the general public.  Let me tell you, for all the sock’s simplicity, it took me forever to figure out how to get the lace to wrap around the ankle without breaking the stitch pattern anywhere.  Absolute ages.  But it all works now: and I’ve done all the hard thinking for you!

Let me let you in on a little secret: every once and a while I like to pay homage to my favorite authors with my patterns.  One Salt Sea is a homage to Seanan McGuire’s book by the same name (which in turn is a homage to Shakespeare, but I digress).  Time Traveler is a tip of the hat to Diana Gabaldon, whose Outlander series features a time traveling heroine.  I have a few other patterns whose design sub names followed that name-scheme, but many of the names don’t make it to publication.  I have to admit, when I named Time Traveler nearly a year and a half ago, I didn’t know that the Outlander Series would be in the process of being made into a TV series.

Photocredit: Sockupied

There’s so much I love about how these socks turned out: the picot hem, which I love (and would like to use more!), the way the lace seamlessly travels into the rest of the sock (which, dear readers, you don’t know how hard that was!), and the deep plummy color of the yarn.  I love the way the heels are worked, the way the toe expansion forms – quite simply, I adore the socks so much.  The Hazel Knits yarn is a really good choice for this pattern: you need a sturdier sock yarn in order for the lace to block out and show well.  Something that is softer (but more fuzzy) doesn’t quite show how the increases and decreases interplay to make the lace what it is.

Later in the week I’ll be talking about historical patterns, and a little bit about the not-so-easy process of reading them and mining them for ideas.

Until then, enjoy!

Photocredit: Sockupied

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