Greta has a tip for us this week about counting your rows. Counting rows in stockinette stitch is pretty easy. You simply count each little “V” stitch you see. Counting garter stitch rows is trickier since we don’t have all those little V’s to count anymore; they’ve been replaced with wide bumps. The solution is simple! Each ridge counts as two rows. To keep track, put a locking stitch marker in the first ridge of your piece and that counts as your first 2 rows. Then you can count by two’s going up the piece where each garter ridge equals 2 rows. This is also good for projects that aren’t entirely in garter stitch because the stitch marker also marks which side is your “right side”. This makes it easier to keep track since the “right side” and “wrong side” of garter stitch are identical.

Suzette is a wonderful member of our store team, and she has a very handy tip for us! Striped projects knit in pieces can be very hard get just right. If you knit your striped projects seamlessly from the top-down instead, the color changes will match up just right. Knitting from the top-down eliminates the need to painstakingly match up your stripes when assembling your garment.

Suzette says, “Knitting stripes that join perfectly can be a real struggle with pieced patterns, but top-down knitting solves all the matching up problems, with the bonus of neat looking angles at the shoulders. I used Knitting Pure and Simple #296 and Classic Elite Yarn Color by Kristin. It was fun to choose the vibrant color contrasts. The only change I made was to create the blue up the center for button loops and buttons.”

Top-down knitting also has the benefit of trying on your project as you go. You can start your hat, and knit it to just the right length. Sweaters can even be tried on as you go when knit from the top-down.

 

You can find more top-down knitting projects here. Stripes can be added to almost anything!

If you make a mistake in your project and you need to rip back, it can be tricky to grab the live stitches and put them back on your needle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Danielle has a great reminder for how to make your cast on and bind off match every time! This technique is wonderful, especially for scarves and baby blankets, so your project is symmetrical.  Use a provisional cast on at the beginning so that after you bind off your project,  you can tear out the waste yarn and pretend your starting edge is a bind off edge!  Using a Provisional Crochet Cast On makes this easy.

You can find the Provisional Crochet Cast On, along with tons of other great cast ons and bind offs in the book Cast On, Bind Off by Leslie Ann Bestor.

This week, Greta shows us exactly what it means when a pattern says, “Block over a plate.” Now you’ll be able to block your berets and slouchy hats perfectly!

Have you ever knitted a slouchy hat pattern and reached the finishing instructions only to find this strange little tidbit, “Block over a plate”? Now, I absolutely love knitting slouchy hats and berets, but when I saw this for the first time I was a little confused. After trying this blocking technique many times, I finally got it down and thought I would share what I’ve learned.

Materials:
A dinner plate (about 10” in diameter)
A bowl or pitcher, something that balances nicely
About 1 yard smooth scrap yarn
A tapestry needle

Step 1: Using some smooth scrap yarn (about 1 yard) and a tapestry needle, thread the scrap yarn loosely around the brim of your hat getting as close to the edge as you can manage. Technically this step is optional, but I like it because it gives the brim a more finished look and helps open up any lace work in your hat.

Step 2: Block as usual. I wet blocked my hat to soften the fibers and really let those stitches bloom.

Step 3: Place the hat around and over the dinner plate. I arrange it so the crown of the hat is over the bottom center of the plate.

Step 4: Gently and evenly tighten the scrap yarn and tie it in a slip knot. Make sure everything is arranged nice and evenly on the plate.

Step 5: Place the plate brim-side down on an upturned bowl. This keeps your project from getting dirty and helps it dry faster.

Once the hat is dry you are good to go! Wear that slouchy hat with a smile knowing both you and it look awesome!

(Pattern is Crooked Paths by Melissa LaBarre; Yarn is Madelinetosh Vintage in Flashdance)

.

.

.

.

This week’s tip comes from Amy G, one of our store staff team members. She finds you can take the 2-at-a-Time skill generally used for socks, and apply it to other projects too, like the sleeves of a sweater.

“I often find the sleeves to be the most boring part of knitting a sweater, so I do them at the same time on a circular needle using two balls of yarn. Of course it only works for set-in sleeves, not sleeves picked up and knit from the shoulders, but it helps me finish my project instead of getting distracted and starting something new!”

Dena, our Ecommerce Marketing Manager, loves this technique. It can definitely get a little confusing though, so she adds a locking stitch marker to join the two pieces together. She finds this helps keep her from turning her work too soon.

Do you have any tricks to keep yourself from leaving a project half finished?

 

 

When Kristin knit Flow by Norah Gaughan, she was presented with a problem. The yarn, Berroco Seduce, is absolutely lovely but the slippery fibers made it hard to get the yarn ends to stay put.

To deal with unruly ends, Kristin uses crazy glue or super glue to tack then down after she’s woven them in for an inch or two. She also likes to use a patch of one sided fusible interfacing and iron it on to of the wiggly end.

Yarn made of slippery fibers like rayon and silk can be tough to keep in place. This tip will help keep your finished project looking clean and polished!

 

One of the most challenging aspects of a project is selecting the colors. It can be difficult to tell which colors “go” well together. Frequently, I spend hours knitting only to discover I don’t really like how those colors I chose came together in the end. In today’s post, J shows us how we can select colors easily by using black and white photographs. He recently knit the Color Affection Shawl, so we asked him to share what he learned.

“Affection for Contrasting Colors or What Do You See in Shades of Gray?”

Every now and again as fiber artists we are tasked with choosing colors. The Kangaroo Dyer’s Color Grid is a great tool for picking colors and we make use of it regularly. For the purpose of this color exercise, we’re going to focus on the properties of color in relation to one another, specifically contrast and we’ll use the broad color palette of  Cascade 220 as an example. (And not just because it’s less than $6 a skein for the rest of April and May, but it is!)

Step One – Grab a skein of each of the colors you are considering (2 or more)
Step Two – Take a picture
Step Three – Make it black and white.
That’s it, three steps! Repeat as necessary with different color choices to your heart’s content.

When viewing your skeins in black and white, if two colors are close in their representation of gray, there will be little, to no, contrast. If the skeins can be distinguished in their representation of gray – TA-DA contrast! Below are some examples that will help illustrate this concept.

Group A: White #8505, Cotton Candy #9478, and Magenta #7803. Notice that the black and white photo shows white, gray, and black. We can see strong contrast between the skeins in both images. This means the colors won’t get lost when used together, and each will stand out in its own way.

Group B: Black #8555, Peacock #2447, and Purple Jewel Heather #7811. See what happens in the black and white version? These skeins show as three similar shades of gray -not good for showing off any of these colors. They don’t look terrible together, but they have similar tone so each gets lost in the other.

To compare these first two groups, with Group A you could stand far away and easily tell the differences in color – great contrast. In Group B the difference is so minimal that none of them take a prominent place – great if you want colors to blend, not so great if you want contrast.

Group C: Christmas Red #8895, Silver Grey #8401, and Blue Hawaii #9421. When viewed as black and white, two of these are similar, but the third stands out –  great for when you want a single color to pop. The light gray and aqua are similar in tone to each other leaving the red to take a more prominent place in your project.

Group D: Christmas Red #8895, Charcoal Grey #8400, and Blue Hawaii #9421. See how just changing the shade of gray makes a difference? It now stands in stronger contrast to the other two, helping to highlight the aqua, while still having more brightness than the red.

It should be noted that “true color” is difficult to represent on a computer screen, so this is just a guideline as color will  vary relative to your settings, the manufacturer of your screen, and the effects of the light that surrounds your screen. This is why sometimes the “color you thought you saw”, looks different when the skein is in front of you. (I love Franklin Habit’s yarn-shaming tumblr because it helps us to laugh at just this sort of thing.)

Do you like making multi-colored projects? How do you pick your colors?

Today’s tip is from Kirsten Hipsky, designer for Valley Yarns. She has some great suggestions for selecting the perfect size to make for your next garment. 

To help figure out which size to make, I recommend measuring around your chest at its widest and choosing the closest size to that measurement, making the larger one if you’re between sizes.

Another helpful exercise is to measure the bodies of your current favorite sweaters or sweatshirts just underneath the sleeves. This will help you see ahead of time which size sweaters you like wearing the most.

We try to design all of our Valley Yarns sweaters so that they could be worn with zero inches of ease. That is, a person with a 40″ chest should be able to wear the 40″ finished chest measurement sweater without the sleeves or neck being too tight. But if you prefer looser sweaters, you could easily make a larger size.

Most of the sweaters could also be worn with a couple inches of negative ease if you like tight-fitting sweaters. The Kohl Lace Pullover, for example, has a stretchy, lacy stitch pattern and a roomy, straight sleeve that could probably be worn with up to 4″ of negative ease. But I would measure your current sweaters first to make sure that’s what you would like.

The sweater shown in the picture is Valley Yarns 464 Bittersweet Pullover knit in Valley Yarns Sheffield.

 

It’s happened to all of us. You spend countless hours working on your project, only to snag it on something. The usual culprits of these pulled stitches include car keys, corners, and pets. But don’t worry, there is a way to fix it!

If your project gets a pulled stitch, you’re going to see that one of the stitches has gotten very long and all the stitches next to it have gotten very tight from being pulled.

It’s a lot easier to see these tight stitches from the purl bumps. Locate which purl bump the problem stitch is, and work your way down the row, gently pulling out each of these loops. This will slowly even out the tension. Once you’ve pulled your yarn through all the way down to the end, you can reblock your project and that should hide any inconsistencies in your tension.

Check out the video below to see this tip in action!