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The past few days have been very hard. Your responses have overwhelmed me and I feel like I have to say something. First of all, I’m okay - this is not due to illness or accident or anything like that.
I’ve never been a crybaby. I don’t think I’m a whiner. I haven’t given any excuses and I won’t now, other than to say, it is true and KNITWORDS is over.

I thought I would share some of the messages I’ve received by email...

'I am so sad. I hated your letter. There isn't a magazine out there ANYTHING like Knitwords, and I will miss it terribly....’

‘So sorry to hear that Knitwords is no more. I do not need any credit for paid issues, I am sure we all have gotten enough of your blood, sweat and tears over the years. Your patterns were always wonderful and written beautifully. I will miss your editorials and watching your cute grandchildren grow up.'

‘Thank you for your consideration. This is not the first time this has happened to me. The embroidery company that went defunct, which was purchased by another company. The other company, which was suppose to take care of fulfilling the subscription, never did.’

‘Say it isn't so. However I can understand as I am sure in this economy, publishing such a specialized magazine just "ain't what it used to be". I am sooo sorry, but I have to say you have been an inspiration to so many. I feel as though I have been with you all these years and feel privileged to have gotten to know you. Good luck on whatever road to plan to travel now-- I am sure you will be a success. Take care-- I do hope you stay in touch with the knitting community.’

‘Have just received a letter about the end of Knitwords and wanted to tell you how sorry I am that such a great magazine has to come to an end. I attended a seminar in Seattle where you were conducting a number of the classes a few years ago and started subscribing. I really enjoyed those classes and the subsequent magazines. I have a grandson younger than Nathan and all the 'boy wear' patterns knitted to your instructions have been a great success. It is not easy to find knitwear patterns that the younger generation is keen to be seen in and the sizing is just spot on. As are all the adult garments I have tried.
I wish you all the best for the future. You will be missed!!’

‘Rumour is going around that you are closing up? Say it ain’t so!! I was just going to send in my renewal and get the two I missed….sigh.’

woodstock...?

Last year, I was in the USA on the anniversary of Woodstock. I was amazed and intrigued by the number of people sporting their tie-dyed shirts - you could tell some were new and some looked like originals, the wearers included, if you know what I mean. Anyway, since then, it seems to me there has been a revival of tie-dyed stuff, some good and some not so good, some psychedelic and some subdued.
I have always been a fan of random prints and batiks but they can be hard to come by. I made ‘A-shirred’, (the pattern is in No 53) in a raw silk yarn  (Yeoman Yarns Silk Bourette) that only comes in the natural colour, with the idea that I was going to get creative and somehow paint/dye/embellish/whatever and do something to my finished garment as my statement on the influence of tie-dye stuff.
Kelly Ripa on the morning show has been wearing this lovely dress by Michael Kors that is a very subtle abstract print blend of pale blues and greens, more pastel-y than I prefer for myself but I found it very attractive. I wasn’t sure what I really wanted the finished product to be, other than an experiment. And I figured, what the heck? if I didn’t like the result, I’d go buy some more ‘Rit®’ and over-dye it (VBG)!!
A couple of good friends who sounded like they knew more about it than I did, took me to a craft store to shop for supplies. After reading labels and debating among ourselves, I ended up with this tie-dye kit (it is actually called ‘Tie Dye Kit by Jacquard, for use with natural fiber fabrics’ - which my friends both seemed to think was a good brand) and a bunch of kids’ paint brushes in various sizes that I could use to ‘paint’ on the dye. The kit chosen, was supposed to, we thought, have red, yellow and blue powdered dye that, in theory, I could use to mix any colour I wanted. At home, reading the ‘fine print’, I had turquoise, fuschia and yellow - yes, those true psychedelic colours!!

Well, undaunted, this morning, with no home-dinner dates planned, I jumped in!

A couple of weeks ago, I had purchased a new grill and while unpacking it for assembly, I realized I could use the plastic bags the pieces were packed in as filler for my dyeing project, so I saved them all - there was one big enough to put over the top of my round dining table for protection. I had an old padded tablecloth, previously ruined in a past experiment (No 32, Leaf It To Me) - that time I was using fabric paints and working on dry fabric, but this one was a wet job. I began by soaking the finished garment, my original tension swatch, and an extra hood - the first was too short and I’d made the second one without having to unravel it. The garment and swatch had been laundered already, but the extra hood had not - I don’t know if it made a difference, but washing out whatever sizing, wax, etc wouldn’t hurt. The kit included a packet of ‘soda ash’ to pre-soak the items to make the dye hold better. We had chosen this type of kit/dyes, because there seemed to be no need to ‘heat-treat’ the final thing. So, while the items were soaking for 20 minutes in the soda ash, I began mixing colours and soon realized nothing much is going to take the turquoise (a colour I loathe) out of turquoise and there was not a great amount of each coloured powder. So, after messing and mixing with tiny, weeny dibs, I came up with several colours, shades of greens, blue, brown and a pinky-red, to experiment with on the swatch and felt that I could live with them.

I stuffed the extra hood to plump it up and practised a bit - I had this vision of sea anemones - I don’t even know what they are, but that came to my mind - that I thought I could manage to paint on my sweater. I’ll admit, it was a fluke - my brush dripped on the first try and I drew a line to connect the dots....

Anyway, I stuffed the garment with plastic bags, I even blew up some zip sandwich bags - that worked really well - because the garment was wet, and I didn’t want it to bleed through, I wanted each layer/side to be separated, stuffed the sleeves as well - then I began painting my vine-y anemones - I thought it was really cool how the colour bled and aura-ed at the edges and I was pretty psyched as the project progressed - the plan was to be able to leave this thing to dry undisturbed for 24 hours, so I had to make sure no portion of it was overlapping - as I finished a sleeve, I wrapped it in plastic so I could manouevre the whole thing, flip it over and work on the back without worrying that the sleeve would infect another part... how’s that for confidence - I actually started on the front - well, really, I had planned to start on the back and work out the kinks - who cares what you look like when you’re leaving anyway? - but in my hurry to begin, I forgot...

I’m finished, pretty happy and tomorrow, I’ll let you know...

how many sleeves does it take to make a sweater?

yikes...I’m knitting and knitting and getting nowhere fast...yesterday I swatched and swatched and swatched and because I’m working with cotton, I had to make a couple of swatches of my final stitch arrangement at different stitch sizes to compensate for the shrinkage factor. I do keep really good notes of my practises because if you don’t know what you did and what stitch size was used, there’s not much point in swatching - you may as well go for the ‘whoever it fits’ theory.

Okay, so everything was washed and dried and I made my choice of the final stitch and needle arrangement, ready to get knitting on the real thing this morning. I sat down and rather quickly knocked off the first sleeve - I did have to stop and make notes, because I’m going to be using all of this for the hands-on ribber class that I’m teaching at Lea-Ann’s do in Indiana at the end of July - check out http://www.knittingtoday.com/ if you want more details - she's having some beginner classes running at teh same time as my 2 days and then finishing up with Susan Guagliumi  doind 2 days of her hand manupulated stitches, hands-on too!- so, an hour for a double bed tuck rib sleeve, that’s not bad. Do the final cast-off and take it off the machine - hummm...feels a little stiff...(4LW) I used the wrong tension!! I wanted T8/6, not T7/5. Oh well, what’s an hour...

I did make what I think is an important break-through. As I said, I’m doing a tuck rib, where I have all needles in work on the main bed and a tuck stitch happening and I made up an irregular needle arrangement on the rib bed that breaks up the tuck to add vertical lines on the front of the fabric with the ribber stitches. Oh, and yes, I started with the sleeve because I find that it’s a smaller piece, goes more quickly and if things go wrong while you’re getting used to new techniques, it’s not as bad as making the entire back and then finding out that you went wrong....also, on the sleeve you can work out all the details of increasing and then decreasing and shaping for the sleeve cap.

Getting the correct needle arrangement on the rib bed is key here - screw it up and it won’t look right and it has to correspond with the tuck pattern on the main bed and each piece needs to be the same. On the first sleeve, it’s only 50 stitches wide, so after the hem, I took the time to look at the tuck pattern and figure out the ribber arrangement, but another problem occurs as you’re increasing to make sure that you’re continuing the proper sequence - I had a brainwave and got a piece of card stock, held it up to the existing needle arrangement and marked two repeats (this one is a 15 st repeat) so I could simply move the card along to match up with the next 15 needles to see what would next be brought into work. You could use this idea for anything requiring an odd needle arrangement, like tuck lace...

So, now, I double check my notes and get going with the right tension this time. Finish up and as I’m casting off, look down and see this solid line running up the centre...(several 4LW’s!!) I can see where, on the first row of patterning, I didn’t bother to re-check and an empty needle came up into work, spoiling my pattern....

I hope I haven’t scared you off if you were thinking of taking the ribber class - I’ll have ironed out all the kinks by then! And we’ll use an easier stitch pattern.

Knitting machine = LSD?

I was at a concert last weekend and while waiting for the performance to begin, I couldn’t help listening to the conversation between two men seated behind me. When I heard the one guy say something like ‘I love LSD!’, my ears perked right up! Turns out he was a car guy and was describing ‘stuff’ in his garage that he called LSD - ‘labour saving devices’... it works for me!

Sitting in MSP airport recently, wearing ‘Tumbleweed’ from No 53, with 3 hours to kill between flights, I was stitching in ends on two ‘take an old bag shopping’ bags that I was finishing up to give as hostess gifts (my bag count since the pattern came out in No 44 is up to 29!). Anyway, this gal came rushing over to me to see what I was doing, all enthused to find a fellow knitter. She gushed over my cardigan and was particularly interested in the edging I’d used on the hem and cuffs - she couldn’t identify it. I admitted that I’d made the sweater and it was my own design. She picked up my finished bag, marvelling over the evenness of the stitches. She began asking me questions about where I got my yarn - she said she was from Winnipeg - I admitted to being a fellow Canadian and we shop-talked the Winnipeg knitting scene. She even exclaimed over my use of the thread cutter on my letter opener that I was trimming the ends with so I didn’t have to worry about them taking away scissors. When she asked me what size needles I used for my cardigan, our relationship was over... as soon as I said ‘knitting machine’, I may as well have used bad language in public. She dropped me like a stone, just when I thought I had her hooked! I had put off using the ‘M’ word as long as possible but sadly she was one of those purist-snobs who believe that stitches should only be made the old-fashioned way. As she flounced off, I wanted to yell, ‘yeah, but...you liked me okay at first, before you thought I was a cheater.’

(oh, quick comeback, MA!)

Now that I got that off my chest, back to cheating...er, knitting with my LSD!

Preview No 53

Just got No 53 from the printers! Wow!! I hope you like it as much as I do!
This is my beautiful daughter-in-law, Agnieszka, (yes, she's the Mom of Nathan and Rhiana) on our cover, in Nancy Roberts’ design. I really liked this cardigan the moment I saw it and as I proofed Nancy’s pattern and read over the various techniques she used so cleverly, I liked it even more. I called it ‘The Chronicle’ after that old joke about what’s black & white and read (red) all over...
We have a great variety of knits in our Summer 2010 issue:
- A mid gauge oversized pullover from Susan Guagliumi using the bridging technique from her new book, ‘More Hand-Manipulated Stitches for Machine Knitters’ - hope her pattern and article will inspire you to get your copy soon.
- A new designer, Alice Tang, whom I met in San Fran last fall - she has some great ideas and her ‘Rib’n Shrug’, done on the bulky machine with ribber is sure to be a hit - it could also be done on the mid gauge, but I’m going to use the schematic and try it out on the standard gauge (hope this is not an idle promise).
- Mar Heck, in addition to her regular 'Do It In DAK, came up with a great collection of scarves, not only to get you ready for gift-giving, but they are good learning patterns as well as great stash busters!
- Eileen Montgomery has our most summery features, a very cute cotton top if you want quick and easy, and a nice, short-sleeved cardi in lace with a tie neckline.

That’s all for now, I gotta get finished packing up for the mail out tomorrow!

The colour Purple - NOT!

'Purple Purls', in No 52 KNITWORDS, is a beautiful lace cardigan with some really nice details, not only a pleasing stitch pattern, but the bands and collar are pretty nice too, if I do say so. The yarn is Yeoman’s Cannele which I have used extensively (I get it from Cardiknits at www.cardiknits.com) - it is a crisp, mercerised cotton that has a lovely sheen. In reality, bright purple is not a colour that I would choose for myself. I had been wanting a plum shade, ordered ‘iris’ which turned out to be more of a bright royal blue - see ‘Spots in Dots’, No 50. My next order was for ‘aubergine’ which didn’t thrill me either - it was more reddish wine than eggplant - and I traded it sight unseen, by mail, with a friend in exchange for ‘cardinal’. My friend had described ‘cardinal’ as a really pretty purple - when it arrived, I kind of grimaced and looked at it for several weeks before gathering up the courage to use it. I loved the finished garment, but I still didn’t feel warm and fuzzy about the colour. I forced myself to wear it 3 different times in an attempt to become more purple-friendly. One time was lunch with my highschool girlfriends - they are always very complimentary of anything I wear, probably because they know I made it and maybe just to be nice, but they always say something. This time, nada! Not a word. Hummm....The last time I put it on, my son had taken me out for lunch on my birthday. He doesn’t normally say anything about anything that I wear but at the end of the lunch he looked at me and said, ‘That’s not your usual colour, is it? It seems a little bright for you.’ That did it! I was either going to have to give it away or burn it!
Now, several times lately, I’ve been meaning to experiment with over-dyeing a finished garment. The sour apple wool crepe deluxe of ‘Frill Ride’ (No 51) was going to be in line for the experiment, but Sue J at BT Yarns said she would wear it, so I gave it to her. Anyway, last week when I was packing up to go to the Knit Knack Shop’s Spring Fling in Peru, Indiana, I held up the purple thing and made a snap decision. I dashed to the grocery store and grabbed 2 boxes of RIT dye in navy blue - they only had 5 colours. I read the instructions...put on rubber gloves, got out my very big soup pot, put 8 litres of hot water in, heated it on the stove just a bit, maybe 5 minutes. Dumped in the dye powder from both boxes and a cup of regular table salt - I did debate for a second whether it would make a difference if it was kosher salt - I had a lot more of that on hand, but went with the regular - the water looked black! Threw in the purple peril, unbuttoned. With a old wooden spoon, ruined in a previous experiment, I stirred a bit, maybe 2 minutes total. It looked really black but that was okay by me. I took it off the heat and dumped it into the sink. Rinsed it several times in cold water, until the water was clear. The sweater still looked black. Then I washed it with ‘Eucalan’ like I normally would, rolled it in a towel to remove as much moisture as possible and laid it out to dry. The next morning I was ecstatic to see it had dried to a lovely deep plum.
The knitters in Peru were shocked and amazed!
Boy, do I have plans!

Groundhog Day

I guess you’ve seen our preview of No 52 - I think it looks pretty good. And, I got my subscription copy in the mail yesterday, already! nah, nah, nah-na! So you shouldn’t have to wait too long - I always send myself a copy in the bulk mailing - the Canadian subscriptions are sent out from Winnipeg via Canada Post, and the US subscriptions go out from a tiny place in North Dakota just across the border, via the United States Postal Service, 4th class mail. I always mark the date I receive my subscription copy just to keep track and this is the earliest ever - Feb 2, Groundhog Day! It is usually around the 7th to the 9th that mine comes, so, although I didn’t hear the official Groundhog Day ruling, I’m going to take this as a sign of an early Spring - might as well be positive!
After the dust has settled, my favourite garment is ‘Purple Purls’, After the dust has settled, my favourite garment is ‘Purple Purls’, After the dust has settled, my favourite garment is ‘Purple Purls’ - (I couldn’t resist - I can’t think of ‘Groundhog Day’ without thinking of that movie - Bill Murray wakes up and every thing is repeated over & over...guess you had to see it) - even though it is not exactly my favourite colour, it’s a great cardigan and I’m sure I will come to enjoy the colour because of the garment. The drape of this yarn - it’s Yeoman’s Cannelé - and the sheen of it, combined with the stitch pattern makes a really nice fabric and there is a ton of good techniques. On one of the mk-chat lists recently, they were talking about lace and shortrowing and a lot of misinformation was going around - reading this pattern should clear up some of those misconceptions, but the key is (at least) reading.
Actually my thoughts are already focussing on the next issue which is Summer and what do I think of? Lace and lacy fabrics and crochet-look things. I’ve spent the past week or so brainstorming, planning and plotting out the next year of KNITWORDS. I think it’s finally time we have a series on the yarn changer, so you can look for seasonal things, starting with single bed yarn changer, maybe a lightweight shawl or wrap in a mohair and rayon bouclé along with a lesson on getting started with the yarn changer - following issues will take you through projects showing the various techniques and types of double bed jacquard.
Another idea I have is for a series called W5 (or something - that’s my working title so far) - which will be say, 3 or 4 methods of doing one thing (What) and then, When, Where, Why and Why not? to help you decide how to apply it to your knitting - what do you think? any ideas for topics? I got a couple, but I’d like to hear what you think/want to see...so email me if you don’t want to respond here.
This is the start of our 14th year of publication. Today, I’m beginning the knitting on a knee-length lace duster in a light tan-coloured, mercerised cotton on the standard gauge machine - loose and airy with a vertical, viney-looking stitch pattern I’m hoping will add inches to my vertically-challenged frame...